Mad Mouse

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Stay down!”

Ceepak scrambles across the parking lot, using the cars for cover.

“Olivia?” I grunt.

“Yeah.” She doesn't sound so good.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I think. Yeah.”

“Stay down.”

“My knees are bleeding.”

“Stay down, okay? Stay behind that car.” I kind of crawl forward. It's hard to breathe. My lungs ache when they push out against my ribs. I check my shirt. No blood. Just bright yellow-green paint. Pretty soon, I won't have anything left to wear.

I drag myself over to the closest car-a big Lincoln in the handicapped spot up front. There's an empty patch of asphalt with blue stripes for unloading wheelchairs. From here, leaning up against the car, I can cover Olivia and see Ceepak. He's all the way across Ocean Avenue and scaling the chain-link fence surrounding the base of that big water tower. I never thought about the water tower as a potential sniper nest before. Just that giant Tootsie Pop.

I figure Ceepak's back in Iraq. Chasing rooftop shooters, looking for bad guys with rocket-propelled grenades. I look to the left of the water tower. There's a two-story house on the corner. The first floor is a shop. A nail salon. They'll paint palm trees on your fingertips. Upstairs is somebody's house or apartment. They have a deck and a widow's walk on top of the roof. I look north. Another house where the first floor is retail space. That house has a dormer, an extra window pierced into the roofline, turning the attic into a bedroom, or somebody's shooting gallery.

Right across from Morgan's, there's nothing but a fenced-in lot for the base of the water tank. I can't remember if there are ladder rungs welded into the tower. We never climbed up to spray-paint our high school team colors on it like they do in Iowa or wherever. We were too busy drinking beer and surfing.

It's dark, but there's some moonlight. I hear the rattle of fence against pole and see Ceepak clear the curled concertina wire up top with a sideways swing of his legs like he's a gymnast doing that pommel horse deal in the Olympics. Pretty impressive. I hear him land hard on the gravel on the other side.

“That was delicious.”

A couple comes out of the restaurant. The man pops wedding mints in his mouth.

“Get back inside! Now! Move!” I scream. I think the guy choked on his mints when I yelled. “Go! Close that door!”

The guy takes a look at me. He looks horrified. I touch my moist head and figure it out: in the dim light of the pier lamps, it must look like my brain is gushing blood.

He makes a move toward me.

I hold up my hand.

“I'm fine. Go back inside, sir. Please. You could get hurt out here.”

“Do it,” Olivia moans.

The guy swings his head right.

“Ohmigod.” He sees the dark wet splotch covering the front of her blouse. Now he must think he's looking at a weeping chest wound, the kind you see in the movies when someone's been blasted with a shotgun at point-blank range.

Our friend finally gets the picture and pushes his wife back toward the door.

“We'll call the police!”

“We are the police,” I want to say, but I don't. I go with “Thanks,” instead.

I look over to the one lantern that isn't lit anymore. Its glass globe has a spider web cracked into it. The bulb is shattered. Guess that's where the bullet went after it zinged past my ear. I hold my hand up to my ear and touch it. It's wet. I check my palm. Still neon green. Still paint. Still no blood.

“You okay, ma'am?” Ceepak is back, kneeling in front of Olivia.

She's crying.

I'm not used to seeing Olivia cry. She's always been “tougher than the rest,” to copy Ceepak and borrow a line from a Springsteen song. Now she's tugging at her soppy blouse, looking at where the exploding paint balloon tore open a middle button and exposed her bra. Ceepak takes off his blazer and drapes it backwards over her like a blanket.

“Thank you,” Olivia whispers.

“Danny? Preliminary injury assessment?”

My man cuts through the crap. I guess this is the no-nonsense battlefield talk you use when your buddies are getting blown up all around you in Fallujah.

“I'm okay. Ribs hurt. That's the worst of it.”

“Hang in there, partner.”

“Roger,” I say. “Wilco.” I think that means I will cooperate with his request. I will hang in there.

Ceepak duckwalks to the shattered lamp.

“Possible seven-six-two millimeter special ball,” he mutters to himself when he sees the shatter pattern in the glass light fixture. The bullet hole in the center of the cracked web isn't very big; in fact, it sort of looks like a hole you'd punch into the top of a mayonnaise jar if you were collecting fireflies.

“Ceepak? We should probably move Olivia inside.”

“Roger that. Can you walk?”

“Yeah. But I'd rather run.” Now she sounds more like herself.

“Stay low. I've got your back.”

They move to Morgan's front door, hunched over, Ceepak covering her back. When they reach the door, he kicks it open so they never miss a stride. As it swings in, I can see that ancient hostess Norma with her hand over her chest like she might need CPR and paddles from the first ambulance to arrive on the scene. There's a whole crowd up near the hostess station. The bartender. A couple of waiters. People clutching doggie bags.

I see Rita. T. J.'s standing next to her. I guess it wasn't him shooting at us this time, not unless he's like The Flash instead of The Phantom and ran real fast from the water tower and got back into the restaurant before anybody even noticed he was gone.

The door glides shut.

“I found this taped to the base of the water tower.”

Ceepak holds out what looks like a plastic-laminated Marvel Comics cover, only it's the size of a baseball card. On the card, in blocky orange-fading-to-yellow lettering I can read the word “Avengers.” The covergirl is a superhero with flaming red hair and a tight-fitting leotard that makes her boobs look like falling bombshells. Her white-gloved hands are splayed out, like she just lost her grip on the trapeze or she's grabbing for something. Her face indicates that she's pissed.

Ceepak tucks the card inside his shirt pocket after first feeling instinctively for his cargo pants hip pouch, which his dress slacks don't have.

I turn around and see a cop car with twirling roof lights swing into the parking lot off Ocean Avenue. Sea Haven's finest have arrived.

“We need to secure this site,” Ceepak says to Mark Malloy and Adam Kiger, the first cops on the scene.

“You got it,” Kiger says.

“Roll out the tape,” Malloy says. “I'll work the crowd inside.”

He heads into the restaurant. Kiger opens the trunk of their cruiser to dig out a roll of yellow “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape.

“More units are on their way,” he says. “Chief Baines, too.”

I hear our dispatcher squawking from the radio inside the car.

“All available units. Ten twenty-four. Morgan's Surf and Turf.”

10-24. Assault.

“This lamp,” Ceepak says, pointing to the shattered light fixture. “Lock it down. We might find our bullet.”

“Bullet?”

“Affirmative.”

Malloy lets that register for a second.

“I'm on it,” he says.

“Thanks, Mark.” Ceepak turns to me. “Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We need to move you indoors.”

“I'm okay. We should go across the street, check out those houses.”

“Did you see something in either location, Danny? Barrel flash? Shadow movement?”

“No … it's just that … I want … I mean I have to …”

Ceepak looks at me. I see something in his eyes, like he understands. Bad people hiding in the shadows have shot at his friends, too.

“We'll get him, Danny. You have my word.” He turns around. “Mark?”

“Yeah?” Malloy stops unrolling yellow tape.

“We need units there and there.” He does this three-finger air chop pointing at the two corner houses. “ASAP. I'm taking Danny inside.”

I hear sirens, see two more cop cars swing into the lot.

“Come on, Danny. Inside.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

I clutch my chest. It hurts more than I let Ceepak know, but not as much as seeing my friend Olivia crying like that.

I guess this is what they mean in all those cop movies:

Now it's personal.