“ — All guests will be issued complimentary return passes for two days at Familyland, the Home of Fun!”
The message was repeated.
“Get a move on,” Philipe said. “They’re closing in on us. Without a crowd for us to hide in, they’ll see us for sure.”
We found Pete and John waiting by the African Princess, Don and James standing in front of the High Seas Adventure ride. By now the park was almost emptied of normal tourists. Teams of the gray-suited men, accompanied by what looked like uniformed policemen, were patrolling the walkways and thoroughfares, walking into the rides and shops and attractions.
Philipe looked at his watch. “That’s it,” he said. “The others should still be outside. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
All ten of us ran back through Wild West Land. We hurried past the shops and arcades.
And saw Tommy and Buster walk through the front entrance of the park into a deserted Old Town.
They got several yards up the street before they were spotted. Then the gray suits were talking frantically into headsets and walkie-talkies, uniforms were drawing guns, crouching into firing positions.
“Run!” Philipe yelled.
“Get out!” I screamed.
We were all yelling, shouting at the top of our lungs for them to hightail it out of here, but they could not hear us and seemed oblivious to the fact that Familyland was practically deserted save for themselves and the gray suits and the uniforms.
A couple of the suits looked in our direction as we screamed, but we ducked into a doorway, were quiet for a moment, and were forgotten.
“Stay where you are!” someone announced over a loudspeaker.
We came out of our hiding place and saw Tommy running like hell back toward the entrance, having obviously figured out that something was wrong. Buster, though, looked confused. He stood in place, turning back toward Tommy, then back toward the men, not moving in either direction.
“Surrender your weapons!” the loudspeaker said.
For a second, it looked like a scene in a silent comedy. Buster stood there, puzzled, glanced around as if searching for someone else they might be addressing, then pointed quizzically toward himself as if to say, “Who? Me?”
Then there was a shot.
And Buster went down.
“No!” I screamed.
I started toward him, but Philipe grabbed my collar and pulled me back. “Forget it,” he hissed. “It’s too late for him now. We have to save ourselves.”
“He might still be alive!”
“If he is, they have him. Come on.”
We cut through the open patio of a restaurant, ran down a side path past some restrooms and a diaper-changing station, through a gate marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“What about Tommy?” Mary asked.
“He’ll make it back,” Philipe said. “He’s smart.”
We were behind Familyland’s false front, in what looked like a parking lot between office buildings, and we ran toward where we knew the main public parking lot was located. We sprinted past one of the buildings and through an unattended open gate, and found ourselves in front of Familyland. We were far away from where our cars were located, but amazingly, idiotically, they did not seem to have staked out the parking lot, and we ran unchecked to our cars.
Tommy was waiting by the Mercedes, and Junior and Tim were parked nearby. All looked worried and frightened, and Philipe shouted at them to get the hell out of here and make sure they were not followed.
I got in the Mercedes with Philipe, and we flew over the parking lot’s speed bumps, bottoming out as we skidded onto the main road. Philipe turned, then sped over the freeway, zigzagged through a residential neighborhood, and drove all the way down Lincoln to Los Alamitos before doubling back and hitting Chapman and heading home. We were not followed.
The rest of them were already waiting for us when we arrived, and Philipe parked in front of the sales office and told everyone to pick up personal effects, it was time to move.
“Where are we going?” Mary asked.
“We’ll find someplace.”
“Maybe they won’t find us here.”
“We can’t take that chance,” he snapped. He looked quickly around the group. “Everyone still have the explosives and detonators?”
We all nodded.
“Good. Let’s take this place out. I don’t want any trace of us left.”
“It’s daytime,” Tim said. “The models are still open.”
“Just do it.”
We each booby-trapped our own houses. James, John, and I quickly dumped all the trash cans — the used Kleenex, the empty food cartons, the old newspapers — on the kitchen floor. I poured lighter fluid all over the trash, then sprayed the rest on the downstairs carpets.
When we were all packed and in our cars, a block or so away from the houses, we set off the detonators.
We hadn’t planned it that way, but the houses went off in sequence, from left to right, and the sight was truly awesome. The explosives we’d gotten were obviously extremely powerful. Walls blew outward, flames exploded from underneath suddenly rocketing roofs, and in a matter of seconds our homes looked like wildly burning piles of junk timber.
The salesmen were running out of the office, yelling at each other, running around wildly. I knew that one of them had to have already called the police and the fire department, and I honked my horn, pointing toward the road, and Philipe nodded. He stuck his head out the window of his car. “Follow me!” he yelled.
He sped out of the subdivision, down Chapman, and the rest of us followed. Just past Tustin Avenue, a fleet of cop cars and fire engines passed us, going in the opposite direction.
We got on the Costa Mesa Freeway, heading south.
We took the 55 to the 405 and did not stop until Philipe turned in at a gas station in Mission Viejo. He had obviously been thinking while he’d been driving, and he came back to each of our cars and told us to fill up. We were going to go down to San Diego for a few days, he said, stay in a motel, lay low. He still seemed shaken, frightened, and he told us to pay cash for the gas and not just steal it — we couldn’t afford to leave a trail.
“You know San Diego,” Philipe told me. “You lead the way. Find us an anonymous motel.”
We drove downstate, and I led the way to motel row. We picked the Hyatt, one of the bigger and more impersonal places, and stole the keys off a maid’s cart, taking rooms on one of the middle floors. After dumping our suitcases in our respective rooms, we met in Philipe’s suite to watch the Los Angeles news on cable.
There was no mention made of what had happened at Familyland.
We watched the five o’clock news, the five-thirty news, and the six o’clock news, switching from channel to channel.
Nothing.
“Those fuckers,” Mary said. “They covered it up.”
“What happened to Buster?” Junior asked. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d left Familyland, and his voice was quiet and unnaturally subdued.
“I don’t know,” Philipe admitted.
“You think he’s dead?”
Philipe nodded.
“Who but us would even notice or care that he’s gone?” James said.
We were silent after that, each of us thinking about Buster. I found myself remembering how happy he’d been on that day we’d trashed Frederick’s of Hollywood, how he’d said he felt so young being with us.
I felt like crying.
“Even if no one noticed that he was killed, the fact that Familyland kicked everyone out and closed down is news in itself,” Philipe said. “Either the company has enough clout to keep that out of the news… or someone else does.”
“Who?” Steve asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”