Page 20 of Carnival’s Playground

"Get Petey and Frank in here," Dutch commands, dropping down the ladder faster than a man his size has any right to move. He pulls his radio off his belt and thumbs the button with a vicious click. "All hands to the center ring. Now."

Within two minutes, Petey sprints in with grease smeared across his forehead, Frank trailing right behind him with a heavy wrench still gripped in his fist. When Dutch lays it out flat, Petey's jaw goes slack, and Frank looks ready to cave someone's skull in.

"You mean to tell us somebody tried to kill Marcy on purpose?" Petey hoarsely asks, his eyes darting toward the roof like the shadow might still be up there.

"That's exactly what I'm telling you," Dutch snaps, his voice cutting through the hollow silence of the tent like a whip crack. "Which means nobody works alone. Nobody touches a piece of gear without a partner watching their back. If you see a shadow move wrong behind a truck, you yell."

Dutch yanks his phone from his back pocket, staring at the lit screen while his jaw works. I can practically hear the gears turning in his head, weighing the permit, the money, the city officials, and the lives of the people who call him boss.

"We're keeping the main gates locked tonight," Dutch flatly announces.

Frank's head snaps up, eyes wide. "Dutch, we've got three packed shows scheduled. Grimwood Crossing gave us the permit extension through Halloween, but if we go dark on a Friday night, the city council will crawl up our asses with a magnifying glass."

"Let them crawl," Dutch snarls, stepping directly into Frank's chest. "The permit allows us to put on a circus, not run a slaughterhouse. Somebody tampered with my high rig. Until every bolt, cable, generator, and prop on these grounds is cleared by hand, nobody walks through those turnstiles."

"The lost revenue will sink us for the week," Petey nervously mutters, shifting his boots in the sawdust.

"Then we take the hit," Dutch sharply responds. "I'll eat the cost before I put one of my performers in a pine box, and I'll be damned if I let a customer get hurt because I was too greedy to stop the machine. The gates stay shut."

I look at Avery. Her chin's lifted, her shoulders pinned back, her eyes fixed on Dutch with raw, unvarnished respect. She doesn't whine about the paycheck. She doesn't flinch from the ugly reality. She just squares her stance and steps into the fight.

"What's the play, Dutch?" she calmly asks.

"Full teardown and inspection of every damn thing with a bolt or a wire on it," Dutch orders, shoving his phone back into his pocket. "Nothing runs until two sets of eyes sign off on it. We work the grounds until we're sure."

"That'll take all night," Frank heavily grunts.

"Then you'd better brew another pot of coffee, Frank," Dutch growls. "I’ll take the north generator with Petey. Frank, you start on the midway junction boxes. Carnival, take Avery and strip the haunt walk props, the sound systems, and every lighting rig on the west corridor. You two move fast and you know the electrical."

"Consider it done," I tell him.

Avery meets my gaze, the sharp, fiery energy radiating off her like heat from an open furnace. We don't need words. We grab our tool belts, heavy flashlights, and hit the haunt walk corridor running.

The haunt walk is a maze of black canvas walls, rubber monsters, hanging skeleton props, and fake tombstones that look sinister under the amber glow of our halogen lights. The chill of the October night creeps through the canvas, smelling of dry dirt, dead leaves, and cold iron.

We work in tight silence, checking cables, junction boxes, and pneumatic lines with ruthless precision. My fingers move over the wiring harness of an animatronic ghoul, testing every terminal screw, but my focus never strays more than two feet from where Avery's crouched on the plywood floor.

"Wyatt," she suddenly whispers.

The use of my birth name hits my ribs like a physical blow. I drop to my knees beside her in the narrow corridor, my thigh pressing against hers. "What do you have?"

She aims her flashlight at the heavy power feed running into our primary high-output fog machine, the one we had to rewire after the storm last week. Her fingertip hovers a fraction of an inch above the thick rubber sheath.

The outer insulation's been sliced clean through, exposing the raw copper line right where it enters the steel chassis. The ground wire inside's been snipped and tucked back into the rubber to look intact.

"Same blade," I roughly say, my teeth clamping together until my jaw aches. "The second we flipped the main load switch for the night rush, the chassis would've gone live. Whoever touched the metal housing would've taken two hundred and twenty volts straight through the chest."

I reach out, peeling my right glove off with my teeth and dropping it onto the machine beside us. Then I wrap my bare hand over hers where it rests against the cold steel. Her skin's icy, her pulse jumping wild under my fingers at her wrist. "We caught it, spitfire."

"This is sick, Wyatt." She looks up at me, her green eyes wide, dark, and furious. "Who hates us this much? Who the hell does something like this?"

"Someone who knows exactly how this circus breathes," I tell her, squeezing her fingers until she squeezes back, hard enough to hurt. "They know the blind spots, they know the schedules, and they know where we don't usually look. But they got sloppy. They left tool marks, and they left a trail."

"You sound damn sure about that for a guy holding a sliced live wire." Her mouth pulls into a faint, crooked line, the ghost of her razor-sharp humor fighting its way through the dread.

"I've tracked worse bastards than this across half the country," I quietly tell her, holding her gaze in the dim amber light. "We lock down what we can tonight. Tomorrow, we start hunting."

We don't stop until midnight. We pull apart every animatronic motor, trace every foot of extension cord, test every circuit breaker, and inspect every shackle along the haunt maze until my shoulders burn and my vision blurs around the edges of the flashlight beam. Dutch checks in twice over the radio, confirming the north generators are clean, and Petey reports the midway lines are clear.