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CHAPTER ONE

I've never been what you might call an “overachiever” but at age twenty-five I've already done the worst thing any human being can possibly do.

John Ceepak, my partner, tells me I should let it all out. Get it off my chest. Make what the priests used to call a full and complete confession.

Fine.

I'll do like Ceepak suggests.

It all starts with this stupid ring he found.

CHAPTER TWO

Last Sunday. Six fifty-five A. M. Bruce Springsteen is on the radio reciting my most recent résumé: “I had a job, I had a girl, I had something going, mister, in this world…. ”

I'm sitting in The Bagel Lagoon waiting for Ceepak. He lives here. Not in the restaurant with the bagels-upstairs in the apartment on the second floor.

“She said Joe, I gotta go, we had it once, we ain't got it any more. She packed her bags, left me behind…. ”

The Boss is laying it on thicker than a slab of walnut cream cheese. Says he feels like he's “a rider on a down-bound train. ”

I can relate.

Katie's gone.

She said, “Danny, I gotta go. ” Okay, it doesn't rhyme as good as it might've if my name was Joe like the guy in Bruce's song. Katie, my ex-girlfriend, moved to California. Grad school. Left town in March.

I hope California is as nice as Sea Haven-this eighteen-mile-long strip of sand-in-your-shoes paradise down the Jersey Shore. I hope it has boardwalks and miniature golf and fresh-cut fries and a fudge forecast that's always smooth and creamy like it has been at Pudgy's Fudgery for the past seventy-five years, at least according to the sign flapping out on their sidewalk near the Quick Pick Fudge Cart.

On the radio, Bruce is done singing the blues.

Me, too.

At exactly seven A. M. every Sunday, the Reverend Billy Trumble shoves all rock ‘n’ roll off the air. He's been doing seven A. M. Sundays on WAVY for nearly thirty years.

“Friends, do you think it is early?” his smooth voice purrs. “Trust me-it is later than you think. Judgment Day is nigh…. ”

“Turn it off,” hollers Joe Coglianese from the back of the shop. He and his brother Jim run The Bagel Lagoon. Joe's in charge of stirring the pot where the bagels bob in boiling water. Jim mans the counter. It's the middle of July and already 80 degrees outside. It feels hotter if you factor in the humidity, plus the steam rising up from that humongous bagel vat. No wonder Joe is the grouchier of the two Coglianese brothers.

Jim snaps off the radio.

I tear another bite out of my bagel.

Ceepak should be joining me any minute. We're both cops with the Sea Haven P. D. and, even though it's our day off, today we are men on a mission.

Ceepak, who's like this 6 '2", thirty-six-year-old Eagle-Scout-slash-Jarhead, found something he thinks is valuable buried on the beach while he was sweeping the sand with his metal detector.

This is what Ceepak does for fun when there are no Forensic Files or CSI reruns on TV. He's even in this club: The Sea Haven Treasure Hunter Society. It's mostly geeks and geezers, guys who strap on headphones and walk the beach like the minesweeper soldier in every bag of green plastic Army men-who, come to think of it, are now chocolate-chip-camo-brown because they've been to Iraq and back, just like Ceepak. They hunt for Spanish doubloons, abandoned Rolexes, rusty subway tokens, discarded paper clips-anything that makes their detectors go beepity-beep.