“It smells like smoke in here,” Susan whined as she sat down in the front seat of my
Camry.
She took a couple of big whiffs and sported an appalled look on her face.
“Well it wasn't me! But I smell it too so maybe it's something with the engine. I'll have
to get this checked out.”
Susan grabbed my hand.
“Maybe somebody broke into your car and smoked a few drags while we were at the
game.”
“Har har…” I really didn't feel up to driving. Instead, I just wanted to stop everything
and focus on the same question pounding away inside my head: how the hell did Peter Hansen get
involved with a Mexican drug cartel? This was sleepy New Jersey, for Pete's sake, things like
that just didn't happen.
My wife opened the window and ran the exterior fan on full blast, while I drove the car
off. Susan was sitting right where the asshole threatening out family had sat nearly two hours
prior.
Morristown won the game 3-1 and I thought Tom got fouled pretty obviously while
giving up the one goal. He was so pissed, he had to be restrained by his defensemen from going
after the offender. That was my boy.
“So, what should we do for dinner,” I asked Susan. It was nearing 8pm and I was starved.
“I've prepared some beef stew that's simmering on low. If you ask nicely, I could whip
up a nice salad and Italian bread to go with it.”
My stomach growled fiercely.
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Tom was hitching a ride home with his older buddies on the team - it was not cool to ride
with your parents after the game – and I didn't feel like waiting for him to eat dinner.
“You left the dishes in the sink last night…also, the garbage can was stuffed full,” Susan
revealed.
I looked at her with a hint of condescension.
“So that was what was bugging you so bad before the game? You could have just said so,
hon.”
“Right…I'll work on that.”
I needed a plan, needed several plans, had to start mapping out scenarios. I didn't trust
Peter to help me, so I decided not to worry about him, at least for the time being.
What if my two new friends decided to „punish' me if I informed them that I wouldn't be
told when the trial results were to be released to the media? I'd need a way to at least protect
Susan and Tom.
It started to rain pretty heavily. Susan leaned in closer and started to laugh. “You know, I
was so pissed walking over to the field that, when I got to the stands, I sat right next to Cheryl
and Peter.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Nothing, I think she is waiting for an apology,” Susan replied. “So we small talked
about the team and just watched the game.”
Tom arrived home twenty minutes after us, clearly in a great mood, as well he should
have been.
“Great game, bud,” I told my son while slapping him on the back.
Tom dove into the beef stew and took a seat at the table.
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“Hey, before I forget. These two guys came up to me after the game, one of them said he
was a patient of yours and hoped to talk to you,” Tom stated with a mouthful of stew.
I looked at my son. Get going with those plans of yours, Nick.
“Did they give you their names?”
Of course they wouldn't, but it didn't hurt to ask.
“I asked them, but the one just said he'd call you in the morning.”
Susan walked in from the den.
“Any idea who that was, Nick?”
I shook my head. The lies were really starting to pop up.
“No, I really don't.”
******
The next morning, Susan was staring at me as I awoke; it was 5:50 a.m. During the
school year, Susan ran earlier in the morning so she could get breakfast ready for Tom. He left for
school in the morning at 7:40. We had been trying to get him up before 7:00 in order for him to
have time for a shower and a good breakfast.
“Who's Ruski? You know, in all the years of our marriage, you haven't uttered a word in
your sleep, until last night.”
“What?” I responded, trying to remove the cobwebs in order to quickly think straight.
I'd never been a morning person and, while Susan adored the morning, she didn't seem
too thrilled now.
“You kept shouting out that Ruski is not going to get away with this. What on earth is
wrong with you?”
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That was weird because I didn't conclude that my two friends were Russian, and they
could have been from a number of countries.
I stayed up last night listening to my recording of these guys talking to me in the car. The
voices were pretty clear on the tape to my surprise. Also evident on the tape was that my front
seat friend never told me when we would meet again and that the guy in the back seat seemed to
upset my front seat friend. The guy in back definitely seemed to make a joke that got the guy in
front speaking harshly back at him. The tape couldn't make clear what language they were
speaking and somebody would have to help me with that. I went to bed thinking strongly that I
needed to get this conversation translated and I knew somebody who could possibly figure it out.
But I really didn't think I went to bed believing these guys were necessarily Russian.
“That is odd, I'll give you that. Who the heck is Roosky?”
“Did you eat anything late last night? I noticed that you came to bed kind of late.”
I looked down at my pillow.
“Yeah…I had some ice cream around 10:30, I know it was stupid.”
Susan laughed and started to get out of bed, the morning run awaited.
“I didn't even know we had any ice cream. Where did you find it?”
“It was in the back of garage freezer…left over from the party we had in August.”
We hosted a barbecue in early August for ten of our favorite families and bought way too
much food. We'd been picking at it for two months now. The ice cream was Strawberry Cheese
Cake.
“Was it still good?”
“Fantastic.”
Susan was in the bathroom getting her running outfit on. She told me last week that she
found a steal of a deal on running shoes and somehow that justified buying two pairs.
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“You're going to pour on the pounds if you keep that up, hon. I don't recommend it.”
“Oh, Okay,” I responded mockingly.
The truth was I slept like crap last night thinking about the two new thugs in my life. If I
got more than three hours of sleep, I'd be shocked.
Susan loved to sit with Stanley at his house during the 11 a.m. broadcast of the Family
Feud each weekday. I couldn't stand that show, but, while I laid there in bed last night and the
wee hours of this morning, I imagined the host of the show asking his two families:
“We surveyed 100 people with the following question - top six answers are on the board:
name something you would do if you found out that someone was threatening to kill you.”
What would these 100 people say?
Number one would likely be „Talk to the police’, but these thugs told me not to do that
and I was going to listen to them for now on this subject. Who knew what they would do to me or
my family if they learned that I paid a visit to the police?
Number two? Buy a gun. I bet Peter owned a gun. That was probably an area he could
help with.
At least that was the next thing that came to my mind. Buy a gun? There were few things
in life I didn't want to know anything about more than the idea of buying a gun. I knew it was
harder than it used to be, but where would somebody even start this process? Assuming I could
even manage to buy a gun, where would I keep the darn thing?
Leaving the gun in the car wouldn't be very useful if these thugs storm our home in the
night. I didn't believe they would do this, at least not until our next meeting, except these jerks
had surprised me once already.
If I were to bring the gun into the house when at home, how could I do that without
alerting Susan or Tom? Carrying the weapon on me in a holster was out of the question, though
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maybe it could be kept in my work bag. It was not like I had small, curious children to worry
about finding a loaded gun and accidentally setting it off. Tom was rarely home and Susan would
never poke through my work bag.
I could put the bag in my closet each night since we had separate closets. She rarely went
into my closet except to hang dry cleaned work shirts every now and then. Wearing collared sport
shirts to the office on most days, I would wear a button down office shirt on occasion, though. I
usually left my work bag in the kitchen, yet that wouldn't do any good if we get a „Ruski'
surprise in the night. The gun needed to stay close. Of course, I'd have to make sure that I
transported my work bag to and from the closet without Susan asking questions.
When I was driving, I would want the gun under the driver seat. I thought I'd leave it
there when I went to work, since I didn't think the „Ruskies' would harm me at the office.
About 1 a.m., I realized that I should try harder to fall asleep, leading me to stop thinking
about the whole gun idea. The other four answers in the Family Feud survey didn't come to me,
mainly because I began to think about how much time I had today around the lunch hour to get
some answers about my tape of the „Ruskies'.
Susan came out of the bathroom and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“See you in a bit, sweetie!”
I thought about going back to sleep for another thirty minutes, but my heart was racing a
little too fast. What if Susan heard about the threat facing our family via my newfound night time
talking act? We'd see if this happened the next night, though if Susan complained again, I would
need a plan. It seemed like I was coming up with a need for a new plan every couple of hours
lately. Maybe sleeping pills could help with this.
“You have way too much energy in the morning – you know that, don't you?” I moaned
to my wife as she tied her running shoes.
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“It wouldn't kill you to start joining me, you know. We could start slow.”
I laughed. “I'd be too afraid of Roosky jumping out from the bushes…anyway, enjoy
your run.”
The baby across the street started crying - I was not a big fan of babies – which could be
heard perfectly clear through our open bathroom window. That family moved in last month and
the mother took the baby on a run every morning with a jogging stroller. There weren't too many
young children on this street anymore and the neighborhood was just now starting to turn over.
This new couple bought the house from the Coopers who had been there for 35 years until they
bought into a retirement community down in Delaware.
“I will – oh, and don't forget to wake Tom up. I think he rushes too much to get ready in
the morning.”
Tom rarely headed for the shower before 7:20, despite our best efforts to awake him
twenty minutes prior. This meant he was usually just grabbing a power bar on the way out the
door.
“I'll work on it. I'll try the air horn approach today. That should work just fine, you
know.”
Susan looked over at me disapprovingly and walked out of the bedroom.
“Joking,” I declared.
Why did Oleg give me his name? I lay back down in the bed, closing my eyes. The
mental nugget that had rattled around my brain for nearly an hour before I finally fell asleep
earlier this morning was this: Oleg was probably playing with my head, trying to become even
more unpredictable than the terror his thug partner had just laid on me by invading my car and
putting a knife to my throat. There was no way he was trying to be nice. He showed me a video of
him and his thug partner close to murdering an innocent couple for god's sake. He was trying to
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be civil with me? This guy could not be familiar with social etiquette – he was an animal, with a
name. I was not sure how to spell his name, but a quick Internet search pointed me to Eastern
European origins.
Tom said that two unidentified men had come up to him after the game. How did Oleg
even know about tonight's soccer game? I left the office around 3:30 and stopped by the house to
pick up Susan, so Oleg must been following us the whole time. That was just too creepy. How
long had they been watching us? Then they approached my son after his game which was obvious
because no patient I had would fail to give Tom their name if they truly wanted to talk with me. It
had to be Oleg and his thug partner.
Hearing Susan open the front door, it hit me that my new „friends' could be outside right
now, so I raced up to the bedroom window facing Skyline Drive and scanned the neighborhood
for any suspicious parked cars. Susan was stretching in the driveway…not a single car in sight.
Oleg probably had a criminal warehouse with sophisticated computer operations linking a much
larger crime network than just the two of them. They had the resources to find me after just two
months on the Zyptorin committee. While I didn't know what pharmaceutical drug Dr. Linder
was overseeing, Oleg's network clearly had found him. There had to be something bigger than
just these two guys on the ground doing the dirty work.
If they had been following me as well as closely watching my family, why did he confirm
who I was and that I worked with the Zyptorin trial? He must have known this. Was this another
attempt to be civil so as to put me at ease? It didn't really work, in my opinion. Maybe by
confirming my identity, Oleg was making it clear to me that this wasn't a random mugging, that
there was far more to it than that.
In any case, though, I was damned glad I had that audio tape.
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Wednesday, November 6th
11:30 am