Chris Grabenstein - Tilt-a-Whirl

“Trust me, Ceepak-you don't want to do that.”

I don't think Ceepak's trusted the chief ever since he “lied a little” to nail Mendez. He motions for me to follow him out of the cellblock.

“The truth can really ruin your fucking day, Ceepak. You'll see! You fucking Mary Poppins!”

Ceepak doesn't stop to listen, so neither do I.

We walk out the door.

Like Springsteen says:

I'll walk like a man

And I'll keep on walkin’.

Ceepak is stalling on letting the chief make his one phone call because he knows Cosgrove wouldn't call his lawyer.

He'd call his girlfriend.

So we need to drive up to the city before she figures out we're coming.

We climb into the Explorer.

“The FBI has her apartment under surveillance,” Ceepak says, handing me a map of the city with the block circled with wax pencil. “You know the way?”

“Yes, sir.”

We pull out of the parking lot and the radio starts squawking.

“All units, 10–34, Playland Arcade. Repeat. 10–34. Playland Video Arcade. Suspect is considered armed and dangerous….”

Ceepak snatches the radio mike.

“This is Ceepak. We're on it. Roll, Danny. Playland.”

“Sirens?”

“And lights. Come on. Roll!”

I flip the switches. The light bar spins, the siren wails. We squeal tires.

“You know what a 10–34 is, Danny?”

Great. A drive-by pop quiz.

Fortunately, while I race through a red light and cut the tires hard to the left, Ceepak answers his own question.

“It's a 10–24 still in progress. An assault with a deadly weapon.”

Got it.

There's a guy with a deadly weapon inside the Arcade at Playland and the assault is still going on.

I step on the gas, push the pedal all the way to the floor and make my engine roar.

Springsteen would be proud.

* * *

We're the first unit on the scene.

Poor Playland. They were closed all weekend on account of the Tilt-A-Whirl murder. Now they've got somebody with a weapon terrorizing people who'd rather be dropping quarters into coin slots. If this kind of action keeps up, the Family Fun Park may have to change its name to Slayland.

The video arcade building is a vast, open space-like a giant warehouse with Astro-turf green carpet and enough evenly spaced red poles to hold up the roof. Usually, there are all sorts of bells and whistles and ray guns going off the second you step inside the front doors. Today, all I hear is about a hundred kids screaming.

“What's the situation?” Ceepak asks a guy in a red tunic with huge pockets up front sagging with quarters.

He points to the far side of the arcade.

“Some guy's got a pistol!”

“Where?” Ceepak asks, his eyes surveying the situation.

“Dodge City!”

“Where?”

He is obviously a first-time visitor to The Playland Arcade. I, however, know where everything is because this is where much of my youth was misspent. Most of my quarters, too.

“This way,” I say.

Dodge City is this corny shooting gallery that's been in the far corner of the building ever since sometime in 1962. It's this life-size barroom where you shoot a six-gun at a piano player, Black Bart and his gang at the poker table, whiskey bottles-that sort of stuff. When you hit the targets, the mannequins move and say stuff like, “Dang! You shot me, sheriff.” You ring enough bells, shoot enough bad guys, you win a tin star you can pin on your girlfriend's chest.

I wish it were still that easy.

People are panicking, hiding under pool tables, clustered behind Skee Ball targets.

Once again, Ceepak shows no fear.

His gun is out in front, sweeping left, searching right.

“Over there!” a girl screeches from beneath the Alpine Racer. “It's Ben!”

Guess she knows the guy with the gun.

“Follow me.” Ceepak uses pinball machines and giant gumball dispensers for cover. When we get to the Crab Claw, this crane you move around to snag stuffed animals, we see the kid with the gun.

He looks like he's drunk.

“She's a hoochie-mama!”

Sounds like he's drunk too-not making much sense, jabbering gobbledegook.

“Chicken head, hoochie-mama!”

Guess he and his girlfriend had a spat this morning. Or, he caught her cheating and has decided to take it out on the world, including me. He points his gun in my general direction and I hit the deck, crawling to safety under a fake Formula One Racecar.

The kid looks to be sixteen or seventeen. Preppy clothes with brown, blotchy stains down the front of his shirt. Preppy puke. Something about him looks familiar, like I should know who he is, like he's one of my buds’ kid brothers or something. He twirls, almost topples, then spins around to point his pistol at Ceepak who is standing right in front of him, holstering his own gun.

The spinning makes the kid even dizzier. He waves his pistol in circles over his head like he wants to be a Dallas Cowgirl cheerleader when he grows up.

“Put that down, son,” Ceepak says.

The kid tries to stand still.

“Snap. You smell bacon? Here come 5.0.”

He is what we call a wigga: a rich white boy who wants you to think he's ghetto. He must've bought a Gangsta Slangsta dictionary last time he was at the mall. Bacon and 5.0? They both mean the same thing: cops.

“Wassup, braw?”

Ceepak doesn't understand a word.

“Hand me your weapon, son.”

“Ease up, braw!”

“Put it down. On the floor. Now.”

The gun hand rushes up to cover his mouth. Up chucks some more puke. Beer and whisky? Mighty risky.

“Son?” Ceepak towers over the boy who's looking down and wiping vomit all over his shirt. The kid is also what we call a sloppy drunk. Maybe he should stick to doing Jell-O shots.

That's why I recognize him.

Saturday night. The Sand Bar. He's the underage asshole I wanted to bust.

“Mr. Sinclair?” Ceepak knows the kid, too. “We met Saturday night, remember?”

“Wassup, braw?”

The kid's eyeballs swim around, trying to find something in the room that isn't gyrating.

“I'm Officer John Ceepak. We talked when your girlfriend Ashley was kidnapped?”

“Hoochie-mama!”

“Hand me the pistol, Ben.”

Ben waves the pistol like a wet flag.

“Man, if you don't stop buggin’, I'm going to open a can on you!”

“Which machine did you tear it off?”

“I'll pop a cap, braw …”

“Not with that gun. It's plastic. A toy.”

The kid looks down at his weapon. People peek out. Some laugh-the ones close enough to see Ceepak is right: The kid's deadly weapon was ripped off a video game. I see a cable curling out of the pistol grip.

“You'll find that most lethal weapons are made of metal,” Ceepak says. “Plastic has a tendency to melt in high temperature situations such as that created when bullets exit a gun barrel. Friction.”

The kid looks dumbfounded. Or maybe just dumb.

“Oh. Yeah,” he says, flashing back to his prep school physics class. “Friction.”

He drops his gun on the floor and, now that I hear it clatter, I know for certain it's a toy.

Ceepak figured it out earlier.

Back when it was dangerous to be wrong.

Ben Sinclair is our honorable mayor's son. This makes the Playland manager nervous. Not Ceepak.

Thirty minutes later, we're in the Arcade office with the six other cops who responded to the 10–34.

“We see no need to press charges,” the manager says. He's about thirty years old and wears a tie tucked under the floppy collar of a short-sleeve polo shirt, which, if you ask me, never really looks all that classy. A metal change dispenser is clipped to the front of his belt.

“No harm done.” The guy is studying the plastic pistol with the wire pigtailing out its butt. “We can repair the machine.”