Gasoline

Inc.

Arne bolted for the GT

and opened the passenger door, jamming the door switch with a toothpick so the dome light was on for only a moment. Brower’s briefcase was on the rear floor, and he opened it. A pen light revealed several conventional electronic circuit boards and engineering drawings with the Drucker Motors title block. Who took stuff like that to go skiing? This might be a real assignment. Brower was up to something.

He considered and rejected as dumb taking the briefcase. If Brower was selling the company out, they had to know who the whiz kid planned to peddle his work to. Arne had just replaced the briefcase in the red car and reclaimed his toothpick when he saw Brower come out of the bathroom, look to his car in alarm and rush for the front door. He must have seen the second dome light flash. Arne beat a hasty retreat to his vehicle and torqued the ignition switch.

Brower reached his car and bent into the back seat. Arne watched him look slowly around as he carefully locked the red car. Then he looked over at Arne’s vehicle, paused for a moment, and started toward it, taking large, meaningful strides. Arne hit the gas, released the clutch, and cut the corner too hard, driving over the curb and the lawn, if that dismal bumpy patch of earth could be so dignified. It was the first time he’d taken the Jeep off-road.

Praise for Robert Neil Baker’s

HIDING TOM HAWK

As in the best comedies, the characters take themselves and each other seriously while the reader is cackling away… There are a few tender moments, but Baker mostly peppers his novel with improbable side plots and hilarious throw-away lines.

~*~

Pretty quickly readers will discover Tom’s sin against the mob, nothing at all to do with him being a bad guy. But who is? Hard to tell in this twisty fun ride, an intriguing take on the gothic mysteries of old, complete with a big old rambling mansion full of victims or bullies, which is what Tom needs to figure out.

Gasoline

by

Robert Neil Baker

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Gasoline

COPYRIGHT © 2017 by Robert N. Baker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com

Cover Art by Diana Carlile

The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

PO Box 708

Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

Publishing History

First Mainstream Historical Edition, 2017

Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1209-5

Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1210-1

Published in the United States of America

Chapter One

Arne Niemi stared at the little pink While You Were Out telephone message sheet and Mavis’s almost illegible handwriting, swore softly, and looked at his watch. There was still time to get this thing turned around. He raced out of his cluttered little office and down the hall, passing wall portraits of President Nixon and the new president of Drucker Motors Corporation, Jerome K. Drucker.

The latter was a poor likeness. The rumor was when his father, Hiram Drucker, died a few months ago, as the 1974 models came out, the frugal Board of Directors sent the old boy’s pictures out to be re-touched to represent his son. Both men were somewhat homely, so the Board probably figured it didn’t matter much.

Arne paused to collect his thoughts and square his shoulders before he finished the hundred and eighty feet to the Finance Department secretary’s desk, knowing how Mavis pounced upon any sign of weakness. He had a moment of false hope someone else was at her battle station today, but she’d only changed her hair color again to a sort of mauve. He forced a smile to unwilling lips. Hi there, Mavis; thanks for taking this message for me.

You should thank me. With two other secretaries, between me and you, only a company this screwed up would assign you to me. I don’t need to babysit guys a mile away. I got bad knees.

Poor girl; it was tragic, how treacherous joints malfunctioned after only being taxed to carry an oversized body to the cafeteria and vending machines. I know. I’m so lucky to have you.

Damn right you are. What is it that makes me the one who has to put up with you? What do you do in the Finance Department anyway, I’d like to know?

She wasn’t supposed to know, not that they’d have had a civil relationship if she did. Mavis, does this message sheet say Terry Madison wants to know if I have a map of the Upper Peninsula or of Iron City, and that Mr. Smith is sending him there?

Duh, that’s what I wrote isn’t it? Pretty boy has drawn an assignment in the snowdrifts. He must need a map bad if he’s asking you for one.

Okay, thanks. You have a nice day now.

Nice day. Man, how I hate that phrase, like it was possible in this dung heap of a car company. Do you and Madison work together, Niemi? I mean, if you actually do any work at all?

Arne had already walked away. He pretended not to hear her and headed straight for his boss, Jimmy Smith’s office. He could fix this, could be the one to go to Iron City. He hummed Secret Agent Man as he walked. His job was secret, sort of. His little work group, Corporate Integrity, was an in-house police force or detective agency. It did not show up on the company organization charts. Besides its five widely dispersed employees, Jimmy Smith claimed only president Jerome Drucker and half a dozen executives knew about it.

Jimmy had his door closed as usual. He was insanely proud of having an office with a door. Arne rapped sharply on the cheap wood panel and was rewarded with a snarled, Come. He turned the greasy knob and entered. Jimmy sat with his back to the far corner of the Spartan, cramped space. He always tried to sit facing the door of a room, out of a well-justified fear of assassins, Arne assumed.

Smith was a muscular but exceptionally pale-skinned man of about forty-five. His bright red hair had thinned badly, giving the top of his head a candy cane appearance. A noxious hairdressing clumped the strands and made the situation worse. Behind his back, most of his co-workers called him Old Glory, but Arne preferred Barber Pole. He wore his good power tie, the one without a coffee stain that he’d told Arne his wife bought before running off with the septic field guy. The tie probably meant Jimmy had seen someone important today. Morning, Jimmy.

Yeah, sure, morning, aren’t you the cheerful one? I told you not to come here without calling first. What is it, Niemi?

I understand you’re sending Terry Madison to the Upper Peninsula, to Iron City.

You know that? Crap, if the kid told you about it, does the whole company know?

Probably not, he wants to borrow a map from me.

Smith scowled more deeply. He needs a map. It figures. The Old Man told me I was getting a hot shot, but I’m not sure he could find his ass with both hands.

Arne’s opinion of his young co-worker was marginally better than that, but he jumped on this opening. The boy is green, and he’d be out of his element up there. Why don’t I go? I’m from that area, from the next county, you know.

Of course I know. I tried to find you first and I couldn’t. Madison got wind of this deal somehow and really wanted the assignment, so I tapped him.

Well, I’m here now. I can go instead.

Smith’s eyes narrowed. What’s up, Niemi? You never volunteered for anything in eight years.

Lord, it has been eight years. Arne had seniority among Smith’s underlings. He joined his group right after leaving the army early in 1966, returning from Vietnam before things got really messy. There’s a first time for everything. What’s the deal with Iron City? What’s up there for Drucker Motors?

He expected to be told it was none of his business and thrown out, but Jimmy motioned him into a lop-sided guest chair. The metal arms were sticky like Jimmy’s doorknob. It’s not what’s there. It’s who’s going there, one of our star employees. We’ve been ordered to watch him. The bosses wanted me to go myself, can you believe it? I had to tell them about this damned court appearance thing tomorrow afternoon.

Arne nodded sympathetically at this abused man, about to be dragged before a judge merely for braining another bar patron with a potted rubber tree. He waited while Smith took a deep breath before telling his story. "Okay, Niemi, there’s this Pete Brower down in engineering who is working on what are called, uh, microcircuits. He’s supposed to be some sort of electrical whiz kid. He’s been with us hardly two years, but his work has gotten the bosses’ attention big time. Yesterday he had a private meeting with Harold Nelson who runs Engineering and Mr. Drucker himself.

They think these tiny circuits are a big deal, so today they called me in. Jimmy basked in reflected management glory and idly flipped the end of his power tie. Me, I don’t see it. Little circuits are for transistor radios. What have they got to do with cars?

I’ve read about it. Experts think it’s our best hope to save a lot of gas. They’re going to put like a little computer right under the hood to think about how much gas and how much air the engine needs, and send the right amount for way better mileage. They say it’s the thing everyone in Detroit is after.

Well I say it’s half-baked science fiction. I think them things are for the space program, not cars. But our bosses think Brower’s got some circuit invention can do that. They want it for the ’75 model year. J. K. Drucker thinks it can save us from the oil embargo, from those damn Arabs who are robbing us blind.

He pronounced it A-rabs, and Arne winced. There was no prejudice the man lacked, no stereotype he didn’t subscribe to. So this Brower is a hero in the making. What’s that got to do with Iron City?

Brower’s been working crazy hours and the project is almost done, but suddenly he wants to run off to the Upper Peninsula, in March. March is all slush and ice there. Nobody goes there in March, do they? So the chiefs want him tailed to see what he’s up to.

Jimmy squirmed in his chair as they spoke as though he, not Arne, was the one with the ill-tempered hemorrhoid. Whatever his low opinion of microcircuits, something additional was troubling him, and Arne pounced. There’s something else, Jimmy. I believe you don’t think much of the circuit business, but something else is bothering you.

Smith glared at him. Maybe Arne had stepped over the line and would still get thrown out. But his boss’ face muscles sagged. What bothers me, Niemi, is Brower had lunch yesterday at a place across the street with a scumbag named Henry Bell. Bell was in the middle of that patent infringement lawsuit against us two years ago.

I remember. Jimmy, distracted at the time by fear his bookie had put out a contract on him, had taken unapproved, out-of-town vacation when he should have been investigating Bell. Management remembered, too.

Jimmy said, Henry Bell would grab these circuit gizmos and peddle them to the highest bidder. God but I hate that guy. So, the Bell meeting is what convinced me we do need a tail on Brower.

Okay, I can handle it.

And you’re really willing to give up the weekend for this?

Absolutely, I’m your man.

I really don’t want to send Madison, but he’s hot to go, and he’ll whine for a week if I take it away from him. Maybe I should just let him do it. I don’t want a problem.

Arne knew Jimmy’s potential problem. Terry Madison was a young, brash, over-dressed show-off, two months on the job. He’d come straight from the West Coast and some high-tech electronic outfit. He also had let it drop that he was from old money with family social ties to the Drucker clan. Jimmy had complained about this to Arne and admitted he was worried the boy knew Jerome K. Drucker personally. So, Arne figured he would have to find a way to handle the newest member of his little staff when he threw a fit over this.

Madison was a bad choice to go north. He was outrageously suntanned, a stronger statement of affluence for this time of year than his Rolex. He probably didn’t even own a plaid flannel shirt. Arne said, If this is a surveillance job, Madison will stand out too much up there.

Whereas you’ll fit in best, just another Finnlander, is what you’re saying.

That’s right.

Fine, you’ll go. Leave tomorrow when Brower does. Don’t lose sight of him, and don’t let anyone know you’re watching him.

Sure thing; what else do you know about this guy?

Not much. He’s smart, has a temper, and he may be a loner. He won’t talk about his time in Vietnam and there are some ugly rumors.

So you think he may have gotten a little screwed up over there.

Who didn’t?

Good point. Arne hated it when people asked him about ’Nam. He had to tell them all he did was process bills from crooked defense contractors and investigate them if they got too greedy. He had never been in combat and never wounded, unless you counted the lower opinion of mankind he left Saigon with. He shook off the memories—Smith was talking.

Smith’s eyes were cold, penetrating. Don’t let him slip away while you’re trying to hustle some woman.

If you only knew. Margaret Polich might be the woman. Count on me boss.

Yeah, I guess it’s come to that. He briefed Arne on where and with whom Brower worked at Drucker Motors. Then Arne left while he was ahead.

Holding a low opinion of the creativity and craftiness of Drucker Motors’ staff of simple and honest engineers, Arne was sure he was on a cakewalk. He was going, on company time and money, to Iron City, the town where his new girlfriend Margaret lived. He met her at a ski lodge near Marquette over Thanksgiving. He’d skied with her at other resorts four times since, twice near Traverse City, once in Wisconsin, and once in Ontario. The relationship was budding, but lately she could never get away from home. This was going to be so sweet.

****

After the meeting with Smith, Arne telephoned an adenoidal accountant named Warren Schultz who approved company business travel. He didn’t talk to him live since Schultz used one of those annoying new desktop answering machines to screen his calls. Arne left a message to say he was going to Iron City, so please advise if they cared if he used his personal vehicle. Then he took a call from Terry Madison, every sentence of which was X-rated. The kid must be terminally bored, to care that much about Arne replacing him on a wild goose chase to the north woods.

Of course in his case, Arne expected the trip to be a splendid pleasure junket. Still, it would be prudent to know more about Brower. Arne had one good contact in engineering in Joe, a guy he’d lost to at poker for three years. Arne always grinned through his defeats and paid promptly, so Joe regarded him as a prince among men. He called the card shark that was luckily at his desk.

Joe thought Pete Brower was an interesting character. He’d been a decorated Green Beret in Vietnam, but then after some hospitalization got some sort of special assignment and his story ended. Joe heard a rumor that the CIA put him to work assassinating Viet Cong operatives in the Strategic Hamlets, and he relished the task. Combining that with some mood swings and occasional temper outbursts led to a rumor of post-combat mental issues. Don’t be fooled by the choirboy face. The guy was strong, fast, and competitive. Joe had seen him in a pick-up basketball game.

Joe didn’t know the nature of Brower’s assignment at Drucker Motors, but knew he worked in a special locked laboratory. That was no problem. Jimmy Smith could get keys to everything. Joe told Arne he had to run. The entire engineering department was to have a special training meeting on reliability statistics or hygienic butt-scratching or something.

Thanks, Joe. Do you think Brower is going to this meeting of yours?

Everybody in Engineering is supposed to go. Look, Arne, this guy has issues. If he’s really up to something, don’t turn your back on him.

That didn’t scare Arne, but it didn’t make it seem like the whole trip could be a dalliance with Margaret either. He decided to have a look at Brower’s lab while the engineering staff was at the training session. Jimmy Smith was pleased when he asked to borrow a key to Brower’s domain.

When Arne reached the deserted engineering department, not a soul was in sight. They were all in the auditorium. Somewhere a transistor radio played Scott Joplin music at low volume. Ugh. Hard to believe ragtime had been popular sixty years ago, let alone that it was enjoying a fad revival now. Rock was where it was at.

He went to the far corner of the huge workspace where cubicle desks were cluttered with slide rules, calculators, engineering drawings, and all the other arcane tools of the technocrat. Here and there lay one of those new handheld calculators that could do all four basic math functions and a few special ones like square root for a hundred dollars. It was amazing, although Arne had never met anyone who needed to know the square root of something.

He took the key from Jimmy and unlocked a gunmetal gray door modestly and falsely labeled Device Storage Room. Then he moved through the door quickly, shut it behind him, and threw a light switch that was barely visible in the feeble illumination from the narrow, high windows. The overhead lights revealed a new and fully-equipped electronics laboratory. A portrait of Albert Einstein hung above a desk. He looked a bit like the Drucker father and son, Hiram and Jerome.

To his left, a side door led through an air lock vestibule into the really expensive part of the secret operation, the microcircuit clean room. Arne peered in, but knew enough from reading about the space program not to try to enter. That crucial place would have an alarm to keep some peasant from blundering in and contaminating a ten thousand-dollar experimental circuit with debris from their body or clothing. And he was more interested in the right end of the room he was in, especially Brower’s desk and file cabinet located past the long workbench watched over by Dr. Einstein.

The illumination there was uneven, probably a consequence of the hasty and secretive construction of this area. There had to be more light, a switch somewhere. There it was; illuminated on the workbench. He threw the switch and felt, heard, even tasted the surge of current that rushed into his body and toppled him to the floor.

****

Hey, Buddy, are you all right? Wake up.

The voice wafted from far away, filtered and distorted like that other voice that raised him from unconsciousness nine years ago with, Yo, Lieutenant Niemi, are you hurt, man? That time a bomb blast dropped some delicate iron scrollwork from a Saigon brothel’s front balcony on his fortuitously thick skull. It had been Arne’s only mishap in fifteen months of Asian duty, occurring while shopping for tube socks.

But he was in Southeastern Michigan now, not Southeastern Asia. He was in an unfashionable suburb of Detroit, not Saigon, a cheap house detective, not an army paper-pusher. What happened to him this time? He pushed himself up off his stomach to a seated position on the floor and touched his scalp. Ouch.

His interrogator asked, I said, are you all right? The tone was more urgent.

No, I’m not all right, damn it. I, I think, crap; I think I nearly got fried here.

No way, not in this lab.

Arne touched his head and winced. Way. I threw the switch right there back of the bench.

You think you got a high voltage jolt from that?

Arne did not like this guy’s tone of voice, and his mind had cleared enough for sarcasm. I know I did. Let me guess, the engineers wired this place themselves.

As a matter of fact we did. The switch is low voltage for the bench power supply. Pete Brower set it up himself. It looks to me like you tripped and hit your head. The switch didn’t do that.

The hell it didn’t. I hit my head when I fell. Arne peered up and the man came into visual and aural focus. He looked like a popular movie actor, a taller Dustin Hoffman with a rich tenor voice. He looked nothing like the picture of Brower in Arne’s pocket, so at least that was a break.

You must have tripped reaching for the switch, and your head caught the edge of the stool as you went down.

Yeah, well I hate to contradict you, but I did throw it, and there is something wrong with it.

Dustin flipped the offending switch while Arne flinched reflexively. Several pieces of equipment glowed to life, but that was all. He put the switch off and on again and was not electrocuted. See, it’s all low voltage, and it’s all good. Concern now turned to suspicion. Who are you? How’d you get in here?

Nuts, Arne would have to tell him enough so he would keep his mouth shut. I’m company security. My name is Niemi. I was doing a routine check. Arne grudgingly showed him supporting identification. After the man handed it back he said, And you are?

Ed Sawicki. I work in this lab.

So this was Pete Brower’s fellow engineer and project partner. Aren’t you guys all supposed to be in some auditorium meeting?

I had that training at GM. It’s common sense. You security guys have a key to this lab?

We’ve got keys to everything.

I was going to call the company cop when you started stirring.

I am the company cop.

Well it’d be nice if Nelson had told me or Brower about your routine checks.

Harold Nelson was the head of all engineering. Jimmy Smith said this project was so important that Brower, the new electronics wonder-child, and this Sawicki guy, the manufacturing engineer working with him, were both reporting directly to Nelson. Arne assured him, Sorry. I’ll be sure to contact you personally next time I have to do a check. Who else works here?

There are two technicians, a metallurgical engineer, and Pete who heads the project.

I suppose he is in the auditorium? Arne couldn’t take a chance of running into the guy face to-face today, not if he was going to secretly follow him around a place the size of Iron City.

Nope, Pete’s gone for the morning for some personal business at a bank. He should be back in a half hour or so. We need to work on some serious negative feedback problems.

Arne knew negative feedback was electrical jargon, but it made him think of Jimmy Smith. A half hour wasn’t much time. Can you walk me around here and give me a three-minute show-and-tell?

Sawicki started to say no, but then couldn’t resist giving Arne a prideful tour. The oldest equipment in the room dated back seven months to Labor Day 1973, the start of the fuel control circuit project. There was no vacuum tube stuff. Everything was the latest solid-state equipment. Arne nodded wise appreciation while barely understanding what the guy was saying. Sawicki said he was amazed at the amount of money the notoriously tight-fisted J. K. Drucker had been willing to spend on the clean room. Roger that.

Sawicki’s lab desk was neat, Arne noted with approval, and the blonde woman in the photograph by his telephone was a knock-out. They were interrupted by a telephone call wherein Sawicki consciously or not altered his speech pattern to sound like actor Hoffman. He asked to call the person back in a few minutes. Girlfriend, he told Arne. Arne nodded knowingly like he was a man who got calls from girlfriends all day long, too.

Sawicki was tired of his guest now. He looked at the treacherous switch. Anyway, everything is A-okay in this lab.

So it seems. I’ve got one more question, though. All auto companies have electronics labs. Why do you have all the secrecy?

"We’re small and our competitors are big, but our project will put us ahead. Once they learn we did this successfully, they’ll jump on it with three or four times the resources. They can’t suspect a thing until we’re in the showroom with it. Pete