Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) (21 page)

I
took
the corner and passed a man walking his dog. I wished him a happy day and continued to the roundabout where I’d parked.

It was sort of funny how Mom thought Jane was in therapy. Sweet revenge, served cold. I’d finally gotten Jane back for all those times Dad put me in charge and she’d pretended like I wasn’t.

“Not too bad,” I said, trying to force myself to feel good about what I’d done.

I could still feel my mother’s kiss on my cheek—the one for who I might have been. Now all I wanted to do was cry like a son who missed his mom. And when I got in the car, that’s exactly what I did.

It didn’t matter if she learned I was Scott Schaefer—not Frank—and that Scott was a monster who preyed on his patients. Mortal monsters she could deal with. Odd as it sounded, a crazy, gun-toting psychologist driving hundreds of miles to comfort a grieving widow was just the thing to take her mind off Dad.

When Jane called the cops and said I’d pulled a gun on her, she’d have to relate my rambling about abandoning people and selfishness and all that. Tara might think Scott, wracked with remorse, had gone off the deep end. For her, a
crazy
cheating husband had to be way better than a smart, successful cheating husband who didn’t think she was good enough. Didn’t it?

Of course, there was always the chance Mom would go on for the rest of her life never learning the truth about Scott. For all I knew, Jane hadn’t even called the cops. Maybe she’d left Scott’s office in fear and hadn’t said anything to anyone.

The sky was the limit, and the skies were clear everywhere I looked.

T
he next day
, I returned to Ohio using the interstates. Having done what I’d set out to do, I was no longer afraid of getting caught by the fuzz.

The more I thought about it, the more I doubted Jane had reported me at all. From her perspective, she couldn’t prove what I’d done in Scott’s office. She would have wanted to win, to be right, to not have a crazy guy with a gun get off for lack of evidence. Likely she was already packed and trying to get out of town with her dumb boyfriend as fast as she could.

Testing the theory, I stayed in Columbus for two days and used Scott’s credit card. I saw the sights and thought about my dad. I thought about Mom and how strong she was, and how she deserved better children than what she’d gotten.

Mom’s parting words followed me wherever I went.

And that’s for who you might have been.

What was I supposed to make of that? Jane said Mom thought all those wrong numbers I’d made were a sign, like I was contacting my family from beyond.

I remembered the day after my great grandmother’s funeral. We were walking down a switchback road in the mountains where Granny Jenkins lived, enjoying the walk down to the river one last time, when a sparrow came down and landed five feet away. We were in the country, not the city, but that little bird hopped around and pecked like it was a bread-eating city bird. It got closer and closer, and nobody moved for fear of scaring it. When I looked at Mom to see what she thought of the strange little bird, her cheeks were wet with tears.

“It’s Granny, it’s Granny,” she said, over and over.

At the time, I couldn’t understand how Granny could be a bird now. Mom was too upset to ask, and nobody else was saying anything, so I stayed quiet and forgot about it for a long time. But yeah, Mom had a superstitious streak. And where it concerned me, at least, she was right.

From Columbus, I drove to Sandusky—to the greatest amusement park of all time. After waiting thirty minutes in a maddeningly long line at Cedar Point, I finally got to the ticketing booth.

“Can I get a Fast Lane pass?” I said.

Some kids behind me had been talking about the intriguing things nonstop since getting in line. Apparently, if you had one, you could get on rides quicker.

“Fast Lane passes are limited to availability,” the girl behind the inch-thick safety glass said.

As an experienced amusement park veteran, I knew never to lose patience with the staff. They didn’t get paid much. They dealt with pushy people all day, and their only joy in life was tormenting the masses by being as useless as they could possibly be—all with a scientifically calibrated passive aggressiveness. You could never actually pinpoint where the line was and whether they’d crossed it. It was almost art. But I was tired of being in line, art confused me, and I wanted to play Whack-a-Mole.

“Let me put it this way,” I said, weighing my words carefully. “Are there any Fast Lane passes available?”

Her eyes narrowed fractionally. “Go to the Fast Lane kiosk when you enter the park. Thank you, sir. Just the one ticket, sir?” This last with a possibly judgmental glance at the empty space behind me.

“Just the one,” I said, and handed her Scott’s credit card. “Where is the Fast Lane kiosk?”

Blandly, without inflection, she played her trump card: “The Fast Lane kiosk is on the left-hand side when you enter the park … sir.”

I paid her over sixty dollars, after the taxes and fees, and entered the park. When I got to the kiosk, it was closed. Taped to the window was a sign saying they were out of Fast Lane passes.

My usual strategy at amusement parks is to do all the so-called boring stuff early, while everyone else waits forever in the lines for the cool stuff. Then at the end of the day, after all the corporate picnics and tour groups have left, I ride the roller coasters as many times as I want—at night, with everything lit up, flying through the darkness in my clickity-clanking chariot in the sky.

Keeping to the strategy, I tried a few of the tamer rides at first, marveling that even
those
lines were long. So I made the most of it and eavesdropped on the conversations around me, sometimes even joining them. It was easy—being in an amusement park line was like this great communal consciousness. As one, we hated the park for being greedy and letting too many people in. We hated the signs saying not to sit on the rails, the heat, and the kids who rushed around and switched spots with their friends when they got to the front. We hated getting to the top of a tall, twisty, scaffolding only to look across to a different ride and seeing
that
line was short.

After an hour and a half, with only bumper cars and this spinning octopus thing to show for my time, I abandoned the long lines and simply walked around.

Being at an amusement park is a great place to witness the best and worst of humanity at leisure: children begging, parents sitting on benches by ride exits or dragging crying children behind them from place to place. Everyone eating. Good, bad, and
really
bad tattoos everywhere I looked. Young men carrying around oversized stuffed animals. Girls with too much makeup. Bare chubby bellies with bellybutton rings. Teenagers racing through the crowds. Security everywhere. Cameras everywhere. The mingled smell of fried food and cotton candy.
Amazing
ice cream cones. Every color of flip-flops and sandals, and smoking in the designated areas.

At one point I saw a fistfight between two women in bikinis. They were grabbing and pulling each other’s hair out and screaming at each other.

Watching the fight with the grinning crowd, it seemed we’d reached the pinnacle of our collective tension, bursting through to something as close to nirvana on Earth as a group could come.

When I got tired of walking, I passed the afternoon playing carney games. I spent two hundred dollars flipping pennies onto plates, dropping tiny hoops onto bottle-tops, dropping softballs into vertically tilted boxes, and climbing ladders over this bouncy airbag to push a button at the far side before flipping over. At one point I won an enormous stuffed gorilla, which I gave to a little girl. It was funny watching how happy she was under the withering glares of her parents, who had to carry the thing around the park for the rest of the day. Other than that, I passed on all the prizes.

With dusk approaching, I quit the carney games for what I really cared about—the roller coasters. Because that’s what Cedar Point is best known for. They had sixteen of them, and I got on as many as I could, starting with the big ones: the Blue Streak, the Corkscrew, the Gatekeeper, the Magnum XL-200, the Mantis, and the Iron Dragon. I rode them all and I had a blast.

But I’d saved one very special roller coaster for last.

A half-hour before the park closed, I walked quickly through the vacant maze of guide ropes to the front of the line. When I got there, a cartoon character with the measuring stick said I had to be
at least
fifty-two inches tall to ride it, which I most definitely was.

The Top Thrill Dragster is a seventeen second ride. It zooms from zero to a hundred and twenty miles an hour in four seconds, sending the rider over a four hundred foot-high hump before returning back to the launch platform.

There was a kid about sixteen or seventeen years old who got in beside me, in the last cars, despite plenty of open seats at the front. I respected him for it. Anyone who knows anything about roller coasters knows the back is the best because of all the extra bumping and whipping around. Also, you’re guaranteed to have a consistently fast ride from the very highest point of a hump down to the bottom. Basic physics.

“You ever ride this before?” I said to him as we waited for the staff to come by and check the safety arms and seatbelts.

“Tons,” he said, making it sound like he was bored.

“You’re not scared at all?” I said. “Not even a little?”

He laughed. “Nope. I even raise my hands in the air.”

I’d seen this kid raise his hands in the air five times in a row before I decided to get on.

“You actually do that?” I said. “Put your hands up?”

“All the time. You should try it.”

“Is it safe?”

“Totally,” he said, with a superior smirk. “But don’t do it right out the gate—wait for it. Your hands fly back faster.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure…”

When the visibly tired and overworked staff finished testing the restraints, one of them gave a halfhearted thumbs-up to the guy in the control booth. The control guy did something and we pulled slowly out of the station in pursuit of the perfect ride—then we
blasted
down the track and into the sky.

My head snapped back against the headrest. Against all common sense, I raised my hands in the air and thought they’d fly off from the force of the wind and the acceleration—it was awesome.

Earlier, from down on the ground, I’d noticed it took five seconds for the coaster to traverse the hump completely. That one section at the top was the slowest part of the otherwise speedy ride.

When those employees had checked the safety bar, I’d been propping it back an extra four inches with my knee while leaning forward with my chest puffed out. Very painful, when they’d tugged it, but nobody noticed the extra inches of space I’d stolen.

The coaster slowed down and we crested the top. This was where I’d planned to leap to my death. With the lingering momentum from the ride up, it would have been so easy to slip out from under the bar and push off yelling,
Why did I listen to you…?

Instead, I curled up around the safety bar and held on for the terrifying ride back to the station, cursing myself for a fool.

O
n the way
out of the park, I saw that employee from earlier today—the ticket booth Nazi. She was walking hand-in-hand with a boy her age, over to a table with about ten other employees, all laughing and talking and having fun.

I took a folded piece of paper from my pocket and reread the suicide note I’d penned:

Dear Tara,

I wasn’t a good husband. I was a cheat and a liar, and I didn’t deserve you. Deep down, I was very unhappy. I knew what I did was wrong, but I couldn’t stop and I hated myself.

You’re a beautiful, special person. I’ll always love you, and I hope that one day you can forgive me.

Scott was a bastard, and no doubt about it. But he deserved his natural fate, and Tara did too.

I crumpled up the note and disposed of it in the proper container, to be recycled for later.

T
he rest
of my ride as Scott Schaefer passed uneventfully. I stopped using my credit card and stayed in cheap hotels that still took cash. I watched TV, read some fun books, and eventually found a lemon filled doughnut.

When my third kick came, I called the minister and found out he’d given the laptop and camera to the police. Beth’s mom and boyfriend had been arrested, and the cops were actively looking for Scott.

I was happily surprised to learn Nate had come to Toledo. He’d donated a hefty amount to the church to help both Tara and Beth with any financial difficulties they’d have in the days ahead. What a great guy.

My next ride came fairly quickly. About a week later, in fact.

I was in Arizona, in the body of a man who liked to smuggle people into the country. Only, when they got here, he’d raise the fee on them and make examples of the ones who couldn’t pay.

I’d shown up right when my ride’s partner was about to shoot an old man, but I killed the gunman instead.

After dropping off my load of smuggled people, I took the money they paid me and got a hotel. The next day, I contacted a tour company and flew for several hours in an actual hot air balloon. Later that week, I signed up for a motorized tour through the desert, and then visited a Frank Lloyd Wright house called Taliesin West.

Talk about easy rides.

Near the end, about three weeks later, I dialed my mother’s house in Allentown. When she picked up, I quickly apologized. Wrong number, I told her. Off by a single digit.

She said that was quite all right.

I thanked her for being so understanding.

She said it was an easy mistake. It could happen to anyone.

L
ike most independent authors
, I rely on word of mouth for nearly all of my marketing. So, if you liked
Fool’s Ride
, please consider leaving a review. The more reviews it gets, the more likely people are to find it, and that would really help me out.

Hopper House, Book Three Of The Jenkins Cycle
,
goes on sale 8/15/2015 (and is available for pre-order).

I've also published a novel about a modern day cat burglar. Nothing supernatural, just good honest crime:
Thief's Odyssey.

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