Wild Ride (10 page)

“Hell, I can't even do that,” Ethan said.

Gus began to speak, but a woman sat down on the bench across from them and said, “May I join you?” and Gus stopped, his mouth open. Ethan understood his surprise. She looked to be in her late thirties, green eyes, sharp planes to her face, shoulder-length brown hair. She was beautiful, but more than that she was—

“Classy,” Gus said.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice pitched low with amusement. She handed Gus a five-dollar bill and said, “I'm buying,” and Gus took the bill and left for the bar before she finished her two-word sentence.

She turned and smiled at Ethan and made him dizzy. Of course, he'd just had half a cup of warm beer on an empty stomach on top of the shots from the flask spaced throughout the day. That'd make any man dizzy. His eyes dropped to the neck of her white shirt, underneath an open leather jacket. A fringe of white lace was showing. That would make any man dizzy, too.

“Master Sergeant Wayne?” she asked.

Ethan snapped his eyes back up to her face. “Who's asking?”

“I'm Weaver,” she said and held out her hand, slender and, Ethan was sure, soft.

“Just Weaver?” he said, but he couldn't stop himself from taking it. Her grip was warm, firm not soft; he felt calluses.

She pulled her hand back. “You're pretty famous around here, you know. Local hero.”

Hero. Right. Ethan glanced back at Ashley. Her head swiveled and she looked right at Ethan and then through him as if he weren't there. “Yeah,” Ethan said, harsher than he intended. “Big hero.”

“So what brings you home, hero?” Weaver asked, smiling.

“My mother needed help.” Ethan picked up his plastic cup and drained the rest of his beer in one long swallow.

“Glenda.” Weaver nodded. “How's Glenda doing?”

Ethan focused on her, trying to figure out her angle. Did she know Glenda was losing her grip? “She's great.”

“Good for her.” Weaver smiled again as she said it, and Ethan felt himself drawn in.

He picked up his plastic cup to drink, but it was empty. He felt flustered putting it back down on the table, and his voice was sharper than he meant it to be when he spoke. “What are you doing here?”

She seemed taken aback. “Drinking with you.”

“Yeah, I'm sure this is the best you can do.” He looked her up and down again and shook his head. “What do you want?”

She leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest, and Ethan felt a slight disappointment.

“Well, I wanted to meet you, grumpy,” she said, her smile fainter now, but still there. “You're Special Forces. Highly qualified. And now you're here in Dreamland doing . . . what?”

“Security guard,” Ethan said.

Her smile vanished. “Security guard? Oh, come on.”

She leaned forward again and Ethan thought,
Don't look
, and looked.

“What are you really doing here?” she asked. “You're on a mission, aren't you?”

Gus slapped a plastic cup in front of her, making the beer slop out and
her jerk back, and Ethan accepted his cup gratefully. Then Gus put the tray he'd been carrying down in front of his seat, two more glasses on it for him. “I left the last buck for a tip. Shannon's a good girl.”

“Of course,” Weaver said, picking up her cup. She took a sip and winced at the taste. Then she looked up and caught him watching her and knocked back a good slug of it and slapped the cup down on the table.

Ethan smiled. He hadn't meant to, but there was something so good-natured in the way she knocked back the lousy beer, unguarded for the first time since she'd sat down, and then she grinned back and he thought,
Screw being careful, if she gets dangerous, I can take her
. That made him smile, too, and he leaned forward, only to catch sight of Mab in her miner's hat, talking to some stranger. Hell, maybe they'd all get laid tonight.

Mab caught him watching her just as Weaver turned around to see who he was looking at. He watched them size each other up across the room the way women always did, fast and thorough, pretending they weren't. Out of the corner of his eye, he also noticed Ashley watching the exchange between the two women as the bald guy chewed on her neck.

Women.

Weaver turned back to Ethan.

“So you come here often?” he said to her, and she smiled again.

“Do you?” she said. “Doesn't your boss mind you drinking on duty?”

Ethan looked at Gus. “You mind?”

“Hell no.” Gus drank half of the first beer on the tray and wiped his mouth.

Weaver's smile faded, and she looked puzzled. “Gus is your boss?” she said to Ethan.

“Pretty much. Gus and Glenda. They're tough but fair.” He tried smiling at her.

She still looked confused. “I thought Ray Brannigan bought the park.”

“Ray don't own all of the park,” Gus said, mustering some outrage. “He just got half.”

Ethan turned to him, astounded. “What? How the hell did Ray get half the park?”

Gus moved his cup around on the table. “Park hasn't been doing that good. Ray said he'd buy half of our shares if we used the money to fix the
park. We all sold him half, only Young Fred sold him all of his so now Ray's got half.” Gus drained the rest of the first beer and moved on to the second.

“Your math's off, Gus,” Weaver said, but Ethan was still dealing with the fact that his mother had let half the park be sold.

“It got that bad?” he said to Gus. “Why didn't you call me?”

“You know Glenda,” Gus said. “She likes to do things herself.”

“Crap,” Ethan said. Ray with a 50 percent interest in the park could go a long way toward explaining why Glenda was deteriorating. Stress could screw with anybody's mind. He knew that one for sure.

He looked over at the bar, but Ray was gone, and then he caught sight of him in the middle of a group of people, all drunk and laughing except for him. He had his iron coin in his hand again. Loser.

“It's okay,” Gus said, following Ethan's eyes to Ray. “He don't interfere much. And Mab's doin' a real good job; park looks like new. We had a real good summer, people coming to see it fixed up. Next year, we're gonna be fine again.”

“Mab?” Weaver said, and Ethan realized that drinking had made him stupid; they'd been talking in front of her the whole time.

“Mab's the redhead you were checking out a minute ago,” Ethan said, gesturing behind her.

Weaver turned around, but Mab and the guy were gone from the bar into the crowd. She turned back to Gus. “Right. I remember her. Nice hat. So Brannigan bought into the park but he's not interfering with anything.” She looked at Ethan, still smiling but her eyes narrow now. “And you're just a security guard.”

Ouch
, Ethan thought, and drank the rest of his beer, still trying to figure out how Ray had muscled in and how bad it must have been for Glenda to let him.

Gus leaned toward her. “Who are you, lady?”

“Oh, I'm a big fan.” Weaver got up and came around the picnic table to sit beside Ethan. She glanced down at the thigh rig. “Big gun.”

“Mark 23 SOCOM,” Ethan said, figuring that meant nothing to her.

“Can I see it?”

Ethan frowned.
Never give up your weapon
was a rule pounded into
him in every training he'd had in the Army. He pulled the gun out of the rig, took the magazine out, ejected the round in the chamber, and handed it to her.

“Heavy,” Weaver said, but she held it as if it were a feather. She hefted it in her hand. “Nice balance.”

She moved fast, smoothly sliding the gun home into the holster before Ethan could react and buckling the keep on top, her fingers brushing over his thigh.

Ethan was trying to think of what to say when she stood up. She looked down at him while he looked at her formfitting jeans, and then she pulled a card out of her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “If anything . . . exciting happens, call me. I love a good Dreamland story. Or just call me. We can discuss your gun.”

Ethan looked at the card. There was just a phone number on it.
At least I got her number
, he thought. “So,” he began, but when he looked up, she was walking away.

She looked great walking away.

Ethan realized she'd put an unloaded gun back in his holster. “Damn.” His life was a mess: robot clowns, black ops, crazy mother, hot cryptic women handling guns—

“She might be a demon,” Gus said judiciously.

Ethan closed his eyes.

He really had hit bottom.

M
ab let Joe-the-reporter-on-an-expense-account buy the hot dogs, telling him, “Cindy has them shipped in from New York.” The beer wasn't very good, but Mab was so tired and thirsty that she knocked back the whole first cup anyway while they were at the bar waiting for their hot dogs. She saw Ethan trying to be charming with a very attractive woman, and then Joe asked her about what she did when she wasn't working on the park, and he was so warm and so interested and so apparently happy to be listening to her that she followed him over to a table near the fire with her second beer and told him about the other things she'd restored, circus wagons and an old medicine wagon and lots of carousel horses in museum collections—“I've been doing this for twenty years, so pretty much anything old that has a carnival aspect to it, I'm your woman”—growing more relaxed as she talked about her work, so relaxed that she went on and told him about the paintings that she did for extra income, designed after vintage circus and amusement park posters, while he hung on every word, describing them all and then going back to talk about the different jobs she'd done, her heart lifting as she remembered all that beauty. She'd always been pleased with her work, but somehow, telling Joe about it now, she remembered it with real pleasure.

“There's not a lot of money in it,” she finally finished, because that was what people always asked. “But I can run all my business stuff off my website, which is cheap, and I get room and board wherever I'm working, and I'm working all the time, and everything I own fits in two bags, so I do all right. And I love my work. That's important. Your work is always there for you, no matter what.”

“You're amazing,” he said, and she stopped, surprised. “What?”

“Men don't usually tell me I'm amazing.” She felt tense again.

“Hey,” he said, and put his hand over hers, and she didn't move it away although normally she would have.

It felt good there.

“I'm always the weird one,” she told him. “When I was growing up here, it was because my family was the Batty Brannigans, and I really thought that once I got out of Parkersburg, I'd be okay, but then I went to art school, and I was
still
the weird one, so trust me, people do not tell me I'm amazing.”

She stopped, appalled that she'd said that, and pulled back her hand.

Joe shook his head. “Normal is overrated. You are fascinating.” He picked up her empty cup. “How about another beer?”

“That would be good,” she said faintly, still wrapping her mind around
fascinating
, and he went back for more beer and dogs.

Okay, so he had called her fascinating, but that was because he was a reporter after a story. It wasn't—

Maybe he liked her. He
seemed
to like her. That was an unnerving thought, she could cope with being ignored or even ridiculed, but some guy
liking
her—

Two men sat down at the other end of their table and spread out their beers and hot dogs, the skinny one talking loudly in the middle of her nervous breakdown.

“Now, your basic hot dog is all well and good,” Skinny said, “but it's the regional variations where you really get your bang for the buck. Like your Michigan hots and your Coneys, although putting meat sauce on a sausage? What's up with that?”

Up at the bar, Joe smiled at Shannon, who blushed and dimpled. He leaned closer to talk to her—probably interviewing her, Mab told herself—and Shannon leaned forward, too.

Well, who wouldn't lean closer to Joe? He was charming. And funny. And—

“Now me,” Skinny said loudly, “I'll take a good old kraut or slaw sauce, maybe a smear of mustard, nothing that gets in the way of the dog, if you know what I mean. You know what I think, Quentin? I think people just pile garbage on a good dog to be trendy. That's what I think.”

Joe leaned in even more to whisper something in Shannon's ear, and Mab found herself annoyed with Skinny and his culinary opinions.

“Go with the classic,” he was saying now, “that's what I say. In fact, you give me a choice, I'll go with a brat and kraut in a bun, any day of the week. That's good enough for me.”

“Nathan's,” his friend Quentin said.

“Okay,” Skinny said.

Shut up
, Mab thought.

Joe laughed with Shannon and then headed back to the table, stopping by the jukebox to punch up “What Love Can Do.”

“So this is Cindy's favorite song,” he said as he put her third beer in front of her and sat down.

“John Hiatt is a park favorite,” Mab said, accepting another hot dog and forcing a smile. “He's on both park jukeboxes, the one at the Dream Cream and here.”

Joe listened to the song. “Nice. Happy.”

Mab listened to the jukebox. “I don't understand it.”

“What's not to understand?” Joe bit into his next hot dog.

“Well, the part about love paying for the pie. Why would one of the things that love can do be pay for their pie? I know it's a metaphor, but I don't get it. Or the part about love can make you lose somebody you thought was you. That makes no sense.”

“It means love changes everything,” Joe said. “One day you're alone and starving, and the next day you're having dessert.” He smiled at her again, that crooked, heart-lifting smile. “What do you want for dessert, Mab?”