Fun House jc-7

by Chris Grabenstein

  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

  And 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 amp; 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 amp; 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.

  Yep. They’re showing everything they promised they wouldn’t.

  “Welcome to Morgan’s Surf and Turf,” Chip the deejay continues in a voice-over as we watch Paulie Braciole strut out the front door and into the parking lot. “Home of the world’s best crab pie and creepiest parking-lot stalkers.”

  They cut to Skeletor in his Boonie hat, talking to Paulie. His Harley gleams in the background.

  “I’m pulling’ for you, bro,” says Skeletor, who looks even skinnier on TV. “Big fan of The Thing. Want The Thing to take the whole thing, know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Paulie actually sounds humble. I think they looped the line. That means they recorded it later, when he could be coached, matched it with the picture.

  They cut from modest Paulie to Skeletor yanking up his T-shirt to flash his bony ribcage.

  “Check it out. This is The Thing you wish you had. The Thing you wish you could be.”

  Quick reaction shot from Paulie looking disgusted. The light seems different. Like maybe they shot this last Saturday-right before we had all those nasty thunderstorms.

  The sequence of events? It isn’t the order it actually happened in.

  “Where’s Soozy K?” asks Skeletor, going on tippy-toe. Behind him, in this shot, the sky is clear again.

  “I need to get back to work,” says Paulie, sounding like an honest day laborer unpacking fruit trucks somewhere.

  “Work?” scoffs Skeletor. “BLEEP, man, all you people do is get drunk, play Skee-Ball, and BLEEP each other. You call that BLEEPING work, bro?”

  Paulie shakes his head and laughs good-naturedly. The sky is, once again, partly cloudy.

  “Fortunately,” said Chip the narrator, “some undercover law enforcement officers had been trailing the psycho known to local authorities only as Skeletor.”

  Ceepak and I make our big entrance.

  Ceepak flashes his badge. “We’re with the Sea Haven Police Department.”

  And they cut to a grateful Paulie throwing up his hands. “I am so out of here. Thanks, guys.” He heads toward the restaurant-before all those dark clouds in his Saturday sky can open up and drench him.

  Back to Ceepak, Skeletor, and me. Three different angles. None of them very flattering. Except for the sky. It looks clear again.

  “Where is your helmet, sir?” says Ceepak.

  Skeletor kick-starts the bike and, in what they call a jump cut (because they chop out a whole chunk of action, which makes the film look jumpy) immediately tugs down on the Boonie hat’s leather straps.

  “I don’t need a BLEEPING helmet.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  They’ve eighty-sixed all of Ceepak’s polite “sirs” to make him sound more like a hardcase cop.

  “You need the full gear,” says Ceepak. He gestures at Skeletor’s hat. “Not the fool’s gear.”

  Friday, August 13, the day after our chase scene in the parking lot airs on Fun House, we’re back at the mobile production office.

  Ceepak and I are about to storm up the steps when out waltzes the mayor.

  Hugh Sinclair looks extremely happy. He is wearing his standard sunglasses on a red Croakie string and a brand new item: a T-shirt that says “Put Down The Corn Cob!”

  See? I told you I’m famous.

  “Officers! Awesome work last night!” He gives Ceepak a finger pistol. “Picked up one of yours, too!”

  “Pardon?” says Ceepak.

  “Your shirt. The one that says ‘Give Me The Fool’s Gear!’”

  Geeze-o, man.

  “Hey, how come nobody told me last night’s show was going to be all about the SHPD and that awesome chase scene?”

  Yeah. In case you missed the episode, Ceepak, Skeletor, the motorcycles, and me got almost as much airtime as the food fight and celebrity guest judges. And, if you care, which I don’t anymore, Nicole Stanziale got the boot at the end of the show. The “Fun House” ten is down to five.

  “But hey,” the mayor continues, “I talked to Chief Baines first thing this morning. Guess you guys didn’t know you were about to become movie stars either, huh?”

  “No, sir,” says Ceepak, that popping jawbone joint about to shoot sideways out of his skull. “We did not.”

  The mayor scampers down the short set of steel steps. Gives Ceepak a hearty handshake.

  “We’re booked up for the season!”

  “What?” I say, because Ceepak is too busy trying to shake free from the mayor’s smarmy grip.

  “Every hotel, motel, guest house, and B amp;B on the island is completely sold out. Reservations came pouring in over the Internet last night and early this morning. Morgan’s? You can’t eat dinner there until sometime in early December. Everybody wants to try their crab pie and see that lobster tank the drunk girl tried to smash with her hammer. So, you guys catch that psycho stalker yet?”

  “He is a not a stalker, sir,” says Ceepak. “He is a drug dealer.”

  The mayor crinkles his nose. “Nah. I like the stalker angle better. But hey, talk to Marty.” He thumb-gestures over his shoulder. “Maybe he’ll go with your idea. Well, I gotta run. TMZ wants to do a satellite interview!”

  He bops into his BMW. Ceepak and I storm up the staircase, shove open the trailer door.

  We see Marty Mandrake, Rutger the director, Grace the stopwatch lady, and Layla. The TV team is huddled around a table loaded down with trays of doughnuts-the kind they probably have to fly in from a gourmet bakery in Brooklyn.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now the top-rated show on television!” says Mandrake proudly.

  “Excuse me,” says Ceepak as we impolitely barge in.

  The production team looks up. Some are in mid-doughnut chomp.

  “All right!” says Rutger
the director. “My two stars! Give me the full gear, baby, not the fool’s gear!”

  Marty Mandrake swaggers over. His face is puckered up in what he probably thinks is an expression of earnest sincerity. To me, it looks like he has gas.

  “Gentlemen, glad you could join us. We need to talk about working you two into next week’s scenario.”

  “You lied to us,” says Ceepak.

  Mandrake looks shocked. Insulted. “Lied?”

  “Yeah,” I butt in. “You told us you wouldn’t use any of the footage from the drug bust until after we arrested Skeletor.”

  “We had to use it, Danny,” says Layla.

  “Had to?” says Ceepak before I can.

  “To protect the kids,” says Mandrake. “We can’t have these kinds of crazies stalking our stars.”

  “Mr. Mandrake, the man known as Skeletor is a dealer of illegal drugs. He was not stalking-”

  “Did you see the way he tugged up his T-shirt, did that whole Thing thing? He’s clearly obsessed with Paulie.”

  “I don’t see how that changes anything.”

  “Of course not. You’re not in show business. Don’t know what kind of crazies we have to deal with on a daily basis. So, I’m sorry if we hurt your feelings, if you think we ‘lied.’”

  “I don’t think it; I know it.”

  “Fine. Good for you. Now we have to deal with what comes next. Layla?”

  She shoves a folder across the table.

  “Paulie Braciole received a very upsetting text message,” she says. “A death threat.”

  “Oh, really?” I say, because I’m guessing they cut together some kind of fake text message the same way they messed with reality in their edit of the parking lot footage. “When’d he get this threat?”

  “Wednesday,” says Mandrake. “While we were in the editing room. It’s what made us scrap our original cut and go with a lot more of the action with Skeletor and the motorcycles.”

  Yeah. Including the scene where the biker bopped me on the head.

  “We needed to let this creep know we’ve got the goods on him,” says Mandrake.