Suburban Dicks

by Fabian Nicieza

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Fabian Nicieza

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Hardcover ISBN: 9780593191262

  E-book ISBN: 9780593191279

  Book design by Kristin Del Rosario, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

  Interior art: Houses pattern by nikolarisim/Shutterstock.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design and illustration: Jim Tierney

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  To my wife, Tracey, and my spuds, Maddie and Jesse. You make suburban misery a wonderful thing.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Part One: Satkunananthan’s Very Bad Day

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two: Pieces of Hate

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part Three: Stretch Marks the Spot

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  West Windsor and Plainsboro are real towns in New Jersey. Unlike the snarky description in the book, it’s a pretty good area to live in . . . I mean, as far as New Jersey goes. . . .

  And though nearly all of the locations listed in the book are real, anything that happens once a character walks inside the door of that location is pure fiction.

  For anyone planning to egg my house, fiction means it is not real.

  Any depictions of government agencies and the police in the book are wholly, totally, completely fictional and heightened for the sake of sarcasm and drama.

  That needed to be said, mostly so I don’t get a slew of tickets for driving thirty-five miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone.

  PART ONE

  Satkunananthan’s Very Bad Day

  1

  SATKUNANANTHAN Sasmal would have been the first to admit he’d had worse nights working the midnight shift at his uncle’s Valero station. For example, there’d been a night last summer that had started out with such promise. Eight drunken girls, on their way home from clubbing at the beach, had spilled out of a stretch limo at four a.m. They flirted with him before piling into the station’s bathroom and regurgitating their night’s activities across all four walls, the floor, and—somehow—the ceiling. For Satku, that had killed the mood.

  Then there was the old lady who fell asleep while driving and plowed into the first island. Satkunananthan barely hit the kill switch on pump three before diving out of the car’s path. The woman rolled down her window and asked him to fill her tank. Regular. Cash.

  Then there was that time he had been robbed at gunpoint.

  And the other time he had been robbed at knifepoint.

  And the other time he had been robbed at spatula-point.

  In his defense, it had been one of those long-handled metal barbecue spatulas.

  And there was last night, when Satkunananthan Sasmal was murdered.

  West Windsor police officers Michelle Wu and Niket Patel stood several yards apart, trying to avoid contaminating a crime scene they had already completely contaminated. This was new territory for the pair. The small New Jersey township hadn’t seen a murder in more than thirty years, and that had been a scorned wife hitting her husband over the head with a microwave oven. The patrol officers had six years on the job between them, with Wu having logged five years and four months of that.

  Repulsed and attracted, she had tried to both look and not look at the corpse, and the strain of getting her eyes to move in different directions had given her a headache. Or perhaps it was watching Patel wrestle with the yellow police tape as he tried to stretch it across the entrance to the station that was causing her head to throb. She faced Route 571, where the entrance and exit horseshoed in from and back out to the four-lane highway.

  Morning traffic had started to pick up. It was 6:35; dispatch had received an anonymous call ten minutes earlier. The caller had fled the scene. Michelle hoped Detectives Rossi and Garmin would arrive. First interesting thing to happen in the West Windsor–Plainsboro area since Orson Welles had chosen Grover’s Mill Pond as the landing site for an alien spacecraft eighty years ago, and Garmin refused to budge from his routine of getting a bagel and coffee before showing up to any morning call.

  Niket continued to struggle with the tape. Michelle sighed and turned her attention to Satkunananthan. His head resembled a watermelon that had exploded from behind, but that was still less horrific than the sight of Niket simulating autoerotic asphyxiation with the perimeter tape.

  The victim lay flat on his back. He had landed an inch from the concrete lip of the second island, closest to the building. The gas nozzle lay two feet from his hand. Blood had spattered across pump four. The digital display on the pump was cracked. The bullet had likely gone clean through Satkunananthan’s skull and lodged in the pump.

  A large stain had dried across the front of the victim’s pants. There was a smudged wet spot where his body had fallen, but it hadn’t rained last night. She looked around. No visible drink containers or cups were in sight.

  Shielding her eyes from the glare of the rising sun, Michelle studied the small brick structure behind her. It had a locked utility door entrance in the center. On either side of the door stood a soda machine and an ice machine. The lone bathroom was around the corner on the right side of the building. She spotted five bullet strikes. Three of them had dug into the brick. One had hit the soda machine and one had dented the le
ft metal door of the ice machine. She stepped around Satkunananthan Sasmal’s body. She looked over the spray of shots. The murderer was no marksman. Scared kid? First robbery?

  “Michelle,” Niket called. He was standing by the Route 571 entrance to the station, dumbfounded. “What should I anchor it to? There’s nothing here.”

  He was a sweet kid, but he was an idiot. As much a diversity hire as she had been, Niket Patel joined the force after a prolonged outcry by the sizable Indian community of West Windsor about a lack of representation in the department. Years earlier, she had been hired as the department’s first Asian American police officer, who also just happened to be the daughter of West Windsor’s mayor.

  Mom/Mayor had vehemently tried to derail Michelle’s hiring, but Chief Bennett Dobeck had rallied to her side. Michelle was under no illusion he had supported her because he thought she would make a good cop or because he gave two shits about having an Asian American woman on the force. He did it to piss Mom/Mayor off.

  “Wrap it around the entrance-only sign and then run it to the traffic light pole on that corner,” Michelle called out.

  “That’s, like, thirty yards,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” she replied.

  Niket sloughed his way over to the sign and wrapped the tape around it without calamity. As he started to walk back across the one-way entrance, a blue Honda Odyssey minivan barreled into the station, nearly running him down.

  The vehicle rushed past Michelle, almost clipping their patrol car, and then screeched to a halt in front of the battered Hyundai parked by the side of the building.

  She started toward the Odyssey, when the driver’s door was flung open with such ferocity that she almost reached for her sidearm.

  In what seemed like painfully slow motion, a woman slid out through the open door as if the minivan was oozing an egg yolk. Her legs popped out first, short and stubby, then she slid her body down and out of the seat. As much bowling ball as human, she wiggled her feet until they touched the ground.

  She was short, five foot threeish, with an unkempt hive of thick, curly dark hair. Her brown eyes were huge, and—Michelle had no other word for it—feral. She waddled as much as walked. She was more pregnant than any woman Michelle had ever seen in her life, and quite possibly more pregnant than any woman had ever been in the history of human civilization. If Michelle had to guess, she would have estimated the woman was about to give birth to a college sophomore.

  From inside the car, Michelle heard the unholy wailing of several children. They were simultaneously shrieking, shouting, and crying. To Michelle, blissfully childless, that van door seemed like a portal into hell. She identified four distinct banshee wails. And this woman was pregnant with a fifth? The minivan was a rolling advertisement for Ortho.

  “Ruth!” the woman yelled. “Elijah! Stop shouting at each other! Right now!” Ruth and Elijah ignored their mother completely. The woman deftly ignored their ignoring of her and switched to a preternaturally soft voice. “Sarah, can you please stop yelling, honey?”

  What Michelle assumed was Sarah’s high-pitched voice continued shouting from the van’s second row, “But Sadie’s going to pee! Sadie’s going to pee!”

  “Screaming isn’t going to make her not have to pee!” the woman responded, just as loudly as her daughter had. Then, in a bipolar shift worthy of a theater actor, she cooed, “Sadie, sweetie, hold it in. We’ll use the bathroom here.”

  Michelle took tentative steps toward the van. She stopped. Niket’s hopeless, bewildered shrug offered no help. Michelle sucked in some air. She had enough experience with the privileged castes of West Windsor—white, brown, yellow, or plaid—to know her next few seconds would be joyless.

  “Ma’am,” she said, “you can’t be here.”

  The woman turned from the car, holding out a crying little girl in her hands like Rafiki holding Simba in front of a fawning kingdom, if the kingdom was a gas station comprised of two bewildered cops and a dead guy. The child wore a bright blue Elmo T-shirt and nothing else.

  “She has to pee,” the woman shouted.

  “The bathroom is locked,” said Michelle. “Ma’am, this—this is a crime scene.”

  With the dangling child still wailing, the woman scanned her surroundings. For the first time she noticed that it was, indeed, a crime scene. She saw the bullet strikes on the building. She glanced over her shoulder toward Niket, who somehow stumbled over the tape while trying to turn away from her gaze. But in actuality, the woman was looking past him, sizing up the access into and out of the station.

  Through a patient study of the scene, she absorbed her surroundings. Then, finally, carefully, she looked at Satkunananthan. She noted the wet stain on his pants. She sized up the blood spatters on the gas pump.

  Neither the child’s crying nor her other children shouting from inside the van seemed to faze the woman. She was seeing . . . what? wondered Michelle.

  “Ma’am?” Michelle said, to no response. Then more forcefully, “Ma’am?”

  The pregnant woman’s attention snapped back to the present. “She has to pee,” is all she said, with a now-eerie calm.

  Michelle had no idea how to respond. “Um . . . yes . . . I’m pretty sure the bathroom’s locked. And, um”—hitching a thumb toward Sasmal’s body—“I think he has the key.”

  The woman processed that. The child’s crying suddenly stopped. The silence was surprising. Then, still held aloft in her mother’s hands, the child started to pee.

  Michelle watched as the jet stream splattered all over the blacktop in front of her. Just when she thought the child had finished, a more powerful secondary surge shot out from between her spindly legs. To avoid getting peed on, Michelle had to backpedal.

  “This is a crime scene!” she said angrily.

  The pregnant woman said nothing. The child peed like a racehorse. She was the Secretariat of urination. Finally, the stream trickled to a drip.

  Michelle said, “I could arrest you for contaminating a crime scene.”

  “In that case, you’d have to arrest yourself first,” replied the woman. She abruptly turned her back on Patrol Officer Wu to put the child back into the car.

  “Excuse me?” Michelle said.

  “This isn’t a crime scene,” said the woman, “it’s a joke.”

  “Excuse me?” Michelle repeated, this time with a cracked squeal that she immediately regretted.

  Seemingly without oxygen in her lungs, the remarkably pregnant woman said, “You should have parked your squad car blocking one of the entrances. That would have prevented your tire treads from contaminating any potential evidence all around you. Once you realized the victim was dead, you shouldn’t have stepped anywhere within a fifteen-foot diameter of the body until your detectives arrived. You’re not wearing shoe covers, so your soles might have deposited minute traces of particles from anywhere you had stepped tonight and/or lint from inside your patrol car around this entire area, which means any potential particles and/or lint and/or residue left by the killer and/or the killer’s automobile is now contaminated. I don’t see a notebook or a pen in your hand, which would indicate you haven’t been taking notes. As first on the scene, you should have been. But I guess I could forgive that, since you have your cell phone out taking pictures of the blood spatters on the pump before they trickle any further or dry up, because you know that could help inform the calculation of the bullet’s trajectories and/or time of death—oh, wait, your cell phone is in your pocket, so you haven’t been doing that, either! Now it’ll be harder to identify the exact direction the shots were fired from and more accurately calculate the time of death.”

  Michelle blinked as she took this in. “Who the hell are you, lady?” Michelle wanted to kick this woman’s ass, pregnant or not. The two things that prevented her from doing so were professional decorum and the fact that the stubby incubator was totally ri
ght.

  Before getting into her car, the woman said, “Oh, and one last thing, you also let a foreign vehicle drive across your crime scene and then didn’t stop a small child from taking a massive—and I really do mean impressively massive—piss all over the potential path the killer’s car took to enter the station. The acid in the urine will affect the analysis of those tire marks from where the killer drove away.”

  Michelle looked around. “What tire marks?” She looked down around her feet and saw only some smudges. Had she stepped all over the tire marks?

  She heard the van’s automatic car door close and looked up. “Wait!”

  After two tries at stretching the straps over her belly, the woman finally fastened her seat belt. The disdain in her eyes softened slightly. The woman lowered the window. “Let me give you a freebie,” she said. “From the angle of the bullet strikes, the shooter had likely stepped out of his car when the shots were fired.”

  The woman rolled up the window and, without a second look, backed into a sharp K-turn. She blew past Niket and out the wrong way through the entrance, hanging a right into traffic before the light changed, driving west down Route 571.

  Michelle and Niket locked eyes.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked.

  Niket shrugged his shoulders.

  2

  ANDREA Stern drove down Abbington Lane faster than she should have. It was a self-contained, U-shaped residential block with fewer than twenty houses on it, a rarity for the McMansion developments of the area. She jerked the Odyssey into her driveway. The bumper scraped the driveway’s heavily pitched apron. She pressed the remote attached to the visor several times in rapid succession, but had to brake hard when the garage door wouldn’t open. The remote needed new batteries.

  “Push it slowly and hold it down, Mom,” said Ruth, drawing “Mom” out in an annoyed roller coaster drone.

  Mooooommm did as her oldest daughter suggested. The door opened.