“I’m still hungry.”
“Shift ends at eleven. Pick up something on the ride home.”
“We should swing by Pizza My Heart. If you’re wearing a uniform, they’ll give you a free slice and a fountain drink.”
“Which you don’t take because it’s against the rules.”
Yes, in Ceepak’s absence, I am the patrol car’s Keeper of The Code.
“What rules?”
The ones they told you about in that lecture you slept through at the police academy, I want to say.
But I don’t.
Because 24-year-old Salvatore Santucci is the late Dominic Santucci’s nephew. I was there when his uncle-who was on the job with the SHPD for fifteen, maybe twenty years-was gunned down by a psycho killer just outside the Rolling Thunder roller coaster. So I cut Sal some slack. We all do.
“We’re cops, Sal,” I say. “We can’t accept gifts.”
My young partner (well, he’s three years younger than me) slumps down in the passenger seat to pout and fidget with the tuning knob on his radio. “I don’t want a freaking ‘gift,’” he mumbles. “I want a slice. Sausage and peppers.”
I ease the steering wheel to the left and we roll into Beach Crest Heights. I give the white-shirted guard in the gatehouse a two-finger salute off the tip of my cop cap. He waves his clipboard back at me. It’s Kurt Steilberger. We went to high school together.
“A gift,” I say to Santucci, “means any fee, commission, service, compensation, gratuity, or-”
The radio interrupts my Remedial Graft lecture.
“Unit A-twelve, what is your twenty?”
I grab the mic.
“We’re in Beach Crest Heights. Over.”
“We just received a nine-one-one call. Report of Assault. One-zero-two Roxbury Drive. The caller says his mother is fighting with his nurse.”
“We’re on it.”
I jam down on the accelerator. Tires squeal. Engines roar. We thunder down the road. I feel like I’m in the middle of a Springsteen song.
We screech to a stop in the driveway made out of interlocking pavers fronting 102 Roxbury Drive. It’s a brand-new, three-story, vinyl-sided mansion with bright white deck railings all over the place.
“Caller is Samuel Oppenheimer, age thirteen,” reports the radio. “He is still on the line with nine-one-one.”