Mad Mouse

CHAPTER SIX

Excuse me,” Ceepak says after he burps.

When he ordered it, he didn't know scrapple was chopped pork and cornmeal mush, seasoned then fried. He'll probably remember all day long. Scrapple has a tendency to repeat on you, and we totally wolfed down our breakfast so we could hustle over to the boardwalk and nab our paintball Picasso. Seems the alleged artiste was busy last night. First The Pig's Commitment, then my annual beach party. Or maybe vice-versa.

Anyway, we figure our perp must strut his stuff at the paintball booth on the boardwalk. People there might be able to ID him for us.

In Sea Haven, the boardwalk runs along the beach for about a mile or two, all the way from Oyster Street north past Anchovy. It's one of the town's top attractions, especially for the under-twenty-one crowd. One side is mostly open to the sand and ocean; the other is cluttered with booths and arcades. There are food and souvenir shacks and games of chance like Whack-A-Mole and The Frog Bog, where you hammer these tiny green seesaws to see if you can flip a rubber frog onto a lily pad. I never can.

The boardwalk is also where the big Labor Day blowout will take place on Monday-the day before I either become a full-time cop or start training for an exciting career in mortgage brokering with Mr. Weese.

“Excuse me.”

If Ceepak keeps saying that every time he burps, he'll wear himself out. Mr. Cereal-and-Fruit isn't used to scarfing down so much early-morning grease. Me? I'm an old pro at digesting partially hydrogenated oil of all types. Most of my meals involve some sort of deep-frying or lard.

As we climb the steps up to the boardwalk, I can see the distant silhouette of the little roller coaster at the end of a pier jutting out into the ocean. It's what they call a Mad Mouse-a tight track with wicked sharp turns. Instead of a train of connected cars like a bigger roller coaster, it has tiny, individual cars shaped like mice. The undercarriage of each one is designed to make you feel like you hit the turns before the wheels do and every time you fly into a curve, you think you're going to rocket off the edge and die. Just when you recover, the little mouse car whips into another turn, throws you another curve, and you think you're about to die all over again.

It's a blast.

Near the north end of the boardwalk is another wicked ride: the Tower of Terror. You can see it no matter where you are because it's twenty stories tall. Basically, it's an open-air elevator that hauls you up, then drops you like somebody snipped the cable. The one time I took the plunge my stomach ended up somewhere behind my eyeballs.

It's Thursday. August 31st. A practically perfect end-of-summer day. Not too muggy, especially for the last day of August. It rained Tuesday night, but I don't think it will today. Maybe we'll get a thunderstorm later. We usually do. The clouds are towering up on top of each other like puffy popcorn balls. I can even smell the popcorn. Hot. Buttery. They sell tons of it on the boardwalk.

As we march up the steps, I'm hit with a cool breeze and the wafting aromas of not only fresh popcorn but sausage-and-pepper sandwiches, curly-cut fries, onion rings, charbroiled burgers, fried clam strips, cotton candy. I figure this is what heaven must smell like. At least the boys’ side.

“Have you any idea who this young man Grace mentioned might be?” Ceepak asks.

“Don't think so.”

“Well, he should be easy to spot,” Ceepak says. “What with the large tattoo ringing his forearm.”

I just smile.

We join the crowd walking the boards, and just about everybody has a tattoo somewhere. This is a great place to show them off because the idea at the beach is to be buck naked except for your underwear. That's what swimsuits are. Drip-dry underwear.

Some guys have your classic scary tats up on their shoulders. Spider webs and skulls and angry ladies biting knives. Others have Thai tribal etchings scrolled around their biceps. Then there are the girls with naughty little drawings or Chinese letters peeking out from under their bikini bottoms, front and back.

Scanning the inked-up passersby, Ceepak decides its time to narrow our search.

“Where's the paintball arcade?” he asks.

Paintball Blasters is a politically incorrect shooting gallery right across from the Mad Mouse pier.

The gimmick is the targets. You get to splatter life-size photographs of folks like Osama Bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, O. J. Simpson, Saddam Hussein, and, of course, Britney Spears. Or Michael Jackson. They're all strung up on a clothesline about twenty feet back on the firing range

When you get tired of defacing America's current crop of evildoers, you can take a shot or two at this garbage can lid that pops open to reveal a red, white, and blue bull's-eye target. Then, when that gets boring, you can blast away at a rusty old Pontiac down in the sand underneath the dangling targets. Looks like the windshield is a popular spot to splatter.

“Ten balls for five bucks,” the burly guy running the place says when Ceepak and I step up to his counter. He's reading a newspaper and doesn't look up. “Thirty for ten.”

“Are these Trippman 98s?” Ceepak asks.

I can tell Ceepak did his paintball homework last night on the Internet. The burly guy puts down his newspaper.

“What?” He snuffles his nose and sounds like he might hock a loogie. “Am I supposed to be impressed here or something? You know the name of a gun?”

“I was merely inquiring.”

“Huh.” The paintball proprietor turns back to his paper.

“Who's your best?” Ceepak now asks.

“What?”

“Who's your top gun?”

“Me.” He proudly snorts some more wet stuff back into his throat.

“Who besides you?”

“Depends. What category? Kid? Adult? Local? Tourist?”

“Juvenile. Boy. Spiky blond hair. Tattoos on his forearm. Sound familiar?”

“Why should I tell you?”

Ceepak smiles.

“Because I'm a better shot than you.”

“What?”

“I believe you heard me the first time.”

“You sayin’ you're better than me, slick?”

“That's right.”

“Bullshit.”

“My friend never lies,” I say.

Ceepak pulls out a ten-dollar bill.

“That's for my first thirty shots.”

“You challenging me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don't give away prizes or nothing. You want prizes, go over there, grab a squirt gun, and pop a clown's balloon.”

“I don't want a prize. I want information. About the boy.”

“T. J.?”

“Is that his name?”

“Maybe.”

Ceepak picks up a rifle.

“Let's shoot. If I win, you tell me where I find T. J.”

“And if I win?”

“You keep the ten bucks.”

“What? No fucking way. I get the ten bucks for renting you my fucking gun.”

“Right you are.” Ceepak pulls out his wager-a crisp fifty-dollar bill he tucks under the barrel of the rifle to his left so it won't blow away.

I turn around and see we're drawing a small crowd.

Ceepak's rival hops up on the counter and swings his feet over.

“You're on, ace.”

Ceepak takes up his rifle and checks out the sighting down the barrel.

“You want Saddam?”

“Fine.” Ceepak's cool with Saddam. They've tangled before.

“I'll take Osama. We both fire thirty rounds. Most headshots wins. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Hey, Joey?” The arcade guy is yelling down to some old geezer I hadn't seen before. He's off to the side of the range, dressed in a sleeveless Italian-grandpa undershirt, chewing on the stub of an unlit cigar. He sits on a stool behind a plywood partition. Must be the target master.

“What?” Grandpa grumbles.

“Hang me a clean Osama and Saddam.”

“Why?”

“Because I fucking told you to is why.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He spits out the cigar stub and drags some clean cardboard targets out to the clothesline.

“You ever use glow-in-the-dark paintballs?” Ceepak asks while they wait.

“Nah. Too expensive.”

“What about T. J.?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I'm not his fucking mother.”

“You two ever talk about it?”

“Maybe. Once. He said he wished he had this special hopper that pumped UV rays into the balls so they glowed or something. Sounded expensive as shit.”

“Set!” Grandpa hollers and shuffles back to his stool, picking up his wet cigar butt on the way. I see that the plywood wall he sits behind has been pelted, too. I guess when you get bored nailing the targets you can always try to nail a live geezer.

“Crank it up!”

I hear an air pump hammer-like on a power washer. The guns are pressurized.

“Send him flying!”

A motor whirrs. A chain clicks on a pulley. All of a sudden, the Saddam Hussein target slides back and forth, while Osama stays still.

“Saddam moves around a lot.” The guy chuckles, sure he's hooked another sucker. “Before we nabbed him, he was always running from one spider hole to another.”

“Does your target move as well?”

“Nah. Osama's just sitting there, hiding in his cave.”

“I see.”

“Hey, pal-you're the one who picked Saddam.”

“Actually, you picked him for me.”

“What? You think I'm cheating or something?”

“I don't think it. I know it.”

“Oh, so now you want out? You just want to talk big, flash your cash, then back down?”

“No,” Ceepak says. “I just want to be clear.” He puts the tiny rifle stock up to his shoulder.

“Thirty balls, pal.”

“Thirty. Roger that.”

“Fire at will.”

I hear that pop, pop, pop again, only now it's in total stereo. Like everybody on both sides of the boardwalk is stomping on paper cups. I also hear a lot of thwacks, paint splatting on pressboard.

The guy who runs the booth? He's good. A couple of his shots miss Osama's head. Some splatter on his robe below the neck. One or two whoosh past the turban altogether. But he's basically nailing his target. I'd say about two dozen paintballs explode dead center on Osama's nose and obliterate his face in no time flat. Like I said, the guy's good.

But he's no John Ceepak.

Every single one of Ceepak's shots hits Saddam smack in that bushy mustache. No misses. No near misses. All thirty shots hit the exact same spot on the moving target. He's just stacking whacks on top of each other.

Those medals Ceepak got in the army? A couple were for marksmanship.