Chris Grabenstein - Rolling Thunder

She almost says snot because I think I said it on one of our Sunday-morning-after-Saturday-night Dunkin’ Donuts runs. The Bavarian Kremes. Who wants to see that much mucus in the morning?

Sam bubbles on. “You want some coffee, Ceepak? This box is regular, this box is French vanilla.”

Why do I think there was a third box of hazelnut that Starky has already guzzled? Then again, maybe not. Samantha Starky is a lot like a Colombian coffee bean: naturally caffeinated. She was a part-time summer cop last year, took a bunch of criminology classes at the nearby community college, then decided she’d rather be a district attorney than a police officer, so now she’s cramming for her LSATs.

Her naturally percolated state? Very conducive to good grades.

“So, Danny, how’s Skippy holding up?” she asks.

“Okay, I guess.”

“He looked rather shaken,” adds Ceepak. “I think he blames his brother Kevin for insisting their mother ride the roller coaster this morning. Apparently, she was somewhat reluctant to do so.”

“Wow,” says Sam. “The whole family must feel horrible.”

No, I want to say, not the youngest son. He’s all kinds of happy. And Peter. We haven’t heard from him yet because he’s gay and they wouldn’t let him ride the ride.

“My mom heard that the funeral will probably be this Friday at Our Lady of the Seas. Poor Skippy.” Sam has met Skip. On one of our dates, we played miniature golf at King Putt, the course he works at for his father. “I bet this is tearing him up.”

“Yeah.” I say. “He always gets kind of emotional.”

Actually, Skippy cries a lot. Has ever since elementary school when he was the kid you’d see bawling his eyes out when he missed the ball in kickball.

I don’t hang out with Skip O’Malley too much anymore, not since this one time at the Sand Bar when we were all sharing a couple of pitchers of draft and, as a joke, my buddy Jess played that Garth Brooks song on the jukebox, the one about lives left to chance and how he didn’t want to miss the dance, and Skippy couldn’t take it. The guy sobbed through a whole stack of paper napkins.

“He really wanted to be a cop,” says Starky.

“Indeed,” says Ceepak. “Unfortunately, if I’m honest, he did not display a genuine aptitude for the job.”

He must be remembering busting Skippy’s chops for yammering on his cell phone in the middle of Ocean Avenue a couple of summers ago when he was supposed to be directing traffic around a sewer excavation.

“Yeah,” says Sam. “And then, of course, last fall he cheated.”

“Come again?”

Okay. Sam’s got Ceepak’s interest. Mine, too.

“Oh, jeez. I thought you guys knew. And here I am, blabbing my big mouth. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Come on, Sam,” I say. “What happened?”

“You promise you won’t tell a soul?”

“Scout’s honor,” I say.

“You have my word,” adds Ceepak.

“Well, you know he was in the Alternate Route Program, paid his own way to the Cape May County Police Academy. Anyway, they have this weekly exam every Friday, and I guess the teacher left the answer key on his lectern on Thursday, and Skippy copied it and even tried to sell the cheat sheet to this other guy who turned him in because, well, it’s really not right to cheat on a test about important stuff like how to deal with death notices and what’s the legal alcohol limit. I sure wouldn’t want a brain surgeon who cheated on his anatomy exam and thought my brain was, I don’t know, in my elbow or something.”

Ceepak and I just sip our coffees and nod.

“Hey-you guys want to go out and celebrate your heroics tonight? You’re not working tomorrow-I checked the duty roster. You both have the day off. We don’t have to stay out too late.”

“I can’t,” says Ceepak. “I promised T.J. I would watch some DVDs with him tonight. In Harm’s Way, The Caine Mutiny.”

I nod.

Navy movies.

Ceepak’s adopted son T.J. Lapczynski-Ceepak (yes, his name sounds like something you need an ointment to cure) is shipping off to Annapolis soon, made it into the United States Naval Academy. He’s already cut off all his dreadlocks and is working on having a few tattoo sleeves erased from his arms.

“Well, we’re not doing anything else tonight, are we, Danny? We could hit Big Kahuna’s Dance Club. They have this awesome band tonight. Steamed Broccoli.”

We.

Over the winter and spring, without even realizing it, I gradually became part of a We, which is much more complicated than a Wii, the cool video game where you get to sprain your wrist playing tennis in your underwear.

Samantha Starky and I are a couple. I guess. We don’t live together or anything, but we have passed the sixth-date mark and I now know that she stows her toothbrush in a souvenir Pocahontas glass from Burger King.

“Big Kahuna’s sounds like fun,” I say.

One of Ceepak’s cell phones chirps on his utility belt.

He wears two: one for business, one for family.

“Hello?”

It’s the family phone. When it’s business, he answers, “This is Ceepak. Go.”

He puts down his coffee cup.

“Are you injured? Okay. No. Stay there. We’re on our way.”

He snaps the clamshell shut.

“What’s up?”

“Rita. Somebody crashed into her car in the parking lot of the Acme grocery store.”

“She need us to write up the accident report?”

“Apparently, it wasn’t an accident. Rita suspects the other driver rammed into her car on purpose.”

“I was over there, putting away my grocery cart.”

Mrs. Ceepak points to the cart corral structure about twenty yards away from her Toyota. While she was off doing what any Ceepak would do (stowing an empty grocery cart in its proper parking spot as opposed to, say watching it roll downhill toward Ocean Avenue where it almost causes a wicked motorcycle wipeout), somebody else was banging into the rear end of her 1995 Toyota Corolla hatchback.

We’re in the parking lot of the Acme, the biggest grocery store on the island. In the summer months, it’s basically a giant Cookout Depot stocked with hamburgers, hot dogs, matching buns, marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers. You can buy potato chips in bags the size of pillows. Salsa or pickles in five-gallon drums.

Ceepak crouches down to inspect the damage.

The right rear bumper is kind of crumpled. The plastic red-and-yellow brake light casing is cracked. There’s a streak of red paint slashing across the fender.

“It was a red vehicle?” says Ceepak.

“Yes,” says Rita. “A red pickup truck. An older Ford. It had Ohio license plates.”

“And you say this wasn’t an accident?”

“He rammed into our car on purpose, John. I saw him. He aimed his wheels at the bumper, then stepped on the gas and-boom! I’m just glad I wasn’t in the car.”

Rita rubs the back of her neck. Sympathetic whiplash.

“You saw that the driver was a man?” Even though Rita is his wife, Ceepak is giving her the same “just the facts, ma’am” treatment Joe Friday from Dragnet probably gave Mrs. Friday when he was off-camera.

“Yes. I think so. I didn’t see a face, just a silhouette, but I’m confident the driver of the red truck was an old man with scraggly hair. Oh-he was a smoker, too. Had a cigarette stuck in his mouth the whole time he was lining up his shot.”

“You make an excellent eyewitness, Mrs. Ceepak,” my partner says, an uncharacteristic hint of playfulness in his voice.

“Why, thank you, Officer Ceepak. Nice of you to mention it.”

The two of them are grinning like high school kids flirting over their Bunsen burners in chemistry class.