Tilt-a-Whirl (The John Ceepak Mysteries)

  “What?” The father is confused.

  So's the mom—she's scrunching up her nose and forehead, exhaling loudly, doing an excellent job looking “flabbergasted.”

  Me? I've heard it a hundred times. It's The Code. The Honor Code from West Point or something.

  “If your son shows me the dollar bills he was attempting to change, albeit in a rather unorthodox fashion, I will apologize immediately. In fact, I will turn in my badge and leave town in disgrace….”

  Ceepak is laying it on thick. Yanking their cranks. I love it when he busts some ballbuster's balls.

  The kid starts to sweat.

  “Show him your money, Trevor,” the father says.

  The kid sweats some more.

  I'm sweating too, but mine is because Ceepak insists on sitting here in the booth near the untinted windows. I squint through the glare to see if there is some merciful cloud about to scoot across the sky and save me.

  That's when I see her.

  A blonde girl. About twelve. Maybe thirteen.

  She's stumbling up Ocean Avenue toward The Pancake Palace.

  When she gets closer, I see her dress is covered with blood.

  So's her face.

  The girl is screaming.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The little thief got lucky.

  Ceepak forgets all about Trevor and races out the front door. I run after him.

  The girl is screaming in the middle of the street, staring down at her dress. I think it used to be white. Her face is freckled with blood, too.

  “My faaaa….” She's wailing now.

  Cars slam on their brakes, fishtail to stops.

  “My faaaa….”

  “Traffic!” Ceepak roars. “Lock it down. Now.”

  I throw up both of my hands. A line of cars starts backing up down Ocean Avenue. Like I said, this is changeover day and people are in a hurry to get the hell out of town before everybody else gets the hell out ahead of them.

  “Help me, please God, help me God, please….”

  The girl is hysterical; stretching her arms open wide, turning around in circles. She looks like she's sweating blood. Her whole body is trembling.

  Ceepak takes off his windbreaker and drapes it over her shoulders like a cape.

  “Easy, sweetie,” he says. I can tell he's trying to keep her warm so she doesn't go into shock. You learn that kind of stuff in the Boy Scouts.

  “My fa … fa … fa … ther!”

  “Easy….”

  “He killed my father!”

  “Who?”

  “The crazy man. The crazy man! The crazy man!”

  She's screaming again.

  “He has a gun! Make him stop! Please make him stop….”

  “Okay.” Ceepak stays calm. “Where is he?”

  She points.

  Across the street, up the block.

  Sunnyside Playland.

  It's a small (by Disney standards) amusement park tucked into four square blocks along the beach side of the avenue. They've got carnival rides, a video game arcade, an ice cream parlor, putt-putt golf—everything a kid needs when he's on vacation at the shore for a week and starts to get tired of swallowing salt water.

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Focus!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stay with the girl.” Ceepak flips her hands over, and I see deep gouges where her palms are cut.

  “Clean her wounds.”

  “Right. Come on, kid.”

  “Where?” She looks at me but can't seem to focus.

  “You're going to come with me … okay?”

  I move her out of the street, and two dozen cars immediately start honking their horns at me for blocking traffic. I'd flip them all the finger, but I'm kind of busy.

  Ceepak crosses the road and pulls out his Smith & Wesson. I can see he's unlocking the safety, checking his ammo clip. I hope Trevor sees this from his window seat and thinks Ceepak's coming back inside The Pancake Palace to ice him.

  Ceepak works his way up the sidewalk, tight against the painted fence that lets you know “Sunnyside Playland Is The Most Fun Under The Sun.” The girl with blood all over her dress might disagree.

  “The Tilt-A-Whirl!” the girl suddenly yells to Ceepak. “We were on the Tilt-A-Whirl!”

  Ceepak nods and makes his way toward the entrance. It's an asphalt pathway under an arching rainbow that's part of the whole sunshine motif they've got going inside Playland.

  But the park doesn't open until ten or eleven, and a locked chain-link fence is there blocking the way in. The girl must have scaled the gate and ripped her hands coming over the top.

  Ceepak sidles right and does one of those patented Starsky and Hutch moves where he sweeps the horizon with his gun held out in front of his face with both hands. The coast must be clear: He tucks the pistol back into his belt and hauls himself up over the fence. He's on the other side in less than ten seconds. Like I said, the guy spends a lot of time at the gym. The gun comes back out when he hits the pavement on the other side. He runs inside Playland, stopping to use a cotton-candy kiosk for cover.

  Now I can't see him any more.

  I hope he's as good a cop as I think he is.

  “My father and I snuck in,” the girl says, and she's shivering like she just stepped out of an icy cold shower and can't find a towel. I wrap my arm around her shoulder and gently guide her up the sidewalk.

  “You snuck in, hunh?” I repeat what she said because I'm trying to get my bearings, figure out what I do next.

  “Yeah….”

  She's fading on me.

  “Hey, everything's going to be okay. Okay?” I say this crap because I don't know what else to say to a strange young girl soaked in blood. I'm no forensics freak like Ceepak; but I figure if she has this much red stuff splashed down the front of her dress and up on her cheeks, she was pretty close when somebody shot her father.

  “It's going to be okay.”

  I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm a summer cop and they teach us how to write parking tickets and help old people shuffle across the street, not how to deal with traumatized murder witnesses who may not even be teenagers yet.

  “My faaa….”

  She's trembling again, shaking up a storm. She sniffles back some tears and wipes her eyes with her bare forearm. She has a stack of those surfer bracelets wrapped around her wrist. Colorful strings and beads. She's a kid. She shouldn't have seen what I think she just saw.

  “Why don't we wait inside here, okay?”

  We're right in front of Pudgy's Fudgery. I can smell burning chocolate.

  I figure it's probably smart to move indoors, find a place to sit, get some ice water or something, clean up her hands and face. The shop isn't open, but I see someone inside working a big wooden spatula against a ten-pound slab of butter. It's Amy Decosimo. We went to high school together. I bang on the front door.

  Amy just about loses it when she sees the bloody kid.

  “Ohmygod!”

  “We need to sit down, okay?”

  “Ohmygod!”

  “Amy?” I shake my head to let Amy know she can't keep “Ohmygodding” or she'll freak the kid out even worse.

  I usher my charge into the shop.

  “Back there, okay?” I say, guiding her to a small cluster of tables in the back. “Is this all right, Amy?”

  “Unh-hunh,” is all Amy can say and it comes out sounding more like a choked-back gag because her mouth is covered by both of her hands.

  “Amy? Work with me here, okay?”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  I get the kid seated. “Could we have some water?” I ask. “Maybe a wet towel?”

  “Unh-hunh,” Amy says, but she just stands there.

  “Amy?”

  The little girl rolls her wrists across the table and stares at her open palms. The gouges are deep.

  “Ohmygod,” Amy gasps and chokes some more.

  The girl looks up, right at
Amy.

  “Do you have something to….”

  She can't finish, so I fill in the blanks.

  “You got a first-aid kit, Amy?”

  “Unh-hunh….”

  “Could you maybe go get it? Grab some peroxide? Gauze?”

  It's like Amy finally wakes up. She runs up front to grab the first-aid stuff.

  I see a towel hanging near a sink back where they make the fudge. I go grab it and run some warm water to make it soppy.

  When I get back to the little table, the girl is staring blankly at the menu board on the wall behind the fudge counter, like she's trying to decide whether she wants the almond-coconut or the pecan-marble.

  I wipe her face. Then her hands.

  “We go there to talk,” she says.

  “You go where?”

  “The Tilt-A-Whirl.” She sounds like she's narrating somebody else's dull home video, like she's not really here. “Even when it's not running, we go to the Tilt-A-Whirl. The cars look like big sea turtles.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Big green sea turtles.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They call it the Turtle-Twirl Tilt-A-Whirl.”

  “I know. It's my favorite ride in the whole park.”

  Not really, but it seems to work.

  The girl smiles faintly, flashing braces. She's a pretty kid. Long blond hair framing an open, eager face. Bright blue eyes, the kind that sparkle.

  “We share secrets….”

  Her voice fades, the smile vanishes, her head drops. I can see tears tumbling into her lap.

  “Here you go.” Amy has the first-aid kit and a paper cup of cold water.

  The girl takes a big gulping sip.

  When she's done, I pour peroxide on her wounds. She sucks in the sting between her teeth.

  “Easy,” I say. “I know it burns. We need to clean you up.” I mop up her palms with the wet towel. She helps, taking the towel and rubbing it all over her hands.

  “The sting going away?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  I show her my smile. Then I finish cleaning up her hands. Amy's got another wet towel. The girl takes that one and pats her face with it. The white towel soaks up the brownish blood. She's looking more like a kid again.

  “We'll wrap your hands with the gauze now, okay?”

  She nods.

  I start unwrapping the roll of Johnson and Johnson around her mitts.

  “We snuck in from the beach,” she whispers. Maybe she thinks whatever happened to her father happened because they were trespassing.

  “Really?” Let her talk, I figure. Let her get it out.

  “We've been sneaking in like that ever since I was a little kid….”

  She stops talking again.

  I think she just realized she and Daddy won't be sneaking in anywhere any more.

  The walkie-talkie clipped to my belt squawks. It's got to be Ceepak. I push the talkback button.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I'm at the scene,” Ceepak says, “and have made a preliminary identification of the victim.”

  There's a real long pause.

  “It appears to be Reginald Hart.”

  I turn to the girl.

  “Is your father Reginald Hart?”

  The girl nods.

  Oh, man.

  “Danny?” Ceepak's filtered voice comes through loud and clear in The Fudgery. “Need your help here. Did the girl see who did this? Can she ID the perpetrator?”

  She nods again.

  “10-4,” I say into the walkie-talkie.

  “Okay. Danny?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “This is important. Focus.”

  “Yes, sir….”

  “You need to take her someplace safe.”

  I wonder if Pudgy's Fudgery works for Ceepak.

  “10-4.”

  “Stick with her. Call the house for backup and secure your position. The bad guy's still at large and must be considered armed and dangerous. Alert the chief. I'll secure and preserve the crime scene.”

  I look at my companion. She's too scared to be frightened any more.

  Not me. My knees now start shaking.

  Amy, having heard all of this, rechecks to make sure the Fudgery's front door is locked and deadbolted. Then she lowers the blinds. This morning, no one's going to get to check out the fresh fudge in the window.

  There's a bad guy on the streets, someone crazy whom Ceepak says is “armed and dangerous” and who's probably looking for the one witness who can pin a huge homicide on him.

  Then there's me.

  A summer cop.

  The guy without a gun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Reginald Hart is kind of like Donald Trump, only richer and without the gravity-defying comb-over.

  Plus, now he's dead.

  If you grew up around Sea Haven, you've heard about Hart all your life. He owns half the skyscrapers up in the city and more than half the casinos further down the shore in Ocean Town. He also owns a bunch of restaurants, an NFL franchise, some oil tankers, and an airline. I think he used to own a mansion here on the ritzy south end of the island, but his third wife scored it in their divorce.

  There are all sorts of stories about how Reginald Hart got his start and earned his nickname—Reginald “Hartless.” Apparently, when he was a young tycoon-in-training, Hart bought up cheap buildings in neighborhoods he figured were ripe for gentrification. But before he could renovate them, class them up for yuppies—or whatever they called professional people with money to burn back before Starbucks— Hart had to convince the old folks already living in his newly acquired tenements to move out.

  Many of these longtime tenants didn't wish to accommodate Mr. Hart's desires. They had rent-controlled apartments and fixed incomes and wanted to stay where they were, thank you very much.

  Hart energetically encouraged them to reconsider their real estate options.

  He hired hookers and drug dealers and junkies to move into the buildings, even made some of the scuzzballs his resident superintendents.

  Some people say Hart bought rats and turned them loose in the hallways. I don't know where you buy rats. Petco? Some eyeshadow factory that's laying off lab workers? I don't know, but I guess Hart did.

  People fled his pigsties. Mostly senior citizens. Grandmothers and grandfathers. Hart was named “Slumlord of the Year,” but he got what he wanted—empty apartment buildings he could gut, gussy, fumigate, and flip. He did it a couple hundred times and made a ton of money. Then he started shopping for casinos and malls and high-end hotels. Hart was playing Monopoly on a really big board.

  Mr. Hart is, correction, was, your basic bazillionaire.

  And his daughter watched him die.

  I did like Ceepak said. I radioed the base and in about thirty seconds every cop car on the island came screaming down Ocean Avenue to back me up.

  Chief Cosgrove was first on the scene.

  He's a big, burly 300-pound bear and when he starts growling orders, everybody hops to it. I don't even know Cosgrove's first name. I think it might be Bob, or Robert, but everybody calls him “Chief.”

  “Lock down the causeway,” he says to Mark Malloy, this muscle-bound cop with a year-round tan.

  “Right, chief!”

  “Roadblock!”

  Malloy jumps into his cruiser, but not fast enough for the chief.

  “Move it! Hustle. Go!”

  Cosgrove is like a junior-high gym teacher. He's always yelling at you to move it or lose it, haul ass, get the lead out—effective motivational stuff like that.

  Malloy does a quick whoop with his siren, swirls his roof lights, and races off to blockade the bridge.

  Those people who honked at me when I stopped them on Ocean Avenue? Man, are they going to be bummed with they bump into Malloy. The causeway is the only way on or off the eighteen-mile strip of sand we call Sea Haven Township. Unless, of course, y
ou've got a boat. Lots of boats down here. There's even a pirate ship, but it's mostly a theme restaurant so it really wouldn't make a very good getaway vessel.

  As I'm standing on the sidewalk in front of Pudgy's Fudgery watching a half-dozen cops running around, I realize that this is probably the worst crime this town has ever seen. Usually we deal with smaller stuff. Like stolen tricycles.

  The chief marches up and sticks his face into mine.

  “Where the hell is Ceepak?”

  “Securing the crime scene, sir.”

  “Good.”

  Cosgrove walks away and retrieves a big blanket from the back of his Chief Car—a hulking Ford Expedition. It's way bigger than my Explorer and has the black-tinted privacy glass. There's not much turquoise and pink on the chief's vehicle. His police car is more Darth Vader death star, less friendly flamingo.

  The chief galumphs into Pudgy's to get Hart's daughter, who's still inside with a couple cops. Guys with guns.

  I look down the street at Sunnyside Playland and wonder what kind of gruesome stuff Ceepak is looking at right now.

  All I see is Sunnyside Clyde's big beaming face on a billboard near the entrance. Clyde is Playland's mascot—a baggy-panted surfer dude with a big ray-rimmed sun for a head. He's always wearing dark sunglasses; but I never understood this, because if his head is the sun, how come he needs sunglasses?

  “Cover me!” I hear the chief bark.

  He has the girl bundled up in the blanket and is hustling her out the front door. Two cops with pistols flank him. When the girl's strapped into the back seat, she sees me and waves goodbye.

  I wave back.

  I see that Amy Decosimo insisted the girl take home some free fudge. She's clutching the clean white box against her bloody dress.

  Cosgrove slams the door shut.

  “Kid?” Cosgrove is in my face again. Apparently, he doesn't know my first or last name.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What's your 10-38?”

  He's using cop code. Something I should have studied more or maybe even memorized.

  “What's your destination?”

  “I, uh … I….”

  “Go help Ceepak,” the chief says, checking his watch. “Tell him I've contacted State. The cavalry's on its way.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “Move it!” Cosgrove barks. “Get the lead out, son.”