Free Hiding Tom Hawk by Robert Neil Baker

hundred people, including most of the village council, in a town this size. It lets me run my other operations with only a reasonable requirement for discretion. Hey, I made tea twenty minutes ago. Do you want some?”
    “No, I’m good, thanks. But if you don’t need me for this store or your pizza business, just exactly what do you need me for?”
    “There are several more technical things. I’m interested in buying some mineral rights. I need an engineering guy involved.”
    “I’m not a mining engineer or a metallurgist.”
    “No, but you’ll be able to understand what those types are saying a lot better than I can. Another big thing, and you’ve got to keep this secret, is I’m planning to build a gambling casino.”
    “So you need an architect and maybe a civil engineer. I’m a mechanical engineer, no more.”
    “You’re a wet blanket, is what you are. I can’t afford to hire a cast of thousands. I need one general purpose guy who can interpret all the technical bull crap for me.”
    “Is Robert doing any technical work for you?”
    “Lord no, he’s fine with keeping the books, but asking him to do anything else practical is like asking pigs to fly. You’ll be my main man now, my tech guru. I’m going to call you Tomahawk .”
    Tom had been waiting for that one, wondering why it took so long for someone in Houghton to do it. He was working up a sickly grin when there was a loud banging on the grocery store’s front door. A familiar voice cried, “Gary, let me in!”
    Gary got up wearily. “Robert is back,” he sighed, maybe to Tom, maybe to no one at all. He went to the front of the store and unlocked the door.
    From the office, Tom saw Robert Matthews tumble into the grocery shop. “You’ve got to hide me. Those maniacs are going to scalp me.”
    “Come on back to the office, Robert. I’ve made tea,” said Gary, re-locking the door. Robert followed him meekly into the office, took the other straight chair, and the room became smaller. “I understand you and Tom Hawk have met.”
    “Oh, sure. What are you doing here, Tom? Is the Nash okay?”
    Robert’s lack of confidence in his English car was unnerving. “Yes, it’s still running”
    “Tom is working with us now,” Gary told him, giving him a mug of hot tea with President Nixon’s picture on it.
    Robert regarded the President’s image with loathing, but he sipped the tea.
    To Tom, Gary bragged, “Robert is my liaison to the tribal center. He’s one-quarter Native American, but his work has had its ups and downs. When he came here and took a job with me I was just putting together an investment deal with the tribe. I arranged for him to live there in my old travel trailer.”
    “But he doesn’t live there now.”
    “No, there was a little misunderstanding about Israeli war bonds I sold out there. Also, I’d convinced him to exaggerate his ethnicity a bit, tell them he was full-blood. They got suspicious when my fellow Young Republicans started sending Nixon/Agnew campaign mail to him in my trailer. The Indians are all McGovern people. Anyway, after the war bond thing collapsed, they checked up on his genealogy and found out he’s three-quarters German.”
    “Half German, one-quarter Dutch,” corrected Robert.
    “Uh-huh. They got real mad about the bonds. They rolled my trailer into a ravine and he had to move to a rooming house here in New Range. The trailer thing was really no big deal.”
    “No big deal? I was inside!”
    “It was a piece of crap, that trailer. Anyway, we patched all that up with the tribe. I got them fifty cents on the dollar back on the war bonds. Today, when I was called down to the courthouse at the last minute about some other misunderstanding, I sent Robert out to the reservation to update the tribal elders on a mineral rights deal. Why did that upset them, Robert?”
    Robert looked uneasily at the open door, his path of escape blocked by Tom. “I got confused, Gary. I mentioned the