Mad Mouse js-2

by Chris Grabenstein

  We near the corner of Ocean and Maple. I hear what I think is a foghorn until I look over and see there's this fire truck straddling the far side of Maple, blocking the street. Guess that's who radioed in earlier. The fire department must've been mobile when all the radio chatter started and dropped by to help. They're blaring their air horn and making so much noise that most vehicles on Ocean Avenue have pulled over to the shoulder of the road so the drivers can cover their ears and cringe. This gives Ceepak and me our own express lane right up the center yellow line.

  The minivan shoots up Maple, slams on its brakes when it sees the fire truck blocking its path, and skids into a sharp right turn in front of us.

  I can see the bumper very clearly now.

  “No ARMY sticker,” I shout. “It's not my guy.”

  “Roger that.”

  So, naturally, I expect our little chase scene to be over.

  I, of course, am wrong.

  Ceepak presses down harder on the gas, and now we're, I swear, two inches from the van in front of us. I can read his window decals. Somebody apparently went to Dartmouth. They have a parking permit for a garage. The tiny little decal says they're number 3246. Like I said, we're that close.

  Whump.

  We're closer.

  Ceepak thumps the guy's bumper.

  Mr. White Minivan must not have felt our little love tap. He doesn't slow down or pull over.

  I make out two people in the minivan. The driver, who looks to be somebody's dad, mid-forties or early fifties. And the passenger. Female. Younger. A mop of wiry, curly hair bouncing up and down.

  Whump.

  I guess this why they call them bumpers. We bump the van again, nudging it forward, sending me bouncing.

  “Seat belt?” Now Ceepak asks.

  “Ten-four.” I strapped myself in back at Smuggler's Cove. It's instinct when Ceepak's behind the wheel.

  “Hang on.”

  He's done with the love taps. He eases up on the gas for a second. When the space between bumpers widens, he jams back down on the accelerator, twists the steering wheel. We slam into the van's rear end at a slight angle and send the vehicle spinning into a spiraling skid.

  Of course the road ahead of the van is clear. Ceepak wouldn't have made his move if it wasn't.

  Now the van makes its move-sliding off the road, scooting backwards, careering into the parking lot of Barnacle Bob's Beach Bikes, this hut of a shop where they rent all kinds of bikes and have about a hundred of them lined up in their parking lot. The white van slams into one end! The whole row dominoes down in a rippling wave. One hundred beach bikes lay wounded on their sides, sparkling in the sun.

  The van has finally stopped.

  “Call in our location.” Ceepak tosses me the radio mic.

  He's out the door, gun drawn.

  “This is Twelve,” I say. “Our twenty is Barnacle Bob's Beach Bikes. Ocean and Jacaranda. Uh, possible ten … ten … uh-I think we might need an ambulance.”

  I really gotta memorize those 10-codes by Tuesday.

  I hop out in time to see a girl stumble out of the van. She's wearing some kind of Victoria's Secret swimsuit. She's basically naked except for her stiletto heel sandals. One stiletto must've snapped off because she's limping. Her face is hidden, covered with a tangle of wild curly hair.

  Ceepak gets the driver to spread-eagle on the ground. White hair. Fancy Rolex watch. Maybe he's the girl's father.

  “Hands behind your back,” Ceepak barks. “Now.”

  “You could've killed me,” the guy whimpers into the hot blacktop.

  “Now!” Ceepak orders.

  “You drive like a fucking maniac!”

  “Only when forced to do so, sir.” Ceepak slips a pair of plastic cuffs on the guy's hands. He tugs them snug but not nearly as snug as I would after some idiot almost made me run over a little kid in a crosswalk pushing her dolly's stroller. I do a quick visual inspection of the minivan interior. I see juice boxes and sippy cups on the floor. Scattered Disney DVDs. The idiot kissing asphalt is somebody's dad. I don't think the woman who stumbled out the side door is his wife. I think we caught them sneaking off to Smuggler's Cove-and not just to buy videos in the gift shop.

  “Danny?” It's the female. Of course she recognizes me. Like Ceepak said, I know just about everybody on the island.

  “Marny?”

  “Hey.” She pulls the curls out of her eyes and tries to smile and fluff her hair. She can't do it with her usual flip and flair because some stray hair strands are glued to her lip with blood.

  “You okay?”

  “I think so.” She tugs on a bikini strap and looks down at her cocoa-brown breasts to see if anything got punctured or jostled out of alignment.

  “Who's your friend?”

  “Stan. Stan Something.”

  “Okay.”

  “I swear I didn't know he was mental … driving like that.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “He's from out of town. We kind of hooked up last night and this morning … you know …”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, Danny? Guess what?”

  Marny does this little finger wiggle suggesting I come closer so she can whisper her big secret in my ear. She does this, I know, so I will be forced to stare directly at her gravity-defying breasts and, therefore, be much more likely to believe anything she tells me.

  “What?”

  “He's rich,” she gushes, her breath reeking of orange juice and champagne. “Really, really, really rich.”

  “Cool.” I try not to be too judgmental. Especially since Marny has that bloody lip.

  She leans on my arm for balance so she can slide her broken-heeled sandal back on her left foot. “I think he might be married, too.” She holds her finger to her lips to shush me because she thinks it's a big secret.

  “You okay?” I ask again.

  “Yeah. I think I bit my lip.” She shivers, and goosebumps pop up all over her body.

  “Hang on, Marny. I've got a jacket in the car. Some Band-Aids, too.”

  “Thanks, Danny.” She gives up on her sandal and sits down on the pavement.

  I go to the car to get my navy blue windbreaker. Ceepak is stuffing the driver into our back seat. The guy looks scared. Yeah. His life and wife are flashing in front of his eyes.

  “He's not Mook's buddy,” I say. “He's not the guy.”

  “Oh, yes, he is,” Ceepak says. “He's the guy who needlessly endangered several lives by attempting to evade a police officer.”

  Yeah. Okay. He's that guy.

  “Ceepak?” I don't recognize the voice now squawking across our radio. “Ceepak? Come in. Am I pushing the right button?”

  “Danny? Can you handle that?”

  “Ten-four.” I say, repeating the one code I know I know.

  I reach for the radio. The lady keeps squawking. “Listen,” she says, not using any kind of code, “when you boys get done playing Smokey and the Bandit, we have some bullet holes we should talk about. Over.”

  “Tell her we're on our way,” Ceepak says.

  I'm confused. “Okay. Who is it?”

  “Dr. McDaniels. Who else?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The state's top crime scene investigator, Dr. Sandra McDaniels, is waiting for us back at Saltwater Tammy's, so we hand Marny off to the paramedics.

  They seem happy to have caught this call instead of making another run to a motel bathtub to help a grandmother who's fallen and can't get up. When we left, I noticed that one of the EMTs was kindly helping Marny reexamine her bikini'd breasts in the back of the ambulance. He was holding his flashlight. She was searching for silicone leaks.

  We dumped Stan, the white minivan man, back at the house. The desk sergeant, Gus Davis, said he'd handle the paper work and “book the cheap, cheating bastard.” Gus says stuff like that. He's old. He's grumpy. He's spent too much time in the sun.

  We park on the walkway outside Saltwater Tammy's plywood-covered windows.
The chief pulls me aside to give me an update: Katie's still unconscious, still on the operating table. He says they're sewing her back up. Closing up the bullet hole in her chest and the exit wound out her back.

  When he tells me the news, I don't think about punctured lungs and nicked spinal cords.

  I think about freckles.

  The ones splattered across Katie's chest. In the summer, in the sun, her freckles blossom and creep across her skin like clover flowers popping up in a weedy field. I used to tease her about them. One game was to connect a few with my finger and make freckle constellations. The dog. The cat. The guy with the bow and arrow and six-pack. The Greeks never saw that one. I saw it right below her collarbone, right above where her halter top usually stopped.

  Katie always giggled when I connected her dots. Partly because my fingertip tickled. Partly because she thought my made-up myth about the Greek hunter hoisting his six-pack to appease the gods of beer and pretzels was funny.

  After the chief gives me the update, he gives me a bulletproof vest. Actually, as Ceepak reminds me, it's a bullet-resistant vest. Ceepak also tells me that the vests don't help much with rifle rounds.

  “So why wear it?” I ask, when I feel how heavy it is.

  “Let's take what precautions we can,” Ceepak suggests. “The layers of Kevlar could catch the bullet and spread its momentum over a larger portion of your body, deforming the round and, hopefully, bringing it to a stop before it can penetrate your skin.”

  Before it can rip a hole in my lung and nick my spine.

  “Put on the vest, Boyle,” the chief says, smiling over my shoulder at the small cluster of shoppers surprised to see cop cars parked outside the boarded-over candy shop. “Put it on, or I'm putting you on administrative leave.” He says all this through a huge smile, in case any tourists are looking our way.

  I start peeling off my polo shirt.

  “Inside!” the chief says before I finish working the shirt up over my head. “Inside.”

  Through the knit holes in my shirt I see his smile go so wide and toothy he might split his cheeks. He pushes me into the store. Since we're telling everybody in town that Katie had been “injured” by a BB gun fired by a rowdy gang of underage drinkers, I can't be seen in public putting on a flak jacket. You don't slip on a bulletproof vest because you're afraid of BBs.

  Inside, with my shirt up over my head, I hear this little voice.

  “You need to do more crunches,” she says. “Need to tighten up those abs, Mr. Boyle. You're looking a little flabby.”

  It's Dr. McDaniels, the CSI whiz, examining my physical evidence.

  “Dr. McDaniels,” I hear Ceepak say. “Good to see you again.”

  “You can't see me,” she says. “I'm not officially here, remember?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  Dr. McDaniels is pushing sixty and doesn't take guff from anybody. She probably thinks the whole “keep-it-a-secret” deal is stupid. And she'd be right, too.

  “I can't wait until we actually work together,” she says to Ceepak.

  “Me, too.”

  “Don't tell my husband I snuck down to meet you. Let's make that another one of our little secrets.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Dr. McDaniels?” says Chief Baines. “Thank you so much for coming down on such short notice. We need you to wrap this thing up ASAP.”

  Wrap it up? ASAP?

  He acts like we're in total control of the situation here, that if we work a little harder, move a little faster, we should have the case cracked before the first rack of ribs hits the barbecue pit Monday morning.

  “And John?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I need you to start using your brain. I do not need you racing up and down the street chasing the wrong minivan, scaring pedestrians, and endangering motorists!”

  Ouch. That's gotta hurt. Ceepak doesn't say anything. Neither does the chief or anybody else for a couple of seconds.

  “Okay, John?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I'm heading back to the house. Sandy, if you need anything, give me a holler. Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, too,” says Dr. McDaniels.

  She says it, but I can tell she doesn't mean it. McDaniels and Ceepak worked together back in July when she helped us on the Tilt-A-Whirl case. I don't think she's keen on anybody suggesting Ceepak's not doing his job the way it should be done.

  “Santucci? Let's roll.” The chief and his sidekick leave.

  I finally yank the shirt off my head. I almost take my nose and ears off with it.

  “Here we go, Danny.” Ceepak holds out the bulletproof, I mean bullet-resistant, vest. He drapes the Kevlar shield over my head and shoulders and works the Velcro side straps into place. I feel like a horse being saddled. The vest is hot, the day humid. Maybe I'll sweat my beer gut away. Maybe I can go on late-night TV with an infomercial and hawk my new Sauna Suit: “Lose the pounds, not your life!”

  “Sorry about your lady friend,” McDaniels says when I'm all bundled up. This I can tell she means. She has the map of Ireland written on her face just like Katie, only Dr. McD's map has more roads wrinkled into it. “Hang in there, kiddo.”

  She moves over to the glass display case filled with chocolates and candy.

  “We've worked out the trajectory.” McDaniels gestures to some bright-yellow yarn strung between the plate-glass windows and the bullet holes behind the counter. “Two points make a straight line,” she says, echoing what Ceepak said earlier. “Works every time.”

  McDaniels is a tiny woman. Spry. She flits around like Tinkerbell. She's wearing cargo shorts that show off her matchstick-skinny legs and knobby knees. She's also wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt with Tabasco bottles printed all over it.

  “For precision, we concentrated on the bullet that missed Mr. Boyle.” She points to the hole in the cinnamon hearts tub. “We matched it to the corresponding hole in the window. This, of course, gave us an uninterrupted firing line.”

  Uninterrupted. My bullet didn't get knocked off course, didn't tumble around inside my chest the way Katie's did.

  I see McDaniels has brought along two associates, two state CSI technicians who came in on Saturday, maybe their day off, because Sandy McDaniels asked them to. Both guys are wearing shorts and T-shirts. Tabasco sauce T-shirts. I guess it's a Casual Saturday theme with the state CSI team, the Tabasco collection. I wonder if they own the hot-pepper boxer shorts. I do, but I didn't wear mine today. I didn't get the memo about Casual Saturday.

  Ceepak does one of this three-finger points toward the window. “Have you run the line outside?”

  “Your chief wouldn't let us,” McDaniels says. “He was afraid we might invite unwanted scrutiny and questions.”

  “I see.” Ceepak sounds disappointed.

  “So we used the laser,” one of the CSI guys says.

  “That'll work.” Ceepak's happy again. “Find anything?”

  “Not much,” McDaniels says. “The line took us to an empty parking spot. The only one in the whole lot. Section D.”

  “Near the Dolphin sign,” says the taller CSI guy.

  They mark the parking lot here with alphabetical signs to help you find your car. You know: Alligator, Blowfish, Clown Fish, Dolphin, Eel. I think they stole the idea from Disney World.

  “The parking lot?” Ceepak's ruminating again. “Fascinating.”

  “Of course, the line continued.”

  “Yeah,” the other CSI guy says, “all the way to nothing-an empty patch of sky between the condos and the water slide.”

  “So, we figure it was a park and shoot,” McDaniels says. “And the guy was tidy. No shell casings.”

  The parking lot.

  I would have figured the sniper took aim from one of the elevated locations surrounding Saltwater Tammy's. Some place high like where we found all the baseball cards.

  “That scenario also seems to fit with your prior crime scenes,” McDaniels says.
“The first attack on the beach.”

  “Roger,” says Ceepak. “We suspect those shots came from the street.”

  “Where the cars park,” I add.

  “Crime scene number two.” McDaniels opens a bin and carefully helps herself to a single Jelly Belly. “Morgan's Surf and Turf restaurant.”

  “Outside,” Ceepak says. “The parking lot.”

  “Either there or across the street-beneath that water tower or in the driveway of one of those houses. I think he likes to park, then squeeze off his shots.” She pops the Jelly Belly into her mouth. “Hmm. Fascinating.”

  “What?” Ceepak asks.

  “It really does taste like Dr Pepper. How do they do that?”

  “Chemicals?” I suggest.

  “Forget I asked.” She pops another Jelly Belly.

  “I suspect the weapon is an army-issue M-24,” Ceepak says.

  McDaniels nods her head. “Also sold as the Remington 700 hunting rifle.”

  “Accurate to eight hundred meters.”

  “Bolt action.”

  These two could sing duets.

  “Uses the M118 special ball cartridge.”

  “Calculating the angle of the line coming out the window, projecting it across the parking space, I put the shooter at approximately six and a half to seven feet off the ground,” McDaniels says.

  “He's a tall guy?” I ask.

  “Or he props his rifle on top of something that tall,” McDaniels says.

  “Six and a half feet,” Ceepak says. “The height of a standard minivan.”

  “Right.” McDaniels rubs her spiky white hair. “I suspect the shooter parks, waits, props his bipod on the vehicle's roof to steady his shot, squeezes off his rounds. Same with the paintball weapon.”

  “If he's getting out of his minivan with a rifle or two, why didn't somebody see him?” I ask.

  “Maybe somebody did,” McDaniels says.

  “Doubtful,” Ceepak says. “Two hits were at night. The other first thing this morning.”