Book of Nathan (24 page)

“Tow my ass,” the senior cop shouted back. “That’ll take
another half hour. The road’s packed all the way to Edison. Since your car’s
practically up the butt end of this thing, push the wiener or whatever the hell
it is down Johnson Drive.”

“It’s not a wiener,” Frank broke in. “It’s a Dubensko
kielbasa.” Both cops gave Frank a killer look.

The junior cop stormed to his city-owned Chevy, rammed it
into gear, and slid the front bumper and hood under the back end of the
Kielbasavan’s elongated bun. A perfect fit.

“One of you boys get behind the wheel and steer,” the junior
cop screeched at the two kielbasa drivers. Frank took up the passenger seat and
driver two slipped behind the wheel. Once the Kielbasavan’s transmission was in
neutral, junior cop gave the vehicle a whack and it made a slow turn onto
Johnson Drive.
 

“Where we goin’?” the driver with an attitude shouted at the
senior cop who was now jogging alongside the kielbasa.

The cop pointed to Johnson & Johnson’s main entrance.
“The driveway up ahead. Turn left and park it there.”

Junior cop gave the kielbasa enough momentum to navigate the
turn into J&J’s property. The maneuver worked perfectly. The sausage and
bun came to a stop about the same time a Johnson & Johnson security guard
arrived on the scene.

“What are you doin’?
the
guard screamed. “What are you doin’? What are you doin’?”

The Kielbasavan had inserted itself into Johnson &
Johnson’s sanctuary and the guard knew it was a nonconsensual act. No
unauthorized vehicles were allowed to breach the boundaries of the corporation’s
worldwide headquarters.
 

“This here is staying put until we get a tow,” the senior
cop informed the guard.

“That’s not gonna happen!”

“It’s already happened, bozo.”

What little authority the guard had was fading fast. “Who
said you could do this? Who said?”

Frank pointed to me. “This man told us to take the side
street and—”

The guard cut off the explanation. “You,” he roared and
glowered at me. “Who the hell are you?”

“Just trying to help,” I explained. My mantra. As Doug said,
“It’s what you do
.
If
I weren’t planning to be cremated, the words would be etched on my
tombstone.”
 

“This can’t
happen!”
the guard insisted and unholstered a walkie-talkie to beep someone higher up
the security chain. “They said to get it off the property!” he said a few
seconds later, repeating an executive order from somewhere deep inside
J&J’s command center.
 

Whoever they
were
did nothing to intimidate the cop with the stripes. “It’s not goin’ back onto
that goddamn street!” he bellowed back.

The guard squawked into his radio one more time, but was
clearly getting no help. Johnson & Johnson’s red-faced sentinel was on his
own and the way he was sweating, dealing with a kielbasa wasn’t in his job
description.

“All right, all right!” the guard sputtered. “But you can’t
leave it blocking the whole damn driveway.”

“You got a better suggestion, genius?” the senior cop asked.

“Pull it up more.”

The junior cop stuck his head out the driver’s-side window
of the squad car. “What’s pull it up more
supposed
to mean?”

“More. You know, more.”

“Idiot.” The senior cop pointed a finger at the hot-tempered
kielbasa driver. “You, steer the thing over there!” He waved at the
sixteen-floor tower that housed Johnson & Johnson’s executive brain
trust.
 

The guard glanced at the gleaming white building. “Oh, good
God, not—” Nothing was more sacred on the corporate grounds than the white
spear that was the cerebral cortex for the world’s largest diversified
healthcare business. The security officer turned to the senior cop and used his
wide eyes to beg for mercy.
 

But it was too late. The junior cop bumped the mobile and it
moved forward along a ribbon of asphalt that wound its way through twenty acres
of perfect landscape. The kielbasa might have ended up in front of the corporation’s
main entrance had it not been for the now totally panicked guard who sprinted
alongside the Kielbasavan screaming at the driver doing the steering. When the
guard realized it was going to take more than words to keep a disaster from
turning into a catastrophe, he ran a few yards in front of the Kielbasavan.
Then he made an abrupt about-face, planted his feet, stretched out his arms,
and turned himself into a human barricade.

“Ah, shit,” the driver with an attitude yelled, and yanked
the steering wheel hard to the left. The Kielbasavan missed hitting the guard
but the maneuver sent the vehicle down a steep curved drive that led to an
underground garage. The kielbasa plummeted toward the entrance to the
subsurface executive parking lot.

“What the hell?” the junior cop cried out.

“Mother of God,”
the
guard croaked.

The driver with an attitude pounded the kielbasa’s brake
pedal, but the van kept skidding down the drive. He yanked the emergency brake
lever and jammed the transmission into reverse. The metal-mashing sounds that
followed were ear piercing. But the noise was mellow compared to the resonance
of steel and fiberglass being mashed against the driveway’s stone wall.

“Sonofabitch.” roared the driver. The Kielbasavan had
traveled halfway down the drive that was the only way in or out of the garage.
The back tip of the sausage was flattened against one side of the driveway and
the vehicle cab was flush against the opposite wall.
 

“What the hell have you done?” the security guard wailed.

The senior police officer quickly grasped the extent of the
tie-up and assaulted the junior cop with a minute’s worth of profanity. Junior
cop didn’t seem at all upended by the incident and, in fact, looked as amused
as Maurice Tyson.
 

“Back that thing out of there!” yelled the guard.

The sausage driver retracted the mobile’s sunroof. “Hey,
jerkhead. The freakin’ transmission’s shot, man. So’re the damn brakes.”

The sweaty guard swallowed and made the sign of the cross.

The driver with an attitude added more bad news. “The only
thing that’s keepin’ this thing from rollin’ the rest of the way down and
takin’ out the garage door is a piss pot of brake fluid that’s leakin’ out
fast!”

“But you have
to
back it out!” the guard implored. He was near tears.

“Mr. Guard,” Frank called out through the opening in the
kielbasa’s roof. “The Kielbasavan can only go one way and that’s down! We need
something to stick under the front wheels before the brakes let go altogether.”

“What?”

The senior cop grabbed the guard by his shoulder and told
him to radio for help. “Somebody needs to open the garage doors and throw a
chuck under them wheels!”

The guard was more comfortable taking orders than solving
problems—particularly a problem that was blockading the transportation artery
used by the corporation’s most powerful men and women. He turned to me once he
finished talking to a J&J garage attendant. “Seventy cars down there and
now not one of ’em can get out. See what you done?”

Before I could complain I was being falsely accused, the
executive garage door rolled up and a husky man with a crew cut walked out
carrying a ten-foot piece of lumber.

“That’s a six-by-six,” the senior cop said knowingly.
“Should do the trick.”

The garage attendant kicked the beam under the Kielbasavan’s
front tires and the angry driver lifted his foot from the brake pedal. Then he
and Frank made an emergency exit through the small opening in the kielbasa’s
roof.

“I’m puttin’ a call in for a wrecker,” the senior cop said
to the guard.

“You know who owns those cars parked down there?” the guard
asked anyone who’d listen. “I’ll tell you who owns ’em. The people who can fire
my ass, that’s who. That garage is filled with Beamers, Lexuses, and Jags, for
chrissakes. And not one of ’em can get out because—” The guard turned to the
two young men hauling themselves off the Kielbasavan’s roof and onto the ledge
of the driveway wall. “Because of this—this bratwurst.”

“It’s actually a kielbasa, sir,” Frank said and got back
such a vicious stare that he and his colleague loped away from the driveway and
headed toward Johnson & Johnson’s prized piece of outdoor artwork, Henry
Moore’s
Mother and Child
.
 

“All of yous—clear out,” the security guard shouted at the
small crowd that by now had lined the sidewall of the executive garage driveway
to get an interior view of the Kielbasavan through its open roof.

I told Maurice the show was over. He agreed to leave the
premises but only after hustling two kielbasa whistles from Frank.

The
New York metro TV outlets had a field day with footage of Dubensko’s
Kielbasavan stuck in one of Johnson & Johnson’s most guarded orifices.
According to news reports, things got worse shortly after Maurice and I left
the scene to continue searching for Yigal and Twyla . About the time we found
the happy couple downing café lattes at a nearby Starbucks, the Kielbasavan’s
gas tank ruptured. A hazmat team was called in to handle the fuel spill and all
attempts to dislodge the kielbasa from the executive garage driveway were put
on hold. When a pair of heavy-duty wreckers were given the go-ahead to extract
the sausage, workers discovered that any yanking and pulling would cause
serious damage to the stone walls bordering each side of the driveway. It was
at that point a J&J heavyweight made an executive decision to bring in a
crane to hoist the Kielbasavan up and away from the garage entrance. That meant
waiting until morning before the luxury cars trapped in the garage could be
given their freedom. Finding a crane, it seemed, was not that simple—even for a
corporation with seventy billion dollars in assets.
 

“The trials and tribulations of the captains of capitalism,”
Doc chuckled as he and a dozen other Gateway residents watched NBC’s eleven
o’clock news broadcast on our only TV. Seeing some of the city’s royalty—and in
New Brunswick that definitely included J&J’s brass—get royally screwed
proved to be top-notch evening entertainment.

Then the anchorman reported Johnson & Johnson was
arranging a limousine pickup for every executive whose car was stuck in the
underground garage. The mood went sour. Doc said, “Still, an embarrassment to
the company.”

“You think?” I asked. It seemed to me the corporation had
turned a serious transportation problem into a minor inconvenience.

“Letterman’s going to be working this for the next month and
a half,” the professor prophesized. “Somebody sticks a sausage where it doesn’t
belong and it’s a manna from heaven for every comedian in America.”

Doc’s humor didn’t register with Yigal, who was spending his
last night in New Brunswick before returning to Florida. The lawyer was
preoccupied with Twyla—one of the few women ever to get past the Gateway’s
front door. A half hour earlier, I had spotted Manny’s niece taking an evening
walk and hauled her into the shelter before she found a way to violate her
parole. In a few minutes, I’d be taking her back to the Hyatt. For the moment,
Twyla was tantalizing Yigal and every other Gateway resident.

“Know what I love, Bullet?” Twyla asked.

“What?”

“Sausages. I love
them
thick, long sausages.”

Why wasn’t I surprised?

I shifted gears. “It’s getting late. We need to get back to
the hotel.” Sequestering Twyla with a bunch of sex-starved men had its
risks—but an even bigger peril would have been to let her loose on her own. I didn’t
want her wandering into any compromising situations with Yigal, Doc, or anyone
else who might raise Maglio’s ire. Plus, there was the matter of the two
Hispanic thugs still wandering the streets. Thanks to Twyla’s stripper pole,
one was down for what could be a long count. The second, however, was still in
good health and probably a bad mood. I wasn’t sure what his next step might be,
but hurting, harassing, or even kidnapping Twyla as a way of getting to me
could be an option. Until I could deposit Manny’s niece in a safe place, I
would do what I could to keep her protected.