Tilt-a-Whirl

CHAPTER TWO

The little thief got lucky.

Ceepak forgets all about Trevor and races out the front door. I run after him.

The girl is screaming in the middle of the street, staring down at her dress. I think it used to be white. Her face is freckled with blood, too.

“My faaaa….” She's wailing now.

Cars slam on their brakes, fishtail to stops.

“My faaaa….”

“Traffic!” Ceepak roars. “Lock it down. Now.”

I throw up both of my hands. A line of cars starts backing up down Ocean Avenue. Like I said, this is changeover day and people are in a hurry to get the hell out of town before everybody else gets the hell out ahead of them.

“Help me, please God, help me God, please….”

The girl is hysterical; stretching her arms open wide, turning around in circles. She looks like she's sweating blood. Her whole body is trembling.

Ceepak takes off his windbreaker and drapes it over her shoulders like a cape.

“Easy, sweetie,” he says. I can tell he's trying to keep her warm so she doesn't go into shock. You learn that kind of stuff in the Boy Scouts.

“My fa … fa … fa … ther!”

“Easy….”

“He killed my father!”

“Who?”

“The crazy man. The crazy man! The crazy man!”

She's screaming again.

“He has a gun! Make him stop! Please make him stop….”

“Okay.” Ceepak stays calm. “Where is he?”

She points.

Across the street, up the block.

Sunnyside Playland.

It's a small (by Disney standards) amusement park tucked into four square blocks along the beach side of the avenue. They've got carnival rides, a video game arcade, an ice cream parlor, putt-putt golf-everything a kid needs when he's on vacation at the shore for a week and starts to get tired of swallowing salt water.

“Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“Focus!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stay with the girl.” Ceepak flips her hands over, and I see deep gouges where her palms are cut.

“Clean her wounds.”

“Right. Come on, kid.”

“Where?” She looks at me but can't seem to focus.

“You're going to come with me … okay?”

I move her out of the street, and two dozen cars immediately start honking their horns at me for blocking traffic. I'd flip them all the finger, but I'm kind of busy.

Ceepak crosses the road and pulls out his Smith amp; Wesson. I can see he's unlocking the safety, checking his ammo clip. I hope Trevor sees this from his window seat and thinks Ceepak's coming back inside The Pancake Palace to ice him.

Ceepak works his way up the sidewalk, tight against the painted fence that lets you know “Sunnyside Playland Is The Most Fun Under The Sun.” The girl with blood all over her dress might disagree.

“The Tilt-A-Whirl!” the girl suddenly yells to Ceepak. “We were on the Tilt-A-Whirl!”

Ceepak nods and makes his way toward the entrance. It's an asphalt pathway under an arching rainbow that's part of the whole sunshine motif they've got going inside Playland.

But the park doesn't open until ten or eleven, and a locked chain-link fence is there blocking the way in. The girl must have scaled the gate and ripped her hands coming over the top.

Ceepak sidles right and does one of those patented Starsky and Hutch moves where he sweeps the horizon with his gun held out in front of his face with both hands. The coast must be clear: He tucks the pistol back into his belt and hauls himself up over the fence. He's on the other side in less than ten seconds. Like I said, the guy spends a lot of time at the gym. The gun comes back out when he hits the pavement on the other side. He runs inside Playland, stopping to use a cotton-candy kiosk for cover.

Now I can't see him any more.

I hope he's as good a cop as I think he is.

“My father and I snuck in,” the girl says, and she's shivering like she just stepped out of an icy cold shower and can't find a towel. I wrap my arm around her shoulder and gently guide her up the sidewalk.

“You snuck in, hunh?” I repeat what she said because I'm trying to get my bearings, figure out what I do next.

“Yeah….”

She's fading on me.

“Hey, everything's going to be okay. Okay?” I say this crap because I don't know what else to say to a strange young girl soaked in blood. I'm no forensics freak like Ceepak; but I figure if she has this much red stuff splashed down the front of her dress and up on her cheeks, she was pretty close when somebody shot her father.

“It's going to be okay.”

I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm a summer cop and they teach us how to write parking tickets and help old people shuffle across the street, not how to deal with traumatized murder witnesses who may not even be teenagers yet.

“My faaa….”

She's trembling again, shaking up a storm. She sniffles back some tears and wipes her eyes with her bare forearm. She has a stack of those surfer bracelets wrapped around her wrist. Colorful strings and beads. She's a kid. She shouldn't have seen what I think she just saw.

“Why don't we wait inside here, okay?”

We're right in front of Pudgy's Fudgery. I can smell burning chocolate.

I figure it's probably smart to move indoors, find a place to sit, get some ice water or something, clean up her hands and face. The shop isn't open, but I see someone inside working a big wooden spatula against a ten-pound slab of butter. It's Amy Decosimo. We went to high school together. I bang on the front door.

Amy just about loses it when she sees the bloody kid.

“Ohmygod!”

“We need to sit down, okay?”

“Ohmygod!”

“Amy?” I shake my head to let Amy know she can't keep “Ohmygodding” or she'll freak the kid out even worse.

I usher my charge into the shop.

“Back there, okay?” I say, guiding her to a small cluster of tables in the back. “Is this all right, Amy?”

“Unh-hunh,” is all Amy can say and it comes out sounding more like a choked-back gag because her mouth is covered by both of her hands.

“Amy? Work with me here, okay?”

“Unh-hunh.”

I get the kid seated. “Could we have some water?” I ask. “Maybe a wet towel?”

“Unh-hunh,” Amy says, but she just stands there.

“Amy?”

The little girl rolls her wrists across the table and stares at her open palms. The gouges are deep.

“Ohmygod,” Amy gasps and chokes some more.

The girl looks up, right at Amy.

“Do you have something to….”

She can't finish, so I fill in the blanks.

“You got a first-aid kit, Amy?”

“Unh-hunh….”

“Could you maybe go get it? Grab some peroxide? Gauze?”

It's like Amy finally wakes up. She runs up front to grab the first-aid stuff.

I see a towel hanging near a sink back where they make the fudge. I go grab it and run some warm water to make it soppy.

When I get back to the little table, the girl is staring blankly at the menu board on the wall behind the fudge counter, like she's trying to decide whether she wants the almond-coconut or the pecan-marble.

I wipe her face. Then her hands.

“We go there to talk,” she says.

“You go where?”

“The Tilt-A-Whirl.” She sounds like she's narrating somebody else's dull home video, like she's not really here. “Even when it's not running, we go to the Tilt-A-Whirl. The cars look like big sea turtles.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Big green sea turtles.”

“Yeah.”

“They call it the Turtle-Twirl Tilt-A-Whirl.”

“I know. It's my favorite ride in the whole park.”

Not really, but it seems to work.

The girl smiles faintly, flashing braces. She's a pretty kid. Long blond hair framing an open, eager face. Bright blue eyes, the kind that sparkle.

“We share secrets….”

Her voice fades, the smile vanishes, her head drops. I can see tears tumbling into her lap.

“Here you go.” Amy has the first-aid kit and a paper cup of cold water.

The girl takes a big gulping sip.

When she's done, I pour peroxide on her wounds. She sucks in the sting between her teeth.

“Easy,” I say. “I know it burns. We need to clean you up.” I mop up her palms with the wet towel. She helps, taking the towel and rubbing it all over her hands.

“The sting going away?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

I show her my smile. Then I finish cleaning up her hands. Amy's got another wet towel. The girl takes that one and pats her face with it. The white towel soaks up the brownish blood. She's looking more like a kid again.

“We'll wrap your hands with the gauze now, okay?”

She nods.

I start unwrapping the roll of Johnson and Johnson around her mitts.

“We snuck in from the beach,” she whispers. Maybe she thinks whatever happened to her father happened because they were trespassing.

“Really?” Let her talk, I figure. Let her get it out.

“We've been sneaking in like that ever since I was a little kid….”

She stops talking again.

I think she just realized she and Daddy won't be sneaking in anywhere any more.

The walkie-talkie clipped to my belt squawks. It's got to be Ceepak. I push the talkback button.

“Yes, sir?”

“I'm at the scene,” Ceepak says, “and have made a preliminary identification of the victim.”

There's a real long pause.

“It appears to be Reginald Hart.”

I turn to the girl.

“Is your father Reginald Hart?”

The girl nods.

Oh, man.

“Danny?” Ceepak's filtered voice comes through loud and clear in The Fudgery. “Need your help here. Did the girl see who did this? Can she ID the perpetrator?”

She nods again.

“10-4,” I say into the walkie-talkie.

“Okay. Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“This is important. Focus.”

“Yes, sir….”

“You need to take her someplace safe.”

I wonder if Pudgy's Fudgery works for Ceepak.

“10-4.”

“Stick with her. Call the house for backup and secure your position. The bad guy's still at large and must be considered armed and dangerous. Alert the chief. I'll secure and preserve the crime scene.”

I look at my companion. She's too scared to be frightened any more.

Not me. My knees now start shaking.

Amy, having heard all of this, rechecks to make sure the Fudgery's front door is locked and deadbolted. Then she lowers the blinds. This morning, no one's going to get to check out the fresh fudge in the window.

There's a bad guy on the streets, someone crazy whom Ceepak says is “armed and dangerous” and who's probably looking for the one witness who can pin a huge homicide on him.

Then there's me.

A summer cop.

The guy without a gun.