The pair up front moved their faces closer together and the Amazon’s gun hand shook as they hissed at each other. Grant was going to get himself shot. Tom needed a weapon, but all he had was the twenty-four ounce can of ravioli still held in his hand. (He really was going to have to learn how to cook.) He crept up the aisle toward the front, closing on them silently, grateful that he was in the sneakers that had been on his feet when he’d fled Phoenix.
Grant scowled at her. “This is nuts. You’ll be lucky if there’s eighty dollars in this register.”
“I’ll take it. Then we’ll go back to that broom closet office of yours and I’ll take what’s there.”
“You’ll still have less than a hundred and fifty. See how far that gets you. Either give me time to make things right or just shoot me, you stupid, hormonal female.”
“You know, since you offer a choice, I think for a hundred and fifty bucks I’d rather shoot you.”
The eagle-beaked grocer’s eyes flickered as he saw Tom come up behind the woman.
Tom raised an eyebrow to silently ask, “Is she a real threat? Should I take her out for you?”
Grant nodded almost imperceptibly and his eyes pleaded,
Yes, do it
. To keep the woman focused on him, he leaned closer to her. “You’d better make damn sure you leave me dead if you pull that trigger. Nobody bullies Gary Grant without getting paid back, nobody.”
She was momentarily immobilized by his improbable fierceness. It was now or never. Trying to gauge the force of the blow so as to drop her without cracking her skull, Tom swung the ravioli down on the crown of her head. She collapsed with an eerie grace, the fall more like a deflating balloon than the thud of a large person being felled. He feared he’d hit her too hard, and waited to see blood pooling in her hair, but he had not broken the skin.
Prone on the floor, her face went slack, and she looked beautiful and wickedly desirable. Tom stepped back as the foolishly hot-headed Gary Grant rushed around the counter, bent over her and took the gun.
“My God, that was fine work. Thank you, man! She had really wigged out.”
Tom knelt and took her pulse. It was strong.
She
looked strong. He guessed she would be out for only minutes. “She’ll come around soon. You should call an ambulance.”
“Oh, sure, right away. How can I thank you?”
“Leave me out of it.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m going to go now. Tell any story you like, but don’t mention me. Not at all.”
“Oh. All right, you’ve got it, I promise.”
“Thanks.” Tom turned his back and started to walk out.
“Hold on,” Grant called.
Tom stopped, turned back. “What?”
“Come back tomorrow. I may have work for you after all.”
****
The next morning Tom was forced to move out of a too small but clean and inexpensive rented room in a drab old house two blocks from campus. He’d been able to stay there for a week, but today the student who had long ago signed a contract for the next two terms would arrive. The landlady, fifty-plus and dressing thirty, hugged him inappropriately and gushed that she’d like to keep him forever. He loaded his scant possessions in his treasured blue Cutlass 442 coupe and drove a few blocks to the housing office.
He needed to sign another scrap of paper and get the key to his dorm room. The number of times he’d had to give someone information that would help Tony’s people find him was depressing. Dorm room. Ugh. There was no other housing to be had. Demand from construction workers on a natural gas pipeline was strangling the usually tight local housing market. The housing office was supposed to be open, but a sign announced it was closed for another thirty minutes when he got there—no reason specified.
As he waited he brooded on the steps of the Student Union, inventorying his wallet. There was the fake Arizona ID stuff from the cops, which was worse than useless, and little else. Out-of-state tuition, while less than in Arizona, had taken nearly all his cash. Watching the confusion of young males around him, he realized ruefully that he did not look like one more new student. A marginally weather-beaten face and a too-short hairstyle betrayed the eight or nine years of age he had on the average undergraduate. There was the corps tattoo on his forearm, although he’d spotted a couple other guys with similar ones. He thought his more developed and hardened physique contrasted to the often slight and bookish lads around him, although Claire would dismiss that part as more of him being too full of himself.
A co-ed, a rare if not exotic creature at this male-dominated institution, passed close by him but did not smile. He was used to being smiled at by women, and unconsciously checked to see if he had shaved his tiresomely fast-growing beard. He had.
Twenty minutes passed and across from him a man opened the housing office. Tom rose slowly from the concrete step, noticing a tiny bruise where the deceleration force of the ravioli can meeting the blonde woman’s large and lovely cranium had been transferred to the fleshy part of his right palm yesterday. Had she really been a would-be thief, or simply someone who had a beef with Grant? The second possibility made him uneasy.
At the housing office he got another shock. “What do you mean, I’ll have a roommate?”
“We have only a handful of single dorm rooms, Mr. Hawk, and they’re all long gone. Candidly, you’re lucky we found you anything at all, coming in this late.”
Tom got a room key and left. The housing officer had told him this roommate had arrived two days ago and was comfortably moved in. He’d have to get rid of him. You couldn’t live a phony life in a shared room without eventually slipping up. If Tony and Company found him, the roommate was likely to get hurt like the paperboy. He went to find his room and get the kid to move out.
The assignment was in an “overflow housing unit,” one of three converted Korean War Quonset huts. The exteriors were offensively ugly, with low-set windows that by late February would likely be half-covered by the Copper Country’s annual three hundred and some inches of snow. Each hut had been painted a different earth-tone color, presumably to aid drunken undergraduates in finding their own bed early on a Saturday morning. His unit was furthest from the rest of the campus, and painted brown.
Tom left his few clothes and personal possessions in his car and went to inspect his new home. The small resident lounge where you entered the building and the long central hallway leading from it to the student rooms looked clean and well-maintained, but claustrophobia reared its nasty head. The hallway was narrow, with walls ready to converge and thoughtlessly crush you. You could see doors at each end, but you’d never make it once those walls started to move. The crowded common bathroom had one urinal, two showers, and three stalls in high metal walls. Little metal boxes, little traps; this would not be easy. He found his room two doors down from the lounge, door closed but not latched. An enormous peace poster was held to the door with
George McGovern for President
stickers at the top and bottom.
Tom hated both the Vietnam War and most of the people who were protesting it. A peacenik roommate might make the unpleasant thing he was about to do easier. He considered kicking the door open, but rejected it as melodramatic overkill. He knocked loudly.
“Enter,” trilled a fluty young male voice.
“Enter,” mouthed Tom, swearing silently. He opened the door and a minor nightmare awaited him. The room was small, for which he’d prepared himself, but it was also plastered with left-wing propaganda and pictures of film stars more famous for anti-war posturing than any acting talent. And it stank of cigarette smoke.
The smoker was easy to find. A scrawny owl of a kid was at a desk in an oversize turquoise sweatshirt. It displayed the name of some WASP prep school in a town he recognized as an old money suburb of Boston. The boy’s plaid Bermuda shorts were faded to such a degree that only a rich kid would wear them. He was listening to Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons
, a piece Claire had tried to teach Tom to like. The portable stereo case was covered with some pansy-assed fake leather grain.
What in God’s name was this delicate Eastern creature doing here among the sons of Midwestern engineers, auto workers, farmers, and iron miners? If this misfit had been here for over two days, why had no upperclassman run him off him already? Why had they left it for Tom to do? He belched loudly to set the tone for his little act as the kid turned to look at him.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m moving in. You don’t listen to that longhair crap all the time, do you?’
“Pardon me?” questioned the boy, bottle glass lenses concealing whether his first judgment of his large new roommate was that of contempt or disinterest.
“Turn off that funny music, Four Eyes. It makes my frigging teeth hurt. Are you queer, or what, listening to that garbage?” Tom was gratified when the boy stopped the record. He reached a hand down inside his pants crotch and scratched vigorously. “I’m Tom Hawk.” He withdrew the hand and offered it for a handshake, which was declined.
“I-I expected a freshman roommate. You’re really going to live here?” the kid squeaked in disbelief in a distinct Bostonian accent.
“Bet your ass, Junior. We’re going to have to move your desk so I can get my drum set and short wave set up. I’m a night owl so I need the bottom bunk. You
are
sleeping on top, right?”
“No, I’ve been on the bottom.” The kid reached nervously for a cigarette.
“You’ll move. Hey, I need one of them. I gave my last cigar to that hooker in Iron Mountain.”
“T-t-take the pack. I have to go somewhere.”
“Pick up some cigars for us and I’ll pay you. Oh, and knock before you open the door when you come back. I told this waitress at the Silver Saloon to come by.”
The boy fled in confusion. Tom felt curiously pleased with himself. After a lifetime of
You’re sure a nice guy
compliments, he could be a real jerk if he needed to. Maybe he should make it part of his hide-out persona. He deserved to have a
little
fun, didn’t he?
****
The dorm room had no telephone; that was in the lounge. It was about the only thing there not covered in cheap vinyl, and it was for local or incoming long distance calls only. But there was a public booth a hundred feet away across the parking lot against the side of the horrendously ugly, old Victorian-style metallurgy department building.
Tom got a Pepsi from the lounge vending machine and went to the telephone, where he stacked quarters on the shelf, but stood mostly outside the tiny booth. He dialed the only Arizona number he still regarded as safe. The time was three-thirty in Houghton so it was one-thirty in Scottsdale. Greg should be back from lunch, if this was one of the days when he was honoring an intermittent commitment to his faltering golf equipment business.
A deep, loud voice announced sonorously, “Golf Equipment Experts, how can we help you?”
“Greg, this is Tom. I’m in Houghton, I’m enrolled, and I can actually work on my master’s here if I want to. Thanks for putting me on to this place. It does feel like it’s the end of the world, though.”
“If you feel isolated now, you should see Houghton in winter.” Greg spoke unusually quietly, maybe a sign of fear. He asked Tom, “You’re still in one piece, then?”
“Yes. You said you owed me, now I really owe you, man. Thanks.”
“Sure. I’d be out of business and flipping hamburgers if you hadn’t gotten me hooked up with those fancy golf clubs. Tom, I’ve been following the papers about the dead jockey in the pizza oven. There’s speculation of a corrupt cop in this thing. I’m not sure you should come back to testify.”
“After what happened in Phoenix I’m not sure either. I’m trying to figure out if I think there’s a strong enough case against the Sartorellis without me.”
“So maybe this will blow over?” Greg sounded both hopeful and afraid.
“Yeah, maybe it will.”
Why further scare a friend who stuck his neck out
. “I may actually stay here and get a degree.”
“You could do worse. Tech has its own golf course. Give it a try. You could use the practice.”
“I might do that. Greg, I need one last favor. Could you telephone Claire at that work number I gave you and tell her I’ll call her when she’s home tonight?”
“I guess so.”
“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.” He hung up and looked back unhappily toward the Quonset hut with the small student rooms. His Cutlass was parked halfway between the hut and the telephone booth. It hadn’t been washed and looked it. Seven days of his landlady’s maple tree dripping crap on it hadn’t helped. Was he going to have to sell it to have enough money to eat?
He wanted to give the Massachusetts kid time to flee, so he wouldn’t unpack and move into the room yet. He would go back to New Range and see if Gary Grant had been sincere about giving him employment. He drove with the driver window down, forearm on the sill with his left hand holding the Pepsi. Coming up the last curving hill before the town and staying scrupulously under the twenty-five mile-an-hour limit, he tried to picture Claire. He was afraid it was getting to be so long that his memory cells were dying. Self-pity mixed with untimely arousal as Claire’s face morphed into that of the big blonde woman. What was that about? He was a pig. All men were…
A deafening sound blew both women from his mind. The force of a side collision tilted him toward the center of the car, and his right hand left the wheel as he felt the restraint of the lap belt. The Cutlass was going sideways, and Tom was being peppered with glass powder from the passenger door as the brown Pepsi drenched his beige trousers. He fought the steering wheel, trying to keep the car on his side of the road as the noise of the collision subsided with a last muted sound of twisting metal. He came to a stop on the gravel shoulder.
His hands balled instinctively into hard fists as he climbed out of his ruined car and saw the faded gray sedan that had hit him. A sign that said
G-G’S PIZZA
tumbled leisurely from the roof, and a grating screech followed as someone forced open the driver’s door of the dowdy old car. The driver was a prematurely balding male a couple years older than him maybe, vaguely resembling him maybe, although with hands pressed to his face in horror, it was a difficult call. When the hands came down, Tom made out a shirt pocket with a
ROBERT
name tag.