Chapter Fifty-Eight
FIFTY-EIGHT
Tim
Tim and Shana pulled into the parking lot twenty-five minutes after receiving word that Terry Martino was at the Rivermouth Arena.
There, Tim assumed, to survey his decaying kingdom like a lord of filth and rot.
A black BMW like the one Tim had seen when he first met Terry was parked in the front lot, which was veined with cracks and seams of dry, brown grass.
The driver’s seat was empty. At best, Terry was a person of interest. At worst, he was a killer.
Out there in the countryside, the air was unsettlingly quiet. Tim nodded at Shana and, hands on their weapons, they approached the leaning structure before them. When they got to the outer wall, Shana peered through the cracked glass.
“Holy shit,” she muttered.
“Yeah, it’s a living nightmare. See anything?” asked Tim.
She shook her head.
There was a door next to the broken window, near where Terry had parked.
“Ready?” he asked, to which Shana gave a nod.
Tim yanked the handle, and it flung wide.
Inside, the Rivermouth felt both familiar and otherworldly, like they’d stumbled into The Upside Down.
All life had been leeched from the amusement center, turning it into a shadow world.
The once cheerful rooms were dank and ravaged, cast in an inky, tomb-cold glow.
The only color left at all was on the interior glass doors.
Rink entrance. Red bubble letters outlined in mustard gold.
Beneath the soles of Tim’s shoes, the floor was uneven, raised where the earth had bucked and settled again.
Tim couldn’t be sure what grew on the jagged ground, but it was spongy in places, snaky and slippery in others, like someone had dumped out a thousand gooey algae-coated flower stems. A smattering of insulation, brown now with age, showered down on them, inciting a hiss from Shana as its needles stung her exposed cheeks.
Strange, Tim thought as they picked their way over hunks of fallen plaster, how much it looked like someone had abandoned this place on a whim.
Everything from the furniture in the canteen to the triangle cups for the snow cones had been left behind.
Tim could still taste the flavored crushed ice, its sourness torquing his young tongue.
“Mr. Martino! State police. Come out with your hands raised.”
There was a moment of absolute silence, followed by a grunt and the sound of imbalanced footsteps coming from the back of the building.
“He’s in the rink,” Tim said, feeling Shana close behind him as he ran down the hall that forked off of the lobby.
“Stay where you are!” Shana yelled, as they passed through the door and the ceiling opened up to the sky where great swaths of roof had buckled and fallen away.
They skirted the edge of the rink, leaping over more debris and ceiling tiles as they went.
There was another exit up ahead, one of its double doors in the midst of swinging closed.
“He’s outside,” Tim shouted to Shana as his shoulder slammed splintering wood and he burst into the open air.
Even after just a few minutes indoors, the daylight seared Tim’s retinas.
Terry Martino was yards away now, jumping back into his car.
Tim closed the distance and jammed his foot between the door and the vehicle’s body, crying out in pain as he wrenched it back open and dragged a blubbering Terry Martino to the ground.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Tim said once he had Terry on his stomach. Both men were breathing hard. “Why’d you run?”
“Tim!”
Shana stood at the back exit of the rink. “We need an ambulance at the old Rivermouth,” she said into the phone in her hand.
Then, to Tim: “It’s Molly Kranz.”