Dream A Little Dream(7)

Ten minutes later when Gabe Bonner returned to the drive-in, he found the boy huddled on the ground, guarding the motionless body of his mother.





“Wake up.”

Something wet splashed on Rachel’s face. Her eyes flickered open, and she saw bars of blue-white light shining above her. She tried to blink them away, then panicked. “Edward?”

“Mommy?”

Everything came back to her. The car. The drive-in. She forced her eyes to focus. The bars of light were coming from the fluorescent fixture in the snack bar. She was lying on the concrete floor.

Gabe Bonner crouched on one knee at her side, and Edward stood just behind him, his little boy’s face old with worry. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry . . .” She tried to struggle into a sitting position. Her stomach heaved, and she knew she was going to throw up.

Bonner pushed a plastic cup against her lips, and water trickled over her tongue. Fighting the nausea, she tried to turn away from it, but he wouldn’t let her. The water splashed over her chin and ran down her neck. She swallowed some of it, and her stomach steadied. She swallowed more and noticed a faint aftertaste of stale coffee.

She barely managed to sit up the rest of the way, and her hands shook as she tried to take the thermos cup from his hand. He let go the moment their fingers touched.

“How long since you’ve had anything to eat?” He uttered the question without much show of interest and rose to his feet.

Several more swallows of water and a few deep breaths let her recuperate enough to manage a smart-ass response. “Prime rib just last night.”

Without comment, he thrust some kind of snack cake into her hand, chocolate with a creamy-white center. She took a bite, then automatically held it out toward Edward. “You eat the rest, honey. I’m not hungry.”

“Eat it.” An order. Curt, flat, impossible to disobey.

She wanted to shove the snack cake in his face, but she didn’t have the strength. Instead, she forced it down between sips of water and found that she felt better. “This’ll teach me not to stay out dancing all night,” she managed. “That last tango must have done me in.”

He wasn’t buying her act for a minute.“Why are you still here?”

She hated having him loom over her and forced herself to her feet, only to realize her legs weren’t working all that well. She settled into a paint-splattered metal folding chair. “Did you happen to notice . . . how much work I got done before my . . . unfortunate lapse of consciousness?”

“I noticed. And I told you I wouldn’t hire you.”

“But I want to work here.”

“Too bad.” With no particular haste, he ripped open a snack-sized bag of tortilla chips and handed it to her.

“I have to work here.”

“I doubt that.”

“No, it’s true. I’m a disciple of Joseph Campbell. I’m following my bliss.” She pushed a tortilla chip into her mouth, then winced as the salt stung the cuts on her fingers.

Bonner didn’t miss a thing. He caught her by the wrists, then turned her dirty hands upward to study her thorn-slashed palms and the long, bloody scratches on the undersides of her arms. The wounds didn’t seem to bother him much. “I’m surprised a smart-ass like you doesn’t know enough to wear gloves.”

“I left them at my beach house.” She rose. “I’ll just slip into the ladies’ room and wash off some of this dirt.”

She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t try to stop her. Edward followed her to the back of the building where she found the ladies’ room locked, but the door to the men’s room open. The plumbing was old and unsightly, but she spotted a pile of paper towels and a fresh bar of Dial soap.

She washed as much of herself as she could reach, and, between the cold water and the food, felt better. But she still looked like a train wreck. Her dress was filthy, her face ashen. She combed the snarls out of her hair with her fingers and pinched her cheeks while she tried to figure out how she could possibly recover from this latest disaster. The Impala wasn’t going anywhere, and she couldn’t give up.

By the time she returned to the snack bar, Bonner had finished putting the plastic cover over the fluorescent light. She summoned a bright smile as she watched him lean the folded ladder against the wall.

“How about if I start scraping these walls down so I can paint them. This place won’t look half bad when I’m done.”

Her heart sank as he turned to her with his flat, empty expression. “Give it up, Rachel. I’m not going to hire you. Since you wouldn’t leave with the tow truck, I’ve called somebody to come get you. Go wait by the road.”