Wild Ride (3 page)

Ethan looked past the dock to the Keep, the dark tower looming in the center of the paddleboat lake. The drawbridge, which usually touched down on the end of the dock, was up and there were no lights on in the restaurant on the main floor, which, if memory served him right, was unusual. Of course, his memory was temporarily being sat on by many slugs of Jack.

They passed the battered Fortune-Telling Machine that he had learned early was a complete crock, and Delpha's tent-shaped booth that he'd carved a hole in the back of so he could listen to Delpha tell fortunes, which were not a crock. Then the Double Ferris Wheel, where he'd grabbed his first
kiss, and the Pirate Ship with its dozen jolly plastic pirates looking brand new, which was a testament to that Brannigan woman's skill; they'd been in pretty bad shape since the glorious afternoon when he was twelve and he'd beaten the crap out of them with a wooden sword and declared himself King of the Pirates. Then the games (Carl's Whack-A-Mole was still there) and the food booths (if he never had another funnel cake again, it would be too soon) and finally the struts and tracks of the Dragon Coaster, with its massive wooden dragon tunnel arching over the highest loop, waiting to swallow the cars on their last ascent, and the seven-foot iron-clad orange Strong Man statue in front of the Test Your Strength machine next to the entrance to the coaster. The whole place looked great except for the dragon tunnel at the top of the coaster that was still missing the jeweled eye it had lost before Ethan could remember.

Gus climbed the stairs onto the wooden platform and went into the small booth that controlled the ride. He threw a switch, and the thousands of tiny green lightbulbs that lined the course of the ride came alive.

Lit now, it looked smaller than Ethan remembered from all the times he'd sneaked out of Glenda's trailer at midnight to watch the Dragon soar, the times that Gus had told him stories of demons in the park and made him count the number of times the cars rattled at the end when they hit the dragon's tail. Five meant the park was safe, he remembered now. Demons all locked up. Gus had even given the demons names. Tura, the one that looked like a mermaid: Ethan had had some fantasies about her. Fufluns, the good-time demon. Two others he couldn't remember. And Kharos, the Devil.

It was a miracle he'd never had nightmares. At least not from his childhood.

The freshly painted blue-and-green cars were ready to go, their scales gleaming in the green lights on the tracks. Ethan stood with Gus on the platform as the old man pulled out his pocket watch and flipped open the lid.

“It's time.” Gus shut the watch, stuffed it back into a pocket on his vest, entered the small booth, and hit the controls.

With a shudder, the cars began moving, heading toward the first turn, gleaming in the lights as they clattered up the incline over the Keep lake,
the entire ride shaking as if it were going to fall apart, then swooping down into the curves. Ethan watched in silence until the cars were slowly crawling up toward the pinnacle of the last loop, the dragon tunnel, at least a hundred feet into the air, the wooden struts supporting the track shivering and creaking in protest. The Dragon wouldn't set any records for height. Or length. Or safety, Ethan thought, mesmerized by the creaking cars that sounded like they were going to collapse at any second. Perhaps they shouldn't be running it any more than they had to.

“Gus? Maybe—”

Gus waved him off, walked to the end of the platform, and unhooked the chain that closed off the service walkway. He stepped onto the walkway and then leaned over, putting the right side of his head right on top of one of the rails.

“Geez, Gus, that's dangerous,” Ethan said, but the old man couldn't hear him, focused on the vibration of the coaster. Ethan walked over and stood on the walkway, prepared to snatch Gus out of the way if the old man didn't move before the Dragon came home.

The coaster went through the tunnel and roared down, racing into the high-bank corkscrew turn called the Dragon's Tail. The cars slammed back and forth on the rails and then splashed through the shallow water at the bottom toward the long straightaway leading back to the platform, and Gus stood up as it came in, his face grim in the light from the control booth.

“What's wrong?” Ethan asked, worried the old man was going to have a heart attack.

“Only four rattles.” Gus headed back to the control booth, and Ethan followed close behind.

The Dragon pulled up to the platform, and Gus threw the lever, stopping it. The bars that kept people from falling out automatically lifted. He threw switches, powering down the ride, turning off the thousands of lights that lined the edge of the tracks, the pinpoint reflections in the water flashing out and leaving the lake lifeless. The park plunged back into darkness, a few streetlamps dotted here and there casting lonely cones of orange light through Glenda's cellophane.

Ethan put his hand on Gus's shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let's go back to the trailers—”

He stopped, suddenly alert.

Nineteen years of Special Operations duty in the Army and three-plus years in combat: no amount of alcohol could wash those instincts away. Ethan fumbled for the pistol, finally pulling it out, the grip sweaty in his left hand. He blinked, trying to focus, searching back and forth, the muzzle of the gun following his eyes as he tried to see into the dark shadows. He grabbed Gus's arm. “Come on
now
,” he said, and saw Gus looking at his chest, frowning.

He looked down and saw the tiny red dot of an infrared laser sight.

Oh, crap
, he thought, and then the round hit him.

M
ab had let Glenda steer her to the Dream Cream and sit her down on one of the pink leather stools at the counter. She really wanted to keep going to the door to the back hall—one short flight up to her bed in Cindy's apartment and solitude and silence—but she was feeling dizzy and her head hurt and she'd read something once about not falling asleep with a concussion. Also, she needed to find out what had hit her. If the damn kids from the nearby college were pulling a prank with the iron FunFun statue at the gate that she'd spent eighty hours restoring, heads were going to roll.

She touched the back of her own head gingerly. It hurt.

“Let me get you a cold cloth,” Glenda said. “You look kind of . . . gory.”

“Thank you.” Mab put her hat on the counter. The Formica was covered in retro pink swirls, so she stopped looking at it and tried to focus on the mirrored wall behind it, with its glass shelves of sundae dishes and milk shake glasses and the blackboard where Cindy wrote down the flavors for the day.

Glenda flipped up part of the counter and passed through to the other side. She took a clean dish towel out of the drawer, ran it under the cold water, wrung it out, and came back to stand behind Mab. “Hold still,” she said, and pressed it to the back of Mab's head, where it stung for a moment and then just felt good.

“That's nice,” she told Glenda, and then the door opened and she heard her uncle Ray's voice saying, “What the hell happened?”

“She hit her head,” Glenda said, her voice hard. She went around to the other side of the counter, looked at the bloody dish towel, and threw it in the trash.

Ray sat down on the stool beside her, his middle-aged muscular bulk crowding her. “You okay?”

“Getting there.” Mab touched the back of her head again and then looked at her fingers. No blood. Things were looking up.

“What are you doing here?” Glenda said to Ray. “It's past midnight.”

“Working late, like everybody else,” Ray said, trying to sound jolly, which was not in his skill set. He jerked his head toward the back of the store and evidently to the yard beyond that, where he kept the small RV he used as an office. “Cleaning up some filing.” He transferred his smile to Mab. “What a worker you are, Mary Alice. I told you she'd be great, didn't I, Glenda?”

Glenda nodded at Mab. “I'll make you a cup of tea,” she said, and began to fill the kettle.

“Let me see your eyes,” Ray said to Mab, and she turned and looked at him as he leaned toward her, big and sure and expensive in his Burberry coat with his miniature black-and-gold Ranger crest stuck to his lapel like a designer label.

He put his hand under her chin, which she hated, and she saw that his broad handsome face was getting puffy with age. She should tell him to stay away from close-ups with people. He looked a lot better from far away.

He peered at her. “You look all right. Pupils the same size. What happened?”

“A clown knocked me down.” Mab pulled back from his hand as her head throbbed. “Can I have an aspirin, Glenda?”

“Sure thing.”

Glenda moved down the counter, and Ray sat back.

“You'll be fine. You ready to start the Fortune-Telling Machine?”

“Yes,” Mab said, and the door opened again and Delpha came in with her bird.

“Here you go.” Glenda handed Mab the aspirin as Delpha sat down beside her, Frankie on her shoulder.

“It's as we thought,” she said to Glenda. “He's gone.”

Mab surveyed the people who surrounded her: Glenda, her platinum hair spiked up and her blue eyes tense; Ray, his shark eyes staring down at her from his beginning-to-bloat broad face; and Delpha with Frankie on
her shoulder, her hollow eyes making her look as skull-like as the cheesecloth ghosts in the park. They all looked odd to Mab, as if they were only pretending things were fine. Frankie was the sanest looking of the lot.

“So who was this clown who knocked you down?” Ray said, trying to smile jovially at her, his tension obvious.

“I think it was the FunFun by the gate,” Mab said, and Ray lost his smile.

“The FunFun by the gate? I thought you meant some clown of a guy—”

“She
hallucinated
that part,” Glenda said, staring at him. “She hit her head and then she
hallucinated
the FunFun, so—”

“Well, hell, yeah, she hallucinated it,” Ray said. “Iron clowns don't go running around, that's crazy.”

He sounded weird, as if he were trying too hard not to sound weird.

“Weird,” Mab said aloud.

“What?” Ray said, his eyebrows snapping together.

“I finished the carousel,” Mab said, to get him on to something else before he drove the clown into the ground.

“Well, good for you,” Ray said. “Now you can start on the Fortune-Telling Machine.”

“I plan to,” Mab said. “Could you go away now?”

“That's no way to talk to your boss,” her uncle said, his geniality dimming.

Mab shook her head and then regretted it as her head pounded harder. “You are not my boss. I am my boss. I have done an outstanding job on this park, and tomorrow when my concussion is over, I will begin on the Fortune-Telling Machine, and it will be as fabulous as everything else I've done, and you will say, ‘Thank you very much, Mary Alice,' and then I will go on to my next job, where I will also be my boss and where I will also do a fabulous job.” She thought of the iron-covered FunFun by the gate, the beauty of the smooth stripes on his coat, the gleam she'd painted in his turquoise eyes, the lushness of the multiple glazes on his waistcoat. If somebody had damaged him—

“You have an interesting approach to employment,” Ray said, an edge in his voice.

“I have an interesting approach to everything.” Mab turned away
from him and nodded at Glenda, nervously tapping her cigarette on the pack. “I'm okay now, I'll go upstairs to bed. You go see your son.”

“I'll see Ethan in a bit, you sit and have some tea,” Glenda said, but she looked toward the door.

“Ethan?” Ray transferred his gaze to Glenda. “He's here?”

“He just came home tonight.” Glenda lit her cigarette. “Resigned from the Army. Big surprise.”

“You should have told me,” Ray said. “Why's he here now?”

Glenda inhaled and blew out a long stream of smoke away from Mab. “He. Just. Got here.”

Mab slid off her stool and detoured around Ray to sit at the end of the counter and look out the mullioned windows into the empty dark street beyond. It was too dark to see clear out to the gate where the iron clad FunFun should be, but she could still see him as he'd looked when he'd hit her, larger than life, saying her name . . . “You know, when the clown talked to me, he split the metal on his cheeks. That's real damage, that's not going to be easy to fix. Good thing it was a hallucination.” She caught sight of Glenda's face, her shock reflected in the window.

“He said your name?” Glenda said.

“The clown talked to you?” Ray said.

She swiveled the stool around to face them. “I hallucinated it. He said, ‘Mab,' and the metal on his face split so I could see the wood underneath—” She felt ill thinking about it. “—and then he reached down his hand to help me up and I heard more metal tear. And then I screamed and he ran away.”

“Hallucination,” Ray said promptly. “It never happened. Put it out of your mind.”

Glenda glared at him. “If she wants to talk about it, she can. You're upsetting her.”

“I'm not upset. I don't get upset. Unless somebody is running around ruining my work, then I might get upset.” Mab looked back at them, but nobody was paying attention to her. Ray scowled at Glenda, Glenda took a hard drag on her cigarette and stared at Ray, Delpha shook her head, and Frankie moved from foot to foot on Delpha's shoulder. “I'm missing something, aren't I?”

“No,” Glenda said with finality. The kettle whistled and she put her cigarette on the side of the sink and picked up the teakettle, shutting off the awful screech.

Ray stood up. “I'm not happy about the lack of security in this park,” he told Glenda. “Somebody coming in here, running around, knocking people down. We had a deal. I pay for the restoration, you run the place. If you can't do that, I'll have to take it over.”