Fun House

7

My hair’s still damp when I whip my jeep into the parking lot of Morgan’s Surf amp; Turf.

Yes, I grabbed a shower.

No, Layla and I did not hook up, get busy, or “know” each other.

She offered. I turned her down.

Fine. Go ahead. Kick me out of the red-blooded-American-male club.

“Drop me off at the front door, okay?” she says. “Pull into the handicap parking slot.”

It’s empty. I’m not parking. Technically. I pull in.

In the rearview mirror, I can see Ceepak standing with a short woman in the only other empty parking spot in Morgan’s gigantic lot.

The woman is leaning on the handle of a rolling case of some sort. Ceepak, on the other hand, is glaring at me. He would never, ever pull in to a designated handicapped-drivers-only spot. To do so would be considered cheating.

“Good luck,” says Layla as she blows me one of those Hollywood style “m’waw” air kisses and hops out of the Jeep. “I need to check inside. See if the watermelons arrived. Catch you later, Danny.”

She bops up the walkway to the restaurant’s front doors.

Tons of people are streaming in and out of the restaurant. The Early Bird specials leaving; the 8 o’clock reservations arriving.

Layla shoves open the front door.

“Hey, Danny!”

Before the front door glides shut, I see Ceepak’s wife, Rita. She’s right where we first met her a couple summers ago: near the hostess stand.

She waves. I wave. The door whooshes shut.

I’m figuring Rita, who used to waitress at Morgan’s, came down to see some of her friends become TV stars, serving dinner to the famous kids in what Morgan’s calls their Party Room. It’s a couple long tables that can be sealed off from the rest of the dining room with an accordion wall. It’s where the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs hold their monthly meetings. Tonight, Fun House has it closed off for their etiquette contest. Layla tells me that the winner of the competition gets “immunity,” which is a very good thing to have in reality TV shows because that means you can’t be booted out of the house that week.

“Danny?”

This from the other Ceepak.

The one waiting-somewhat impatiently-for me to drive our surveillance vehicle (my Jeep) into position for the sting, which is, geeze-o, man, supposed to take place in like twenty minutes!

I slam my ride into reverse, peel wheels backward, cut a fishhook swerve to the right, jam the transmission into drive, and blast-off for Ceepak and the empty parking spot, twenty feet away.

Ceepak and the short lady have to dodge my front bumper when I screech to a stop.

“Hey,” I say as nonchalantly as possible when I climb out the Jeep. The engine is ticking, trying to cool down. My tires smell like it’s rubber-burning day down at the town dump.

I notice Ceepak stealing a glance at his personal time control unit, what other people might call their wristwatch. His jawbone is popping and out near his ear again. I think he’s ticking and trying to cool down, too.

“Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“When I was a Boy Scout, our troop leader encouraged us to operate on what he called White House time.”

My face must say “Huh?” because Ceepak clarifies.

“When invited to the White House, if you are not five minutes early, you are considered ten minutes late.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“This our rig?” says the lady with the rolling luggage.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak. “Danny, this is Ms. Tory Wood. She is a sound technician, working for Prickly Pear Productions.”

“Gimme a hand with this stuff, kid.” She pops open the rolling case. I see all sorts of electronic gear stowed in custom-cut foam slots. She pulls out a suction-cupped antenna, slaps it to the hood of my Jeep. “Put the recorder in your cargo hold. But be careful. That’s a Nagra Six.”

“Okay,” I say, placing what looks like the high-tech gizmo into the back of my Jeep.

“Ms. Wood will be recording Paul Braciole’s conversation with Skeletor,” says Ceepak.

“Just the audio,” she says as she runs the antenna wire through the passenger-side window, heaves it behind the seats to where I just stashed her knob-covered recorder. “Paulie’s wearing a wireless mic. They all do, all the time. Stupid kids forget to turn them off when they hit the head, which they do an awful lot, seeing how they guzzle beer 24/7. I should mix together a bootleg compilation of their longest farts and pisses. ’Scuse me.”

She says this, not because she’s “crude as oil,” as my Irish grandmother used to say, but because she’s crawling into the Jeep to go fiddle with her dials and slap on her headphones.

“Are we getting video too?” I ask.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak, gesturing toward a van parked three spaces away. Its running lights flicker. I wave to whoever’s behind the tinted windows.

“That’s the ‘A’ camera,” says Ms. Wood, crouched in the back where I usually toss crap. Like the Styrofoam ice chest she’s using as a seat cushion. “I’m not sure where Rutger put ‘B’ and ‘C.’”

Up arches Ceepak’s eyebrow. “B and C?”

“Yeah. He likes to roll three cameras at all times, catch the action from three different angles. And since we can’t use the steadicam rig on this setup without blowing the shot.…” Now she holds up two small boxes with earbuds attached. “You guys want headsets?”

“Come again?” says Ceepak, taking the audio unit and staring at it confusedly.

“They’re wireless. You can hear what I hear.”

Ceepak nods. We both jam foam buds into our ears.

“You gentlemen are good to go. You better climb in. Here comes Paulie.”

Ceepak takes the passenger seat. I slip in behind the wheel. Layla escorts The Thing out of the restaurant, into the parking lot.

Back in the cargo hold, Tory Wood flips a switch and we hear Paul Braciole saying, “I need more fucking money. Juice is expensive.”

“Here.” Layla’s voice. “But return whatever’s left to the prop department when we wrap the drug dealer scene.”

Ceepak’s eyebrow inches up.

I try to explain: “I think, you know, everything’s a scene from a TV show to Layla.”

“I get to fucking eat later, right?” Paulie whines. “I want some of that fucking crab pie.…”

“Ms. Wood?” says Ceepak.

“Yeah?”

“Have you set your recording levels?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you mind muting Mr. Braciole until our suspect arrives?”

“Officer, it would be my pleasure.”

She flips a switch and cuts The Thing off in mid F-bomb.

Ceepak checks his watch again. Reaches for the walkie-talkie hidden under the tails of his untucked Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt, which I think he raced out and bought special for tonight’s undercover drug bust operation. No way he wears green and yellow hibiscus-covered tops on a regular basis.

“Reed? Malloy? This is Ceepak. Radio check.”

“Standing by,” says Reed.

“Locked and loaded,” says Malloy, who watches way too many cop shows on TV.

I’m assuming Reed and Malloy are commanding our two backup vehicles.

“Where are they?” I ask.

Ceepak gestures right, then left. We have the parking-lot exits covered.

Ceepak’s eyes narrow. “Now we just wait.”

I nod. It’s deathly quiet in my Jeep.

“Sorry I was late,” I finally say.

“Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“We both need to focus on the task at hand.”

“Right.”

“Avoid distractions.”

“Gotcha.”

“I know you recently lost a girlfriend.…”

“Katie really wasn’t my girlfriend anymore.”

“You recently broke up with Ms. Starkey.”

“Actually, she kind of broke up with me first.”

Ceepak sighs. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“‘Nothing we can say can change anything now.’”

Oh. Great. He’s quoting Springsteen at me. Lyrics from “Independence Day.” We used to swap Springsteen’s words to fill in the gaps when we didn’t know how to express what we were feeling, which, come to think of it, maybe Ceepak’s doing now, because he feels I’ve been letting down the team because I’ve been a bit distracted by the lovely Layla.

Which would be correct.

“You’re right,” I say.

“What are you two talking about?” This from Ms. Wood in the back seat.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just that, maybe, I’ve been blinded by the light.”

“What?” Ms. Wood, it seems, doesn’t know from Springsteen.

So I keep mangling lyrics: “Some fleshpot mascot may have tied me into a lover’s knot with a whatnot in her hand.”

Ceepak grins.

“What?”

“It’s all good, Ms. Wood,” says Ceepak. And then, unexpectedly, he reaches over and gives me a man-sized pat on my knee, the way your dad would when you finally admitted you’d made a huge mistake and promised not to be so stupid in the future.

The police radio crackles again. “Yo? Ceepak?”

It’s Gus Davis from inside the restaurant. When he worked the desk at the SHPD, everybody called him Grumpy Gus. Retirement, it seems, has not mellowed him. With just two words, I can tell: Gus still has his grouch on.

Ceepak brings the radio mic up to his mouth. “This is Ceepak. Go.”

“Yeah, these freaking TV people-they’re putting plastic sheets all over the floor. They’re loosening the tops on all the saltshakers. They’ve got one of those cardboard bins from the supermarket filled with freaking watermelons.”

“Gus?”

“Yeah?”

“Has anyone broken the law?”

“No. Not yet, anyways. But I gotta tell you: something doesn’t smell right about this setup in here.”

“Stand by, Gus,” says Ceepak. “Hold down the fort. We have company.”

He nods his head at a guy cruising into the parking lot on a rumbling Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

A guy wearing an Army-surplus Boonie hat.

His chopper scoots between a couple cars, heads straight for the lamp pole where Paulie Braciole, hands stuffed into his baggy shorts, stands waiting.

“You guys want wedding mints?” Gus suddenly asks over the walkie. “Smitten and me both snagged a pocketful from the bowl up front. They got jelly in the middle. Mint jelly, like with lamb.”

“Sure, Gus,” says Ceepak, distractedly. His eyes are glued on Skeletor as the drug dealer dismounts. “We’ll be inside, ASAP.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Roger, wilco.”

Ceepak buries the radio under his flowered shirttails.

“He is once again wearing the Boonie hat,” Ceepak mumbles, totally focused on his prey. “No helmet.”

And Skeletor definitely needs one. His emaciated head looks as brittle as an empty eggshell. The guy is maybe six-six, all jangling bones and knobby joints. He looks like a cadaver who just slinked out of his tomb.

I stare at his hat-a floppy, stiff-brimmed, camouflaged number that a lot of vets still wore after they came home from the jungles of Vietnam.

Believe it or not, I recognize it. The hat!

Two summers ago, we were patrolling the boardwalk, looking for a paintball prankster who had been splotching up billboards and people all over town. This creepy guy came up to us while we were conducting an interview. Super skinny. Dressed in chocolate-chip camo shorts, a matching T-shirt, and a Boonie hat. Challenged Ceepak to a shooting match. Called him an Army asshole when Ceepak refused.

Back then, I called him Bones.

But it was Skeletor.

And he’s been more or less challenging us ever since.