Read Online Hiding Tom Hawk by Robert Neil Baker - Free Book Online Page B

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 back 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