Rolling Thunder (2 page)

“Ticket booth,” Ceepak shouts.

“AED?” I shout back.

“Roger that.”

Ceepak's hoping Big Paddy was smart enough to equip his thrill ride with an Automated External Defibrillator, a portable electronic device that can revive cardiac-arrest victims—if you jolt them soon enough.

Ceepak barrels over the final barricade, scopes out the small hut where the ticket seller sits.

“AED!” he shouts to the girl sitting stunned behind the window. She doesn't flinch so Ceepak shouts again: “AED!”

Meanwhile, on WAVY, Bruce is singing, “When it comes to luck you make your own.” Springsteen. The soundtrack of my life.

“On the wall!” I shout. I have a lucky angle and can see the bulldozer-yellow box mounted on the wall behind the petrified teenage ticket taker.

Ceepak dashes in, yanks the defibrillator off the wall, then darts out of the booth, AED in one hand, radio unit in the other.

“This is Ceepak,” he barks as he dashes up the empty exit ramp. I dash after him. “Request ambulance. Pier Four. Possible cardiac arrest. Alert fire department. Potential roller coaster rescue scenario.”

“Ten–four” squawks out of his radio as he clips it back to his belt.

“Danny? You know the family?”

“Yeah.”

I guess I know just about everybody in Sea Haven. I grew up here. Ceepak? He grew up in Ohio, where they don't build roller coasters jutting out over the Atlantic Ocean. He only came to Jersey after slogging through the first wave of hellfire over in Iraq as an MP with the 101st Airborne. Saw and did some pretty ugly stuff. Then an old army buddy offered him a job down the Jersey shore in “sunny, funderful Sea Haven,” where nothing bad ever happens.

Yeah, right. Tell it to whoever's having the heart attack.

“When we reach the roller coaster cars, keep everybody calm and seated,” Ceepak shouts over his shoulder as we race up the steep ramp. “I'll administer CPR. Wire up the AED. Time is of the essence.”

“Okay,” I say.

We reach the unloading platform, between the control room and the train tracks.

Ceepak scans the horizon.

“There!” He spots the stranded roller coaster train—on top of a curved hill about a quarter mile up the track. He hops off the platform. “Keep to the walkboard!”

There's a wooden plank paralleling the train tracks. A handrail, too. This must be how the maintenance workers inspect the tracks every morning.

“Use the cleats, Danny.”

I notice wood slats secured to the walkboard.

“They act as a nonslip device.”

Good. Nonslipping off a giant wooden scaffold eighty feet above the ocean is an excellent idea.

“Short, choppy steps, Danny. Short, choppy steps.”

Ceepak takes off, looking like a linebacker doing the tire drill at training camp. I hop down to the narrow walkway plank and, like always, try to do what Ceepak is doing.

Except, I grab the handrail, too.

We're going to have to run down a slight hill, the straightaway where the roller coaster slows down before coming to its final, complete stop in the loading shed. After that comes an uphill bump and a downhill run to a steeply banked inclined turn sloping up to the crest of another much higher hill where the roller coaster train is stuck.

“They should've brought the car down to the finish,” I shout, the words coming out in huffs and puffs as I chug up what is basically a 2-by-12 board.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak. “I suspect they panicked.” He's not even winded. Cool and calm as a cucumber on Xanax.

I'm not surprised.

When he was over in Iraq, Ceepak won all sorts of medals for bravery, valor, heroism—all those things I only know from movies.

Of course, Ceepak never brags about the brave things he's done. I guess the really brave people never do. In fact, I only learned about the Distinguished Service Cross he won for “displaying extraordinary courage” last summer when Ceepak, his wife, Rita, Samantha Starky, and I went swimming at our friend Becca's motel pool. In his swim trunks, I could see that Ceepak has a huge honking scar on the back of each of his legs—just below his butt cheeks.

“I took a few rounds,” was all he said.

Then I went online, looked up his citation. It happened during the evacuation of casualties from a home in Mosul “under intense enemy fire.” Although shot in the leg, “Lieutenant John Ceepak continued to engage the enemy while escorting wounded soldiers from the house.”

When the last soldier leaving the house was nailed in the neck, Ceepak began performing CPR. That's when the “insurgents” shot him in the other leg, gave him his matching set of butt wounds.

Didn't stop him.

According to the official report, he kept working on the wounded man's chest with one hand while returning enemy fire with the other. He brought the guy back—even though he was “nearly incapacitated by his own loss of blood.”

Yeah. The O'Malleys don't know how lucky they are John Ceepak was on roller coaster duty today.

3

W
E
'
RE ALMOST TO THE STRANDED TRAIN
.

A forest of wooden trestles and trusses rises around us: a maze of slashing horizontal, vertical, and diagonal pine lines.

“Ceepak!” It's Skippy. “Help!”

“Who's in cardiac arrest?” Ceepak asks as he crests the hill. I'm twenty paces behind him.

“My wife!” shouts Mr. O'Malley from the first car. “Help her!”

He struggles to right Mrs. O'Malley, who has slumped forward. Her long hair is dangling over the front panel of the coaster, blocking out half the Rolling Thunder lightning-bolt logo. Mrs. O'Malley's plump body is locked in place by the roller coaster safety bar.

Behind Mr. O'Malley, I see Skippy and his older brother, Kevin. In the second car, sister Mary and Sean—the youngest son. The fourth O'Malley boy, Peter, isn't in any of the cars. Skippy told me once that Peter is gay. His father and mother don't approve. Hell, they don't even invite him to roller coaster openings.

Behind Sean and Mary, I see my D.J. buddy Cliff Skeete, who sticks out like a sore thumb because, one, he's wearing big honking headphones and holding a microphone, and two, he's the only black dude on this ride. Next to Cliff is our mayor, Hugh Sinclair. Behind them: all sorts of big shots I didn't go to high school with.

“Quick!” Mr. O'Malley cries. “Help her. Do something!”

“I need to access her chest!” says Ceepak, hopping off the walkboard, landing on the track.

“Do it!” says Mr. O'Malley.

Ceepak braces his feet on the tie beam in front of the stalled coaster car.

“Help me lean her back,” he says to Mr. O'Malley.

Mr. O'Malley, who is a big man with a ruddy face, grabs hold of his wife's shoulders and, with Ceepak's help, heaves her up into a seated position.

Now Ceepak props the mustard-yellow AED box in her lap. Lifts a wrist to check her pulse.

“She's not breathing!” screams Mr. O'Malley.

“No pulse,” adds Ceepak, matter-of-factly. He tears open her blouse and slaps the two adhesive pads where they're supposed to go: negative pad on the right upper chest; positive electrode on the left, just below the pectoral muscle.

The AED will automatically determine Mrs. O'Malley's heart rhythm, and if she's in ventricular fibrillation—which means that even though there isn't a pulse, the heart is still receiving signals from the brain but they're so chaotic the muscle can't figure out how to bang out a steady beat—it'll shock the heart in an attempt to restore its rhythm to normal.

You work with Ceepak, you learn this stuff.

He switches on the machine.

“Clear!” he shouts.

Mr. O'Malley lets go of his wife's shoulders.

Ceepak pushes the “Analyze” button.

Waits.

If she's in v-fib, it'll tell him to shock her.

I glance over his shoulder, read the LED display.

No Shock.

That means Mrs. O'Malley not only has no pulse, she is not in a “shockable” v-fib rhythm.

“Initiating CPR,” says Ceepak.

“You should step out of the car, Mr. O'Malley,” I say, extending my hand. “We need to put your wife in a supine position.”

He climbs out.

Ceepak finds the roller coaster's safety bar release and slams it open with his foot. All the bars in all the cars pop up. Now he can maneuver Mrs. O'Malley across the two seats so he can more easily administer CPR.

“Time me, Danny!”

“On it.”

After one minute of CPR, he'll use the AED to reanalyze Mrs. O'Malley's cardiac status.

While he thumps on her chest, I glance at my watch and wonder why nobody in the roller coaster car started doing CPR while they waited for us to charge up the hill. Skippy should have known how to do it. We learned it when we were part-time cops. Well, we were supposed to. Maybe Skippy thought he could skate by without doing his homework.

“One minute!” I shout.

Ceepak goes to the AED machine. “No shock indicated. Time me!”

He pumps his fists on Mrs. O'Malley's chest again. She's a large woman. Very fleshy.

It's so eerily quiet up here on the wooden train track. Just the wet, flabby sound of Ceepak's fists pumping down on Mrs. O'Malley's chest. Nobody's talking. Hell, they're barely breathing. There's nothing up here but the wind whistling through the squared-off beams. They surround us like crosses on Calvary.

And then Cliff Skeete starts yammering into his microphone.

“This is the Skeeter with a live WAVY news update. Officers John Ceepak and Danny Boyle, two of Sea Haven's finest, are currently on the scene administering CPR to Mrs. O'Malley.”

“Danny?” This from Ceepak who doesn't even look up from his chest compressions.

“Cliff?” I slice my hand across my neck, give my buddy the cut sign.

“And now back to more sizzling sounds of the Jersey shore. Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. ‘I Don't Want To Go Home.'”

I do. But I'm busy staring at my wrist, timing Ceepak's CPR. “One minute!”

Ceepak goes back to the yellow box. “Reanalyzing cardiac status.”

He doesn't bother to report what the LED on the AED unit says.

He simply swings back to Mrs. O'Malley's chest, starts thumping it again. Off in the distance, I can hear the approaching whoop-whoop of a siren. The rescue squad ambulance. The whoop-whoop is shattered by the blast of an air horn. The fire department.

All the first responders are racing to the scene.

But it's too late.

Mrs. O'Malley's brain isn't sending signals of any kind to her heart any more. It isn't beating.

We ran up here as fast as we could.

But it took us too long to reach her.

Ceepak keeps pounding on Mrs. O'Malley's chest.

“Dammit,” he mutters.

He has to keep administering CPR until the paramedics or a doctor shows up. Those are the rules.

But I can tell we're not winning any life-saving merit badges today.

4

A
TEAM OF PARAMEDICS CLIMBS UP THE TELESCOPING LADDER
off the back of a fire truck.

They administer some drugs to see if they can get Mrs. O'Malley's heart to quiver a little, stimulate some kind of shockable rhythm.

It doesn't work.

One of the guys takes over for Ceepak. The other one radios the hospital.

The doctor at the other end calls it.

Mrs. O'Malley is officially dead.

The paramedics climb back down the steep aluminum ladder to the fire engine below.

We don't want the civilians trying to do that, so Ceepak and I will stay up here with the stranded roller coaster train until it starts rolling again.

Why'd they throw the emergency brakes?

This is what I'm thinking as Mr. O'Malley, with Ceepak's assistance, slowly climbs back into the first roller coaster car so he can cradle his dead wife's head in his lap.

They should've let the damn train keep going till it reached the end of the line. It would've saved us five minutes.

It could've saved Mrs. O'Malley's life.

“Mommy's dead?” This from Mary O'Malley, squirming in the first row of the second car. She's the oldest of the five O'Malley children, maybe thirty-five, but she sounds like she's six.

I nod because I'm closer to her than Ceepak. “Yeah.”

Believe it or not, Mary giggles.

“What are you gonna do now, Momma's Boy?” she leans forward to tease Skip in the car in front of hers.

Skip glares over his shoulder. Hard. I see tears in his eyes.

“She didn't want to ride this stupid ride! Kevin made her!”

“Shut up, Skippy,” says big brother.

“She was afraid of roller coasters.”

“I said shut up.”

Skippy sniffles. Poor guy. He has a hard time hiding his emotions. Doesn't make you prime police cadet material, something I know Skippy still wanted to do, even though his summer as an auxiliary cop didn't end with a job offer. Friends tell me he signed up for one of the New Jersey police academies, paid his own tuition. I guess that didn't pan out, either. He never graduated. Still works at his dad's miniature golf course.

“Momma's Boy, Momma's Boy!”

“Okay, you guys,” I say as I work my way up the walkboard. I need to be closer to Mary, who's rocking back and forth in her seat. A side effect of her meds, I'm guessing. “We should probably lower those safety bars.”

“Good idea,” says Mayor Hugh Sinclair, who's seated beside Cliff Skeete in the second row of car number two. They lower their safety bar. So does just about everybody else. I hear the crickety-clink-clicks all around me.

Except in Mary's row.

“What can I tell ya, Danny Boy?” says her snotty brother Sean seated beside her. “Me and Mare be lunchin', livin' on the edge.” From six feet away, I can smell his breath. It reeks of booze. And it's ten o'clock in the morning.