Hell Hole

  “Shall I call for backup, sir?”

  Starky. Ms. One-Track-Mind. I believe she doubts my ability to defuse our current situation without heavily armed assistance. Maybe a full SWAT team.

  I shake my head.

  “Look, Sergeant Dixon,” I say, “you’re drunk. Okay? You can not and will not drive a vehicle this evening.”

  “One of my men needs me! I can’t leave him like that. Jesus—dead in a stinking shithouse?”

  “I understand. You need to be there. Fine. I’ll radio in and get permission to drive you wherever you need to go.” I gesture toward our cop car. “We’ll give you an official police escort. Flashing lights, siren, the works.”

  Dixon gives me the slit eyes again.

  “You ever see a dead body, son?”

  “Yeah,” I answer.

  One on a Tilt-A-Whirl. Number two came courtesy of the mad mouse. Then there was the guy I personally made dead. Yeah. I’ve seen a dead body or three. However, I see no need to rehash any of that with Sergeant Dixon.

  But my “yeah” doesn’t seem to suffice. He keeps at it.

  “You ever see a man after he’s jammed a pistol inside his mouth and blown the roof off his brain?”

  I shake my head. No. That one I have not seen.

  This seems to make Dixon ease up. Soften.

  “Me, neither,” he says. “Fortunately, I’ve never had one of my men take the coward’s way out before. Fucking Smith. Fucking chickenshit. This was supposed to be a party … .”

  He reaches into a hip pocket on his cargo pants. Pulls out a leather cigar case. Pops it open, finds a plump stogie. Fires it up with the snapclick of his Zippo.

  “Let’s roll,” he says.

  Starky and I follow him to our car. Hoo-ah. We’re all off to see another dead body.

  The desk sergeant gives me and Starky permission to escort Sergeant Dale Dixon down to the rest stop off exit 52 of the Garden State Parkway.

  According to the state police, a janitor working the late shift discovered Corporal Shareef Smith’s dead body locked inside a toilet stall in the men’s room a little after 11:30 PM. The police also found a MapQuest map tucked inside Smith’s shirt pocket. It indicated that he was on his way to 22 Kipper Street in Sea Haven, New Jersey. A cell phone number was scrawled in the margins of the map. So the state troopers called; Lieutenant “Worthless” answered.

  The state police reported that Mr. Smith had jammed a pistol inside his mouth and blown a hole through the back of his skull. One shot. It’s all you usually get when you take the do-it-yourself route.

  Exit 52 on the GSP is ten miles south of the Sea Haven exit. But first you have to take the causeway off the island and head west on Route 22 to the entrance ramp. All told, we’ll be chauffeuring Sergeant Dixon about fifteen miles.

  Now we’re crossing the bridge to the mainland, leaving behind the happy tourist world of miniature golf and soft serve ice cream and clam chowder and never-ending surf and fudge. Heading into the other New Jersey. The one where it isn’t vacation every day all summer long.

  I smell burning leaves.

  Or fried dog poop.

  “Sergeant?” Samantha Starky is sitting up front with me. I’m driving. Dixon is in the back, flicking his Zippo, firing up his cigar again. Frying the dog poop.

  “What?”

  “You can not smoke in this vehicle.”

  Dixon makes like the refineries up near Newark and exhales an acrid cloud of stench. “Says who?”

  Starky taps on a little no smoking sticker taped to our dashboard.

  “Municipal ordinance fourteen fifty-two.”

  I grin. I think she just made that up.

  “Fucking civilian pussies …”

  Reluctantly, Dixon raises his leg to grind the glowing tip of his relit cigar into the heel of his boot. It’s hard for him to maneuver in the backseat. The guy’s so immense he had to fold himself up to sit sidesaddle across the transmission hump.

  “You ever serve, miss?” Dixon asks.

  “In what capacity?” replies Starky.

  “Military. Army? Navy? Air Force? Marines?”

  “Negative. I felt I could best serve my country by assisting in homeland security.”

  “What? Back there in Sea Haven? Tough duty, ma’am. Patrolling the beach. Hell, come low tide, you could cut your foot on a fucking seashell.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’ll hurt. Seashell. Or a crab bite. Crabs always go for the toes.”

  Hey, I don’t mind sounding stupid. Especially if it means Dixon will lay off my partner-for-the-night and redirect his nicotine-deprived wrath at me.

  “I did three tours in three years,” he says to me.

  “Really? They kept rotating you back?”

  “Negative. I volunteered. Wanted to earn a few more oak leaves.”

  Oak leaves are what the Army gives you for being heroic in combat. I know because Ceepak has all sorts of medals and decorations. A whole forest of oak leaves. The difference? He never talks about his.

  Dixon keeps going: “The silver oak leaf is the same as receiving the Distinguished Service Cross five different times,” he says proudly. “‘Given for extraordinary heroism in connection with a military operation against an opposing armed force.’ You have to fight somebody to get it. Can’t pick it up patrolling a beach in Jersey.”

  Ceepak has the DSC too. Plus the Silver Star. That one they give for gallantry in a military operation. I asked him if I could look at it once. He said he’d shipped it home to Ohio. Gave it to his mom. Guess she keeps a scrapbook.

  Dixon squirms around in the backseat some more. “Over there, you’re presented with opportunities to be heroic on a daily basis because every-fucking-body who’s not in your unit is your fucking enemy. Hell, the fucking Hajis blew up half of my men with chickenshit roadside bombs. They even got Sully. John Sullivan. One of my best. So now, I tell my guys, ‘you see some Ali Baba with a cell phone, put a bullet in his skull because, chances are, he’s using that phone to trigger another fucking bomb.’”

  Now I wish Sergeant Dixon was smoking that cigar. Might not be able to talk so much with a tobacco stump corking his piehole.

  “Sheriff Smith was a good man. Tough as they come. Definitely brought some noise to the sandbox.”

  “I thought his name was Shareef. Shareef Smith.”

  “I called him ‘Sheriff.’”

  Sheriff Smith. Butt Lips. Worthless.

  “You give all your guys a nickname, Sergeant Dixon?”

  “Roger that.”

  “So, what do they call you?” I ask, figuring “Dixon” is prime material for a humiliating handle.

  “Stone.”

  “How come?”

  “Short for Stone Cold Killer.”

  Oh-kay.

  The tires hum. We glide west on Route 22. Pass the Home Depot. It’s closed. A Pathmark grocery store. Closed too. A gigantic Beer Depot where I’m guessing “Stone Cold” Dixon and his squad filled up a couple shopping carts with crates of liquid refreshment. Up ahead, I can see the green-and-yellow sign pointing the way to the entrance ramp for the Garden State Parkway South.

  “You ever see a dead body, ma’am?”

  Here we go again.

  “We’ll be there soon,” I say, hoping to avoid another grisly lecture. I hear Dixon clicking open and shut the lid on his Zippo.

  “Death never smells pretty,” he says. “Not like that perfume you’re wearing. Jesus. You always wear perfume while helping to secure the fucking homeland?”

  Starky keeps her back ramrod stiff, eyes tightly focused on the road ahead.

  “Cigar helps cuts the stench of death,” says Dixon. “If you’d ever smelled it, you’d know. Hell, you’d be lighting up with me.”

  “Gum works too,” I say.

  “Come again?”

  “Chewing gum. Or Vicks VapoRub. Smear it under you nose. Or, you can just breathe through your mouth.”

  I sound stupid enough to shut Dixon up
.

  He sighs. Disgusted to be riding in the same car with two pukes such as Starky and myself. Good. Maybe he’ll remain silent for the short haul down the Parkway.

  I ease into the left-hand lane as we near the overpass. My entrance is on the other side. We wait at the traffic light.

  I glance up into my rearview mirror. Dixon is staring out the window. Probably looking for someone with a cell phone he can kill.

  Then I see something else. To my left.

  A junky white Toyota heading home to Sea Haven.

  I know he’s heading home because I recognize the car.

  It’s my regular partner. John Ceepak. A man who never stays up past 10:00 PM because he wakes up every morning at five.

  I check out the dashboard digital.

  One thirty-two AM.

  3

  The Garden State Parkway is a wide ribbon of concrete stretching the whole length of New Jersey, 175 miles from Montvale to Cape May.

  Every now and then they make you stop and toss 35 cents or a token into a plastic basket so you can drive down to the next tollbooth and plunk in another 35 cents. If you have E-ZPass, you can pay without stopping—in some spots you can even pay while doing 50 MPH, which is very difficult to do the old-fashioned, non–E-ZPass way—chucking change at basketball buckets strapped to the sides of tollbooths. Trust me on this one. Me and my buddy Jess tried it once.

  Yes, this is the kind of crap I think about when I’d rather not think about where I’m going and why I’m going there.

  I slide into the left-hand exit lane. The rest area sits in the wooded center of the roadway so you can access it from either the northbound or southbound sides. Buses are welcome.

  These GSP rest areas are like pit stops set up every thirty miles or so. Of course the gas costs more than it does back in the real world. Rest areas are like airports. Independent countries cut off from reality and manufacturer-suggested retail prices.

  Okay.

  That’s all I’ve got. Time to face what comes next: a dead soldier sitting atop a toilet with the lid to his brain blown open. As I said, it won’t be my first dead body. But it will be my young partner’s. I know Starky’s never seen anybody dead who wasn’t dressed up in their best suit and laid out in a padded box at a funeral home. I glance over at her.

  She’s working her jaw hard. Now she puts a fist to her lips. She looks a little green around the gills. Puke green.

  We see the state police vehicles and an ambulance parked near the south side entrance to the main building.

  We climb out of the patrol car. Dixon jabs his cigar stub back into his mouth. Rolls it around until it’s good and wet.

  “I’ m sorry for your loss,” Starky says as we try to keep pace with the hard-charging sergeant in the parking lot.

  What else can she say?

  Dixon ignores her. Keeps marching. We’re going into the rest stop where, according to the plastic translights, we’ll find a Burger King, Cinnabon, TCBY, Sbarro, Starbucks, and a Commerce Bank ATM. No sign announcing the presence of Corporal Shareef Smith, deceased.

  “Where the fuck is the men’s room?” Dixon asks as we push our way through the first set of glass doors.

  “Over there.” I point to the sign. Restrooms.

  The big building is pretty empty, except for a gaggle of state troopers guarding the men’s room, because it’s nearly 2:00 AM. During the day, about a thousand travelers zip in and out of here every ten minutes. They hit the head or grab a snack in the shop where everything hangs in bags on pegs. They look at the giant wall map or stand in cafeteria lines so they can guzzle jumbo-sized sodas to refill their bladders and be primed to hit the next head, which, according to that wall map, is thirty-six miles down the road.

  Most of the plastic-scooped seats in the food court are empty. I see some sleepy kids in Burger King uniforms scraping down the grills. A few cold slices of pizza sit under infrared lamps at Sbarro. Tables clustered near the Cinnabon outpost are occupied by what looks like a busload of losers on their way home from Atlantic City.

  The troopers at the entrance to the men’s room see my badge and give us the nod that says it’s okay to head in.

  “Where is he?” Dixon’s voice echoes off the tiled walls in the bathroom entryway.

  “Shit,” shouts somebody around the corner up ahead. “Who the fuck is it now? Tell’em to go take a leak in the ladies’ room.”

  I recognize the voice. Can’t figure out why.

  “This is Sergeant Dale Dixon,” he barks.

  “Who?”

  “One of the Army guys,” says some other voice up ahead.

  “About fucking time he showed up.” Again, I can’t see who’s talking. Just tiles and a mirror and one of those hand-blower deals mounted to the wall near a barrel of crumpled hand towels. “You think I got all night to stand around in a shitty crapper scraping your buddy’s brains off the fucking walls?”

  Up ahead, the corridor hits a T. There are urinals, stalls, and sinks to either side. We turn right, step into the side where all the men are. Some women too. State police. Burlington County CSI. They’re clustered in front of an open toilet stall and block our view at whoever is inside. A state trooper raises his hand, suggests we wait where we are. He also shakes his head in a way that tells me he can’t believe his bad luck in catching this call.

  I look back toward the toilet stall and see feet under the partition: one pair of scuffed black shoes facing in, one pair of high-tech sneakers facing out. The sneakers are spotted with paint. Brown paint. No. Blood.

  That would be the dead man.

  Someone in a backwards Jersey Devils cap hauling a boxy camera steps toward the open door and triggers a lightning storm of fa-whomping flashes.

  “Jesus!” says the guy standing inside the stall. “You want to fucking blind me? Enough with the pictures, already. We don’t need’em! This thing is open-and-shut. Mr. Smith here stuck a pistol in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and sprayed his brains against the back wall. End of story. Now move out of the way. I’m fucking starving.”

  The photographer retreats. Starts breaking down his gear.

  A fat man steps out, pulls the stall door shut behind him.

  Saul Slobbinsky.

  Actually, his real name is Saul Slominsky but everybody calls him Slobbinsky because he’s the sloppiest crime scene investigator in the state of New Jersey, maybe the world. Once he blew a county prosecutor’s whole case by smearing chocolate from a Snickers bar on the lift tape of the only fingerprint found at the scene of a pretty heinous crime.

  “It’s summer,” Slobbinsky told his bosses. “It melted.” It became known as the Snickers bar defense: you screw up on the job, it’s not your fault. Blame it on the nearest candy bar.

  I met Slominsky a couple summers ago on the Tilt-A-Whirl in Sea Haven. At the time, he was with the state’s major crime unit. Usually worked a desk job but we were lucky enough to have him come out into the field that particular Saturday and muck up our evidence.

  “Anybody know if that Burger King out there is still open?” he asks the room, wiping his hands on his pants.

  He’s even fatter than I remember. Still has a floppy mustache. Looks like a walrus working on his winter coat of blubber.

  “I need one of those angus steak burgers,” he says to his crew. “That fucking yogurt cone isn’t going to hold me, you know what I’m saying?”

  Chocolate yogurt. Explains the brown crud clumped in his whiskers.

  Rumor has it Saul Slominsky only kept his cushy MCU job with the state because he had a well-connected friend in the governor’s office. However, that particular governor gave the New Jersey homeland security job to his boyfriend, got caught, resigned, wrote a book, and told the world about it on Oprah.

  Slobbinsky lost his “friend” when New Jersey lost its first officially gay governor. Now he works with the Burlington County prosecutor’s office. Seeing how he’s here in a men’s room at 1:00 in the morning, I gotta figure the
y gave him the graveyard shift. It’s where they always put their best and brightest: in the dark where nobody can see them. This particular GSP rest stop is, of course, in the middle of Burlington County. Slobbinsky’s jurisdiction.

  The fat man is in charge.

  He goes over to the sink. I figure he’s going to wash off his hands after crawling around searching for evidence on the floor of a toilet stall. Instead, he ducks down so he can drink straight from the tap.

  “How’s this fucking thing work?”

  “Motion detector,” answers one his guys. This one has a major belly too and is working on a jumbo bag of Chex Mix, shaking it out over his face so he doesn’t miss a single crumb. Guess everybody working the night shift is here for a reason.

  “What fucking motion detector?”

  “In the black circle. See it there?”

  Slominsky waves his hand around the spigot.

  “Fucking thing’s broken.”

  “Stand up and lean in again,” suggests his colleague. “You need to make motion that it can detect—”

  “Sir?” It’s Dixon. He’s seen enough of the Saul Slobbinsky Show.

  “What?” Slominsky stands up from the sink.

  “The body? I’m here to identify it.”

  “Cool your jets, pal. He ain’t going anywhere.” He laughs. So does Mr. Chex Mix.

  “Sir,” Dixon demands, “what is your name?”

  Slominsky snorts. “Me?”

  Dixon nods. His eye slits are thinner than the space between tightly drawn blinds.

  “You.”

  “Saul Slominsky.”

  “Your position here?”

  “Senior investigator for the Burlington County prosecutor’s office. This is my crime scene. You are here at my invitation.”

  “Then show me the goddamn body!”

  Slobbinsky eyes the big man. They probably weigh the same. Two hundred and fifty pounds. Only Dixon is six-three. Slominsky is more like five-two and the soldier’s belly doesn’t flop over his belt.

  “Show it to me, now.”

  “Ease up, ace. Who’d you say you were again?”