Hiding Tom Hawk

by Robert Neil Baker

  The housing clerk returned and looked at him indifferently. Tom requested, “Since I’ve been burned out, I’d like a refund of my housing money. I’ve found a permanent place off-campus.”

  He waited to be grilled on where he would be living, prepared to lie and to either give his old address in Houghton or to make one up. But the clerk only glanced at the ID again and nodded. “I’ve still got your bank cashier’s check here somewhere. I’ll get it for you and void out everything from yesterday.”

  “That’s perfect,” Tom assured him.

  ****

  Getting in and out of the tiny Nash with the screwed-up shoulder and back drove Tom crazy. Plus he had a sensation of being watched as he struggled to exit it at the B&B. Maybe he was right, because Beth was at the door a second or two after he rang the bell.

  “You’re ready to move in?”

  She was being friendly again. He still held hope she wanted his presence for benefits beyond the paltry added revenue. Then he remembered Claire telling him he wasn’t as pretty a boy as he let himself think. Where the hell was Claire, anyway?

  He nodded. “If the offer still stands.”

  “It certainly does. Come look at the room and see if it will do.”

  It was fine. It was like she’d described it: run down, but clean and comfortable looking. It was a corner room with three good-sized windows and was only a touch smaller than Robert’s. “This is great,” he asserted, giving the double bed a test bounce.

  “Good. I’ll keep Robert from following you around making amends. He broke a vase the day he moved in, and it took me three days to get him to stop apologizing about it. I think his mother made him this way. I met her once and she’s quite a piece of work.”

  It was Dani, not Robert, that Tom was worrying about. But he said, “I know he’s not a student and he works delivering pizzas. Is that his whole life?”

  “No. He works for a local guy doing several things.”

  She had answered reluctantly, he thought. “I think he told me he has lived here for a week?”

  “Yeah. It seems longer. Sorry. I shouldn’t talk about my guests that way. Robert is excitable and it’s probably Gary who makes him so jumpy. I’d be a nervous wreck if I had to work for that man.”

  “Gary Grant? Grant’s Grocery?”

  “Uh-huh. Where the geriatric gang gathers and gossips.”

  He wanted to ask her more questions about Grant, but she was already shifting position uncomfortably, and he wasn’t about to do anything that would change her mind about his suitability as a boarder. “Can I get my things from the car and move in now?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll help you.”

  Tom pushed two weeks’ rent on her (part of Robert’s money). Once he felt he’d unpacked sufficiently to establish himself in this new kingdom, he went to find her and let the conversation drift to Gary Grant. She was arranging bric-a-brac in the treacherous china cabinet. He was gratified to see small pads under the front feet tipped it back against the wall, adding stability.

  “Looks like you’re getting killer cabinet tamed.”

  “Oh, hi. Yeah. Is the room all right?”

  “It’s perfect. By the way, this G-G’s Pizza that Robert works for, is the pizza a good product?”

  “Not really. You wouldn’t like it, Tom.”

  “Oh. Okay. That’s not ‘G-G’ for ‘Gary Grant,’ is it?”

  She turned to the cabinet, face away from him before she answered. She moved so as to make it less than rude, but it was still strange. She conceded, “Yup. He names everything after himself.” She started fussing with some crystal.

  He stayed stubbornly behind her, waiting.

  Finally she turned back to face him. He hadn’t heard her speak in anger before, and it was not pleasant to hear now. “You’re not going to give up, are you? I give up. After Dani grilling me, my resistance is down. So here it is. Gary is my first cousin; that’s none of my doing. Gary is a wheeler-dealer, if it’s possible to be such a thing in a burg this small. Besides the grocery store and what he’s doing with Robert and the pizza boxes without a restaurant license, he’s incorporated as Grant Industries, Grantronics Technology, Grant Minerals Corporation, and maybe one or two more that I don’t know about.”

  “He has all those businesses?”

  “He has all those incorporations. I’ve got enough to do without trying to figure out which ones are real enterprises.” She held a cleaning cloth and was rubbing furiously at an imaginary smudge on the main shelf of the cabinet.

  “Sure, no problem, I’m sorry if I touched a nerve.” He started away before he offended her beyond repair.

  She called him back. “Wait, Tom, I’m sorry. Look, I told you I had financial help from a cousin. It’s him. Gary has a piece of this place, and taking his money was the dumbest thing I ever did. The man meddles and he seldom improves a situation when he does.”

  She made the grocer sound unpleasant or worse. It was paranoia, but he still had to ask her. “Gary hasn’t spent any time out west, has he? He doesn’t have any contacts on the Pacific coast?”

  “He’s never been west of Minneapolis. I don’t see why you’re so interested.”

  “I’ve agreed to work for him. I’ve got to have some money.”

  “Oh boy, that’s how it started with me too.”

  “Pardon?”

  “First I needed some money for closing costs and I cut him in on my B&B. Then I asked him to help a couple of my friends get draft deferments. That’s how it all started, I suppose.”

  He wanted to follow up, but she put the cleaning cloth down abruptly and walked through the swinging door to the butler’s pantry and kitchen.

  He retreated to the porch. He had to work for Gary. The other jobs if there were any, would expose him on or near campus, and at one-third the wage. Classes would start the day after tomorrow, Monday, but the only reason he was going to go back to campus now was to find the fat man and find out who he was. Good luck with that. He didn’t have a description. He had been afraid to ask for one and bring suspicion back on himself.

  He assumed the fat man in the dorm room had been looking for him and might trace him to this house. He had to be ready for that. It was time he made a circuit of exploration of the Kessler’s property. Heading across a broad front lawn comprised of more dandelions than anything else, there was little to see once you were away from the house. There were thick trees on three sides of Beth’s estate, trees from which a sniper could blow Tom’s head off the minute he stepped out the door. There was a field which maybe had once been a large vegetable garden with a collapsed fence, and more trees.

  The fourth side, the rear, was more interesting. The murmuring Little Superior River, deep enough for small boat traffic, bounded the property, and there was even a short area of sandy beach. A decrepit rowboat, looking long unused, was tied to one of two posts of a collapsed and rotting dock. The boat and ruined dock looked romantic, and quite unsafe.

  Where was the fat man? Once he found him, what exactly could he do next? Take him to the police and start the whole safe house business again? He thought not.

  Back at the house Dani greeted him. “Hey, I hear you’re going to be staying here after all.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “That’s super. We’re really going to get to know each other. Good decision.”

  He had a feeling she knew he had no choice. Dani smelled more and more like trouble.

  Chapter Five

  Trouble. Tom asked himself if he was going looking for it now, like some nutty addiction. He parked the Nash in the side alley next to Gary Grant’s grocery again, checking for a little lunatic blue-haired woman with a baseball bat before shutting down the riding mower-size engine. He walked to the front of the store, trying to decide whether or not to go in. Beth Kessler had warned him to stay away from Gary, but she might have been less than honest in saying she wasn’t jealous of a prosperous relative. He could go in there, give Gary’s money bac
k and walk away. And then he could find a job washing dishes from eight to twelve p.m. for minimum wage of a buck-something an hour.

  A man on the creaky side of eighty walked out and nodded pleasantly. Tom nodded back and entered the grocery store.

  “I was wondering when you would show up,” complained Gary.

  “I got burned out of the place I was going to live in. I had to find something else.”

  “No kidding? Sorry about that. Did you lose your stuff?”

  “No. I wasn’t even moved in, and I’m probably better off.” Tom glanced around the store. Empty. “So what is it you need me to do for you?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Gary took a closed sign out from behind the counter, shut and locked the front door, and mounted the sign in the window. He tossed his head. “Let’s go to the back.”

  Tom recalled the miniature office, and briefly considered admitting to the claustrophobia, but it was not the way to start out with a new employer. He sought to distract himself from the terror of the wee room, and the first thing to come to mind was the pizza oven back in California. And opening it up, and…not that, anything but that!

  “Something wrong?” probed Gary.

  Tom had stopped walking, stopped dead, and was holding onto a shelf full of feminine hygiene products. He was stalled by the fear of having to enter the little office. He blurted, “What kind of oven do you use, in your pizza business?”

  “Huh? I don’t remember mentioning that operation yesterday.”

  “Your delivery man, Robert Matthews, ran into me.”

  “You met him on campus?”

  “No, he truly ran into my car while he was making deliveries. I thought he might have told you.”

  “No. It always takes him a while to fess up. Was this reported?”

  “No. Robert promised to pay me out of pocket to cover my repairs.”

  “No kidding? He did that? I may have to give the boy a raise. I owe you both, I guess. We’re going to get along, you and I. Come on in the office.”

  Somehow Tom did, managing to block Gary from closing the door. He took the same chair as the day before, and winced again as Gary’s chair screeched the same protest.

  Gary leaned across the little table. “It’s better you don’t know about the pizza business. There’s nothing in it for you anyway, at least not until you’ve been in class for a while and met some students.

  “Likewise this grocery store has nothing for you. I operate from here, and I have real customers. Nearly every last one of them is on Social Security, a military pension, or a railroad pension. Nice old people who don’t want to have to drive to Houghton to shop too often. The store runs a loss, but I don’t care. It’s useful to be beloved by a hundred people, including most of the village council, in a town this size. It lets me run my other operations with only a reasonable requirement for discretion. Hey, I made tea twenty minutes ago. Do you want some?”

  “No, I’m good, thanks. But if you don’t need me for this store or your pizza business, just exactly what do you need me for?”

  “There are several more technical things. I’m interested in buying some mineral rights. I need an engineering guy involved.”

  “I’m not a mining engineer or a metallurgist.”

  “No, but you’ll be able to understand what those types are saying a lot better than I can. Another big thing, and you’ve got to keep this secret, is I’m planning to build a gambling casino.”

  “So you need an architect and maybe a civil engineer. I’m a mechanical engineer, no more.”

  “You’re a wet blanket, is what you are. I can’t afford to hire a cast of thousands. I need one general purpose guy who can interpret all the technical bull crap for me.”

  “Is Robert doing any technical work for you?”

  “Lord no, he’s fine with keeping the books, but asking him to do anything else practical is like asking pigs to fly. You’ll be my main man now, my tech guru. I’m going to call you Tomahawk.”

  Tom had been waiting for that one, wondering why it took so long for someone in Houghton to do it. He was working up a sickly grin when there was a loud banging on the grocery store’s front door. A familiar voice cried, “Gary, let me in!”

  Gary got up wearily. “Robert is back,” he sighed, maybe to Tom, maybe to no one at all. He went to the front of the store and unlocked the door.

  From the office, Tom saw Robert Matthews tumble into the grocery shop. “You’ve got to hide me. Those maniacs are going to scalp me.”

  “Come on back to the office, Robert. I’ve made tea,” said Gary, re-locking the door. Robert followed him meekly into the office, took the other straight chair, and the room became smaller. “I understand you and Tom Hawk have met.”

  “Oh, sure. What are you doing here, Tom? Is the Nash okay?”

  Robert’s lack of confidence in his English car was unnerving. “Yes, it’s still running”

  “Tom is working with us now,” Gary told him, giving him a mug of hot tea with President Nixon’s picture on it.

  Robert regarded the President’s image with loathing, but he sipped the tea.

  To Tom, Gary bragged, “Robert is my liaison to the tribal center. He’s one-quarter Native American, but his work has had its ups and downs. When he came here and took a job with me I was just putting together an investment deal with the tribe. I arranged for him to live there in my old travel trailer.”

  “But he doesn’t live there now.”

  “No, there was a little misunderstanding about Israeli war bonds I sold out there. Also, I’d convinced him to exaggerate his ethnicity a bit, tell them he was full-blood. They got suspicious when my fellow Young Republicans started sending Nixon/Agnew campaign mail to him in my trailer. The Indians are all McGovern people. Anyway, after the war bond thing collapsed, they checked up on his genealogy and found out he’s three-quarters German.”

  “Half German, one-quarter Dutch,” corrected Robert.

  “Uh-huh. They got real mad about the bonds. They rolled my trailer into a ravine and he had to move to a rooming house here in New Range. The trailer thing was really no big deal.”

  “No big deal? I was inside!”

  “It was a piece of crap, that trailer. Anyway, we patched all that up with the tribe. I got them fifty cents on the dollar back on the war bonds. Today, when I was called down to the courthouse at the last minute about some other misunderstanding, I sent Robert out to the reservation to update the tribal elders on a mineral rights deal. Why did that upset them, Robert?”

  Robert looked uneasily at the open door, his path of escape blocked by Tom. “I got confused, Gary. I mentioned the casino.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “You know how nervous those guys always make me. You’ve been telling me all the time how great they will make out on your casino if they let you put it up out there. I forgot they don’t know anything about it yet. They got real mad about you not telling them what you were doing. When they went to get the Chief, I bugged out.” Robert mopped his brow with a frayed handkerchief.

  “Geez, Robert; that only made things worse.”

  Gary told Tom, “They’ll thank me later. I’m planning a nice upscale casino with a restaurant, maybe a motel in a couple years.”

  “Aren’t gambling casinos against the law in Michigan?” Tom questioned.

  “They have been, but now they’re going to be legal on tribal lands. Isn’t it cool? This is the biggest money deal since the Beatles. We can…”

  Gary was interrupted by a thunderous pounding on the front door. Robert whispered, “I think the tribal elders are here.”

  Tom stepped out to the store aisle and Gary followed. Three large and fit-looking brown-skinned men had their faces pressed near the front window glass of the store. They didn’t look very elderly to Tom. The one in the Purdue t-shirt looked more like a vicious drill inspector he would go to his grave hating.

  “Those guys?” he asked Gary.

  “Yup, it�
��s the elders.”

  Robert called from the back, “For Pete’s sake, hide me, Gary.”

  “Hide yourself. Let me think.”

  “You want me to go with you and talk to them, see what they want?” suggested Tom.

  Gary shook his head. “I don’t think so. We can’t out-muscle them. Any fool can see you’re all but crippled by that hurt back, so that glorious Marine physique of yours won’t slow them down. Plus I don’t want them to meet you yet, Tomahawk, and certainly not while they’re in a snit. I’ll go and reason with them.”

  Robert cried, “No, Gary, they’re pissed. Let’s go out the back. I didn’t sign up to hold off Indian attacks.”

  There was a sound of shattering glass and, shortly after, a door opening. Gary admitted, “They are a bit testy. You two stay here out of sight and I’ll go straighten this out.” He headed to the front of the building, saying loudly, “Hi there, guys, what’s wrong? Is my door sticking shut again?”

  A voice barked, “Gary, how long have you known about this special gambling casino deal? How long have you been holding out on us?”

  “Oh come on, boys, I’d never hold out. I’ve got a presentation all but ready to bring to the council. You know how confused Robert gets. I can explain everything.”

  “You damn bet you will. You’re coming with us to make a real good explanation this time. Get in the car. The Chief is waiting.”

  “Hey, guys, let’s not go off half-cocked. We can talk here. I’ve got some single malt stashed in the back.”

  “No firewater today, white man. Get in our car and watch your head on the roof.”

  Tom and Robert heard the opening and slamming of four car doors. Tom got to the front of the store in time to see an old cream-colored Lincoln sedan speeding away from the curb.

  Tom took Robert by the shoulders. “Those fellows were really worked up. We’d better follow them. You know where to go, right?”

  “No, leave it be. We’d just make it worse.”