by Diane Kelly
After a few seconds, a voice came back. “This is Andre. Dante’s on engine number one, in the rabbit suit.”
I responded. “Roddy’s supposed to be in the suit. Dante’s supposed to be in the cruiser.”
Andre came back. “Roddy paid him a hundred bucks to wear the thing.”
Damn. With the bunny under a vow of silence, I’d never know if it was really Dante in the suit. So much for solving the mystery of the twins today. I pointed at Roddy through the windshield and fingered my gun before getting back on the radio. “You ever disobey an order again, Roddy, I’m shooting you.”
He responded with a chuckle. “Understood, captain.”
I circled around the cruiser and headed back up the other side of the parade. As I eased past the junior high pep squad clad, shaking both their pom-poms and their posteriors, a flash of yellow and black caught my eye. Behind one of the orange plastic barricades the Ninja pulled up, its rider stopping to watch the parade. My head jerked around in a double take and I inadvertently pulled on the handlebars. The bike tilted to the side, taking me with it. I turned my attention back to the road, put my left foot to the ground, and whipped the handlebars straight just before the bike could fall over on me. Gah! How embarrassing! I cranked back on the gas and zipped out of there.
Knowing the Ninja rider would be at the Jamboree gave me both a secret thrill and a knot in my gut. Trey would be coming, too, and I was looking forward to spending the day with him. He knew who rode the Ninja, but I didn’t know how well Trey knew him. What if we ran into the guy? Would Trey introduce us?
Lights flashing, I returned to my place at the front of the lineup and led the parade slowly down Main, waving to the crowd who waved eagerly back, turning on my siren a time or two to show off when the marching band was between songs. The band performed a heck of a show, the highlight being a rowdy rendition of the classic “Deep in the Heart of Texas.”
It didn’t get any better than this. At least not in Jacksburg.
When we reached the end of Main a half hour later, the parade cut down a side street to return to the high school parking lot. Once the cruiser at the rear pulled into the lot, I got on the radio. “All officers report to your assigned stations.”
En masse, the citizens of Jacksburg headed for the Jamboree grounds at the city park, myself included. As I pulled into the park, I spotted the Ninja in the designated motorcycle parking area, its driver nowhere to be seen, having disappeared into the gathering crowd. My heart spun like the cotton candy machine at the booth across the way. I parked next to the Ninja, noting the bike now bore an official State of Texas metal license plate, skillfully fabricated by inmate labor at the penitentiary in Huntsville. The owner information would be in the DMV’s system now. Finally, I could identify him. Just as soon as I could get on the computer back at the station.
Then another sensation hit me, that plunging, hollow feeling you get when bottoming out on a roller coaster. Sure, I’d identify the Ninja rider. But could he be as great a guy as Trey? Would he be as right for me as Trey? Would he make me laugh? Comfort me when I needed it? Bring me to climax with nothing more than a few skillful flicks of his thumb like Trey had done last night? I doubt it.
I’d fallen for Trey. Hard. Damn me! How had I let that happen? I knew going into this that Trey would be leaving town. There was no hope, no chance whatsoever for a long-term relationship with him. I should’ve never let it get this far. But if I hadn’t, I never would’ve felt this incredible connection to another human being. Maybe that old saying is right, after all. Maybe it is better to have loved and lost.
After securing a frozen lemonade to take my mind off my man troubles, I assumed my position near the corny dog booth. Despite the cold drink, beads of sweat rolled down my back and sides, and my feet and calves sweltered in my leather boots.
“Hot enough for you?”
I looked up to find Trey walking toward me, a paper plate in his hand. I cocked my head and looked him deliberately up and down. “Yup. Definitely hot enough for me.”
A grin spread on his face. Today Trey wore his hiking boots with shorts and a T-shirt. He held out the plate, which was loaded with a powdered sugar-coated funnel cake. “Breakfast?”
I pulled off a bite, powdered sugar drizzling down onto the chest of my uniform. The fried batter melted on my tongue. “Yum.”
Trey flicked a speck of powdered sugar off my collar, then tugged playfully on it, pulling me toward him for a sweet, sugary kiss. “Let’s play some games.”
I glanced around. My zone seemed orderly and free of potential threats other than a little girl with a gooey piece of the mayor’s bubble gum stuck in her hair, howling as her mother tried to pick it out. “Why not?”
We made our way past a bounce house full of jumping, screaming children and a line of toddlers waiting at the improvised “duck pond,” a bunch of yellow rubber ducks floating in a blue plastic kiddie pool. When we reached the midway, Trey slapped four tickets down on the counter for the first game, a shooting challenge involving BB guns and a precarious pyramid of empty root beers cans. Trey’s three shots missed the targets entirely. Mine hit the soda cans dead center, sending them crashing to the ground in a tinny ruckus. No trick rifles here. The Rotarian manning the booth handed me a stuffed brown teddy bear.
I handed it to Trey. “Here you go, babe.”
Trey cuddled the bear to his chest. “I feel so emasculated.”
I winked at him. “Don’t worry. I’ll make you feel all man later.”
He handed the bear to a passing child. “Now you’re talking.”
At the face painting booth, we found Savannah and a group of other moms putting their meager artistic skills to work painting red hearts and basic daisies on the faces of Jacksburg’s kiddos.
“Marnie. Trey. Hey.” She looked up and smiled, standing to give us both a hug. She reclaimed her seat and picked up a paintbrush. “What do y’all want? A star? A flower? A rainbow?”
Before I could answer, Trey leaned over and whispered something in Savannah’s ear. She turned her face up to him and grinned. She then turned to me, yanking me down into the chair in front of her, dipping the brush in the red paint. She ran the brush over my cheek, the bristles tickling my skin.
“Quit scrunching up your face,” she chastised me. “You’ll mess this up.”
“Can’t help it. It tickles.”
When she was done, she held up a hand mirror. I looked at my reflection. Although the lettering was backward, I could still read it. M + T inside a red heart.
The equation wasn’t complete, however. What did Marnie plus Trey equal? Love? Sure seemed like it. If it wasn’t love, it was a damn good imitation.
“Hey, Marnie.”
I looked up to find Lucas Glick, dressed as usual in a pair of Wranglers, worn boots, and a faded T-shirt, this one a rock concert tee. “Hey, Lucas.”
“Paint your face?” Savannah asked Lucas.
Lucas shook his head. “Stuff’s too itchy.”
He was right. The paint on my skin had dried out quickly in the heat and already had me scratching.
When I stood, a skinny boy of about eight took my seat. “Can you make me look like a tiger?”
Savannah tilted her head, her furrowed brow betraying her lack of confidence. “I’m not sure I’m that talented.”
“Give me a shot,” Lucas said.
Savannah gave up her chair and Lucas slid into it, looking over the paints and brushes, carefully deciding which ones to use. He finally chose a brush with thick, short bristles. He dipped it into the small bottle of white face paint and began to apply it to the boy’s forehead. He alternated the white, two shades of orange, gray, and black. When he was finished, the boy could’ve starred in a Broadway performance of Cats.
The kid looked in the mirror. “Cool!”
Savannah took a look. “Wow, Lucas. Can you stay and help us out? Anybody gets a look at this kid’s face and they’re gonna come here expecting the rest of
us to be able to do that.”
The other moms murmured in agreement.
Lucas shrugged and looked off down the midway. “Wasn’t nothing.”
Is Lucas blushing again? Surely that pink tint had to be sunburn. Nope, he actually looked a bit sheepish to have his secret talent discovered.
I put my hand on his stubbly cheek and turned his face to me. “It wasn’t nothing, Lucas. It was something.”
“It was something else,” Trey added. “By the way, Lucas, great job on those logos. The clients were impressed.”
Lucas had surprised me by actually calling Trey, taking him up on his offer to design art for websites. Maybe now that his life was taking this positive turn, heading in a new direction, he’d get his mind on his future and off the bottle.
Trey and I left the face-painters to their task and made our way down the row of games, past the milk can toss, past the horse-roping game where a boy in blue jeans, pointy-toed boots, and a straw hat sent the rope sailing over the head of the wooden rocking horse, jerking back when the rope fell neatly around the horse’s neck.
“Nice job, kid!” I called.
The boy turned to me and beamed, his teeth, tongue, and lips blue from snow cone syrup. What a cutie. My heart seized up. I wanted a blue-mouthed kid of my own, and I wanted him to have Trey’s dark hair and steel-gray eyes.
I mentally slapped myself. Why want what I can never have?
We continued down the midway. The next game was a guess-your-weight booth. Trey began to slow, pulling on my arm.
“If you dare stop,” I said, “you’re dead.”
“Aw, come on. I love that you’ve got some junk in your trunk. You’re voluptuous.”
I shook my head, but secretly I was flattered.
At the next booth, Trey beat me at darts, popping two balloons while I only broke one. The prize was a braided straw finger trap. Trey put his index finger in one end and slid the other end onto mine. “Finger sex.”
I pulled back on my finger. It was hopelessly trapped in the straw tube.
“Uh-oh.” He shot me the grin I loved. “Looks like we’re stuck with each other forever.”
I could think of much worse things. Divorce hadn’t scared me off the idea of marriage. Chet and I had many happy years before we grew apart. I’d do it again if I met the right guy. Had I already met him? I watched Trey out of the corner of my eye as we walked along, the tips of our fingers touching inside the straw tube. He was fun, smart, unconventional, and adventurous, like me in many ways but with some complementary traits and opposing body parts. Just the kind of guy I wanted. Hell, just the kind of guy I needed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WET
Around noon, we took a detour back to the food booths for lunch, chowing down on roasted turkey legs and questionable coleslaw. Probably not the best thing to eat in the heat, especially when it was served lukewarm, but I’d never been one to shy away from risk and apparently neither was Trey. Dad and Angus joined us for lunch under a large oak, which provided a tiny bit of relief from the relentless sun. We tossed our trash into a garbage barrel and headed back to the midway.
Farther down we came upon the dunking booth. Inside sat a shirtless Mayor Bennett, enclosed and protected by the metal mesh, his old man boobs sagging over his pasty belly. He taunted passersby. “Who’s got the cojones to dunk the mayor? Get back at the government! Give Uncle Sam what for!”
Trey cocked his head. “Isn’t Uncle Sam the federal government?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but taking down Uncle Sam sounds better than ‘dunk the small-town part-time mayor.’”
Jacksburg’s mayoral position was part-time, offering no vacation pay or benefits, which explained why only an independently wealthy guy like Otto Bennett could afford to serve in the position and why, as the only independently wealthy guy in Jacksurg, Bennett had held the position for six consecutive terms.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Watch out, mayor. You’re going down. I’ll show you what happens when you don’t give a police officer a raise.”
I was only playing along, trying to increase interest, help the charities that would benefit from the ticket sales. Jacksburg was full of charity cases, so most of the money raised would stay in town, merely being transferred from one pocket to another.
Trey and I stepped up to the card table where Betty Langley sat next to the mayor’s wife, both wearing purple cotton sundresses and big red floppy hats, representing the Jacksburg Red Hat Society.
“Hi, ladies.” Trey handed Betty four tickets and she handed me three weatherworn baseballs, one of them pulling apart at the seams to reveal the thin, crisscrossed strings inside.
I’d just stepped into place for my first throw when a slurred voice behind me called, “Get ‘im, Marnie!”
I turned to find Lucas standing off to the side, wobbling, a drunken smirk on his face. Gah. Should’ve checked his boot earlier. So much for him focusing on his art instead of the bottle. Beside me, Trey stiffened, standing a bit taller and placing himself strategically between me and Lucas in an unconscious act of chivalry. Sweet, even though I could take care of myself and, with a loaded .38 on my hip, posed more of a threat to Lucas if he chose not to behave.
I turned back around, ignoring Glick. I took aim and threw my first baseball, missing the target entirely. As a kid, I’d never been one for softball, opting instead for Powder-puff football. I was the best defensive tackle in Ruger County Powder-puff history.
The mayor put his thumbs in his ears and wagged his fingers at me good-naturedly. “Nanny-nanny boo-boo.”
I threw the next ball as hard as I could, missing the target again. “This is harder than it looks.”
By then, Lucas had come up close behind me.
“You cain’t throw for shit.” He followed his words with a whiskey-scented belch. Charming.
The Jackrabbit Jamboree had been an alcohol-free event ever since the year the junior high music teacher got plastered at the beer booth and took the stage singing a raunchy tune and dancing a bump and grind. Luckily, the basketball coach she was dating pulled her off the stage before she got too far, and she managed to hang on to a shred of dignity and her job.
“Captain Muckleroy,” Mayor Bennett called, “you throw like a girl!”
Nothing like ridicule to motivate a person. I narrowed my eyes, took aim, and sent the third baseball directly to the metal target, where it hit home with a resounding clang. There was a momentary pause as the mechanical apparatus activated. The mayor dropped into the water, sending up a wave that splashed through the wire protective mesh and onto the muddy ground surrounding the booth.
“Nailed it!” Trey held up his hand and I gave him a high five.
Lucas scratched his belly, his shirt riding up to expose his skinny hip bones. “Get in that booth, Marnie, and I’ll get even with you for all the times you’ve hauled me in.”
I cast him a skeptical glance. “Sure you would, Lucas. Sure you would.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“No. You’re drunker’n a skunk and probably couldn’t hit the side of a barn.”
Lucas glared back at me, his eyes narrowed. All camaraderie of the recent days was gone, the liquor coming between us, making us enemies again. We’d had a great time bowling, and I’d hoped he’d taken my advice about AA to heart. Clearly he hadn’t. I felt frustrated. No, I felt furious.
The mayor climbed out of the booth and walked over in his bare feet, his Hawaiian print bathing suit dripping and leaving a wet trail in the dry grass behind him. He tilted his head to each side, pounding a palm on the side of his skull to force the water from his ears. “Man, that felt good.”