Until the Ride Stops by Amie Denman

Author:Amie Denman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IN ONE OF her criminal justice classes, Caroline’s professor had made an important point about the value of listening. Their class had taken several field trips and each student was required to write down everything they heard. They’d gone outside where the distant noise of trains mingled with birdcalls, wind and car traffic. At a local coffee shop, students hunched over their drinks listening to conversations at nearby tables. They’d even gone to a baseball game on campus and a bank during busy Friday hours.

Caroline had been amazed by the different sounds and impressions the students had heard. How could two people sitting side by side at a coffee shop come away with different perspectives on a neighboring table’s conversation? This summer, wherever she was posted at Starlight Point, Caroline had resolved to practice listening.

Most days, it was a failure. The scrambler ride created a whooshing wind noise. The roller coaster down the midway clacked and induced screaming. Lots of screaming. The train whistled and puffed. Kids cried and yelled. Sometimes parents cried and yelled, depending on how their day was going.

Starlight Point was a cacophony of noise. Which was one of the reasons Caroline was happy to take an early morning shift even though it would be a long day with another STRIPE class scheduled for the evening.

Beginning in the cool morning air at seven o’clock, Caroline gradually added sounds to her collection. Employees arriving, vehicles on the Outer Loop road, rides groaning into action for their first guests. Eventually it would become deafening, but the rise in volume was gradual over the first several hours of her shift.

At around nine in the morning, Caroline heard the park coming to life. But she could still hear the construction sounds from behind the fence. Those noises of trucks, backup alarms, digging and men shouting over their own noise had become her early morning friends, a constant assurance that work was progressing.

But something was not right. She heard beeping that indicated reverse gear on some large piece of equipment, but when it stopped she heard something else. Shouting. Voices raised not in anger or greeting or directions, but fear and panic instead.

“Get it off him. Off. Hurry!”

A door slammed. More shouting, and the voices held wild notes of panic.

Something was definitely wrong. It was not her job to open the gate and snoop on the construction zone, but she didn’t need her police training to know those shouts were fueled by something bad.

Caroline unlocked the gate closest to the midway and swung it open. The usual trucks, steel beams, piles of earth and stone, and excavating equipment littered the site.

But all the men were grouped around the back of one of the dump trucks. At least one person was on the ground. Her heart raced as she looked for Matt in the chaos. She found him.

He stood over the man on the ground, one hand over his eyes and holding his cell phone to his ear. Although his posture suggested he was in agony, he appeared physically unharmed.

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