Rolling Thunder by Chris Grabenstein
“Yes. I think so. I didn’t see a face, just a silhouette, but I’m confident the driver of the red truck was an old man with scraggly hair. Oh—he was a smoker, too. Had a cigarette stuck in his mouth the whole time he was lining up his shot.”
“You make an excellent eyewitness, Mrs. Ceepak,” my partner says, an uncharacteristic hint of playfulness in his voice.
“Why, thank you, Officer Ceepak. Nice of you to mention it.”
The two of them are grinning like high school kids flirting over their Bunsen burners in chemistry class.
Mrs. Ceepak is in her early thirties, a little younger than her husband. Her hair is blond and slightly old-fashioned in the styling department because, I think, if she ever had fifty bucks, she’d rather give it to one of her favorite charities instead of the Shore to Please Hair Salon. Her face is Jersey fresh with gentle eyes—though the crow’s-foot corners hint at the wear and tear from the fourteen years she spent working two jobs to raise her only son on her own.
Their playful grins quickly fade as they go back to surveying the new damage to their seriously dented car.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ceepak asks.
“Fine,” Rita sighs. “Just a little, you know, shaken up. Who would want to kamikaze into Silverado?”
I’m guessing the Ceepak’s give their vehicles names. People do that, I’m told. I, on the other hand, call my Jeep “my Jeep.”
“Perhaps a tourist from Ohio who wanted your parking spot?”
“I don’t think so. The spot next to me, the one closer to the store, was wide open. I think this was somebody who wanted to hurt us.”
Ceepak nods.
Unfortunately, sticking to his code, not tolerating lying, cheating, and/or stealing has earned my partner a few enemies. Locals and Bennies—Benny being a derogatory Jersey shore term for tourists. Why? I don’t know. Some say it stands for Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, and West New York, all towns north of here.
We take some digital photographs of the damage and write up the incident as a “leaving the scene of an accident.”
“That’s a violation of N.J.S.A. 39:4–129,” says Sam Starky when I pick her up around nine for our date at Big Kahuna’s Dance Club.
“If you’re convicted, your driver’s license will be suspended—that’s mandatory for the first offense. Of course, the state has to show that the driver was knowingly involved in the accident. ‘Knowingly’ means that the driver was actually aware that he was involved in an accident, or that, given the circumstances, he reasonably should have been aware that an accident had occurred.”
Sam, my future D.A., finally takes a second to breathe, so I jump in edgewise: “Wow. I’m impressed.”
“Well, I want to practice law in the State of New Jersey. Stick close to home and the people I love.”
“Yeah,” I say as we pull into Big Kahuna’s parking lot, avoiding saying the “L” word myself. Sam seems to toss it out with reckless abandon. Me? Well, let’s just say I’m not completely over the whole Katie deal.
Multicolored light ropes outline the nightclub’s long roof. The parking lot is edged by fake palm trees and old surfboards stuck in the sand where other places might have flowerbeds.
We head up the ramp and join the line of tanned beach babes and their lucky dates. I feel like I’m at a cleavage convention.
“Danny?”
I turn around.
It’s Gail, a drop-dead gorgeous girl who works at The Rusty Scupper, this grease pit over near the public marina where the waitress in her bathing suit is much more appealing than anything that crawls out of the kitchen on a plate.
I remember that Gail was the girl Skippy O’Malley was dating back when he was a part-time cop. Tonight, however, she’s flying solo, traveling with her girl posse—six other incredibly beautiful women, none over the age of twenty-seven, all in party dresses that show off their cocoa butter tans, belly button jewelry, and what I’d either call their large, prominently supported breasts or their double lattes.
“Are you alone?” Gail asks, even though I’m standing next to Sam. Gail Baker has always been a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
“This is my friend, Sam. Samantha Starky.”
“Hi!” says Sam.
We all shuffle a few feet closer to the doormen checking IDs. The smell of Axe body spray and Calvin Klein’s Obsession wafts through the air. “So, how about you? Seeing anybody?”
“Not tonight. Tonight is girls’ night! My treat!”
Her six friends give up a wild chorus of whoo-hoos.
“You’re treating?”
“Yunh-huh!”
“Tips must’ve been amazing at the Scupper this week!”
“Something like that! Catch you later, Danny Boy!”
We all fish out our entrance fees, get hand-stamped and wristbanded by the thick-necked bouncer, Phil Lee (an old friend of mine from when I worked at the Pancake Palace). Some of the girls in Gail’s crew have to show Phil their driver’s licenses, and he takes his time studying them, matching photos with faces. He uses a little flashlight that lingers at the halfway point on the way down from the face to the ID, if you catch my drift.
The band, Steamed Broccoli, is extremely loud.
“You want a drink?” I shout at Sam when it’s our turn to move beyond the bouncer station and wade through the mob flooding the barn-size dance floor. The joint is jumping, as they say. Some of the dancers, too.
“Sure!”
We head over to the main bar, which is set up like a horseshoe with maybe twenty stools, even though very few horseshoes have stools. I can see Gail and her girlfriends wiggle-walking across the dance floor, stealing glances from guys contemplating how to dump their current dates so they can head over to Gail Country. The seven hottest beach babes God ever created (well, that’s what their bouncing booties say as they strut across the crowded room) find a cluster of round tables close to the bandstand.
“Goo bam,” Sam says. I think.
“Huh?” I say just to be sure.
“Good band.”
I nod. In here, speech, like resistance when dealing with the Borg on Star Trek, is futile.
Sam and I each order a bottle of Bud from the bartender, who happens to be another bud of mine, named, well, Bud.
“What’s the maximum capacity of this room?” asks Sam, who, much like Ceepak, memorizes fire codes in her spare time.
I shrug. “Probably however many people are jammed in here right now.”
Purple and pink lights flash on dancers waving their hands high above their heads. You can’t really tell who’s dancing with whom. It’s one big wiggly, sweaty, writhing mass of barely clothed humanity. The guy in the light booth is switching colored lights in time to the beat, shooting spotlights at the disco balls left over from twenty summers ago.
And in waltzes Bruno Mazzilli, the baron of the boardwalk, looking like the cheesy fifty-year-old uncle crashing his niece’s Sweet Sixteen party down in the rumpus room so he can scope out all the hot young bods. On his arm, if I’m not mistaken, is another friend of mine from high school—Marny Minsky. She’s hard to miss. Has a head of sproingy blonde curls. Looks like she’s smuggling rugby balls under her blouse.
The last time I saw Marny, she was crawling out of a wreck wearing some kind of Victoria’s Secret swimsuit and stiletto-heel sandals. The minivan she’d been riding in had crashed into a rack full of rental bikes because the married guy who’d been plying her with champagne didn’t want Ceepak and me to catch him cheating on his wife in the family soccermobile.
Marny looks young enough to be Bruno Mazzilli’s daughter. I say this because Toni, one of Bruno’s daughters, went to high school with Marny and me.
“Hey, Gail!” I can hear Marny shout—only because Steamed Broccoli just announced they’re going to take a short break.
“Hey!” Gail shouts back.
“You go, girl!” Marny raises a plastic cup of something pink.
Gail and he
Mr. Mazzilli and Marny go over to Gail’s table. The two bend and hug and air kiss. Mazzilli smiles. He admires the view. Both girls are in dive-suit-tight skirts that barely cover their butts.
Now Mazzilli whispers something to Marny, who giggles and whispers to Gail, who laughs and shakes her head.
“Come on,” booms Bruno. “Live a little!”
“Not tonight.”
“Okay. But we want a rain check!”
Mazzilli and Marny head off toward smoky glass doors labeled VIP, probably so they can canoodle in the dark.
“Bitch stood me up,” the guy to my right mumbles. I notice he looks like a thirty-year-old nerd, only with big arm muscles bulging out of his shiny silk tee.
“Easy, Marvin,” says Bud.
“Bitch. She owes me.”
Bud swipes at the counter with his towel. “Really? For what?”
“I did her root canal,” says Marvin. “For free.”
“Free?”
“Well, I only took what her insurance paid.”
Bud chuckles. “And of course you told the insurance company it was like two or three root canals, right?”
“So? I can’t believe it, man. She told me she couldn’t hang tonight because her grandmother was sick.”
“Yeah,” says Bud the bartender. “She used that one on me once, too. That’s when you know it’s over.”
“It’s true,” I butt in because, well, it’s happened to me, too. “When they invoke the sick grandmother, you’re history.”
“I usually says it’s my little brother who’s sick,” adds Starky. “Either way, Danny’s right. You need to move on, sir.”
The nerdy guy, Marvin the dentist, gives us all this huffy “who asked any of you” look, slams a twenty on the bar, swivels off his stool, and stomps away.
“Was it something we said?” I joke to Bud.
“Probably.” The bartender shakes his head. “Poor man. Gail Baker messed with his mind. Big time.”
Bud thumps up a metal cooler lid and scoops up a jug full of ice cubes to make somebody a fruity colada.
“Hey, Joe,” he hollers to a busboy who just backed in behind the bar with a fresh keg of beer on a handcart. “We need more ice.”
“Sure, no problem,” says busboy Joe as he turns around.
Only he’s not a boy—more like a geezer. Craggy face, white stubble, stringy hair sticking up in wild clumps like he just came in from hurricane.
He looks exactly like he looked the last time I saw him.
Joe Ceepak.
My partner’s asshole father.
8
I THOUGHT JOE CEEPAK WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN JAIL UP IN OHIO.
Ohio.
The license plates on the red pickup that creamed Rita’s rear bumper.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt out.
Mr. Ceepak glares at me. “Workin’.”
He hunkers down to fiddle with some tubes and valves, hooks up the aluminum keg to the taps. Mr. Ceepak is, from my experience, a genius on anything related to beer. When I first met him, he told me his friends called him Joe Sixpack instead of Ceepak.
“So, how’d you get out of jail?” I ask it real loudly because, like I said, the man is a skeevey creep.
Mr. Ceepak stands up from the beer barrel and vise-grips the edge of the bar with both hands. He’s squeezing so hard, the tendons rope up and down his arms. “I did my time, Officer Boyle,” he says, biting back the bile he’d probably like to spew at me if it wouldn’t cost him his crappy job. “I did my time.”
“But sir,” asks Sam, “do the terms of what I imagine to be your early release allow you to leave the state of Ohio for an extended period of time?”
He glares at Starky. “I gotta go get ice. How much you say you need, Bud?”
Bud stands frozen behind the bar like a human daiquiri.
“Huh?”
“Ice?”
“Oh. Bucket or two.”
“Roger that,” says Mr. Ceepak, simultaneously mimicking and mocking his son. “I’m on it.”
He wheels the handcart down the back of the bar.
“Hey, Mr. Ceepak?” I call out.
He keeps moving.
“You driving a red pickup truck these days?”
He doesn’t answer.
“You do your grocery shopping over at the Acme?”
Still no response. He lifts up the bar pass-through and heads off to the kitchen.
“Jeez-o man,” I say to Bud, “you guys hired that scumbag?”
Bud holds up his hands. “Hey, wasn’t my call, Danny Boy. I just work here”
“He did time, Bud. For murder. Well, they dealed him down to manslaughter.”
“No way.”
“Way,” says Starky, who knows all about Mr. Ceepak and his monstrously heinous past.
“What can I tell you guys?” Bud starts wiping out beer mugs. “Mr. Johnson has a soft spot for ex-cons.”
“Because they work cheap?” I say.
“Exactly.”
Mr. Johnson is Keith Barent Johnson, another proud member of the Sea Haven Chamber of Commerce. He owns a slew of motels, rental homes, and Big Kahuna’s Dance Club. I think Kahuna was his nickname in college.
I stand up. Slap enough cash on the bar to cover our tab. Stuff a few bills into Bud’s tip cup.
“Come on, Sam.”
Sam pops up off her stool. Neither one of us wants to be breathing the same air-conditioned air with old man Ceepak.
We head around to the rear of the building where the Big Kahuna staff park their cars.
I see Keith Barent Johnson’s Cadillac. Hard to miss, what with the KBJ vanity license plates done up on New Jersey’s “Shore to Please” specialty tags. I recognize Bud’s Harley. And there, down by the Dumpster, is a 1980-something red Ford pickup truck.
“Bastard,” I mumble, touching the streak of silver paint Old Man Ceepak scraped off his daughter-in-law’s ride.
My partner, the good Ceepak, would probably secure a sample of this silver paint, take it the lab, and run it through a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer like they do on that TV show, Sherwin-Williams, CSI. He’d compare it against the thousands of automotive paints in the computer data banks and match it to the paint on his Toyota.
Me? I go with my gut.
The jerk did it. He rammed into Rita’s car on purpose. That’s just how Joe Sixpack rolls.
I hear a door squeak open on the nightclub’s loading dock.
I swear this place used to be a warehouse.
Joe Ceepak comes out dragging a black trash bag from the kitchen. It’s leaking a stream of garbage juice as he lugs it down a short flight of steps. A sloshy mixture of Corona lime hulls, half-chewed ribs, smooshed baked potatoes, stale beer, and anything else on the menu folks didn’t want to take home in a Styrofoam box.
“You messing with my wheels, Boyle?” he says when he reaches the Dumpster next to his truck. “You scratch it, I’ll cut your nuts off with a blunt butter knife.”
Now he eyeballs Samantha, who smoothes out her miniskirt in a futile attempt to make it magically cover her knees.
“So, who’s your friend?”
Yep. He’s his old nasty self.
I step between him and Sam.
“Earlier today, Mr. Ceepak, you left the scene of an accident,” I say. “That’s a violation of N.J.S.A. 39:4–129.”
“What?”
“You broke the law. Look it up.”
“You can’t prove shit, smartass.”
“Really? Watch us.”
“Us? You still working with my retarded son?”
“Yes, sir. You still a pain in everybody’s ass?”
He tosses up both hands. Grins. “It’s what I do best, Boyle.”
&n
“Here and there, Boyle. Here and there.”
“Could you be a little more specific, sir? We might need an address to put on your arrest warrant.”
He rumbles up a phlegmy laugh. Grabs hold of the neck of his lumpy plastic bag. Starts to hoist it up off the asphalt.
“I gotta go back to work. Just tell Johnny I need to know where his mother’s hiding.” He tries to peer around me at Sam. “She let you diddle with those big ol’ titties, Boyle?”
I channel my inner John Ceepak and refuse to rise to his bait.
Well, not completely.
“Fuck you, asswipe.”
Mr. Ceepak finishes hoisting his fifty-pound sack of rancid garbage off the asphalt. Slings it sideways to heave it into the Dumpster.
The bag drizzles on me and Sam on its way up.
Mr. Ceepak lets rip with a rib-rattling laugh. “Guess she don’t smell so sweet now, does she, Boyle? But, hell, I’d still fuck her. How about you?”
I step forward to deck him.
Sam grabs me by the back of my belt.
“He’s not worth it,” she whispers.
Yeah. That’s what Ceepak would say, too. The real Ceepak. The one who’s my friend.
“See you ’round, Danny Boy. Tell Johnny I’ll be callin’ on him. Can’t wait to meet my goddamn daughter-in-law and her bastard son. See what kind of ass Johnny’s old lady has on her.”
I run Sam back to her place.
Date night is officially over.
“Thanks, Danny,” Sam says when I walk her to her door.
“No problem.”
“I’m sorry we’re not …”
“Don’t worry about it, okay?”
She touches her hair. It’s sticky. “I smell like sour milk mixed with rancid vinegar and moldy cabbage.”
“Yeah. It’s the recipe for Big Kahuna’s secret sauce.”
She smiles.
“Good night, Danny. I really do love you.”
There she goes again with the “L” word. I hear it but don’t knee-jerk it back.