Chris Grabenstein - Fun House

No, Layla and I did not hook up, get busy, or “know” each other.

She offered. I turned her down.

Fine. Go ahead. Kick me out of the red-blooded-American-male club.

“Drop me off at the front door, okay?” she says. “Pull into the handicap parking slot.”

It’s empty. I’m not parking. Technically. I pull in.

In the rearview mirror, I can see Ceepak standing with a short woman in the only other empty parking spot in Morgan’s gigantic lot.

The woman is leaning on the handle of a rolling case of some sort. Ceepak, on the other hand, is glaring at me. He would never, ever pull in to a designated handicapped-drivers-only spot. To do so would be considered cheating.

“Good luck,” says Layla as she blows me one of those Hollywood style “m’waw” air kisses and hops out of the Jeep. “I need to check inside. See if the watermelons arrived. Catch you later, Danny.”

She bops up the walkway to the restaurant’s front doors.

Tons of people are streaming in and out of the restaurant. The Early Bird specials leaving; the 8 o’clock reservations arriving.

Layla shoves open the front door.

“Hey, Danny!”

Before the front door glides shut, I see Ceepak’s wife, Rita. She’s right where we first met her a couple summers ago: near the hostess stand.

She waves. I wave. The door whooshes shut.

I’m figuring Rita, who used to waitress at Morgan’s, came down to see some of her friends become TV stars, serving dinner to the famous kids in what Morgan’s calls their Party Room. It’s a couple long tables that can be sealed off from the rest of the dining room with an accordion wall. It’s where the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs hold their monthly meetings. Tonight, Fun House has it closed off for their etiquette contest. Layla tells me that the winner of the competition gets “immunity,” which is a very good thing to have in reality TV shows because that means you can’t be booted out of the house that week.

“Danny?”

This from the other Ceepak.

The one waiting-somewhat impatiently-for me to drive our surveillance vehicle (my Jeep) into position for the sting, which is, geeze-o, man, supposed to take place in like twenty minutes!

I slam my ride into reverse, peel wheels backward, cut a fishhook swerve to the right, jam the transmission into drive, and blast-off for Ceepak and the empty parking spot, twenty feet away.

Ceepak and the short lady have to dodge my front bumper when I screech to a stop.

“Hey,” I say as nonchalantly as possible when I climb out the Jeep. The engine is ticking, trying to cool down. My tires smell like it’s rubber-burning day down at the town dump.

I notice Ceepak stealing a glance at his personal time control unit, what other people might call their wristwatch. His jawbone is popping and out near his ear again. I think he’s ticking and trying to cool down, too.

“Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“When I was a Boy Scout, our troop leader encouraged us to operate on what he called White House time.”

My face must say “Huh?” because Ceepak clarifies.

“When invited to the White House, if you are not five minutes early, you are considered ten minutes late.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“This our rig?” says the lady with the rolling luggage.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak. “Danny, this is Ms. Tory Wood. She is a sound technician, working for Prickly Pear Productions.”

“Gimme a hand with this stuff, kid.” She pops open the rolling case. I see all sorts of electronic gear stowed in custom-cut foam slots. She pulls out a suction-cupped antenna, slaps it to the hood of my Jeep. “Put the recorder in your cargo hold. But be careful. That’s a Nagra Six.”

“Okay,” I say, placing what looks like the high-tech gizmo into the back of my Jeep.

“Ms. Wood will be recording Paul Braciole’s conversation with Skeletor,” says Ceepak.

“Just the audio,” she says as she runs the antenna wire through the passenger-side window, heaves it behind the seats to where I just stashed her knob-covered recorder. “Paulie’s wearing a wireless mic. They all do, all the time. Stupid kids forget to turn them off when they hit the head, which they do an awful lot, seeing how they guzzle beer 24/7. I should mix together a bootleg compilation of their longest farts and pisses. ’Scuse me.”

She says this, not because she’s “crude as oil,” as my Irish grandmother used to say, but because she’s crawling into the Jeep to go fiddle with her dials and slap on her headphones.

“Are we getting video too?” I ask.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak, gesturing toward a van parked three spaces away. Its running lights flicker. I wave to whoever’s behind the tinted windows.

“That’s the ‘A’ camera,” says Ms. Wood, crouched in the back where I usually toss crap. Like the Styrofoam ice chest she’s using as a seat cushion. “I’m not sure where Rutger put ‘B’ and ‘C.’”

Up arches Ceepak’s eyebrow. “B and C?”

“Yeah. He likes to roll three cameras at all times, catch the action from three different angles. And since we can’t use the steadicam rig on this setup without blowing the shot.…” Now she holds up two small boxes with earbuds attached. “You guys want headsets?”

“Come again?” says Ceepak, taking the audio unit and staring at it confusedly.

“They’re wireless. You can hear what I hear.”

Ceepak nods. We both jam foam buds into our ears.

“You gentlemen are good to go. You better climb in. Here comes Paulie.”

Ceepak takes the passenger seat. I slip in behind the wheel. Layla escorts The Thing out of the restaurant, into the parking lot.

Back in the cargo hold, Tory Wood flips a switch and we hear Paul Braciole saying, “I need more fucking money. Juice is expensive.”

“Here.” Layla’s voice. “But return whatever’s left to the prop department when we wrap the drug dealer scene.”

Ceepak’s eyebrow inches up.

I try to explain: “I think, you know, everything’s a scene from a TV show to Layla.”

“I get to fucking eat later, right?” Paulie whines. “I want some of that fucking crab pie.…”

“Ms. Wood?” says Ceepak.

“Yeah?”

“Have you set your recording levels?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you mind muting Mr. Braciole until our suspect arrives?”

“Officer, it would be my pleasure.”

She flips a switch and cuts The Thing off in mid F-bomb.

Ceepak checks his watch again. Reaches for the walkie-talkie hidden under the tails of his untucked Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt, which I think he raced out and bought special for tonight’s undercover drug bust operation. No way he wears green and yellow hibiscus-covered tops on a regular basis.

“Reed? Malloy? This is Ceepak. Radio check.”

“Standing by,” says Reed.

“Locked and loaded,” says Malloy, who watches way too many cop shows on TV.

I’m assuming Reed and Malloy are commanding our two backup vehicles.

“Where are they?” I ask.

Ceepak gestures right, then left. We have the parking-lot exits covered.

Ceepak’s eyes narrow. “Now we just wait.”

I nod. It’s deathly quiet in my Jeep.

“Sorry I was late,” I finally say.

“Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“We both need to focus on the task at hand.”

“Right.”

“Avoid distractions.”

“Gotcha.”

“I know you recently lost a girlfriend.…”

“Katie really wasn’t my girlfriend anymore.”

“You recently broke up with Ms. Starkey.”

“Actually, she kind of broke up with me first.”

Ceepak sighs. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“‘Nothing we can say can change anything now.’”