But it was too late: Messina fired.

The gunshot cracked the afternoon into a million pieces.

Screams of surprise and fright seized the midway, and Huey’s amplified voice said, “Shit!” Knowing the Kingfish, who was not the bravest individual I ever met, he’d be cowering on the floor of that platform about now.

Amazingly, Messina had had the presence of (his excuse for a) mind to fire into the air.

And the blond boy stood there, on the grass, by a merry-go-round, frozen, and slowly put up his hands.

Messina lumbered over to him like a squashed version of the Frankenstein monster, the revolver thrust forward in a trembling hand; he was breathing like an asthmatic, and his frog eyes were bulging. Veins stood out in his forehead like exclamation marks.

“Joe…” I said.

He was headed for that blond kid, who had turned around, hands still in the air, to find himself looking down the barrel of that.38.

“Don’t shoot him, Joe,” I said.

“Don’t shoot him, Joe!” the girl called out, hysterically, as if she knew Messina. I had the wallet in one hand, and her arm in the other, and was hauling both toward Messina, who was facing his quavering captive, looking very much resolved to remove him from the planet.

“Joe,” I said, nearing him, “no…no. It would make the Kingfish look bad.”

“What the hell’s this about?” an authoritative male voice called.

“Drop those guns!” a second male voice chimed in.

We turned and a pair of uniformed cops, whose own guns were drawn, were closing in.

Messina lowered his revolver.

“We’re bodyguards for Senator Long,” I explained.

“That don’t give you leave to go wavin’ rods around,” said the older of the cops, “shooting ’em in the air like a goddamn Wild West show.” Like many a cop, he could say all this through his teeth, barely parting his lips. It’s an art.