Tinman

by Karen Black

  Copyright © 2020 by Karen Black

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2020

  ISBN 978-0-9724449-3-4

  C&K Publishing

  3341 Avenida Hacienda

  Escondido, CA 92029

  www.TINMAN-novel.com

  www.KarenBlack-author.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Epilogue

  FOREWORD

  Kay Thorson, one of my early girlfriends — I mean way back to junior high school — with whom my wife, Lynn, and I have remained in contact all these many, many years, married Matt Walton, head of the Minnesota Geologic Survey and professor of geology at the University of Minnesota. Besides being a good scientist, Matt was also a talented writer. After his retirement, he decided to write a novel. However, shortly after starting it, he became ill and passed away, leaving several pages of an unfinished manuscript with very few notes and no clues as to where the plot was going, so the manuscript lay fallow for a number of years.

  During a telephone conversation with Kay one day, I happened to mention that I was a member of a writers’ group, and if she’d like to send us what Matt had written, we might be interested in trying to finish the book. Kay sent the manuscript and a few notes that Matt had left. Our group liked very much what he had started, but we had no idea where he intended to go with it; since there was no outline. Unfortunately, it lay fallow in my home for a few more years. I kept asking members of our writers’ group if someone would please give it a shot. One of our members, Karen Black (author of Code of Conduct, the Vietnam era novel based on her husband, Cole’s, seven-year POW experience,) retired from her 30-year law practice, and took on the task. After a few months, this novel emerged.

  I think Matt would have liked the way it turned out. We hope you do too.

  Terry M. Badger, Escondido, California

  Author of:

  A FULL DECK OF DOUBLE DUMMY PROBLEMS

  PUZZLES AND GAMES IN LOGIC AND REASONING

  THE SAGA OF HS-6

  SNAKE TALES

  CHAPTER I

  Saint Paul, Minnesota, June, 1994

  On Friday, life took a one-eighty turn from my serious research and the academic environment. Charley Farnsworth called from Los Angeles to tell me he had a job for me. “Now listen, Greg,” he insisted, “before you start thinking up reasons why you can’t just take off from whatever the hell you do at your lab, let’s just think creatively about giving yourself a break, because you can’t kid your Uncle Charley that you are getting along just great as the resident ghost in that Charles Addams monstrosity you call home.”

  “But….”

  “No buts. Listen to me, McGregor, mi fine laddie, let the penurious instincts of your Caledonian heritage dwell a moment on the fact that your Uncle Charley is on to a very big game…one that is being played with nine-digit numbers.”

  “Signifying dollars?” I asked, somewhat surprised. That was a lot of money.

  “You’ve got it. There could be some very big winners.”

  I could tell by Charley’s somewhat more flamboyant-than-usual rhetoric and the way he let the phrase, “nine-digit numbers,” roll off his tongue that he was really turned on. “Tell me about it,” I suggested.

  “Not on the phone. But I’ll tell you what I’ve done. I’ve just sent you a little care package by Federal Express. It contains, among other odds and ends, an airplane ticket. The destination will be disclosed only when you need to know. Now shut up. It will get to you tomorrow, and you get your ass in gear on Sunday.”

  “But, Charley….”

  “By the way, don’t bother trying to call back.”

  “For Christ sake, Charley, you can’t….” Charley hung up.

  I stayed home and waited for Charley’s “care package,” which arrived, as promised, on Saturday. Its odds and ends were odd indeed. In addition to an open-ended round trip ticket from Minnesota to Anchorage, Alaska, via Los Angeles, in the name of a person titled Dr. Malcolm Gregory, it contained a major credit card and a Colorado driver’s license in the same name. Dr. Gregory was described thereon as a six foot three-inch tall, l96 pound, blue-eyed, red-headed Caucasian male, whose photograph also looked remarkably like me, and who resided in Aspen, Colorado, at an address I recognized as Charley’s vacation condominium. Even odder was an envelope containing 200 one-hundred-dollar bills with a tag that said, “For expenses. Keep the change.” A note directed me to register as Dr. Malcolm Gregory at the Cliffe Motel on Highway 1 between Santa Monica and Malibu, where Dr. Gregory had a guaranteed reservation, and be sure to check for messages. Taped to the note was a key with a tag that said, “My apartment, just in case.” A word to describe my state of mind might be “nonplused.”

  I have long since forgiven my parents for christening me Gregory McGregor, and I’m used to being called Greg or Mac interchangeably, but I had to wonder if it were more than Charley’s puckish sense of humor that prompted him to create an alter ego for me, to which both nicknames–Mac and Greg–applied.

  Charley was admittedly an eccentric genius in the heavy engineering and construction business, a profession whose creativity ran more toward large solid objects in steel and concrete than fictitious identities, bogus credit cards and forged driver’s licenses. And what about the “nine-digit numbers game”? I had worked with Charley on some big jobs. One of them involved a major dam failure in which lives and prestigious engineering reputations, as well as a great deal of money, had been lost. It had gotten pretty heavy, with everybody pointing the finger at everybody else, but never these cloak-and-dagger theatricals.

  *

  I awoke as dawn was breaking on Sunday morning, long before my alarm was set to go off, partly out of a lingering ache for the empty place in the bed beside me, partly, I suppose, because my subconscious mind was busy with the fact that I was hitting the road again. The two were not totally unconnected. I wondered if I could ever pack a bag without thinking of Helen. Memories of our travels flooded in: folding beach chair, sou’westers in case we went sailing in a hurricane, riding boots, hiking boots, tennis shoes, dancing shoes, formal wear, casual wear, warm clothes, cool clothes, tennis racquets, golf clubs, fishing poles, skis, light reading, heavy reading, shampoo, lotions, cosmetics too numerous to mention and pills, pills, pills. Finally, a mountain of matched luggage, hours of hassles at check-in counters and baggage carousels, and a retinue of porters and bellboys to tip at every turn. But then Helen was chic and very beautiful. She taught me to travel light.

  As usual, when I really stop to think about Helen, the ache goes away, replaced by b
itterness. I admit I have had the kind of job that’s hard to explain when someone at a cocktail party asks what you do. Usually I say I’m a trouble shooter on large engineering projects that run into geological problems. It’s easier than trying to define geotechnical engineering. It can take you to a lot of far-out places, like central Africa and the high Andes, but that doesn’t translate into deluxe safaris and chic resorts. It means a bunch of weather-beaten, grimy men in hard hats, building dams, driving tunnels, or opening mines and living in camps and trailer courts with a couple of bars and a whorehouse for social amenities. It can be challenging, even exciting, but I never told Helen it was a lot of fun, and she was certainly smart enough to understand that–if she had wanted to.

  Besides, she had her own career to think of, as she so frequently reminded me. So a couple of years ago, in a last ditch effort to make it work, I quit consulting and went back to the University as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Geotechnical Research Institute. It was a big cut in income, but the research was fascinating, even exciting, I suppose. Based on receiving all those postcards from faraway places, my friends think I’m some kind of engineering James Bond. Actually, underneath it all, I’m a somewhat pedantic type. I actually like the serious research and the academic environment better than off-the-hip trouble shooting, but as Helen also frequently pointed out, it meant she made more money than I did, which was some kind of defect in my character.

  But, it turned out, being all wrapped up in a grubby old lab with a bunch of technical types for friends was no better than being out there in a Landrover somewhere on the road to Mandalay. We had, as the saying goes, “outgrown” each other, and after a good many thousand clichés, generally uttered in anger, we arrived at our definition of “irreconcilable differences.”

  Besides, she had a shot at a fantastic job in Chicago, working with a “really neat guy.” We split, and I found myself rattling around in the quaint old gingerbread Victorian house we had acquired in a sentimental moment, in the midst of a do-it-yourself restoration project, with no one to share it but an aged and amiable golden retriever named Darwin.

  There was no use staying in bed. All I really had to do was pack a bag, close the house and leave Darwin at a boarding kennel on the way to the airport. I pulled the old carry-on bag off the shelf and started packing, taking my time, savoring the activity, laying everything out on the bed and inspecting it for missing buttons and other repairs. As I began folding and packing, the gray of early dawn was just turning a little pink. Now rosy-fingered Dawn draws back the veil of night, and something about Apollo’s lances putting the stars to flight. How did it go? And was it Shakespeare or Homer? I couldn’t remember. Anyway, the start of a new adventure.

  It had been one of the first really balmy nights of spring. The windows were wide open and nothing stirred in the neighborhood yet. The muffled sound of an approaching van seemed intrusive until I heard the inches-thick bulk of the Sunday paper plop heavily on the front steps. Darwin, who slept under the bed, and up to this point had obviously considered it much too early to get up, roused himself. His one official duty and principal accomplishment in life was to bring in the paper when he was let out in the morning. But he was not quite ready to face the dawn, and he was provoked with me anyway, because he knew what packing meant. So, when he saw me standing quite nude in the midst of packing and clearly not about to go downstairs, he retreated under the bed, and I resumed my leisurely preparations. Out the window, I heard the plops growing fainter as the newspaper delivery van moved on down the street, until the neighborhood again fell silent.

  Two minutes later another motor sound, a subdued, throaty snarl, came down the street and stopped in front of the house. The sharp click of hard leather heels followed, hurrying up the front walk. I glanced out the window to see an aggressively sleek, gunmetal gray Corvette standing at the curb with the passenger door open. The clicking heels had passed out of sight beneath the front porch, but in a moment they reappeared at the extremities of the extraordinary legs of a tall, willowy blonde in very short shorts. She wore the merest wisp of a halter. Spun gold hair cascaded down over a bare back. She appeared to be clutching my Sunday paper to her bosom as she folded her elegant form as gracefully as a gazelle into the Corvette’s low-slung door, closing it quickly as the car accelerated effortlessly down the street and out of sight.

  I had gotten not so much as a glimpse of her face, and, looking down from the upstairs window, all I could see of the driver was a long leg in white trousers. It took me a moment or two to assimilate the fact that what was quite possibly the shapeliest girl I had ever seen, and a good six feet or so of her at that, had just stolen my Sunday paper. As if Charley’s care package weren’t bizarre enough! I ran downstairs, only to see my paper sitting on the top step as usual.

  Starting out the door to get it, I remembered I was naked as a babe. I was peering up and down the street looking for early joggers before risking a quick dash, when Darwin gave an indignant yelp. The bedroom door had swung shut on him. Rather than insult poor Darwin by bringing in the paper myself on the last morning that I expected to see him for a while, I went back upstairs to let him out to do his business and bring me my morning paper.

  He dashed past me down the stairs and bounded out the half-open front door.

  A moment later, a shattering explosion sent glass from all the front windows spattering through the house. I was on the stair landing, out of direct line, but the concussion stunned me momentarily. Somebody down the street screamed. I stumbled down the stairs and unsteadily walked barefoot through the broken glass to the gaping hole where the porch had been. The roof over the front porch sagged on splintered columns. A spattering of blood and something that looked like a small heap of matted hair was all that remained of my poor Darwin. I immediately felt overwhelmed with sadness at the loss of my precious companion. As a stifled sob caught in my throat, a wave of nausea came over me.

  Left to myself, I think I would have been sick, but my neighbor, Orson Segerstad, appeared in his bathrobe peering over the hedge with a very strange look on his face. He started as though he had seen a ghost when he saw me framed in the shattered door. “For God’s sake, Greg, what happened?”

  I gathered my composure. “I don’t know.”

  “You all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re naked, you know.”

  People were already running toward the house from up and down the street. “Oh, for God’s sake! Orson, keep an eye on things while I get something on.”

  “I told Mary to call the cops,” he called after me as I bounded up the stairs.

  I dashed into the bedroom, picked up the phone and dialed Charley in L.A. It rang five or six times before Charley came on, and while I waited, I began to hear sirens in the distance. When he finally answered, his voice was thick with sleep. “Wake up, Charley, and wake up fast,” I shouted.

  “Have you got any idea what time it is out here?” he grumbled.

  “The hell with that. A long-legged blonde just booby trapped my Sunday paper.”

  “Booby trapped your Sunday paper?” Charley sounded like he didn’t know whether to laugh or try to humor me.

  “Damn it,” I shouted, “Get your brains in gear. Listen!” I held the phone toward the window. Sirens from several directions were converging on the house, now no more than a couple of blocks away. “Somebody just tried to kill me, and you’ve got about two minutes to tell me what this is all about.”

  Suddenly, Charley was all business. “Greg, I’ve got to talk to you, and you can’t come to L.A. now…Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this…Get out of town as fast as you can and meet me in Denver.”

  “Where?”

  “The Denver Public Library. It’s by the park in front of the State Capitol building, across the street from the Art Museum. Whoever gets there first gets himself a good book and waits in the main reading room.” The sirens outside were growling to a halt. “And, G
reg, keep your ass covered. This thing could be getting out of hand.”

  I hung up, grabbed my bathrobe and ran downstairs just in time to meet a small army of policemen, firemen, paramedics and gas company emergency crew storming across the gap where my porch had been with a fire ladder for a bridge. They seemed a little let down when it was established that the only victim was a dog named Darwin. The paramedics put Darwin…or what was left of him…in a plastic bag and withdrew. The gas men went down to the cellar to check for leaks, and the firemen went back to the porch to check for any signs of smoldering fire. I was left with a short, slightly paunchy police captain. “I think you better come down to the station for a report while the bomb squad gets to work on this,” he said. “We’ll seal the house, unless it’s okay with you for us to search it now.”

  “Now wait a minute,” I objected. “What the hell for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the captain said, smiling pleasantly. “It’s just that it’s a little unusual when somebody tries to blow up your ordinary, everyday local citizen.”

  “Hey, I’m the victim here.”

  “I know,” the captain sighed. “It’s just routine.”

  I looked hard at him, and he looked back. Underneath, he wasn’t kidding. “I’ll get dressed and throw some things in a bag.” I turned to go upstairs.

  “We ain’t gonna keep you.”

  “I know. It’s just that for some funny reason I don’t feel much like staying here.”

  “Captain,” somebody called, “reporters here.”

  “I’ll talk to them when I’m dressed,” I said, and ran upstairs.

  I threw on my clothes and stuffed what was left to pack in my bag. A policeman stuck his head in the door. “Would you mind telling the captain I’m almost ready,” I asked. “Give me three or four more minutes.”

  He nodded and disappeared down the front stairs. I tiptoed down the hall to the back stairs and out the back door. The flashing lights and neighbors in various states of hastily dressed were all in front, staring at my shattered porch and broken windows. I slipped through a hole in the back hedge and into the alley, cut across the Ogilvy’s side yard into the next street, which was deserted, and jogged two blocks down and one block over to Mike Stephanic’s house.