Super Born: Seduction of Being (18 page)

When the truck rocked back and forth, then up
and down. Jimmy reassured his nephew that it was just Thompson
letting The Tool stretch his legs or something. Shaun later
realized that his uncle knew that the boys had to work Thompson
over a bit so that The Tool’s escape wouldn’t look too easy. What
neither Shaun nor his uncle knew was that the remaining groups of
Gambrelli’s men—around twenty-five—had shown up to take out the
B.I.B.

Several minutes later, they heard the back door
slam shut, and someone slapped the side of the van to indicate all
was ready.When the second set of police cars arrived as escorts,
Jimmy said, “What’d I tell you? Okay, here we go. Home free.” As he
put the truck in gear, he pulled in line behind the escorts. “Easy
as pie.” None of these folksy phrases helped Shaun ignore his gut
feeling of concern.

But when they arrived at the county jail
without further incident, Shaun had chilled—a little. He was up and
out of the van while Jimmy took his time. The rookie unlocked the
rear door and had begun to open it when the weight of something
pushed the door open without effort. The unconscious body of a man
dressed in a suit fell at his feet. Shaun instinctively unstrapped
and raised his 9 mm. When the man didn’t move—but seemed to be
breathing—Shaun looked up to find the van littered with unconscious
men. He was bending to handcuff the man on the ground when Jimmy
rounded the back of the truck and stopped in stark
amazement.

“
Jimmy, look,” began Shaun, “This is
‘No Neck’ Nicky, and that’s Franky ‘The Fish.’ There are
outstanding warrants on all of these guys! Give me your cuffs,” he
said, taking them and clapping them on The Fish. “We’re gonna need
a lot more cuffs.”

Jimmy ran to the front of the van and returned
with a box of plastic-wrap restraints that would do for the time
being. He and the rookie were busy cuffing, searching, and stacking
the henchmen like logs on the garage floor when the other officers
arrived, marveled at the sight, and began to help. When they
reached the front of the van, under the pile, they found The Tool
with a major-league black eye, unconscious but well. Officer
Thompson was there too, with a jaw that just didn’t look right.
Shaun and Jimmy called the medics.

After the “catch” had been revived and carted
off to jail, Shaun stood tall and accepted handshakes and
congratulations from anyone and everyone on a job well done, for a
rookie. When everyone had moved on, he stood behind the van for a
long while, admiring the scene. That’s when he noticed some
plastic-wrap cuffs that hadn’t been used lying on the floor of the
van where the pile of mobsters had been minutes before. He proudly
picked up the unused cuffs, but then he noticed a used tissue that
had been under the stack. He picked it up with ends of two fingers
and said to himself, “Someone’s got a cold.”

* * *

I put together a picture of what had really
happened for the readers of my website to counter the official line
that the arrests were a result of a police sting operation. I knew,
I friggin’ knew, the arrests and the disaster for the mob were the
result of B.I.B. and her beauty, strength, and keen intellect.
(There are so few of us.)

Those twenty-five thugs had been outnumbered by
an army of one, my girl. She’d dispatched them so quickly that not
one of them had a chance to fire a gun. In short order, she’d
stacked them in the van and left, tapping the van to tell the
drivers to go. The other escort cars had arrived and failed to
notice anything a miss.

I promoted this alternative view in my articles
with great success, as people could sense that the official view
was BS. Imported BS—you know, the kind that really
stinks.

* * *

As Gregorio Gambrelli’s right hand man, I was
with him that morning. He was full of confidence and anticipation.
As he walked around Giovanni’s his steps were light, and he hadn’t
put the hurt on anyone all morning—a prince compared to his usual
self. I even heard him say, “Hey, it happens,” to a panicked waiter
who had dropped his silverware. Even when Gregorio failed to hear
reports of his men’s success in dealing with the B.I.B., he did not
falter; after all, there were also no reports of failure. He was
confident in his boys. Little did he know that there was no one
left from the hit squad to report anything.

The first hint of trouble, in fact disaster,
came from a snitch at the police headquarters who regularly called
when any of Gregorio’s boys found their way there.

Gregorio sat down in his private booth to take
the call and pressed the speaker phone button. “Who’s it this
time?” he barked when he knew who was on the line.

The man stammered, “Well, it’s everyone…Franky,
Nicky, Topo…there must be twenty or thirty guys here!”

Gregorio looked like the cannoli had gone bad
in his stomach. Without any further information, he seemed to know
exactly what had happened. “And Tony?”

“
Yeah, yeah, Tony’s here too…he
don’t look good. What do you want me to do, boss… boss?”

Gregorio sent the mobile phone
flying. It missed Vito by inches, then flew through the kitchen
door as it swung open, landing with a
splat
in a freshly prepared pot of
pasta. Then he took the bowl of linguine with marinara sauce that
Vito had been working on and sent it flying into the side of an
unlucky waiter’s head.

I had seen this before and knew to get clear
and stay clear until Gambrelli’s anger had claimed enough victims
to cool his wrath.

Gambrelli’s head fell into his hands and he
tried to calm himself, but that didn’t seem to work. He looked out
the corner of his eye at the family pictures around the booth and
said, “Don’t you turn your backs on me!” It always freaked me out
when he started talking to the walls like that.

* * *

That morning I had been scheduled for a brief
interview with the mayor—apparently he wanted to keep his options
open with all of my B.I.B. fans after the searchlight fiasco. As I
entered his office, the mayor was watching a special report on a
large TV.

“
Today, police agents have captured
twenty-seven alleged members of organized crime in the city. In
what has been described as a massive sting operation, police used
the transfer of Tony Turtulio to draw out the alleged gang members
who allegedly tried to free him from a prison van. Never in the
history of the city has there been such a large-scale apprehension
of known criminals. Police predict that today’s sting will deal a
major blow to criminal operations that will be felt for months or
even years to come,” said Amanda James, the female reporter who had
taken Janelle Roote’s spot on a live broadcast from police
headquarters.

“
Thank you, Amanda. Great news…And
finally, some good news for our beleaguered mayor,” concluded the
smiling male newsroom anchor.

As the anchor spoke, the mayor stood behind his
desk and repeatedly pounded the back of his head into the wall
before taking notice of my presence. He greeted me with a smile and
firm handshake.

* * *

At the cellular phone company where I worked, I
walked up to the old prune, supervisor of the customer service
department, with a doctor’s note that explained why I had been late
to work that morning.

“
Late again, are we?”

“
It’s all explained there in my
doctor’s note. Sorry.”

The old prune gave me a good look over. The
puffy, watery eyes, the red, runny nose, the mouth breathing, all
seemed to confirm that I was truly sick. I could sense the wheels
turning in her head. Did she want me to get back to work, or get
away and not infect her with my cold? The thought made her hold my
doctor’s note with two limp fingers at arm’s length. “Go on, then.
Get back to work, but I don’t want to see you in my office until
you’re no longer contagious! Do you know I haven’t had a cold in
seven point eight years? And even then, I didn’t miss a tick of
work. You should learn something from that! Now, go,” she said,
pulling a tube of hand sanitizer out of her desk and rubbing it
over her hands, “Go, get out of here.”

What she didn’t see were the wounds I had
suffered in the battle with Gambrelli’s men. There were abrasions
on my arms and legs and a knife slice on my side that I had
stitched shut myself. Not to mention how much my fist hurt from
pounding those losers. There were so many of them. I’ll bet it took
over fifty seconds to hit them all.

Being a woman with superpowers and having to
report to an asshole like this old prune for a paycheck could
really be a bitch. But what was I supposed to do? Rob a bank? Hold
up a convenience store? Even with superpowers, there was no way I
would even let myself think about something like that. I’d gotten
this far by swallowing my pride, putting up with idiots, and just
doing my job. None of that seemed like it was going to change any
time soon

* * *

The next morning, I, Logan, the media mogul,
sat on my beat-up-but-comfy sofa in my boxers, sipping a cup of joe
and reading the paper. The front page carried a big picture of
Jimmy and Shaun smiling. Above it was the headline, “Local Boys
Take a Bite Out of Crime.” Amazingly, the department’s attempt to
spin the van event as a planned sting seemed to be holding up. I
thought they wouldn’t even have had the nerve to try it, but it was
working.

Anyone with common sense—no, even less than
common sense—even an RFD could see that two officers could not take
down the Gambrelli family in a morning. Had the B.I.B. come out and
taken credit for the collars, everyone would have believed it in a
second. But the fact that she hadn’t shown up at the Searchlight
Event—and now, the fact that she’d failed to take credit for The
Tool—meant that her window of opportunity for fame and fortune had
passed. Worst of all, my T-shirt sales dipped…a lot. I had gotten
used to having a little change to spend, and had no desire to go
back to scraping for a living.

I was so concerned about my business that I
played only one round of B.I.B. Rescue and three rounds of B.I.B.
Pub Crawler before lunch and only twice that many in the afternoon.
Rebecca had really perfected the games by now, including all sorts
of real people from my past. What I didn’t tell her, she somehow
knew. She was amazing. In Pub Crawler, I thought I had located the
B.I.B. at Skelly’s, but I ran into the Nelson twins, and you could
guess what happened…again. Those two (four) can drink.

I remember those two events, the searchlight
and the twenty-seven collars, as being a temporary climax for the
B.I.B., at least from my point of view

I didn’t see Dr. Jones for a while. The mayor
had added him to his staff after realizing he needed something to
rebuild his Swiss-cheesed image. His pollsters told him that the
public would approve of further connection between him and the
B.I.B. So he took on Jones.

For organized crime in Scranton, it was a
consolidation. For Gregorio Gambrelli it was the end of a crime
family. There is a military adage that I would have learned while
studying at Penn State before being forced to Scranton by a lousy
economy. If you cut an army off from its leadership and reduce the
fighting force by half, even with the large number of men
remaining, the army will, in effect, cease to function. That is
what occurred. With all of Gambrelli’s middle managers in jail, he
became separated from his foot soldiers. Other members of his
organization fled, fearing that those in prison would be cutting
deals. Thanks to the B.I.B., it wasn’t a good day to be on the
wrong side of the law.

But it was a good day to be Carmine Camino. He
had waited his turn, paid his dues, and here was his opportunity.
Gambrelli was floundering, unable to control what was left of his
organization, and the other crime families were like sharks
smelling blood in the water. If it wasn’t Camino cutting his
throat, it would have been somebody else, so…after Gambrelli’s
second-in-command ended up swimming upside down in the Susquehanna,
the Gambrelli foot soldiers, including Vito, jumped to get in line
behind Camino. In a morning’s work, the B.I.B. had used Gambrelli’s
overconfidence to bring him to his knees and lift Camino up into
power.

Chapter 14

Frustration, Road Trip, Beer—Did I
Mention Frustration?

For the B.I.B., it seemed to be a slow time as
well, a time to reevaluate. There were far fewer sightings reported
on my website. After the two days, I think she took a rest and
began to evaluate what she was really doing.

In the days that followed, I even took occasion
to visit the old barkeep at O’Malley’s. Whether I wanted to get
connected with the place where I had last seen her or I really
expected her to be there—or hoped the barkeep had seen her—I don’t
know.

“
Hey, how have you been?” I asked
the old man.

“
Respectable, I guess,” he said,
wiping dry some glasses. It seemed as if he wasn’t sure how to take
me.

“
She been in lately?”

“
She…? Oh, you mean the blond
bird…Ms. Twenty I call her. Always remember a good tipper. No, I
ain’t had the pleasure since that night. Shame.”

I handed him a hundred dollars and my new,
fancy business card. “My offer is still good. She shows up, call me
right away, and there’s another hundred in it for your
trouble.”