Hiding Tom Hawk (5 page)

She barked, “The hell you will leave in that car. That is my grandnephew’s car. I saw you park it here on the way to my office, and I want to know how you got it.”

Here was someone else for Robert to be afraid of. A relative this time. “He loaned me the car.”

“Lenny loaned it to you?”

“Lenny? Who’s Lenny?”

“I thought so. You don’t even know him. I’m going into Grant’s to call the cops.”

Tom foolishly stepped into her path.

She started a roundhouse swing of the bat as she screamed, “Help, someone help me!”

He put his left forearm up to take the blow so he could try to disarm her with his right hand. As he moved sideways from her swing, the beagle (where had he come from?) got between his legs and tripped him and Tom went down hard. He watched the bat come down where he had been standing, the arc defined such that if he would have been lucky if the blow hadn’t shattered his femur.

The bat was well on its second upswing when a second pair of arms and large hands seized it just above the old woman’s. This deflected its path to the brick side wall of Grant’s Grocery as Tom crabbed sideways away from its impact. It made a crunching noise as it skidded down the brick, but nothing compared to the yelping he would have made had it found its intended target due south of his navel.

He struggled to take a breath. The treacherous dog that had felled him was enthusiastically trying to overturn Grant’s garbage can. The ball bat lay on the pavement, and his rescuer came into focus. It was the big blonde woman from the day before in the grocery store. She was holding the old lady, who was squirming angrily.

“Thank you,” muttered Tom, struggling to his feet. He kicked the baseball bat out of range. “I think you can let go of her.”

She did so, and the old woman did not move. In a voice higher than Tom expected from yesterday’s hissed dialog with Gary Grant, somewhere between soprano and alto, the blonde demanded, “What’s going on here?” It wasn’t clear if she was asking him or the old lady.

Tom said, “I sure wasn’t doing anything to her, if that’s what you mean. She came after me.”

The old woman attacked. “Liar. You stole Lenny’s car.”

Without contesting the accusation, Tom went to the Nash and took the registration out of the glove box. He handed to the old lady, expecting her to fumble in a small over-the-shoulder purse for reading glasses, but she immediately inspected the paper. Contact lenses maybe? Everyone was wearing them now. She looked up at him. “I’ll be damned. Robert Matthews. That’s not Lenny. I would have never dreamed there could be
two
of these little shitboxes.”

This came from someone in a lace collar and a dark blue tailored pantsuit? The blonde woman laughed. Angry as he was, Tom did too. The ball-bat grandma didn’t like it.

She confessed primly, “I guess I made a mistake. I suppose you’ll want to call the police?”

The blonde woman, the one whose return to the scene of her attempted crime had saved Tom from a brutal bludgeoning, stopped grinning and went pale on hearing this. “I have to go,” she mumbled.

“Wait,” Tom implored her. Then to his attacker, “I’m not calling anyone. Go home now and I’ll forget all this. Done deal?”

She looked at him quizzically. “You will?”

“Yes.”

“Well, good enough then.” She started for her bat, but Tom crossed in front of her and put a foot on it. “I keep this.”

“Lizzie won a tournament with it.”

“I’m sorry.” Tom was not at all sorry.

“Yes, I can really see you are. It sure looked like the same little shitbox car, Mr. Matthews. If you change your mind about keeping my bat, bring it to the Chamber of Commerce office down the block and ask for Mildred. I do appreciate you forgetting all of this.”

The old woman walked away. It seemed
nobody
in New Range ever wanted to call the cops.

Chapter Three

“Golly, I didn’t realize it, but you’re gorgeous,” gushed the big blonde.

“Huh?” said Tom as he turned back into the alley and saw her in the shadows against the wall, rolling a reefer.

“Well, you could be taller, but man, your body looks perfect.” A lighter was somehow extracted from breathtakingly tight purple jeans. She sat against the grocery store wall and purred, “Want a drag?”

He did actually, but he was struggling to be a good and more importantly anonymous Michigan citizen. And he was struggling to figure this latest companion out. “No. Thanks for the thing with the lady and the bat though. Who are you?”

“Danielle, but you can call me Dani. It’s nice to see a man around, not just these college kids. You’re old.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I meant past twenty-two and that’s a good thing. I’ve checked out the few grown men under fifty in this burg. You’re the pick of the litter. Are you living in town?”

For some reason, self-pity probably, he told her. “I wish. No, I’m moving into a Quonset hut at the edge of the Tech campus, a big brown tin can. The room is like a walk-in closet. It’s not going to work for me. I’ve got to get out of there.”

“So leave.”

“Yeah, right. I signed a lease that gives the university the high cards as long as I’m enrolled. And go where? All the kids are here and there’s no housing left. My little Camel-smoking roommate would have to burn the place down for me to get out of it. It all sucks.”

“Oh well, you don’t like your dorm room. Big frigging deal. My whole life sucks all of a sudden, and it used to be damn good. Sure you won’t take a puff?”

He shook his head, ashamed of his whiney outburst of self-pity. His back hurt. He sat down, not too close to her. What was the deal with her and Grant? “So where did you come from, was it the back door of the grocery store?”

“Why do you care?”

“I just figured maybe you worked for Grant, that’s all.”

“No, I don’t work for Gary.”

“But you just called him Gary so you know him, right? Do you and he get along?”

She eyed the baseball bat. She leaned toward him and griped, “You ask too many questions,
Robert Matthews
. You need to chill. Sure you don’t want me to roll you one, mellow you out? We could get out of this alley and have some fun together.”

He was tempted. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had fun, couldn’t afford to think of having fun. He should just walk away now. But it was driving him crazy how no matter what happened around here, everyone wanted to hush it up. “No thanks. We were talking about you and Gary Grant,” he persisted.

It made her angry. “No,
you
were talking about Gary; I was trying to talk about you and me.” She rose with unexpected swiftness, walked past the Nash and disappeared behind the buildings. The beagle gave up on the garbage can and came over to sniff at Tom’s crotch. He patted its head absently.

****

The sun was brushing the western horizon as Tom passed a well-groomed lakeside park. There was little industry here and so there was no haze to filter a sunset. It was near-blinding and he didn’t pull off to watch it. He didn’t like watching sunsets alone. He found a gas station pay phone on the way back to campus and tried to call Claire in California. If she had gone straight home from work she might be there to pick up. She wasn’t.

He stopped at a drive-in and lingered over a cheeseburger, fries, and coffee. Being lonely didn’t mean he was willing to end the day with the Massachusetts roommate. Maybe he’d grossed the boy out sufficiently on one encounter so that he’d be gone. Their meeting had been long ago, back when Tom still had a fine Cutlass coupe instead of an English roller skate. It had been back when he had a shoulder undamaged by a car crash, a back untroubled by having lifted a monster china cabinet off of a foolish girl, and no senior citizen trying to brain him with a Louisville Slugger. Long, long ago, maybe five hours.

How to ditch the roommate? Faking disgusting personal habits could take a while. He could come on to the kid, but Tom wasn’t sure of the boy’s own preferences, like,
Vivaldi
for cripes sake. He could try to get him expelled. No, he couldn’t; he wasn’t that desperate yet.

The cheeseburger was fine. The food around Houghton was good considering the students didn’t have a lot of options. The local population, generally underemployed or modestly paid, demanded value for their hard-earned money and held the standard up. He got a coffee refill and then another.

He had to wait to exit the drive-in parking lot as a battered pick-up truck with a volunteer fireman raced by, little siren screaming. Tom admired people who would do that. The danger to person was not insignificant. Maybe he’d follow it and watch the fire? It would postpone dealing with the roommate. No, he was exhausted and he wouldn’t do that either.

He pulled out and headed for the Quonset hut. Diligent use of the gears got him up to fifty-five miles an hour in about twenty-five seconds. Even though the car handled badly, he grimly held his speed until he rounded the last tree-shrouded curve before the campus.

The first thing he saw was the big fire truck parked in the lot not far from where he’d had his Cutlass earlier in the day. The dude who had sped past the diner was racing to it. Flames were coming from the side (if Quonset huts could be said to have sides) of the building, from his side of the building, and meeting a wall of water from the pumper truck. Good thing he’d never unpacked. He stood and watched as the firemen contained and then extinguished the flames. A number of young men, most likely students housed in the Quonset hut, had gathered and were chattering excitedly.

A man that had been shouting orders and who, judging from his age, attitude, and belly size, was probably in charge, walked close to Tom.

Tom caught his eye. “I was about to move into a room in that building. Were there any injuries?” He was thinking now of his Boston roommate.

“Only one. The boys were gone because there was a free folk music thing on campus. There was one fellow in there, in the second room who took some smoke.” He pointed to what had almost been Tom’s window.

“Skinny kid from Massachusetts?”

“Not hardly. It was a fat guy near forty, I’d say. They took him to that ambulance over there a few minutes ago. He had no ID on him, just a sports page from a Los Angeles newspaper, of all things. Does any of that sound familiar?”

Tom felt a deep chill in the warm August night, in the heat of the fire. He shrugged nonchalantly. “No one I’d know.”

Another fireman called to the man with the belly. “Chief, our smoke victim is gone. Herman left him for a minute, and he disappeared from the ambulance.”

“Why the hell would he do that,” complained Chief Belly irritably.

Tom figured
he
knew.

People of all ages were gathering, a crowd a fat West Coast hit man could melt into and slip away. A campus security officer arrived waving his arms and the students gathered round him. Tom joined them as the security man cleared his throat for a self-important little speech. “Settle down, fellows, and listen up. That place is full of smoke and water. No one sleeps there tonight.”

“Can we get our stuff?” fretted a freckle-faced kid who looked to be about fifteen.

“A fireman will take you in to get what you need for tonight in about ten minutes, unless you were in one of the two rooms with the actual fire.”

“Where do we all sleep?” a chubby lad with a Deep South accent asked the security guy.

“I’ve got some vouchers here for the hotel, and a bus coming, but there’re still a lot of parents staying in town. Even doubling you up, there’s not enough rooms open there for everyone. We do have a couple other locations out of town. So if any of you have a vehicle, I need to talk to you first.”

Tom had a vehicle, sort of. And if a visitor from Los Angeles had been waiting in his dorm room, survived the fire, and was well enough to climb out of an ambulance and disappear, he was in trouble. “I have a vehicle,” he told the campus cop.

The security man noticed his tattoo and his face lit up. “You a vet?”

Tom noticed the American Legion lapel pin. “Right,” he affirmed.

“Good man. You’ll be the best housed of this bunch. It’s my sister-in-law’s niece’s really big old place in New Range. Lucky for you one of her girlfriends was around here watching the fire and suggested it to me. You want it?”

Good question. How many “really big” houses could there be in New Range? He remembered one. Did he want to stay with mousy Robert Matthews and the Beth woman who had seemed to read him as trouble and struggled with his car being left there? He capitulated. “I guess.”

“You got it, then. Here’s the address and the voucher. Can you find it?”

“Yes, I know about this place. It belongs to a Beth Kessler, right?”

The security man must have noticed his lack of enthusiasm. He assured Tom, “That’s her name. Look, you’ll be fine there. Beth’s all right. There’s nothing to those stories about her trying to assault President Nixon. Hell, her father is a Legionnaire.”

The Kessler woman had tangled with the president? What was he in for? What other choice was there? Tom saluted him. “I’m on my way.”

He reviewed his situation as he drove to New Range. A man carrying part of an L.A. newspaper had found him here. That ended the hope of peacefully advancing his education in Michigan. He was going to
have to
go back and testify. He was going to have to figure out who in the law enforcement structure that had failed him he could trust. And he was going to have to stay alive long enough to do so.

****

The B&B was foreboding, lit only by a single yard lantern and the typically dim English headlights of the Nash. But its isolation was attractive to Tom in his situation. There was a light on in the front parlor, and presumably he was expected. He left the Nash at the front door, confident he would be the last arrival this evening, took two bags from the trunk, climbed the steps and rang the bell.

“Oh,” Beth Kessler said when she opened the door. “You’re the one with the lodging voucher?”

He handed it to her. She did not seem overjoyed to see him. He confessed, “I’m afraid so. I hope you don’t need any more furniture moved.”