Rolling Thunder

35

“Lights and sirens?” I ask.

“Negative.”

Yeah. I didn’t think so.

We’re peeling wheels out of the parking lot, spewing a flume of gravel back at all the guys’ personal cars lined up behind us. Ceepak’s at the wheel. I’m riding shotgun as we race off to apprehend Oedipus Skippy, who actually has a shotgun, a tactical shotgun, one with ghost-ring sights for easy acquisition of targets at short distances, not to mention the ability to dump a full magazine of seven rounds before the first empty shell casing hits the ground.

We don’t want a man pumping that kind of shotgun to know we’re coming because we blared our siren and swirled our roofbar.

We stopped by the locker room on our way out of the house. Pulled on our level III body armor before we jumped into the car-heavy vests that go on over our shirts and have POLICE written across the front and back with reflective yellow lettering, I guess to turn us into light-up targets.

“All units, all units. Code eight.” On the radio, Dorian Rence, our dispatcher, is putting out the call for backup. “Ocean Avenue and Oyster Street. King Putt Golf. Suspect is considered armed and dangerous.”

She could’ve added the word “extremely” in front of both armed and dangerous.

We fly the nine blocks up Ocean Avenue from police headquarters.

I work my personal cell. Call Ceepak’s house.

“Rita says the guys finished their game, went across the street to grab a burger at The Pig’s Commitment.”

Ceepak nods. His immediate family is safe. Now he just has to save the rest of the world.

He slides the vehicle into an empty parking place near the entrance to the pink pyramid. For the first time in his life, he’s parking in a handicapped space.

We’re both up and out of the car. Fast.

“Office,” says Ceepak, going for his sidearm.

Mine’s already up and aiming at the door. I use the two-hand cup-and-saucer grip-wrapping the nonfiring fingers around the back of my firing hand. I get more bull’s-eyes that way.

Ceepak does a series of hand signals that, after working with the guy for a couple years, I finally understand. He’ll kick open the door. I’ll cover him.

He kicks.

The front door flies open.

“Down!” I shout.

Three kids, about eleven years old, picking out their putters, hit the deck. Three colorful golf balls bounce like bouncy kangaroos across the wooden floor.

“Clear!” shouts Ceepak.

Skippy is not behind the counter, but a row of blinking chargers and cell phones sure is.

I’m also figuring one of the hundred or so putters lined up in the wooden racks along the walls might be the “blunt force impact” weapon Skippy used to bash in Gail Baker’s skull. He puts it back in the rack, we’d never find it. Be like trying to find one particular needle in a needle box. And, if we do, it’s covered with a week’s worth of teenaged boys’ fingerprints.

A second patrol car screeches into the parking lot.

“Murray,” says Ceepak.

He strides out the door.

I talk to the three kids lying on the floor. One’s whimpering, one’s breathing hard, and the third guy’s horrified eyes are about to gumball out of his head.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I tell them. “We’re just looking for someone.”

“Did he do something bad?”

Figuring “Well, duh!” would be an inappropriate answer, I go with, “Yeah. Just keep down.”

Ceepak returns with Dylan and Jeremy Murray, the only brother act currently serving on the force in the Sea Haven. Guess Santucci, Murray’s usual partner, is working his side job, running Italian Stallion security for Mr. Mazzilli at the grand opening of the roller coaster.

“Secure this area,” Ceepak says to the Murrays, chopping the air with his hand as he spells out the master plan. “We’ll direct any golfers still on the course down to this location.”

“Got you,” says Dylan.

“Watch those windows.”

Jeremy Murray nods, takes up a defensive position at the plate glass window overlooking the course. As he crouches down, I scan the horizon. I can see the River Nile and Victoria Falls-a sculpted mountain with foamy blue water bubbling up out of the peak-but no Skippy.

Just a tumbling ribbon of blue, blue water.

“Ceepak?” I say.

He cocks an eyebrow.

“He did it here!” I say. “In the river.”

Ceepak peers through the window. “Why is that water so blue?”

“They probably dye it,” says Dylan Murray. “To fight algae and weeds. My uncle has a pond up in Pennsylvania. He dumps in this stuff called Aquaclean. The blue blocks the sunlight.”

“Thank you, Dylan.”

“No problem.”

“We’ll call our supposition into the medical examiner,” says Ceepak, adding, “as soon as we get a chance.”

“Roger that,” I say. Holding a locked and loaded pistol always makes me talk much more militaristically.

“We need to clear the course, Danny.”

“You want to split up?”

“Swing right, I’ll head left. Any golfers you encounter send them down here to the Murrays.”

The pink pyramid is about to become Fort Apache.

We dart through the back door, the one that takes you out to the first hole.

“We’ll want to search inside that utility shed,” says Ceepak, head gesturing toward the smaller pyramid tucked behind a clump of fake palm trees. “Later.”

“Right.”

He heads to the eighteenth hole.

A family foursome is clomping down the hill to play the final hole, where if you can run your ball up the ramp so it flies into the crocodile’s snout instead of his wide-open mouth, you win a free game.

“Sir? Ma’am?” says Ceepak. “You and your children need to head into the office. Immediately.”

They give him no guff. People seldom do when you’re wearing what they’d call a bulletproof vest and have your semiautomatic weapon out and up.

The mom’s good. She calmly ushers everybody down the winding concrete path before they have time to panic. While Ceepak clears the back nine, I make my way up to the front. It’s a little after noon so King Putt isn’t very crowded. In fact, it’s almost deserted. Must be why T.J. and his pals opted for an early tee time: They’d have the course to themselves.

I cross a sand trap (more like a kidney-shaped sandbox, but it goes with the whole Sahara Desert theme) and come to the Python Pit. Hole number six. Three high school girls are giggling every time the cobra head pops up out of his basket.

“Girls?” I say.

They shriek. I came up behind them.

“You need to head back to the office. Now.”

They squeal and scamper away.

“In here, girls!” Jeremy Murray screams from the office doorway. “Now! Move!”

Guy could be a lacrosse coach.

I swing around holes seven and eight, remembering when I came here as a kid how much fun I had. Hoping I don’t see it all again when my life flashes in front of my eyes two seconds after Skippy pops out of the cave with one of his tactical shotguns. Or his Beretta. Or whatever else he’s got.

A towering mountain sculpted out of plaster on chicken wire looms at the center of the course, linking holes nine and ten. Up top is the fake Victoria Falls, with tons of water the color of windshield washer fluid fountaining up through its crater top, then tumbling down over craggy outcroppings until it splashes into the mighty blue Nile snaking through the labyrinth of holes.

There is a tunnel cutting through the fake mountain. It’s dark and dank.

It’s where I’d hide if I were Skippy.

The civilians on my side are all safe. I see Ceepak gesturing at an elderly couple at the eleventh hole. Both seem to need new hearing aid batteries.

Meaning I need to take the cave alone.

I suck down a deep breath and grab the Maglite off my utility belt. I use what some guys call the Arnold Technique when juggling a flashlight and a Glock: Maglite coming out of the bottom of my left hand, fist held to my collar bone, gun pointed at the ground when searching, at the target as needed.

I’m pretty fast on the upswing.

I creep forward, shine the light into the darkness. I see nothing but slick walls. I step into the mouth of the mountain.

“Skippy?” I shout.

My voice rings off the sculpted rock.

No answer.

I swing the flashlight left, to where I know there’s a recessed nook, a ledge where you can sit and make-out with your date in the dark.

Nothing.

I swing it right.

The blinding beam bounces back at me.

Reflected off the POLICE letters on Ceepak’s chest.

This is why I like to keep my gun pointed at the ground in the flashlight searching situations. You shoot fewer partners.

Ceepak radios in a BOLO APB.

That’s a “be on the lookout” all points bulletin. We assume Skippy hightailed it off the golf course two minutes after his dad called him up to ask who had the magic cell phone on Thursday night. He knows we’re onto him.

“Request all available assistance, local and state, police, fire department, sanitation workers: anyone with eyes on the street. We need to locate Skip ‘Skippy’ O’Malley. Male Caucasian. Sandy hair. Freckled face. Approximately six feet tall, hundred and thirty pounds. Slight build. Stooped shoulders. No known distinguishing tattoos or scars.”

Although sometimes he wears a chariot skirt.

I check out the parking lot on the other side of the fence penning in the golf course.

“He might be in the King Putt pickup truck,” I say because it isn’t parked where it was parked the last time we came by to stop Mr. Ceepak from harassing folks picking out their tiny pencils and score pads. “It’s got the logo painted on the doors.”

Ceepak nods. “Suspect could be driving a Dodge Ram pickup truck with King Putt Mini Golf signage painted on the doors.”

Ceepak is, of course, one step ahead of me. I say pickup truck, he says Dodge Ram, because he remembers those tire treads Carolyn Miller found over on Tangerine Street.

“Please be advised, suspect is thought to be heavily armed and mentally unstable.”

Wow. Dr. Ceepak. Much tougher than Dr. Phil.

We listen in as Mrs. Rence broadcasts the bulletin.

“Should we hit the road?” I ask when she’s done.

“Not just yet,” says Ceepak. “I want to investigate that tool shed.”

We head over to the smaller pyramid in the stand of artificial Egyptian trees.

I reach for the handles.

“Danny?”

I look over. Ceepak has assumed a firing stance, weapon aimed at the split between the twin doors.

“Do you think?”

“It’s a possibility. Jump clear as you open.”

I nod. Damn. Would Skippy really hide in the shed?

“On three,” says Ceepak. “One, two, three …”

I pull the door open, fly to the right.

But nobody discharges their weapon.

“Suitcase,” says Ceepak who, in the time it took me to wince, already has his flashlight up and is working it around the storage hut’s clumpy shadows. “Matches the color and style of those found at the crime scene.”

Now his beam hits a sand pit rake.

Then a hacksaw hanging on a hook. The blade is too clean. It’s brand-new.

“He did it here.” He turns around. Surveys the bright blue river. “He crept up behind her, whacked her in the head with a blunt metal object-”

“A putter,” I suggest.

“Yes. A putter. Similar impact pattern to that of a hammer. Good going, Danny.”

I’d say thanks but we are talking about a creep bashing out a bathing beauty’s brains here.

“Realizing she was dead, he most likely dismembered her body in the river, knowing that the water would wash away most of the evidence, that the blue dye would cover up the blood.”

“Especially if he dumped more in when he was done.”

“We should check the filtration system. We may find traces of Ms. Baker’s blood and bone matter trapped inside.”

“Wait a second,” I say. “If Skippy killed Gail here, how come we found blood splattered all over the shower walls?”

“Because he wanted us to. I suspect, Danny, that Skippy took some of Ms. Baker’s body parts out of the suitcases when he arrived at number One Tangerine. That he pressed the bar of soap up under her fingernails. It’s why there was so much green residue trapped under her nails yet no soap on the rest of her body.”

I hate to ask but I do: “And the shampoo?”

Ceepak grimaces and looks a little queasy. “Skippy took Ms. Baker’s decapitated head into the shower stall, lathered the hair with shampoo and then, when he noticed that the recently severed neck was still dripping blood, spun around, and, holding the head out, splashed blood droplets on all four walls.”

Like a little boy making a spiral-art painting at summer camp.

“It would explain the unusual spatter pattern,” Ceepak continues. “He then went to the twenty-four-hour CVS and purchased the white shoe polish, knowing that it would further implicate his father. He took the empty bottles and the potassium chloride vials, three of which he emptied, into the house.”

“How’d he get in?”

“Perhaps he had learned from his father or his younger brother where the spare key was kept.”

Yeah. Guys that rich probably bought one of those plastic key-hiding rocks they sell in “People With Too Much Money” catalogs.

“Hey, Dad!”

It’s T.J. and Dave Tranotti. They’re coming into the golf course sucking on milkshakes from the restaurant across the street.

“You looking for your father?” T.J. asks.

“Come again?”

“The skeevey old guy with the wild greasy hair,” says Tranotti, who must not have studied international diplomacy during his first year at the naval academy.

“He said he was my grandpa,” says T.J. “Well, stepgrandpa.”

“My father was here?”

“Yes, sir. Joe Ceepak. But the other cop already hauled him away. Told your father he was in direct violation of an active restraining order.”

“Who was this other cop?”

“Freckle-faced dude,” said Tranotti. “Had on a cop cap, black cargo pants, uniform shirt.”

“Holster and pistol,” adds T.J.

“He works the counter here on his days off,” says Tranotti.

“You know him, Danny,” says T.J. “Skippy O’Malley.”