Mad Mouse: A John Ceepak Mystery (The John Ceepak Mysteries)

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Me, Jess, Katie, Becca, Olivia, and Mook.”

  “Our primary targets,” says Ceepak. “And our possible shooter.”

  “Okay,” McDaniels rubs her tiny hands together. “We're getting someplace.”

  “Officer Ceepak?” A young cop from the radio room is at the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you guys still looking for a Harley Mook?”

  “Roger that,” Ceepak says.

  I glance at the clock. Twelve ten P.M.

  “Has he been spotted?” Ceepak's ready to roll.

  “No. He just called in.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He just called nine-one-one.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sea Haven's cellular service is pretty technologically advanced.

  We have something called E911 for Enhanced 9-1-1. That means our cell towers can tell our 911 operators where you're calling from, thanks to some sort of GPS technology Ceepak probably understands but I never will.

  It's the only way we have to find Mook. He never told the operator his location. No address, no landmarks. According to the transcript, the call went something like this:

  OPERATOR: This is nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?

  CALLER: He fucking shot me.

  That's it.

  The call stayed connected but Mook didn't say anything more, which isn't like Mook at all. Usually, the guy never shuts up. Not when we were fifteen, not now. They know it was Mook on the line because the caller ID system at 9-1-1 told them that, too.

  E911 is sending us to Oak Street near Beach Lane. Probably a house. It's close to the public beach where Jess had his lifeguard chair in ’96, the beach where I used to hang out with my best bud and casually bump into the bathing beauties who were always there because Jess looked like one of those tanned weight lifters in red gym shorts from Baywatch. Jess was only one man, so there was no way he could flirt with all his fans. I took care of any spillover.

  We're almost there. Couple more blocks.

  The operator added a note to the transcript:

  While the line remained open, I heard a faint pop in the background. Possible gunshot.

  Makes me think somebody “fucking shot” Mook twice.

  We swing off Ocean Avenue and head down Oak Street. No sirens, no lights. Mook called us so he's not going to run away—especially if he's wounded. If the shooter is still in the vicinity, we don't want him to know we're coming.

  The state CSI crew is close behind us. Malloy and Kiger will come up Beach Lane to provide backup. An ambulance is on the way, too, because we figure Mook is going to need one. Now all we need to do is find exactly where on Oak Street near Beach Lane he is.

  I squinch my eyes and look for a little red sports car. It's not parked in the street, and, for the first time since this thing started, I don't see any white minivans, either. The people on Oak prefer SUVs. Range Rovers. Expeditions. GMCs. Even one of those civilian Hummers. This single block would suck a gas station dry if they all hit empty at the same time.

  “There,” Ceepak says.

  He does his three-finger point to a million-dollar reconstruction job. The rich people who own the houses closest to the beach are always tearing them down and starting over. That's what we see at number 2 Oak Street. A huge, three-story beach house with Tyvek-wrapped walls ready for the vinyl siding neatly stacked in the gutted front yard. Some of the windows upstairs aren't in yet; the ones that are have Anderson stickers covering the panes. The house is sort of built on stilts—concrete piers that form a shaded carport underneath.

  That's where Mook parked his Miata.

  Ceepak coasts up to the curb. I check my bulletproof vest to make sure it's snug in case the shooter is still in the neighborhood, waiting for me to make my big entrance.

  “Hang back,” Ceepak says.

  This is an order.

  He won't let me out of the car until he determines whether or not it's a sniper trap. He's probably thinking what I'm thinking: this Wheezer character lured Mook here with the promise of primo weed, then took a potshot at him. He might want to do the same to me. Mook could be the bait the sniper's using to pull me into his trap.

  McDaniels and her crew park behind us. Ceepak hops out, stays low, and hugs the side of our car for cover. He flips up the palm of his hand at the CSI guys. Nobody is allowed out except him. I check the rearview mirror. McDaniels nods her head. She's okay to wait until Ceepak says it's safe to come out and do her job.

  Ceepak pulls his pistol out of its holster, lets the gun hang loose at his side, does this crouching dash to the carport. He moves in a zigzag pattern, ducks behind piles of cinder blocks, then a cement-mixing drum. No straight lines, nothing to give anybody an easy shot. If you want to take down John Ceepak this afternoon, he's going to make you work for it.

  He reaches the Miata. Squats. Duck walks around to the driver side. Looks inside.

  He reholsters his weapon. Shakes his head. He's not in a hurry anymore.

  Poor Mook. He must be dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It's one P.M.

  Malloy and Kiger and about six other cops have swept the surrounding area, searching for possible perps. They must all think the shooter fled the scene, because Ceepak finally gestures that it's okay for me to crawl out of our car. I feel like a little kid, like the adults had to make sure it was safe before I was allowed to go outside and play. I'm also extremely glad they did so.

  I start the long walk up the newly poured driveway. Dr. McDaniels and her crew run yellow yarn through a hole in the sports car's windshield. One CSI guy has a plastic protractor, like we had in seventh grade geometry class, even though I can't remember what we did with them. Something about angles. Triangles. Now he's pointing across the street and McDaniels is nodding her head. I look over my shoulder. There's another huge house on the other side of Oak Street with a Realtor's “For Rent” sign posted in the front yard beyond the white PVC picket fence. That house also has three stories, and a garage underneath. There are decks on all three floors and another one of those widow's walks up on the roof.

  Deer stands.

  It's like the architects design these beach houses for hunters and snipers. Give them lots of levels to work with. You can prop your rifle on any of the porch railings and nail your neighbor across the way if his dog barks too much.

  Some kids hang out in the street to watch the crime scene action. Junior looky-lous. There's a crowd of them in bathing suits, wrapped up in beach towels. All ages, six to twenty-six. They dragged their boogie boards up from the beach and bumped into cop cars and an ambulance and wondered what all the excitement was about.

  Word must be spreading. Behind the kids, I start seeing adults in swimsuits, moms with gauzy flowered sarongs wrapped around their bottoms. The grownups came up to rubberneck because this is better than anything down on the beach or over at the boardwalk; this is something to talk about when people at the office ask you what you did on your summer vacation.

  “He's dead,” Ceepak whispers when I reach the carport.

  I look into the driver seat.

  Mook's head has fallen backwards. There's a bloody bullet hole in his right shoulder. Another in the center of his forehead. His cell phone lies open in his lap, like he dropped it when the second shot hit him in the skull. He had his convertible top down, made himself an easier target. Behind Mook, there are gray spongy chunks spattered across folded roof fabric, blood is splashed on the roll bar. I think the second shot made his brain explode.

  My stomach lurches. I've never seen a dead person my own age before, never someone I used to hang out with, someone who used to be my friend back when we spent all day on the beach doing nothing. Even if I wanted to kill him, myself, yesterday.

  “You okay, Danny?”

  I swallow hard. I haven't eaten much today. There's nothing in my stomach so maybe nothing will come up. I let the wave of nausea roll over me and wash away. This job is tea
ching me a whole new kind of surfing.

  I look at Mook's face. His lips are purple.

  “Jesus. How long has he been dead?”

  “Approximately fifty-two minutes,” McDaniels says. “The call came in at twelve-oh-eight. He had already sustained the shoulder shot at that time, precipitating his call.”

  These professional people who poke around dead bodies all day long? They use words like “sustained” and “precipitating” to give them what they call “emotional distance.” I need to learn how to do that trick. Need to learn it quick.

  “He was able to speed dial nine-one-one with his thumb,” she continues. “When he brought the phone up to his ear, he alerted the shooter that the first shot wasn't fatal. ‘He fucking shot me,’ the victim stated, and the shooter fired a second round. Given the nature of the second shot, the cranial impact, the bullet path entering the frontal cortex, exiting the striate, I suspect death was instantaneous.”

  He fucking shot me. The famous last words of Harley Mook, the class clown who always had to get in the last word. He fucking shot me. Not your best line, Mook. In fact, it's not funny at all. Nobody here is laughing.

  “Why are his lips so purple?” I am totally fixated on the purple lips. Maybe it's my own emotional distancing technique, dwell on the weirdest thing in the scene. Don't look at the whole bloody picture, just the lips. I know lips turn blue when you die from lack of oxygen. But purple?

  “Grape soda,” Ceepak says and points to the car's cup holder.

  Mook has a twenty-four-ounce bottle of Fanta grape squeezed into it. Grape soda. Purple lips. Purple tongue. Mook must've been sitting here, sipping his favorite summertime soda, waiting for Wheezer to show up. Now that I see the bottle, I realize the whole car reeks of gumball grape, the mouth-puckering kind of grape you only taste in grape soda and grape gum, never in any real grapes they sell at the grocery store. Mook loved his artificially flavored grape soda. Fanta. Nehi. Welch's. Some summers, he was the only one on the whole beach drinking the stuff.

  “We think the shooter positioned himself over there.” Ceepak gestures with a quick nod to the house across the street. He's not pointing, not chopping the air with his arm, because he knows several dozen civilians are currently watching our every move.

  “We need to secure the scene,” McDaniels says to her crew. “Come on, guys. Let's lock it down.”

  The CSI team trots across the street.

  Dr. McDaniels points at the corners of the lot, and her two guys start stringing POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape all around the house.

  Kiger and Malloy hustle up Oak Street to knock on doors, canvass for witnesses.

  Ceepak moves around the car, searching for clues. He peers into the cockpit of the convertible. I try not to look at Mook, who's frozen in place like he's leaning back to snore through a real long nap but kept his eyes wide open.

  Ceepak freezes. He just saw something, I can tell.

  “Dr. McDaniels?” He shouts across the street.

  She looks over.

  Ceepak waves for her to come back over to our side of the street. She steps into the street. He digs into his cargo pockets to pull out a pair of forceps.

  “What is it?” McDaniels is a little winded. I think she never usually moves that quickly.

  “Not sure.”

  Ceepak leans into the car. The center console seems to be his target. There are two air-conditioning vents up top, the climate-control knobs below those, a CD slot under that.

  “It's cardboard.”

  I see it now. A straight edge of gray sticking out like somebody jammed in a card where the CDs usually go.

  “Gentle,” McDaniels says.

  “Roger that.”

  Ceepak clips the edge with his forceps and slowly, carefully tugs out the piece of cardboard.

  It's another trading card. The man in purple. Another still frame from that movie. The Phantom.

  “Guess they're cheaper by the dozen,” McDaniels cracks.

  Ceepak turns the card over.

  “Fascinating.”

  “Something on the back?” McDaniels reaches into her cargo shorts, pulls out her reading glasses.

  “Yes, ma'am. He left us a note.”

  “What's it say?”

  “‘You'll never remember. I'll never forget.’ ”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Square one.

  I figure that's where we basically are. Back at the starting line, inside one of those tiny wooden boxes they squeeze the horses into at the Kentucky Derby.

  We're nowhere.

  Maybe Mook's ARMY buddy turned on him. Maybe he was done having fun when they wounded Katie, but maybe his ARMY buddy couldn't stop. Maybe Rick, I remember that was his name, maybe Rick is a killing machine without an “off” switch.

  “Richard Westerfield,” Ceepak says. His friends in the army just faxed us a list of discharged snipers known to have recently returned to college. “Pfc. Westerfield never saw action. He was honorably discharged before the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  So Mook's college buddy learned all this sniper stuff but never got to use it, never hunted a human. Maybe, after shooting at us a couple of times and missing, he wanted more, wanted to see the pink mist when his bullet made a skull explode. Wanted to go for the kill when Mook wanted to move on to the next joke. Maybe Richard Wester-field took out party pooper Harley Mook.

  That's my best guess right now.

  Ceepak and I sit in the front seats of the Explorer.

  He's on his cell phone to someone back at the house.

  “You have Westerfield's plate number?”

  Ceepak nods so I guess they do.

  “Able Baker four-nine-four Charlie seven. Got it.” Ceepak writes the number in his little spiral notebook. “Excellent. Thanks, Denise.” It's Diego. The woman puts in a full day. “This will help. Have Gus issue an APB. Suspect has been seen in the area but could be mobile, could be …” he looks at his watch, does some mental math, “anywhere in a radius of a hundred and fifty miles from our current position. Right. Thanks.”

  Ceepak closes up his cell and clips it back on his utility belt. He has so much gear dangling off that thing he could pass as a plumber.

  “You think it's Mook's new buddy?”

  “It's one possibility.”

  “Right.”

  When we're working a case, all things are possible with Ceepak until they have been proven otherwise. Or something like that. I forget sometimes, especially when people are shooting at my friends and me.

  “This drug dealer Wheezer? What do we know about him?”

  “Not much. Just what Mook told me.”

  Ceepak waits.

  “Focus, Danny.”

  I try. But my eyes and mind drift over to the small crowd of civilians clustered around Chief Buzz Baines and Mayor Sinclair. The bosses have arrived on Oak Street and are giving the curious citizens some sort of impromptu press conference. They're quite the dynamic duo: the tall, handsome police chief and the sandy-haired, boyish mayor. They're smiling, then frowning, then smiling again, then shaking their heads in dismay, telling everybody that Mook's murder was “the tragic consequence” of a “drug deal gone bad.” The chief says the good people of Sea Haven have nothing to fear, unless, of course, they have plans to purchase illegal narcotics in the near future.

  The crowd chuckles.

  I hear Baines wind up: “Unfortunately, this is where underage drinking ultimately leads. There's an express lane that takes teenagers from beer blasts on the beach to marijuana binges to crack houses and heroin addiction. That express lane dead-ends right here.” He hangs his head like a graveside preacher, and everybody knows what he means: Harley Mook got shot in a carport by drug thugs because he bought beer with a fake ID when he was fifteen.

  Buzz Baines has done it again. He's linked Mook's murder to his favorite boogeyman—underage drinking.

  “Danny?” Ceepak must sense that I'm floating along like a stringy clump of s
eaweed. “Wheezer?”

  I need to focus. Work the evidence. Chief Baines can tell the people out in the street anything he wants. It's up to us to find out the truth.

  “Yeah. Okay. What Mook said was that Wheezer was a guy ‘from back in the day.’ ”

  “A school friend?”

  “I don't know. He wasn't specific. Just ‘back in the day.’ ”

  “Go on.”

  “Mook said he never really liked the guy but that Wheezer had this primo ganga. That's—”

  “Marijuana. Was Wheezer Mook's usual dealer?”

  “I doubt it. But I really don't know. Mook was just in town for a week or two. Summer break from grad school. He was here having fun, seeing old friends. Wheezer sounded like someone Mook accidentally reconnected with, or bumped into at a bar. Not like a guy he went looking for. He also said he never ‘pictured the dude for a dealer.’ ”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. Said Wheezer was more like a loser.”

  “Interesting. Do you remember this Wheezer?”

  “No.”

  Ceepak nods. “He didn't think you would.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The note.”

  You'll never remember, I'll never forget.

  If only I hadn't done so much underage drinking. All that beer, Boone's Farm and those Icees laced with Bacardi, which is how we used to enjoy rum and Coke without buying cocktail glasses or ice.

  “You think he left that note for me?”

  “Yes, Danny, I do.” Ceepak fixes me with an odd look. “I think he intended the note to be read by you and your friends from, as you say, ‘back in the day.’ The beach crew from nineteen ninety-six.”

  “The six targets.”

  “Five, Danny. Five.”

  Yeah. Mook was just scratched off the list. One down, five to go. Unless, of course, Katie doesn't pull through. Then, there's only four little Indians left.

  “Don't worry, Danny. We'll nail the guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  The chief and mayor march over to our car. The crowd has now dispersed. I guess they bought the chief's act. Now that he's not on, I can see Baines looks worried. Angry. I wouldn't want to be his mustache right now. He's in a plucking mood.