“Where is your helmet, sir?”
Skeletor kick-starts the bike. The engine varoom-pop-pops to life. He puts a hand to his ear. “What?”
“Where is your helmet?” Ceepak shouts as we move closer. Paulie, The Thing, moves backward, his hands trembling.
Skeletor tugs down on the Boonie hat’s leather straps.
“I don’t need a fucking helmet.”
“Yes, sir. You do. In New Jersey, all motorcyclists are required to wear DOT-approved headgear.”
“Not me. I got other protection.”
“Sir, you need the full gear,” says Ceepak. He gestures at Skeletor’s hat. “Not the fool’s gear.”
I think Ceepak’s cribbing that corny line off a motorcycle safety poster he hung up in the SHPD locker room a few months ago.
Skeletor responds by flicking his wrist on the twist grip throttle to rev his engine, make it go chug-pop-pop.
“Sir? Kindly shut down your engine and dismount.”
Skeletor snaps his bony teeth shark style at Ceepak. “Bite me.”
Ceepak doesn’t flinch. “Dismount, sir. Now!”
“Shit,” gasps Paulie. “I’m out of here!”
I hear glass shatter. Reflexively, Ceepak and I both glance behind us. We see Paulie turning tail to run, crunching across the shattered steroid bottles he just dropped on the blacktop.
That’s when Skeletor gooses his throttle to the max, lets go of the clutch lever, and pops a wheelie that sends the front tire spinning like a studded chainsaw at Ceepak’s head.
And Ceepak isn’t wearing a helmet either.
9
C
EEPAK DUCKS LEFT
.
The whirring motorcycle tire grazes the shoulder of his shirt on the downswing, chews into the Tommy Bahama gardenias like a hedge trimmer. Ceepak rolls right. I go for my gun.
“No weapons!” shouts Ceepak, gritting through the pain that comes when your collarbone gets clipped.
Skeletor lands hard and rips up a lane between parked cars.
Okay. Now he gets more than a twenty-five-dollar fine; he goes to jail for resisting arrest.
Ceepak grabs his radio mic. “All units,” he shouts, “suspect is fleeing the scene on motor—”
Before he finishes, the throaty roar of rolling thunder shatters the air around us. Not the roller coaster—fifteen more choppers or hogs or whatever the hell Hell’s Angels geezers call their rides these days. Only these aren’t fat old guys with black leather vests, David Crosby hair, and too much facial hair.
This looks like The Creed. Tattoo sleeves. Wallets on silver chains. I see pirate skulls with devil horns, the Creed logo. They’re a gang of outlaw bikers that runs drugs in South Jersey. These guys are the mafia on motorcycles.
The Creed, like Ceepak, live their life in strict accordance to a code. Theirs includes stuff about brotherhood and loyalty, like “If a citizen hits your brother, you will be on that citizen without asking why. There is no why.”
I’m figuring Skeletor is a brother. The gang has probably been protecting him for years.
Ceepak and me? We’re lousy stinking citizens.
Up near the Spruce Street exit, Skeletor slams into a swerving fishtail turn, falls in behind three other Creed riders. They do this Shriner Circus move, cutting tire-smokin’ doughnuts around a terrified couple who had been toothpicking their way to their Volvo when the wild bunch rolled into the parking lot. The four thrumming motorbikes circle the trembling tourists and then split off in different directions.
When they make their big finish and peel apart, I can’t tell which one is Skeletor any more.
Ceepak, however, can.
“Reed? Malloy?” he barks into his radio mic, which he holds with one hand while the other one massages that tire gash on his shoulder. “Suspect is headed west on Tangerine.”
“Which one?”
shouts Malloy.
“There’s a whole pack of ’em!”
I can tell by Malloy’s choppy voice that he is in hot pursuit of something or somebody.
That’s when I hear another blast of gear-ripping engines scream into a turn off Tangerine Street to tear up Ocean Avenue. Meanwhile, the first battalion of bikes is still zipping around the restaurant parking lot, hard-cranking through gearshifts, stuttering up the musical scale, straining to hit the high notes.
“Boonie hat!” says Ceepak. “Look for the rider without a helmet. He’s wearing a green tiger-stripe camouflage hat.”
“They all are!”
says Malloy.
“All of them are wearing the same stupid hat.”
Ceepak brings down the mic. “Damn,” he mutters—a word he very rarely uses.
That’s when I know we’re toast.
One of the parking-lot invaders screams up the lane where we’re standing. Bops me on the head as he passes. He’s laughing so hard as he speeds away, I can hear him over the whine of his tweaked-out engine.
Now the first wave of motorcycles swarms into a pack and streams out of the parking lot, heading north after their brothers in the Boonie hats.
“Lock down the causeway!” Ceepak shouts into the mic. “Lock it down!”
Malloy and Reed both start calling in the disaster to the dispatcher. The causeway, about thirty blocks north of where we are, is the only bridge connecting our island with the mainland; it’s their only escape route. I don’t hear much more of the radio transmission; just the dispatcher frantically searching for any available units—enough to throw up a roadblock.
But motorcycles? Unless we can immediately pull together enough cop cars to line them up bumper to bumper across both sides of the span, they’ll slip through. On the shoulder. Between vehicles.
Ceepak and I stand stranded in the parking lot.
The last of the motorcycles squirts out of view.
We can hear the throaty roar as the motorcycle gang, all two dozen of them, flees the scene.
They’ll be at the causeway in no time.
They’ll get away. Maybe the highway patrol will grab them. Or maybe they’ll hide their bikes in the back of a tractor-trailer when they hit the mainland. Ride up a ramp, roll down the door.
Hey, they planned this thing.
They knew the drug buy might be a setup.
Because, to tell the truth, I don’t think The Creed rolls around in Boonie hats on a regular basis.
This is bad. Very bad.
A door slides open on a nearby van. Out steps this dude in khaki shorts and a safari vest. I can see a couple guys huddled around a video camera set up on a tripod behind him.
“And we’re clear!” the dude shouts into his handheld walkie-talkie. “You get that, Jimbo?”
“Got it, Rutger.”
The dude in the safari clothes, whom I guess is Rutger Reinhertz, the
Fun House
director, practically dances a jig. “I smell Emmy Awards!”
Geeze-o, man. The reality show cameras. They saw and recorded everything.
And then things get worse.
“Ceepak? Boyle?”
Gus Davis’s voice crackling out of our radios.
“You better get in here!”
Gus shouts.
“These freaking punks are tearing the place apart!”
10
A
ND THEN THINGS WENT FROM WORSE TO HORRIBLE
.
Since we couldn’t do much with my Jeep to aid in the pursuit of Skeletor and his biker brethren, we hotfooted it into the restaurant to answer Gus Davis’s security-detail distress call.
The Etiquette Competition was actually a very messy food fight.
You see, in the twisted world of
Fun House
, the winners would be whoever had the
worst
table manners, as determined by this week’s celebrity judges, the surviving members of a 1980s hair band famous for trashing hotel rooms.
If you’ve ever seen bratty kids running around a restaurant while their parents sip their third umbrella drink, you have a pretty good idea of what awaited Ceepak and me when we made it into the back room of Morgan’s Surf & Turf. Every sugar packet had been torn open and emptied. Dinner rolls were flying. Globs of world famous crab pie were being spoon-catapulted.
And then there were the watermelons.
Like I said, I’ve never been to a real college, but I’m told, in certain circles, the ceremonial smashing of a watermelon is considered the traditional way to open a frat house barbecue bash. Mike Tomasino had a ball-peen hammer and was making a squishy mess in the middle of his table. Morgan’s nice white tablecloths were turning pink.
“Taser ’em!” shouted Gus Davis, who was in a corner, pawing mashed potatoes out of his eyes. “Taser ’em all!”
“Cease and desist,” Ceepak said to the rowdy drunks. “Cease and desist!”
They weren’t listening.
Paulie had quickly caught up with his inebriated housemates. He was swilling vodka straight from a gallon jug he must’ve snatched from behind the bar. It still had the silver shot spout in its neck.
I saw Layla. Huddled behind one of the roving camera crews capturing all the action.
She, like everybody else working behind the scenes, was wearing a bright yellow rain poncho so her clothes wouldn’t get splattered. She was also laughing her ass off.
Probably at me.
I was wrestling with tattooed Jenny Mortadella, trying to persuade her not to smash Morgan’s lobster tank with
her
ball-peen hammer.
Ceepak’s wife, Rita, the former Morgan’s waitress who had come down to catch a whiff of Hollywood glamour, was in the kitchen. Weeping.
We didn’t Taser anybody, but we did shout a lot.
“Put down the corn cob. Step away from the clam chowder. Leave those lobsters alone!”
Maybe you’ve seen the T-shirts.
Because now I’m a TV star too.
Here’s how
that
happened:
The parking lot buy-and-bust went bust on Friday night.
Our SHPD mobile units and the New Jersey State Police didn’t catch Skeletor or a single member of his motorcycle gang. Once they roared across the causeway bridge (six abreast, we were told by startled eyewitnesses), they apparently split up and headed for what the guys in the state’s Narcotics and Organized Crime Bureau call “safe garages.” They’re like safe houses for motorcycles. Places where a badass biker and his hog can lie low until the heat blows over.
Friday night and all day Saturday, Ceepak and I worked the obvious Sea Haven leads. Paulie gave us the number he had used to contact Skeletor.
Disposable cell phone. They sell them at Wal-Mart, Rite Aid, Target.
We interviewed Mike Charzuk, this trainer at Beach Bods, the local gym where the
Fun House
cast works out. That’s where Paulie said he’d first bumped into Skeletor. Charzuk remembers seeing the walking cadaver but can’t give us anything we don’t know, like Skeletor’s real name or his address. Apparently he isn’t a dues-paying member. He just scares the girl at the front desk so creepily, she never asks for his I.D. tag.
Sunday, we more or less took the day off, stayed home and licked our wounds. I did not respond when Layla texted me. Six different times. She had Sunday off, too. Wanted to hook up.
Not gonna happen anytime soon.
In fact, the one time it had almost happened, I think there had been what they call an ulterior motive. Ms. Shapiro wanted me and Ceepak nowhere near Morgan’s Surf & Turf during that early-evening break so her prop crew could set the stage to transform the restaurant’s party room into the cafeteria scene from
Animal House
. She knew Ceepak would be busy organizing the buy-and-bust. Me? Let’s just say she tried her best to keep me distracted.
Anyway, let me cut to the chase, as they say in Hollywood. All week, we get nowhere on the Skeletor case. Then Thursday night, at ten, nine Central, I see him again.
On TV.
I’m watching
Fun House
.
“America, you’ve heard about it all day,”
says Chip Dale, the wannabe Ryan Seacrest who hosts the show.
He has very bright chompers.
His dentist must be proud.
“Well, tonight you’ll meet the crazed stalker who threatened to take the
fun
out of the
house.”
Okay. I didn’t have time today to watch
Access Hollywood, E.T., Extra
, or any of those other shows where they plug the shows their networks need plugged that day, so I had no idea what America had heard all day.
They cut to Soozy K sitting somewhere, doing an interview. She doesn’t look directly at the camera, they never do. Cheesily dramatic reality show music, the same soundtrack they use in all these shows, makes what she’s saying sound important.
“We were all like, you know, freaked out. That skinny dude was BLEEPING scar-ee. I’m glad the undercover cops were there to protect Paulie, even if we’re not, you know, on this journey together anymore.”
Next, they went to some of the footage they shot last Friday. In the parking lot. The buy-and-bust.