Wild Ride

WILD RIDE

 

ALSO BY
JENNIFER CRUSIE AND BOB MAYER

 

 

Agnes and the Hitman

Don't Look Down

 

Also by JENNIFER CRUSIE

 

Bet Me

Faking It

Fast Women

Welcome to Temptation

Crazy for You

Tell Me Lies

 

Also by BOB MAYER

 

The Novel Writer's Toolkit

 

Writing as Robert Doherty

 

Bodyguard of Lies

Lost Girls

Area 51

 

JENNIFER CRUSIE & BOB MAYER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS
   
   
NEW YORK

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,
organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the
authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.

 

WILD RIDE
. Copyright © 2010 by Argh Ink, LLC,
and Robert J. Mayer.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

For information, address St. Martin's Press,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.stmartins.com

 

Map by Rhys Davies

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Crusie, Jennifer.

Wild ride / Jennifer Crusie & Bob Mayer. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-53377-9

  1. Demons—Fiction. 2. Amusement parks—

Fiction. I. Mayer, Bob, 1959–II. Title.

PS3553.R7858W56 2010

813'.54—dc22                              2009040091

 

First Edition: March 2010

 

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

 

 

This book is for the amazing Calliope Jinx

We would like to thank

 

Our beta readers, Brooke Brannon, Heidi Cullinan,
Rachel Plachcinski, Lani Diane Rich, and Anne Stuart,

 

Debbie—for being Bob's better half,

 

Kennywood for giving us a place to start thinking
about Dreamland,

 

Joss Whedon for
Buffy
,

 

the Argh People who brainstormed the fortunes,
especially Carolyn T. (“Someone close to you has a secret to share”),
McB (“Th at's not a good look for you,” “It's going to get worse
before it gets better”), and Karen F. (“He loves you all
he can, but he cannot love you very much”),

 

Mollie Smith for putting together the Crusie–Mayer website
and up with us,

 

Amy Berkower and Jodi Reamer of Writer's House
and Meg Ruley of the Jane Rotrosen Agency
for also putting up with us,

 

and

 

Jennifer Enderlin for being the best editor
any writer could hope for.

 

WILD RIDE

M
ary Alice Brannigan sat on the roof of the Dreamland carousel at twenty minutes to midnight and considered her work in the light from the lamp on her yellow miner's hat.

It was good.

FunFun, the redheaded clown sitting cross-legged next to her on the roof's peak, was fully restored again. Of all the clowns in the park, including the beautiful seven-foot ironclad Fun at the Dreamland entrance, this wooden one was her favorite: exuberantly happy, one yellow-gloved hand pulling back his striped blue-green coat to show off his orange-and-gold-checked waistcoat, the other flung above his head, reaching for the gold panpipes he'd lost long ago.

“Don't worry, baby,” she said to him, patting her work bag between them. “I got your pipes right here.”

He grinned crookedly down at her, or at least down toward the ground as a breeze picked up, biting with the chill of the Ohio October night. Mab pulled her canvas painting coat closer around her and looked out over the newly restored jewel box of an amusement park. It had taken her thirty-nine years, but now she was not only in Dreamland, she'd saved it.
Once I finish the Fortune-Telling Machine, I will have put this place back the way it was at the very beginning. I will
belong
here. I
rock.

And the best part was that she was surveying it all at night with no—

“You up there, Mab?” Glenda yelled.

—people around to spoil the moment.

“Stop what you're doing and come down here,” Glenda called, the cheer in her voice sounding as platinum bright as her hair, and about as authentic. “We'll walk you back to the Dream Cream, see you get upstairs to bed. You need your sleep, honey.”

Mab gritted her teeth. This was what she got for taking a break to gloat over her work: people showed up and shouted at her.

She pulled her bag closer and took out the pipes, careful not to scratch any of the five little golden cylinders. Then she fished a tube of fast-set glue out of the bag, stood up carefully, and reached to glue the pipes into the FunFun's empty fingers, tilting her head back so the light from her miner's cap shone on the hand.

A small black raven swooped down and perched on the clown's head.

“Beat it, Frankie,” Mab whispered to the bird, trying to brush it away without dropping the pipes or falling to her death.

Frankie flapped his wings and rose above the clown and then settled down on the upflung hand, cawing at her like a cheese-grater dragged across a fire escape.

Cinderella got bluebirds doing her hair
, Mab thought.
I get ravens screwing with my work.

From below, Mab heard the raspy voice of Glenda's friend Delpha, an echo of Frankie's: “She's up there, Glenda. Frankie knows.”

“I know, too,” Glenda said, and then she raised her voice. “I'm not kidding, Mab, stop whatever you're doing up there
right now
.”

Mab leaned in, holding on to the glue with one hand and the pipes with the other, and looked Frankie right in the eye.

“These pipes are going in that hand, bird,” she told him, serious as death. “Do not get between me and my work.”

Frankie watched her for a moment, his eyes steady and bright with intelligence, and then he cawed again, the sound going down Mab's spine like a rasp, and flapped off.

“Okay, then.” Mab checked for the side of the pipes with the broken metal rod on it, reached up and squirted a generous shot of glue into the hole in the FunFun's palm, and slotted the broken rod into it. She held it for sixty seconds, ignoring demands to quit from down below, and then wiggled it a little to see if it had set.

The pipes clicked, the sound sharp in the night, as if the metal rod had moved into place, engaged a gear or something.

What the hell?

“Okay, that's it,” Glenda said, the brightness gone from her voice. “I'm coming up there.”

At fifty-nine, Glenda was probably in better shape than Mab was at thirty-nine, but it was dark, and Glenda liked a cocktail or three after six, and while she was often annoying, Mab didn't want her dead, so . . .

“Hold on.” Mab capped her glue and put it in her paint bag and eased down the turquoise-and-blue-striped carousel roof to peer over the edge, gripping the gold scalloped trim for insurance.

Glenda stood on the flagstone below in the spotlight cast from the lamp on Mab's hat, one hand on her capri-clad hip, the other waving a cigarette, her spiky white hair glowing over her pink angora sweater. Beside her, ancient, black-eyed little Delpha looked up from under lowered brows, her improbably black hair slicked down on both sides of her sunken face like two strokes of black paint over a skull, the rest of her swathed in a dark blue shawl that blended into the night.

Frankie flapped down to sit on Delpha's shoulder.

Death's parrot
, Mab thought. “Glenda, I'm almost done—”

“Done?”
Glenda smiled up at her, tense for some reason. “But, honey, you shouldn't be doing anything up there—”

Somebody staggered out of the night and lurched into Glenda, who bumped into Delpha, who stumbled back and dislodged Frankie, who went for the staggerer, who screamed and batted at him.

Frankie flew to sit on the edge of the carousel roof beside Mab, and the guy looked up.

Mab saw brown hair, bleary eyes, and a dense five o'clock shadow over an orange Bengals shirt: Drunk Dave, one of the Beer Pavilion regulars who should have been out of the park when it had closed forty-five minutes before. He'd probably stumbled off to pee in the trees that rimmed the island and gotten lost. Again.

“Whassat?” Drunk Dave squinted up at her, and Mab realized that to him, she was just a big light in the black sky.

“This is God, Dave. Go home, sober up, get a job, and never get drunk again. Or you'll go to hell.”