Hiding Tom Hawk (20 page)

Finally, “We’ve got three problems. Several people are after Tom. At least one guy is after Renada and thus Robert. We don’t know who was killed in the fire or how. But maybe we can make some of that work for us.”

“Go on.”

“Here’s the story we’ll tell. I hired Tom to start today. We present him as kind of a drifter. He’s no one to anybody around here except the people in this house. We say that soon after I sent Tom away on an errand, an unpleasant, wild-eyed German calling himself Horst came to the grocery store looking for him when you and I were there. He seemed to really have something against our boy and we warned Tom when he returned. He, seemingly a brave and resourceful guy, told us not to worry, that he would take care of himself. We both had to leave the store after that. Before either of us returned, it burned. We fear this German came back, overpowered Tom and burned the store, killing him.”

“Tom died, not Wyatt?”

“Yes. Wyatt was nearly Tom’s height. He was thin but not small, so the bones will be similar size to Tom’s and there probably isn’t much tissue left. Even with a detailed autopsy, our elderly medical examiner, who likes scotch more than you do, may not achieve identification for many days, if ever. No one will continue looking for Tom, who is dead. Everyone will be looking for the mysterious German. The pressure will be off all of us.”

Beth frowned, scratched her head, and smiled. “Gary, that’s sheer genius.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s a tiny problem, though. Tom can’t testify against Tony if he’s dead. Tom needs to be in a California courtroom in a week or so.”

“Oh.”

They sat staring at each other for a minute, and then a second minute. Finally Gary spoke. “Here’s how we do it. He stays hidden here for a couple days while we do what we can to disguise him. Then he flies back to California to testify. He tells the authorities Harv and Marv found him here, which they did, except he says he says he first saw them the morning he was hired at my store and bugged out. That was before the fire.”

Beth protested, “But we will have told everyone it was Tom who died in the fire.”

“No, we’re going to tell everyone
we think
it was Tom who died in the fire. When he turns up safe in California it will be obvious we were wrong.”

“What about Wyatt? If he worked for them, won’t they miss him?”

“Dani says there’s no way he was one of Tony’s own people. He was local talent. They’ll think he’s lying low after doing an arson murder. It’s damn near perfect.”

“Three people in the other room know that Tom’s alive.”

“Sure, I know. Dani has every incentive to play along. She needs Harv and Marv to go home too. Robert and Renada will be a lot safer with the cops all hunting Horst.”

“Gary, it’s brilliant. Let’s go and explain it to the others.”

The others had Tom on a parlor sofa with his eyes closed, smiling, snoring softly. It went surprisingly well. The plan was unanimously approved save for Tom, who was sound asleep. Beth and Gary headed to the police station to end Tom’s life and launch the manhunt for Horst.

Chapter Thirteen

The next morning Tom hurt more from Horst’s injections than his shoulder or his back injuries. He struggled to concentrate as he listened skeptically while Beth and Gary outlined the whole business before breakfast. “I’m dead?”

“Yes, in a tragic fire,” moaned Gary. “We explained to the authorities how you were a brand new employee, alone in the grocery store yesterday when it burned. Since you lived here at Beth’s house, she backed me up on how excited you were about your new job. We miss you already. You were a bit full of yourself, but basically a good guy and it’s very sad. They have the body of a young male nearly your height, courtesy of Wyatt Stone, and everyone can quit looking for you now.”

“And what do I have to do?”

“You lay low here for three days while we change your looks. Your beard already has a day’s growth so don’t shave. Beth will get some dye for your hair. I wish I could give you a new set of identification documents, but all that stuff went up in the fire.”

“Do I get a Groucho Marx nose and glasses?”

“Whatever gets you safely back to California to testify and put Tony Sartorelli in prison.” Gary leaned back in smug satisfaction. Beth nodded her head in agreement.

“I still don’t know if I like it. I don’t like cowering here for days. I should move around and make sure Tony’s brothers aren’t still looking for me.”

Beth scowled at him. “No. Dial down the testosterone. Follow our plan.”

It wasn’t a terrible plan. He had no alternate proposal that made as much sense. “Okay. I agree. Thanks, both of you.”

Gary and Beth nodded, and Beth added, You are welcome.”

Tom asked, “Do we need to get rid of Wyatt’s personal belongings?”

“Oh, good catch, yes,” said Gary. They went to Wyatt’s room. It had been cleaned out.

Tom was surprised. “He must have snuck everything out before I took him to the grocery store.”

“Wow. See, he was ready to kill you and scoot. Horst did you a favor by carrying you off, Tomahawk.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him when I see him. Wyatt’s room may be empty, but if he’s dead his car could still be parked near the store. That could be a problem.”

“Not if we get to it first. Beth and I will go and find it now. You stay in your room until we can fix up the storage room for you.”

Tom wanted to protest, to go with them, but he felt nauseous. He asked Beth for a painkiller and she said he shouldn’t take anything until whatever Horst had given him burned off. He found some anyway and took two.

****

Harold sat in the Northwest Lounge at O’Hare, willing himself not to look at his watch again. He’d had a couple hours sleep on the nighttime flight from Vegas to Chicago after threatening to punch the garrulous life insurance salesman in the center seat. Now he had an hour layover before the flight to Houghton, with an intermediate stop in Green Bay, for goodness sake. He had to get up there, take command, and sort this thing out. A call to Wyatt Stone had brought confusing news.

After their last telephone conversation, Wyatt had been unable to re-enter the burning building, turned back by the flames. Everyone thought Tom Hawk was dead in the fire but it could not be. His platinum-domed man had to have been the victim.

Who on earth could
he
have been? Tony employed no blond guys. Harold had no confidence that Wyatt knew what the heck he was doing. Convinced that Gary and perhaps others had tried to incinerate him, the lad had left the B&B and gone to a nearby campground. A campground; it figured. He was a Boy Scout, all right. Harold had no gun. With all these stupid Cuban skyjackings, airports had started searching luggage and the risk was too great.

His flight was called. As he headed for the gate, two Hare Krishna folks approached him with literature. In the old days, he would have stuffed it down the short one’s throat, but he merely told them he was already on the One True Path, thank you. That was cool and all but they asked him for money anyway. He told them the One True Path was still in Reverend Timmy-Bob’s storefront, whereas he understood they had a beautiful temple nearby in Wilmette. They shook their heads. That place belonged to Baha’i folks, not them, and they were really pinched for cash to build their own temple in West Virginia near Wheeling. He gave them five dollars.

****

Tom didn’t shave again the next morning, and he allowed Beth to dye his hair two shades darker. His beard was fast-growing and he already looked scruffy. His head was finally clear almost all of the time. He wore department store “value section” clothes Gary bought him locally, to make him look like some scruffy logger on his monthly trip to town. Gary had lost his own wardrobe in the fire and had gone fifteen miles to a fashionable men’s store in Calumet to discreetly buy
his
new clothes.

Tom had Beth leave a message on Claire’s home answering machine. They assumed she had fled herself, but Dani suspected Tony’s people would be monitoring the machine. The message explained that following Tom’s fiery demise, Beth had found Claire’s number among his paltry personal effects. She felt compelled to share the bad news with what she assumed was a past neighbor or friend of the late Thomas Hawk. In her grief, Beth failed to identify herself or leave her own number.

Listening to how smoothly she did all this, Tom was not sure she was as different a person from her cousin Gary as she liked to believe.

Horst had not been apprehended. Gary had surveyed those of his clients who were still speaking to him and gotten no word of anybody sighting him. Robert and Renada did everything they could think of for the common defense but dig a moat around the house. Robert worked on an alarm system for the doors and windows and consulted with a long-term pizza client, now in the seventh year of his undergraduate Electrical Engineering program.

Dani bounced in and out of a fit of depression, seeing herself as an angel of Angelo’s and perhaps Wyatt’s death and unable to find even a student romantically interested in her. Apparently (and it was another blow to Tom’s ego), she had seen Wyatt as an acceptable consolation prize if Tom had again rejected her the day of the fire. It was plausible from the way she expressed her grief that her relationship to Angelo had once been closer than she acknowledged. Nonetheless, she did her share of guarding the house, and when she wasn’t trying to flirt with Tom she was helping Beth with the chores.

They hadn’t located Wyatt’s car, and were worried that he had indeed been working with Harv and Marv. Beth had visited Tom late in the evening in the too-small storeroom where he was now living, if you could call it that. There had been no ropes, and they were under too much stress for it to be exactly magical.

With the incipient full beard itching, the dark hair being a repeated shock when seen in a mirror, and nothing else to focus on, Tom worried that he was sidelined and accomplishing nothing. His Marine pride was wounded. It did not help that the Chicago paper had a four-line item buried deep in its back pages stating that Tony’s trial was still officially planned, but the prosecution was hedging.

Tom decided as soon as he was well out of Michigan he’d call the prosecutor to say he was on his way to testify, and pray the guy wasn’t on Tony’s payroll. Brooding alone in the parlor, he was glad to have Gary breeze in to join him. The ex-grocer said, “Hey, you genuinely look like a local in those clothes I got you.”

“I hate plaid. I doubt you bought any plaid for yourself.”

“I chose
your
clothes so you’d blend in. I have an established, independent image: civic leader, entrepreneur, forward thinker.”

“Bullshitter, you mean.”

“Watch your language in my cousin’s house. Your new persona is a non-descript woodsman, and I have outfitted you appropriately.”

“What do you want, Gary?”

Gary grew serious. “Is Beth around?”

“No. She’s in town.”

“I know we told you to lay low for another day or so, but I desperately need you to see Mildred again. You look a lot different. All the cops are busy looking for Horst, so I think it’s pretty safe.”

Tom doubted the safety part, but chafed at his confinement. “I’m going nuts here. What is it?”

“I’ve absolutely got to have Mildred’s mineral rights for the tribe so I can move on to the casino project with them. You’ve got to get them for me. You’re the only one whose guts she doesn’t hate.”

“Is that so? Has your great aunt come after
you
with a Louisville Slugger recently?”

“That’s ancient history. Compared to me and Robert, she adores you.”

“You can’t get money anywhere else?”

“No. The fire insurance people will take forever to pay me. They don’t like the part about finding your body in the ashes, and say they worry that your heirs are going to sue me. You’d think they’d insured you, not my store. The skids are greased. I got our twerp cousin to admit to Mildred that he lost the Nash to Robert in a poker game. He’s a long-time pizza customer.”

“Does this mean you’re ready to buy Mildred’s property outright, not just the mineral rights?”

“Sure, once I have the insurance money. But who knows how long that will be? For now I have to get her to take seventeen grand and a piece of the casino as a down payment. She can live in the house rent-free until I can pay the whole hundred grand.”

“Gary, Mildred wants to move to the ocean and drive a sports car. I thought you had to do the mineral rights deal with the tribe before the elders would work with you on the casino.”

“True, but Mildred doesn’t know that, Tomahawk.”

“I don’t know. You’re asking me to help you trick your own aunt.”

“Great aunt. She tried to kill you with Beth’s ball bat.”

Did he say “Beth’s bat”? Oh: “Lizzie” was written on the bat. Lizzie, Elizabeth, Beth. Why hadn’t Tom figured that one out? He said, “Mildred’s dating the Chief. What if she asks him where he’s going to let you put the casino?”

“She won’t, because you will explain to her that it will be right here at Beth’s B&B. Tell her she can’t mention it to the Chief at all, because he’s such a Puritan. He is, you know.”

“But the casino has to be on tribal lands.”

“Mildred won’t know that either. Besides, I plan to make this place into tribal lands.”

“Does Beth know what you’re doing, the part about putting a casino in her house?”

“Damn, but you get hung up in the
details
of a deal, don’t you Tomahawk. We take this thing one step at a time and today we just need the mineral rights. Try to see the big picture here.”

It was hard with so much smoke being blown. But Tom would do anything to get out of the house for a few hours. He didn’t need to actually succeed today. He would set his own limits as to how much he would mislead Mildred. “How big a piece of the casino will I offer her?”

“It doesn’t matter, because in the long run it isn’t going down that way. But don’t go over thirty percent or she’ll get suspicious.”

“I’ll need to use your Thunderbird to go out to her place.”

“Ah, that brings us to the nice surprise Robert and I have for you. Your Nash is fixed. The mechanic brought it back and it’s in the driveway. They re-painted the whole front end.”