Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (26 page)

With that statement I was certain that my roommate was still under the influence of drugs.

Inching back, I tugged him. His one arm wrapped over the
bar, one hand still clutching my arm in a death grip, James came with me.

“James. Hang onto the bar tight, man. Then throw your other arm up. Get both of them over the bar.”

He glanced toward the ground.

“Oh, shit, Skip. That’s a long way down. Look at you. You’re up on the beam, you’re on top with your legs and arms. I’m hanging here, pard. Legs down, ready to fall at any moment.”

Yeah. I was high and dry. Thank goodness I wasn’t in any peril.

“Damn it, James, do it. You’ve only got to work yourself down about eight more feet.”

“Skip.”

One more glance at the crowd below. The burned-out metal housing unit on the ground and the gears from the Dragon Tail. He let go of my arm and threw his other hand up and over the bar.

“Skip, I love you man. If I drop, tell Em I’m sorry.”

“Move. Just inch yourself down. Follow me.”

I’d thrown my arm back over the beam and as strange as it felt, I started backing up.

James hung down, jerking his arms along the bar, centimeters at a time.

And the bar shook.

“What was that, pard?” He froze, looking up at me with raw fear in his eyes.

“Move, James. Don’t stop.” Me being the old pro.

He moved.

“Skip, if I drop—”

“Shut up.”

We moved, another foot, then two. Hanging in the sky like some carnie freak show. It was just too ironic.

“Amigo, I’m serious. Bury me in the truck and don’t pay that bitch Angie one cent back on that loan.”

“Move.”

“Skip—”

“Would you shut up and save your strength?”

We moved another foot, then another. He was shaking and I could see his hands slipping, losing their grip on the bar.

“Skip, this isn’t going to work, man.”

“It will.” I heard a siren in the distance and wondered just how long it had been. Maybe an hour, maybe two?

“I’ve got five hundred bucks in the inside pocket of my sport coat.”

“Five hundred bucks?”

“Can you buy me a funeral for that?”

One more foot and he was wheezing. His hands were clawing at the metal and there was nothing I could do.

“Come on pal, one more foot.”

His legs kicked out and he forced himself toward the empty car. Inches at a time.

“James—”

“What pard?” I could hear the weakness in his voice. He’d all but given up and I looked down and saw the weariness in his eyes.

“I’m taking that five hundred bucks.”

“Yeah?”

“Come on, move.”

He inched along, almost by remote control.

“You know what I’m going to do with that?”

Silence.

“Move, James.” He moved. I slid back and saw the empty green car below me.

“I’m going to pay myself back, dude, for all the beer you’ve made me buy over the years.”

I moved. He moved. I dropped my feet and hit the roof of the car.

Oh my God, did it feel good to be on something firm. Even if it was seventy feet above the ground and swinging beneath me.

“Come on, James.”

He inched down and his feet hit the roof.

Unbelievable. I let out ten sighs of relief.

“Son,” he looked at me, still grasping the metal bar tightly, “you don’t want to drink beer.”

“No?” I let myself down over the edge, into the seat and reached out to him. He dropped one hand and reached down. I steadied him as he swung down and lowered himself into the car.

“No. That’s for daddies and kids with fake IDs.”

“Homer Simpson?”

“You got it, dude.”

We both heard the groan, felt the Tail shake and shimmy as the car at the end dropped from the bar.

The hook and ladder truck showed up about four minutes later. By then James and I were shaking in our seat and the fireman had to almost pry us from the hard plastic. Someone told me it was an aftershock. The adrenaline that had been pumping all that time had stopped, and the shock to our systems was severe.

As they lowered us to the ground I saw the aftermath of the fallen Tail car. It was like someone had dropped a pumpkin to the ground from a twenty-story building. Splat.

We stepped from the bucket and there to greet us was detective Bob Stanton. His shirt dotted with perspiration, his thin hair plastered to his head, and his jacket hung over his shoulder.

“Just what the hell did you boys get yourselves into?”

I glanced around and there were dozens of people gawking. There really isn’t a lot going on in Carol City so I suppose I should have been happy, providing the amusement for this entertainment-starved community. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t happy at all.

“Moe Bradley tried to drug me, and he did succeed in drugging James.”

“Drug you. Just how did he accomplish that?” He turned to my roommate.

“A needle. I have no idea what was in the syringe.” James pointed to his right bicep.

Stanton pointed to a uniformed officer. “Get a blood sample from this man, immediately.”

“Bradley sabotaged this ride.”

Stanton glanced over at the wreckage that was the Dragon Tail. The bombed-out crater of the former housing unit, the remains of James’s Tail car smashed on the landscape, and the Tail itself, high in the sky. Riderless. Made of six sections of gold-colored metal that probably had our fingerprints embedded in each section.

“I’ve got more questions,” he looked me in the eyes, “but you probably want to go get cleaned up.”

I glanced at myself, arms and hands raw and streaked with grease. My clothes covered in black grease and torn beyond repair.

“Skip—”

I turned and there was Em.

She ran toward me and hugged me, apparently not worrying that she was going to get some of that grease on herself.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“What?”

“My God, Skip. Dumbest thing you have ever done. Dumbest.”

James was being led away by a uniformed officer to a rescue unit, its red light flashing on the roof. They’d probably find the drug that Moe injected, and maybe find some of last night’s beer.

Em was saying this was the dumbest? There were some things she didn’t even know about, however, she may have been right. I responded, “Hey, James would have done the—”

“No. He wouldn’t have.” She shut me off with the curt statement
and a harsh glare. “There is no question about that. He would never have done that for you. Don’t ever let me hear you say that again.”

I didn’t say anything else.

“Let’s get you back to the trailer. Or maybe you should be going with James to the hospital.”

I shook my head. The crowd, the commotion, the music still blaring over the speakers, it was all a little overwhelming. I saw Linda Reilly, several rows back, and grabbed Em by the arm as I approached her.

“Hey, Linda. Where’s—” And I saw him, standing behind her and closer to the ground. “Winston, thanks for your help.”

“Hey, kid,” he walked from her shadow. “That was a very brave thing you did.”

I reached down to take his hand, but he kept it by his side. Just as well. My raw hand, my sore forearm, and aching shoulder would not respond well to handshaking.

“Also, it was very, very stupid what you did.”

“So,” I pulled my hand back, “for whatever reason, it appears that Moe is guilty of sabotaging the rides and probably killing Kevin Cross.”

Linda, silent until now, nodded. “I told you, Winston, it must be Moe. And he wanted to shift the blame to you. Trying to make these boys believe you were the killer.”

“Looks that way.” Pugh scratched the white hairs on his bare chest.

“Who would have thought?”

“Not you.” He stood back and gazed up at me. “Definitely not you.”

“No, we never—”

“You never thought it was Moe, because you were accusing me.” Pugh stomped his foot. “You and your drugged-up partner were telling people that I was responsible.”

“Hey, if it means anything, I always believed in—”

“Don’t even try to explain it.” The dwarf grabbed his girlfriend’s hand and pulled her away. “Linda told me. She got a phone call telling her you thought I was the killer. Number-one suspect. Well I’m gonna remember that.”

I could hear the distant barking of their sheepdog from hell as the two of them headed in the direction of the zoo.

Em walked up shaking her pretty head. “I would have sworn it was Winston. He’s paranoid about losing this job and he just seems like the likely candidate to try to discredit the rides,” I said.

She grabbed my arm and held on tight. “Skip.”

“Yeah.” We walked toward the Airstream.

“Jody and I—” she hesitated.

“What? Jody and I are having an affair? Are going to elope?”

She squeezed my arm. “Jody and I found some interesting stuff on Moe’s computer.” She kicked me in the shin without missing a step and kept holding on. “First of all, there was a line regarding the sticking valves that he didn’t read to you. It was down a paragraph. You can’t use kerosene solvent when—”

“The ride is in motion.” I stopped and looked at her. “I found that out the hard way.”

“The brief comments I heard after the explosion, were that if you hadn’t blown up the motor, James’s car would have shaken loose while he was still in it. I would bet that the bolts in that car had been cut. And from what I can figure out, you were supposed to be in the Tail car too. Right?”

“If Moe had his way.”

“They’d be picking up pieces of you guys for days. Scraping the ground with—”

“Em, enough with the graphic description.”

We walked, and I suddenly realized that the show had shut down. The Ferris wheel was motionless, the Sidewinder, the Fun
House, and food vendors were quiet, eerily quiet. The roller coaster sat still and the strangest sensation of all was silence. No rock and roll or big hair music. My throat was sore, but I wasn’t yelling anymore.

“And we found a letter.”

“Yeah?”

“Some big holding company was willing to buy up the Moe Shows for a whole lot of money.”

“Why?” I couldn’t imagine someone wanting to own a carnival.

“Limit the competition. They were making offers to about a dozen carnivals. The fewer rivals, the more money they could charge.”

“So why didn’t he sell?”

“Moe?”

We’d reached the Airstream and I just wanted a hot shower and a beer.

“It appears in the correspondence that the longer Moe held out, the more money this company offered.”

“So he was holding out to get rich.”

“Remember,” she stepped up on the landing, “Moe didn’t own that much stock in the company. The only way he could really clean up was if he moved out the ghost sisters.”

“Ghost sisters?” I’d only been gone, glancing at my watch, for about twenty-five minutes. And now there were new players in the game?

We walked into the trailer and I opened the refrigerator. No beer.

“Jody calls them the ghost sisters. You just see them from a distance and they appear and disappear from view.”

“I saw them up close. I talked to them. Schiller and Crouse. They are far from ghosts.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. So this letter, you think he was trying to get a bigger share of the pie?”

“The whole pie, James. There was a lot of money at stake. He had to get his sisters out of the business. And he thought the accidents would scare them into selling their shares.”

“At a fraction of what they were worth.” It made sense. This was like going to business school only the stakes were a lot higher. It was better for Moe Bradley to bring down the value of the Show. The lower the value, the less he would offer the ghost sisters. If they walked away from the Show, Moe could have it all.

“There were millions of dollars involved, Skip. This other company really wanted the Moe Shows.”

She leaned into me and started unbuttoning my shirt.

“Em?”

“Skip. It’s important that you know everything we found.”

“You think?”

She kept unbuttoning the shirt. After pulling it off my shoulders, she started unbuckling the belt on my jeans.

“Em?”

“I thought you were going to fall. I had no question about it. You and James were going to drop to your deaths and I was so sick, I can’t even tell you. I mean, my stomach was rolling, Skip. By all rights you both should have fallen. My God, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever watched. I’ve seen you in the hospital when you were on life support, but—”

She pulled the belt from its loops.

“Hey—”

“Get a shower. Take some aspirin. We need to celebrate your victory today.”

Who the hell was I to argue.

Em turned and walked to the door of the trailer. “I’m going
outside. I’ll be back in twenty minutes to see if you’re a little cleaner. I hate to say it, Skip, but I hate a dirty lover.”

I wondered how James was doing. I thought about the idiotic stunt I’d pulled, the danger I’d put myself in, and wondered what was wrong with me. Seriously. There was something, maybe a screw loose. But hey, I’d saved my best friend’s life, and I was going to get laid, so maybe it wasn’t that bad.

The trailer shook from the pounding on the door.

“Your husband?”

Em punched me on the arm. I gently eased out of bed, pulled on a wrinkled pair of semiclean jeans and removed a T-shirt with a pocket from the dresser, and there in the drawer was that damned pen. Pulling the shirt over my head, I dropped the pen into my pocket and stepped into the living area.

“Kid.”

I jerked the door open. Looking down I saw Pugh.

“What, another dead body?”

“Is Linda here?”

I looked around. As strange as things had been, you never knew.

“I’m pretty sure she’s not here.”

He pointed back to the tiny bedroom.

“Winston, give me a break. I’m not taking your paramour back to my trailer.”

He bit his upper lip. “She’s gone.”

“Where?” I wasn’t quite sure what this had to do with me.

“I wish I knew.” He scratched the hair on his chest, pushing his hand down into the flap on his overalls.