“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.
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.”
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.”
7
“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
“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.
Mrs. Ceepak is in her early thirties, a little younger than her husband. Her hair is blond and slightly old- fashioned in the styling department because, I think, if she ever had fifty bucks, she’d rather give it to one of her favorite charities instead of the Shore to Please Hair Salon. Her face is Jersey fresh with gentle eyes-though the crow’s-foot corners hint at the wear and tear from the fourteen years she spent working two jobs to raise her only son on her own.
Their playful grins quickly fade as they go back to surveying the new damage to their seriously dented car.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ceepak asks.
“Fine,” Rita sighs. “Just a little, you know, shaken up. Who would want to kamikaze into Silverado?”
I’m guessing the Ceepak’s give their vehicles names. People do that, I’m told. I, on the other hand, call my Jeep “my Jeep.”
“Perhaps a tourist from Ohio who wanted your parking spot?”
“I don’t think so. The spot next to me, the one closer to the store, was wide open. I think this was somebody who wanted to hurt us.”
Ceepak nods.
Unfortunately, sticking to his code, not tolerating lying, cheating, and/or stealing has earned my partner a few enemies. Locals and Bennies-Benny being a derogatory Jersey shore term for tourists. Why? I don’t know. Some say it stands for Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, and West New York, all towns north of here.
We take some digital photographs of the damage and write up the incident as a “leaving the scene of an accident.”
“That’s a violation of N.J.S.A. 39:4-129,” says Sam Starky when I pick her up around nine for our date at Big
