Shooting Gallery

Mystery Fiction by Lyndy Wibking

It was 10:07 p.m., and still Jack was nowhere in sight.

In her old car in a corner of the fairground’s huge dirt parking lot, Bonnie Honeybone stared out the windshield at the fair’s whirling, blurring, blinking riot of a skyline a hundred yards distant. Against the vast blackness of night, the high-voltage bulbs of the roller-coaster and Ferris wheel and Tilt-a-Whirl and Gravitron shone garishly. The screams of passengers rose and fell with the twists and turns and sudden drops of the rides.

Movement in the rearview mirror caught Bonnie’s attention. She adjusted the mirror to watch a white-tailed deer nibble its way along the edge of the parking lot. Since last year’s fair, the county had installed more streetlights in and around the parking lot. In their gauzy sodium glow, Bonnie could see the deer in detail, the ragged velvet on its stubby antlers, the dried mud on its flank. Something somewhere made the young stag raise its head—but then with a twitch of an ear, it went on grazing.

Bonnie sighed.

10:07 became 10:08… 10:09… 10:10.

“Oh, that’s it!” She unbuckled her seatbelt and threw open the car door.

At the entrance to the fairground, she showed the red stamp on the back of her hand to the bull-necked man at the gate.

“Oh,” she said, “and, actually, is there, like, a speaker system, like a PA, that I could use to try to get my nephew’s attention? He was supposed to meet me in the parking lot, but…”

“How old is he?” the man asked. “There’s a tent set up for lost kids right up that way.”

“Well, he’s fourteen, so I think maybe he just, you know, I don’t know. I bet, actually, he just lost track of time. He doesn’t have a phone yet, so—it’s fine. I’ll look around. Thank you, though!”

Within the fairgrounds, noise buffeted Bonnie from every direction: the clatter of the roller-coaster as it rocketed along its wooden track. Screams of terror and whoops of laughter. Babies wailing, fried dough sizzling. Grease smoke stained the air around the concession stands, and the smell of grilled meat (“100% Beef!”) mingled with the odor of a thousand bodies and manure from a neighboring farm. Bonnie’s nose crinkled.

So many people wore red baseball caps like Jack’s, she thought she spotted him several times. She walked right up and reached for the shoulder of a gangly boy who was in line to buy funnel cakes—who turned out to be an adult woman in a St. Louis Cardinals, rather than Cincinnati Reds, cap.

In the shadow of the roller-coaster, she again thought she saw her nephew, but like a flash, Jack—if it was Jack—cut off through the crowd, and the crowd reformed behind him like a phagocytic blob. Bonnie shouldered and excused her way through, and when she stumbled out the other side, she was on the midway. Plywood booths clustered up and down the hard-packed path. Stuffed tigers and teddy bears hung from hooks above each counter, while smaller plush toys lined the back of all the booths.

“Cash Prizes!” said the sign above the ring toss game, while the milk bottle toss offered players unlimited throws of a baseball for a dollar a turn: “Pitch Til You Win!”

Bonnie walked past these booths and others, looking left and right for Jack, until she reached the shooting gallery at the end of the midway, at the edge of the fairgrounds. Beyond lay darkness.

“Step right up!” said a ponytailed man behind the counter, where six rifle-style airguns were mounted in a line with their wooden stocks pointing up, their barrels trained at the ground. A sign on the counter said, “Be Right Back!” The man flipped the sign so it listed the prices: $1 for two shots, $2 for five.

“Oh, no, thank you,” Bonnie replied. “I’m actually just looking for my nephew.”

“Well, sure,” the man said. “That’s the top prize.”

Bonnie blinked.

“What do you mean?”

The shooting gallery operator pointed with an unlit cigarette at the six targets set up behind him.

“What I said. You hit the target in front of you, right smack dead on the bull’s eye, and I tell you where your nephew is. Scrawny little fella in a Cincinnati Reds cap, right? Not the chunky one with chocolate syrup on his shirt, or the Mexican.”

“I think,” Bonnie said, “you better just tell me where he is right now.”

“Dollar for two shots. Or for two bucks, take five.”

Shaking her head, Bonnie staggered back from the booth and spun to retrace her steps across the fairground. But the fairground was frozen, a scene in a movie stuck on pause, inaccessible to Bonnie: Streams of people facing all different directions, stuck in midstride. Tilt-a-Whirl riders dangling high above the ground, mouths open in silent screams. Teenagers making out atop the Ferris wheel caught mid-rotation, and a baseball perpetually glancing off a stack of milk bottles.

“They can’t help you, Bonnie,” the operator of the shooting gallery said, behind her. “This is your only shot.”

As she turned back toward him, the faint whiff of some new and unknown smell reached her, the smell of something earthy, like water from a very old and very deep well.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know everybody’s name. This is a small town.”

“I’ve never seen you before. Who are you?”

“Name’s Arnold, friend. Are you playing or not?”

Slowly and with great concentration, as if moving underwater, Bonnie unzipped her purse—dug out her wallet—removed two dollar bills, and set them on the counter.

“All right,” she said. “Five shots?”

“Uh-huh. Good luck!”

The operator, Arnold, stepped aside to give her a clear view of the target. She picked up the airgun at the end of the counter, settled the stock on her shoulder, and moved the barrel slowly until it pointed at the bull’s eye in front of her, no more than twelve feet away.

Bonnie squeezed the trigger.

Arnold whistled.

“Well, folks, they say a miss is as good as a mile, but in this case she missed by a mile!”

Bonnie aimed again, fired again, missed again.

Sweat sprang out under her arms. She lowered the airgun to wipe her right hand against her pant leg, clenched and unclenched her fist a few times, then repositioned the stock on her shoulder. She blinked rapidly, trying to clear the spots that had appeared in her vision.

Damn it, Jack, didn’t I tell you to be careful? Didn’t you say you’d stick with Nate and Andy? Don’t you know never to talk to strangers, not to wander off alone?

“He didn’t wander,” Arnold said.

“What?”

“Nothing, sorry. Third time lucky, maybe, huh?”

Ping!

Bonnie’s third shot, fired off haphazardly, grazed the edge of the target.

“Closer,” said Arnold, with a cock of his head. “But I’m afraid close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

Bonnie slammed the airgun down onto the counter.

“You have to tell me where he is. You understand? Either you tell me, or I tell the police.”

“I will tell you, Bonnie, if and when you hit the bull’s eye.”

“Was he here? Did he say something, about me picking him up in the parking lot? Did he tell you my name, where I’d be? Jack!” She leaned over the wooden counter, scraping her forearms, to shout at the back of the booth.

“There’s nobody back there, Bonnie. This is a big plywood box, there’s nowhere in here for a boy to hide, or be hidden.”

“So where is he, you son-of-a-bitch?”

“Take your next shot. You’ve got two left.”

Bonnie snatched the gun up again and took aim for the fourth time. But it might as well have been the fifth and final time, for all the chance she had of ever hitting the target in the bull’s eye. She inhaled a deep breath, held it, and clamped her eyes shut. A tear leaked out of her right eye. It ran down her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. She flicked it off with her tongue, swung the gun toward the spot where she knew Arnold was standing, and squeezed the trigger twice.

“Ding, ding, ding!”

The shooting gallery operator brought his hands together with a clap that made Bonnie’s eyes fly open. She gaped as the man went to remove her target from its holder.

“How about that? I think we’ve got a winner, folks.”

“Wait, what?”

The back of this man’s head had a cowlick, not a ponytail. His face was younger, fuller and unlined, and he smelled of Lavoris mouthwash, not faintly sulfurous water.

“Yep!” He gave the paperboard target a flick of his finger. “Clean shot, straight through the bull’s eye. See? So you can take your pick of any prize.”

Bonnie shook her head at him. The airgun clattered onto the counter.

“No! No, no, no. My nephew, Jack—where is he?”

“Sorry, what?”

“There was another man here, a second ago, named Arnold? He said if I hit the bull’s eye, he’d tell me where my nephew is. Where is he?”

“Uh”—this other operator reached up to rub the back of his neck—“gee, I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t know anything about that. It’s just been me here tonight, all night, except for like five minutes when I went to get a slice of pizza. If you’ve got a kid that’s gone missing, though, there’s a tent set up over by the entrance, with folks from the sheriff’s department to help reunite you? Ever since what happened last year, when that boy went missing, I guess—”

The young man cut himself off with a little gasp of recognition.

“He didn’t go missing,” Bonnie said. “That man, Arnold, took him. Where is he? Tell me!”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am. You want me to call for some first aid? You look awful pale.”

“No. Thank you. I”—she put her head in one hand—“I’ll just take the tiger, please.”

The bull-necked man at the entrance gate looked up as Bonnie approached with the stiffly stuffed tiger draped across her shoulders. He was holding a newspaper now, an old issue from back when the Gazette still ran a picture of Jack’s face every day.

“Ms. Honeybone? I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t recognize you earlier. Would you like me to—?”

“No, thank you,” Bonnie replied without looking at him, as she exited through the turnstile.

She continued in a daze across the huge parking lot, mostly empty by that hour but lit up like a stadium by all the new streetlights installed since the previous summer. Reaching her car in the far corner, right at the edge of the pitch-black pine forest, Bonnie leaned inside to lay the stuffed tiger across the backseat, making sure it was right-side up, as if its comfort mattered.

When she straightened up, the man who’d called himself Arnold stood on the other side of the car’s roof.

“He didn’t wander off, you know, Bonnie.”

She said nothing.

“I just took him. Same as I took all the others.”

She slammed the back passenger door shut and opened the driver’s.

“He wasn’t late getting back here, to the same spot where you’d dropped him off that evening, far away from the gate so he could walk in by himself, back before they put up all these damn lights. He wasn’t late that night, Bonnie.”

She ducked in behind the wheel, stuck the keys in the ignition switch and twisted.

“You were!”

At the shriek of Bonnie’s car taking off, a young white-tailed stag sprang away into the safety of the forest. After a while, it slowed to a walk and lowered its head again, to nibble berries off the bushes that grew out of the earth, within feet of where Jack Honeybone’s skeleton lay.

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Bio: Lyndy Wibking is a librarian from Knoxville, TN. She has self-published several mysteries, most recently a novella called “The Girl In The Van”. She has also written and illustrated two children’s books under the pen name Sandy Winking: “Bigfoot Sandwiches” and “Gus the Stegosaurus & The Greatest Gift of All“. Besides writing, she enjoys tennis and attempting to garden.

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