“No ARMY sticker,” I shout. “It's not my guy.”
“Roger that.”
So, naturally, I expect our little chase scene to be over.
I, of course, am wrong.
Ceepak presses down harder on the gas, and now we're, I swear, two inches from the van in front of us. I can read his window decals. Somebody apparently went to Dartmouth. They have a parking permit for a garage. The tiny little decal says they're number 3246. Like I said, we're that close.
Whump.
We're closer.
Ceepak thumps the guy's bumper.
Mr. White Minivan must not have felt our little love tap. He doesn't slow down or pull over.
I make out two people in the minivan. The driver, who looks to be somebody's dad, mid-forties or early fifties. And the passenger. Female. Younger. A mop of wiry, curly hair bouncing up and down.
Whump.
I guess this why they call them bumpers. We bump the van again, nudging it forward, sending me bouncing.
“Seat belt?” Now Ceepak asks.
“Ten-four.” I strapped myself in back at Smuggler's Cove. It's instinct when Ceepak's behind the wheel.
“Hang on.”
He's done with the love taps. He eases up on the gas for a second. When the space between bumpers widens, he jams back down on the accelerator, twists the steering wheel. We slam into the van's rear end at a slight angle and send the vehicle spinning into a spiraling skid.
Of course the road ahead of the van is clear. Ceepak wouldn't have made his move if it wasn't.
Now the van makes its move-sliding off the road, scooting backwards, careering into the parking lot of Barnacle Bob's Beach Bikes, this hut of a shop where they rent all kinds of bikes and have about a hundred of them lined up in their parking lot. The white van slams into one end! The whole row dominoes down in a rippling wave. One hundred beach bikes lay wounded on their sides, sparkling in the sun.
The van has finally stopped.
“Call in our location.” Ceepak tosses me the radio mic.
He's out the door, gun drawn.
“This is Twelve,” I say. “Our twenty is Barnacle Bob's Beach Bikes. Ocean and Jacaranda. Uh, possible ten … ten … uh-I think we might need an ambulance.”
I really gotta memorize those 10-codes by Tuesday.
I hop out in time to see a girl stumble out of the van. She's wearing some kind of Victoria's Secret swimsuit. She's basically naked except for her stiletto heel sandals. One stiletto must've snapped off because she's limping. Her face is hidden, covered with a tangle of wild curly hair.
Ceepak gets the driver to spread-eagle on the ground. White hair. Fancy Rolex watch. Maybe he's the girl's father.
“Hands behind your back,” Ceepak barks. “Now.”
“You could've killed me,” the guy whimpers into the hot blacktop.
“Now!” Ceepak orders.
“You drive like a fucking maniac!”
“Only when forced to do so, sir.” Ceepak slips a pair of plastic cuffs on the guy's hands. He tugs them snug but not nearly as snug as I would after some idiot almost made me run over a little kid in a crosswalk pushing her dolly's stroller. I do a quick visual inspection of the minivan interior. I see juice boxes and sippy cups on the floor. Scattered Disney DVDs. The idiot kissing asphalt is somebody's dad. I don't think the woman who stumbled out the side door is his wife. I think we caught them sneaking off to Smuggler's Cove-and not just to buy videos in the gift shop.
“Danny?” It's the female. Of course she recognizes me. Like Ceepak said, I know just about everybody on the island.
“Marny?”
“Hey.” She pulls the curls out of her eyes and tries to smile and fluff her hair. She can't do it with her usual flip and flair because some stray hair strands are glued to her lip with blood.
“You okay?”
“I think so.” She tugs on a bikini strap and looks down at her cocoa-brown breasts to see if anything got punctured or jostled out of alignment.
“Who's your friend?”
“Stan. Stan Something.”
“Okay.”
“I swear I didn't know he was mental … driving like that.”
“Unh-hunh.”
“He's from out of town. We kind of hooked up last night and this morning … you know …”
“Right.”
“Hey, Danny? Guess what?”
Marny does this little finger wiggle suggesting I come closer so she can whisper her big secret in my ear. She does this, I know, so I will be forced to stare directly at her gravity-defying breasts and, therefore, be much more likely to believe anything she tells me.
“What?”
“He's rich,” she gushes, her breath reeking of orange juice and champagne. “Really, really, really rich.”
“Cool.” I try not to be too judgmental. Especially since Marny has that bloody lip.
She leans on my arm for balance so she can slide her broken-heeled sandal back on her left foot. “I think he might be married, too.” She holds her finger to her lips to shush me because she thinks it's a big secret.
“You okay?” I ask again.
“Yeah. I think I bit my lip.” She shivers, and goosebumps pop up all over her body.
“Hang on, Marny. I've got a jacket in the car. Some Band-Aids, too.”
“Thanks, Danny.” She gives up on her sandal and sits down on the pavement.
I go to the car to get my navy blue windbreaker. Ceepak is stuffing the driver into our back seat. The guy looks scared. Yeah. His life and wife are flashing in front of his eyes.
“He's not Mook's buddy,” I say. “He's not the guy.”
“Oh, yes, he is,” Ceepak says. “He's the guy who needlessly endangered several lives by attempting to evade a police officer.”
Yeah. Okay. He's that guy.
“Ceepak?” I don't recognize the voice now squawking across our radio. “Ceepak? Come in. Am I pushing the right button?”
“Danny? Can you handle that?”
“Ten-four.” I say, repeating the one code I know I know.
I reach for the radio. The lady keeps squawking. “Listen,” she says, not using any kind of code, “when you boys get done playing Smokey and the Bandit, we have some bullet holes we should talk about. Over.”
“Tell her we're on our way,” Ceepak says.
I'm confused. “Okay. Who is it?”
“Dr. McDaniels. Who else?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The state's top crime scene investigator, Dr. Sandra McDaniels, is waiting for us back at Saltwater Tammy's, so we hand Marny off to the paramedics.
They seem happy to have caught this call instead of making another run to a motel bathtub to help a grandmother who's fallen and can't get up. When we left, I noticed that one of the EMTs was kindly helping Marny reexamine her bikini'd breasts in the back of the ambulance. He was holding his flashlight. She was searching for silicone leaks.
We dumped Stan, the white minivan man, back at the house. The desk sergeant, Gus Davis, said he'd handle the paper work and “book the cheap, cheating bastard.” Gus says stuff like that. He's old. He's grumpy. He's spent too much time in the sun.
We park on the walkway outside Saltwater Tammy's plywood-covered windows. The chief pulls me aside to give me an update: Katie's still unconscious, still on the operating table. He says they're sewing her back up. Closing up the bullet hole in her chest and the exit wound out her back.
When he tells me the news, I don't think about punctured lungs and nicked spinal cords.
I think about freckles.
The ones splattered across Katie's chest. In the summer, in the sun, her freckles blossom and creep across her skin like clover flowers popping up in a weedy field. I used to tease her about them. One game was to connect a few with my finger and make freckle constellations. The dog. The cat. The guy with the bow and arrow and six-pack. The Greeks never saw that one. I saw it right below her collarbone, right above where her halter top usually stopped.