“As many as you like, Renada.”
“Done.” They shook hands solemnly. Renada made a sort of a bow and was out the door.
Robert came in swinging his ball bat. He bubbled, “Beth, I have an idea, a simple way to wire the house to set off an alarm if there is an intruder. I can get the parts from one of my pizza customers. He can’t pass differential equations to save his ass, but he’s a whiz with electrical hardware.”
Beth was skeptical. Still, what harm could it do? Anything was better than him marching about outside the place with the bat. Sooner or later he’d be seen, and there would be hell to pay explaining it to the neighbors. Better to keep him close to the house with a project that might calm him down.
“What will it cost me?”
“It’ll be peanuts. I’ll start with that cellar door that you worry about.”
“Can you really do electrical work?”
“Sure. I’ve got a book. And this math client will help me if I get stuck. I’ll need your station wagon to get some stuff.”
“I suppose it’s all right. Please do alarm the cellar door first.”
“Super.” Beaming, he was gone before she could speak again. There was a sweet innocence to Robert. She felt bad that Renada had so little warmth for him. Actually, Beth might be imagining it, but the German woman seemed to have become interested in Wyatt Stone. Who was he, really? Why was he so vague about his degree program and classes? Why did he deflect personal questions as though West Coast gangsters were after
him
?
She headed for his room. This was getting to be a habit. But her life was filling up with assaults, kidnappings, and a murder/drowning. She had a right to know who was in her house. Nothing in Wyatt’s bedroom was out of the ordinary until she opened a drawer in the old student desk stuck in the far corner of the room. There she found a small notebook. It listed the Quonset hut room Tom had been burned out of. It had a reasonably accurate written description of Tom. There were downstate telephone numbers, including a couple for police agencies. Wyatt was not a student; he was something quite different. And now suddenly he seemed dangerous.
She returned to her bedroom, closed the door, picked up the telephone, and called the grocery store. Tom answered, “Grant’s Grocery.”
“Tom. Thank God. We need to talk. Is Wyatt with you?”
“No.”
“Good. Tom, he may be with the people trying to kill you. I found some very strange stuff in his room.”
“Aw, damn it, him too? Why am I not surprised? Can you come down here?”
“I’m on my way.”
****
Tom hung up the telephone and tried to look casual as he wandered up to the front to take a fresh look at Wyatt Stone, the latest threat. He stared nonchalantly out the window waiting for Beth to show. As he watched for her, he saw Gary pass in his Thunderbird, headed for his usual parking spot.
Then he saw the green Suburban from yesterday park across the street one door down. Harvey and Marvin Sartorelli went into the hardware store. He stood stock still, mesmerized, until the tinkling of the doorbell roused him. Gary.
“You feeling well, Tomahawk? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I need to talk to you.” He motioned him to the far front corner of the store, still a scant twenty-five feet from Wyatt.
“We can go to the office.”
“‘No. I need to watch out this window too. And I need you to get rid of Wyatt while we talk.”
“Geez. Big secrets.” Gary turned to Wyatt. “Hey, kiddo, go to the storeroom and see how much canned asparagus we’ve got.”
Wyatt threw him a puzzled look, but walked to the back.
“Okay, why so mysterious, Tommy boy?”
Tom told him.
Gary leaned close to him and lowered his voice to say, “Do I understand this? The mob is after you, not the cops, but you don’t trust the cops? One of the mobsters died in or near the river behind Beth’s place the other night after scuffling with Beth? Dani was tied to the crooks herself?”
“Yes.”
“And this dippy red-headed kid, Wyatt, is part of it?”
“I’m not sure. It starts to look like it, but I need to talk to Beth. She’s coming here. He has some involvement, but maybe not as part of the gang that Dani was in.”
“He doesn’t actually look much like some Mafia hit man.”
“Dani’s sure he isn’t, but I don’t know. I don’t know why he’s here.”
“Dani is a hot-tempered airhead. And with what you’ve told me today, I don’t trust her. Do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, not to worry, we can handle it. There’s only been the fat guy and this kid Wyatt, right?”
“No, I wish. Tony’s twin brothers are across the street in Art’s Hardware right now.” Tom kept watching the hardware store intently. “They’ve shown no interest in this place yet. When they come out, I need to follow them and learn where they’re staying.”
“I get it. And…?”
“There’s where I need your help. I also need to find out what Wyatt is up to, if he’s with them or not. His half shift is up in ten minutes. I need you to keep him here until I come back. But I don’t know how you are going to do that.”
“No problem. We’ll use my document room, the old walk-in freezer.”
“You mean you’ll lock him up?”
“Yup, it’ll be an accident. Like I said, the place is super-insulated. Once he’s secure in there, he can scream his head off and never be heard. If we find that he’s really dirty, you and I can have a discussion with him through that little window.”
“How will you get him in there?”
“The kid is curious, too curious, I think now. I’ll tell him the freezer room is the core of my operation. I’ll have to show him the locked file cabinets and he’ll walk right in.”
“I guess it might work. You capture him and we find if he’s part of our opposition. What if he won’t talk?”
“Ah, there’s the beauty part, Tomahawk. The refrigeration still works. I can make it twenty-eight degrees in there. He’s wearing a polo shirt, sandals, and Bermudas. He’ll talk. Hey, are those your guys coming out of the hardware?’
Tom turned and saw Harv and Marv bobbing down the three stairs of the place on short, heavy legs. “Yes. I have to go. Watch for Beth.”
“Done. You run along and find their lair. We’ll have a chat with young Wyatt when you get back.”
The last thing Tom heard was Gary calling to Wyatt. “Hey kiddo, forget about finding the asparagus for a minute. I have something real interesting to show you before I go to my settlement meeting at the courthouse.”
Chapter Eleven
Tom followed the Suburban onto still another country road he had not yet noticed, having to stay well back. There were all these neat hilly curving roads, great for sports cars, and he was driving a clumsy antique sedan.
The road twisted its way steadily toward Lake Superior, the patches in the asphalt becoming numerous and crude as the road narrowed. From the odometer and Robert’s dime store dashboard compass, they had to be getting close to the lake, and Tom imagined he could smell the water. He almost had to stop the Plymouth dead as Harv and Marv slowed their car to a crawl and then turned right onto a narrow lane. Tom found an old mining trail on the other side of the road and parked the Plymouth. He checked Renada’s gun and raced up the lane after the brothers.
Crossing a low rise, he saw the Suburban had driven down onto a wide expanse of artificially flat land that he guessed was a depository of old mining waste. The brothers drove carefully through a narrow gate in a peeling wooden fence and pulled up close to an old cabin. It was a saggy, soggy-looking affair sitting under high tension power lines, with the wires casting a set of thin shadows on the faded green asphalt shingle roof. It was hard to imagine in this wilderness where the lines had come from or where they were going, but they made the cabin less desirable looking, if that could be possible. The site did come with a spectacular view of Lake Superior. If this was California and that was the Pacific, this would be a half-million dollar property awaiting a million dollar house.
He watched from behind a giant poplar. The smell of wild raspberries reminded him that he was overdue for lunch. His stomach growled, and to add insult to injury, Harv and Marv were lugging groceries from the Suburban into the cottage. Either they were prodigious eaters, or they expected to spend a long time finding and killing him. He preferred explanation number two.
What now? Dani’s words had been
kill or be killed
. There were milder variants of that, like
fight fire with fire
. That would be a favorite of hers. He wasn’t ready to kill these guys in cold blood or burn them out. Could he wear them down? Slow them down? The cottage had a low hanging, easy to reach and cut telephone line. Their only other link to the world was the car. Disable before you got disabled. Keep them here while he went back to town and got Dani, maybe Gary too, maybe Beth. Disable the car first, then the phone.
He crept to the Suburban. No hope of getting the distributor out without being heard. But the right side tires, the side of the car away from the cottage, held more promise. The Suburban would only have one spare tire for two flats. He knelt and ever so gently opened the right rear valve stem, the hissing of the escaping air sounding like a hurricane to him. Finally the tire was flat. Now do the same thing for the front. After that he would cut the phone line and go to town and get the cavalry. It was six miles back to the phone booth outside that junkyard posing as an antique shop, a two hour walk for a couple of portly boys from the coast. And that walk would begin only after they noticed the Suburban had a problem.
A snuffling sound to his left alerted him as he reached for the right front valve cap. He turned and saw a seriously overweight black bear, not thirty feet from him. The bear was looking at him with hungry eyes. Tom reached for Renada’s petite pistol, but realized it would take all six shots to stop the bear, if he could stop it at all. The first shot would bring Harv and Marv streaming out of the cabin with real guns. He would be caught between two types of furry adversary.
He extended his arms trying to look large and formidable and started walking backward toward the power line tower. The bear eyed him curiously but did not move immediately. Then it snuffled again and took a tentative step toward this 195 pound California snack. Tom snarled at him, surprised that his voice was as loud and firm as it was. The bear hesitated. Tom backed up as fast as he could, arms flailing. Just as the big animal started for him, he backed into something hard—the power tower.
In nanoseconds he was twelve feet up the tower with a couple of small climbing cuts to his hands. The bear’s claw had grazed the heel of his sneaker but he was out of its reach. Bruno snorted in disgust, then relaxed patiently onto its haunches and regarded him curiously.
He might be safe for the moment but he stuck out like Raquel Welch quarterbacking an NFL huddle. He was clearly visible to anyone looking out of the cabin. Hopefully, if Harv and Marv peered out at all, it would be over the lake toward the approaching storm. Lightning flashed over the rapidly darkening water and there he dangled, on a giant lightning rod. The bear growled at him so he moved up another three feet.
When the rain came it was torrential. He felt he was about to be washed from the steelwork into the gaping mouth of the animal, which was now fourteen feet tall in his imagination. He tried to clamber yet higher, closer to the lightning, but the steel was slippery and it was all he could do to maintain his position. The bear seemed to be grinning at him, and if the brothers saw him, they would be laughing their asses off. His first sally of taking the war to the enemy was not going well.
After five minutes of being pelted by the downpour, the beast made a half-hearted snort, which was almost lost in the storm, and ambled off to the forest, resigned to disassembling Tom on a less inclement day. Tom slid down the tower with one eye on the cabin and ran full out to the Plymouth. Safely inside, he stored the pistol under the seat, realizing for the first time how truly beautiful Robert’s faded and scarred mouse hair upholstery and scratched-up steel dashboard were. It took a few seconds to drop his heart rate to about three hundred and he hit the starter, remembering its reluctance in Mildred’s driveway. This time, the boat anchor flathead six fired at once.
Lake Superior sometimes made its own coastline weather and it hadn’t rained in town. As he parked behind Grant’s store, he saw a man, a heavy-set middle-aged male with close-cut platinum blonde hair, leaning against a nearby delivery van. Tom had a photograph of this man. This was Renada’s psychotic boyfriend. He turned his back to Horst to open the Plymouth hood, thankful these old tanks had no inside release, and bent over the engine so he could watch the German from the corner of his eye while buying some time to think. But Horst started toward him.
There was no time to get Renada’s gun from under the car seat. So start with a bluff. He doesn’t know me from Adam. Get him off guard and take him down. Maybe he could be enticed to look into the engine compartment until Tom got Renada’s gun out of the car. He shouted at the engine, “You damned piece of crap. I need all six of your miserable cylinders firing, understand?”
“You have trouble with your motor?” Horst inquired in lightly accented English.
“I’ll say. I don’t have my glasses. Can you look in here and see if a spark plug wire is busted?”
“Of course. Perhaps you will step back a bit.”
This was going to be too easy. Tom moved back with one hand casually on the hood, ready to fold it over a commie skull. But as Horst got to the front of the car, he did not look into the engine compartment, but kept his attention on Tom. He said, “I see the problem. Come to my van with me. I have just the tool we need to fix this.”
“What the hell do you mean? You haven’t looked at anything yet. I don’t understand.”
The German reached behind his back and pulled out a large and nasty-looking automatic. “You may understand this.”
Tom felt a tad less clever. “I’ve got hardly any cash on me. This car barely runs.”
“I do not care about your money or whatever this curious thing is that you have the misfortune to drive. Walk to my van. If you do one bad move or make a sound, I shoot you in a leg. If you try to turn on me, I shoot you in the chest.”