Chris Grabenstein - Rolling Thunder

Now Mazzilli whispers something to Marny, who giggles and whispers to Gail, who laughs and shakes her head.

“Come on,” booms Bruno. “Live a little!”

“Not tonight.”

“Okay. But we want a rain check!”

Mazzilli and Marny head off toward smoky glass doors labeled VIP, probably so they can canoodle in the dark.

“Bitch stood me up,” the guy to my right mumbles. I notice he looks like a thirty-year-old nerd, only with big arm muscles bulging out of his shiny silk tee.

“Easy, Marvin,” says Bud.

“Bitch. She owes me.”

Bud swipes at the counter with his towel. “Really? For what?”

“I did her root canal,” says Marvin. “For free.”

“Free?”

“Well, I only took what her insurance paid.”

Bud chuckles. “And of course you told the insurance company it was like two or three root canals, right?”

“So? I can’t believe it, man. She told me she couldn’t hang tonight because her grandmother was sick.”

“Yeah,” says Bud the bartender. “She used that one on me once, too. That’s when you know it’s over.”

“It’s true,” I butt in because, well, it’s happened to me, too. “When they invoke the sick grandmother, you’re history.”

“I usually says it’s my little brother who’s sick,” adds Starky. “Either way, Danny’s right. You need to move on, sir.”

The nerdy guy, Marvin the dentist, gives us all this huffy “who asked any of you” look, slams a twenty on the bar, swivels off his stool, and stomps away.

“Was it something we said?” I joke to Bud.

“Probably.” The bartender shakes his head. “Poor man. Gail Baker messed with his mind. Big time.”

Bud thumps up a metal cooler lid and scoops up a jug full of ice cubes to make somebody a fruity colada.

“Hey, Joe,” he hollers to a busboy who just backed in behind the bar with a fresh keg of beer on a handcart. “We need more ice.”

“Sure, no problem,” says busboy Joe as he turns around.

Only he’s not a boy-more like a geezer. Craggy face, white stubble, stringy hair sticking up in wild clumps like he just came in from hurricane.

He looks exactly like he looked the last time I saw him.

Joe Ceepak.

My partner’s asshole father.

I thought Joe Ceepak was supposed to be in jail up in Ohio.

Ohio .

The license plates on the red pickup that creamed Rita’s rear bumper.

“What are you doing here?” I blurt out.

Mr. Ceepak glares at me. “Workin’.”

He hunkers down to fiddle with some tubes and valves, hooks up the aluminum keg to the taps. Mr. Ceepak is, from my experience, a genius on anything related to beer. When I first met him, he told me his friends called him Joe Sixpack instead of Ceepak.

“So, how’d you get out of jail?” I ask it real loudly because, like I said, the man is a skeevey creep.

Mr. Ceepak stands up from the beer barrel and vise-grips the edge of the bar with both hands. He’s squeezing so hard, the tendons rope up and down his arms. “I did my time, Officer Boyle,” he says, biting back the bile he’d probably like to spew at me if it wouldn’t cost him his crappy job. “I did my time.”

“But sir,” asks Sam, “do the terms of what I imagine to be your early release allow you to leave the state of Ohio for an extended period of time?”

He glares at Starky. “I gotta go get ice. How much you say you need, Bud?”

Bud stands frozen behind the bar like a human daiquiri.

“Huh?”

“Ice?”

“Oh. Bucket or two.”

“Roger that,” says Mr. Ceepak, simultaneously mimicking and mocking his son. “I’m on it.”

He wheels the handcart down the back of the bar.

“Hey, Mr. Ceepak?” I call out.

He keeps moving.

“You driving a red pickup truck these days?”

He doesn’t answer.

“You do your grocery shopping over at the Acme?”

Still no response. He lifts up the bar pass-through and heads off to the kitchen.

“Jeez-o man,” I say to Bud, “you guys hired that scumbag?”

Bud holds up his hands. “Hey, wasn’t my call, Danny Boy. I just work here”

“He did time, Bud. For murder. Well, they dealed him down to manslaughter.”

“No way.”

“Way,” says Starky, who knows all about Mr. Ceepak and his monstrously heinous past.

“What can I tell you guys?” Bud starts wiping out beer mugs. “Mr. Johnson has a soft spot for ex-cons.”

“Because they work cheap?” I say.

“Exactly.”

Mr. Johnson is Keith Barent Johnson, another proud member of the Sea Haven Chamber of Commerce. He owns a slew of motels, rental homes, and Big Kahuna’s Dance Club. I think Kahuna was his nickname in college.

I stand up. Slap enough cash on the bar to cover our tab. Stuff a few bills into Bud’s tip cup.

“Come on, Sam.”

Sam pops up off her stool. Neither one of us wants to be breathing the same air-conditioned air with old man Ceepak.

We head around to the rear of the building where the Big Kahuna staff park their cars.

I see Keith Barent Johnson’s Cadillac. Hard to miss, what with the KBJ vanity license plates done up on New Jersey’s “Shore to Please” specialty tags. I recognize Bud’s Harley. And there, down by the Dumpster, is a 1980-something red Ford pickup truck.

“Bastard,” I mumble, touching the streak of silver paint Old Man Ceepak scraped off his daughter-in-law’s ride.

My partner, the good Ceepak, would probably secure a sample of this silver paint, take it the lab, and run it through a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer like they do on that TV show, Sherwin-Williams, CSI . He’d compare it against the thousands of automotive paints in the computer data banks and match it to the paint on his Toyota.

Me? I go with my gut.

The jerk did it. He rammed into Rita’s car on purpose. That’s just how Joe Sixpack rolls.

I hear a door squeak open on the nightclub’s loading dock.

I swear this place used to be a warehouse.

Joe Ceepak comes out dragging a black trash bag from the kitchen. It’s leaking a stream of garbage juice as he lugs it down a short flight of steps. A sloshy mixture of Corona lime hulls, half-chewed ribs, smooshed baked potatoes, stale beer, and anything else on the menu folks didn’t want to take home in a Styrofoam box.

“You messing with my wheels, Boyle?” he says when he reaches the Dumpster next to his truck. “You scratch it, I’ll cut your nuts off with a blunt butter knife.”

Now he eyeballs Samantha, who smoothes out her miniskirt in a futile attempt to make it magically cover her knees.

“So, who’s your friend?”

Yep. He’s his old nasty self.

I step between him and Sam.

“Earlier today, Mr. Ceepak, you left the scene of an accident,” I say. “That’s a violation of N.J.S.A. 39:4-129.”

“What?”

“You broke the law. Look it up.”

“You can’t prove shit, smartass.”

“Really? Watch us.”

“Us? You still working with my retarded son?”

“Yes, sir. You still a pain in everybody’s ass?”

He tosses up both hands. Grins. “It’s what I do best, Boyle.”

“So where are you staying while pursuing your new career in the exciting field of nightclub custodial sciences?” I gesture toward his leaky sack of garbage.

“Here and there, Boyle. Here and there.”

“Could you be a little more specific, sir? We might need an address to put on your arrest warrant.”

He rumbles up a phlegmy laugh. Grabs hold of the neck of his lumpy plastic bag. Starts to hoist it up off the asphalt.

“I gotta go back to work. Just tell Johnny I need to know where his mother’s hiding.” He tries to peer around me at Sam. “She let you diddle with those big ol’ titties, Boyle?”