Nothing Ventured

by Roderick Price

  Morning came too soon for Larry. His plane to Minneapolis wasn’t scheduled until eleven a.m. but he got up early every day, even when he wasn’t working. Larry took his time packing, and from experience he knew the value of planning ahead. Packed a handgun too. It wasn’t illegal to pack a gun on a checked suitcase or bring it into a state, especially if you had a permit for it. And if you said you were using it for hunting, nobody at Houston Intercontinental Airport even blinked when you declared it at check-in. He pulled on his new boots, jeans and a heavy flannel, hunting shirt. Arriving in Minneapolis, he picked up his rental car. When he crossed the St. Croix River at Stillwater he stopped and filled his trusty thermos with hot coffee. Relaxed, he made the long but pleasant drive to the area around Iron River and pulled into the Green Top Diner for supper. After supper, he headed to Deep Lake Lodge and checked in at one of the private cabins he had reserved earlier. It was a beautiful setting—seven one- and two-bedroom cabins overlooking the lake. In the summertime it would be great. Tonight, he shivered in the cold, clear night air as he carted his stuff from the car into the empty cabin and struggled to start a fire in the old, iron stove in the corner. Once he got it going, the small cabin warmed quickly, and he turned down the draft vents to settle the flame and give him some low, even heat that would last until morning. There was an old table television on a wire stand by the plaid couch. The two channels from Superior were surprisingly clear. Larry settled down on the couch and spread the contents from the map cylinder over the cigarette burns on the Formica coffee table. A few items slid off the edge of the table onto the cheap shag carpeting and Larry leaned over to pick them up. He took the smaller items from the pile—legal and letter sized reports, lease documents, a bank ledger, and spreadsheets—and put them in a neat stack on the end table. Then he organized the larger documents, plat maps, geophysical maps, surveys, and national forest maps and placed them in the middle of the coffee table, some of the edges hanging down almost to the floor. Sticking out from between two of the maps was the corner of a small piece of paper; one that should have been in the smaller stack of documents. Grabbing it by the corner, he slowly pulled it out and reached to drop it on the end table. It was a photocopied newspaper clipping from a Houston paper, nearly eight years old, the business section. The title of the article read, “Elephant Hunting in Michigan-Exploration Companies Look for Another Big One.” Larry picked up the article and sat down on the edge of the old couch. The light from the wagon-wheel light fixture glared starkly over his shoulder and cast his own shadow over the copy.

  Nobody thought of Michigan as an oil producing state, but Larry knew that they had discovered the Saginaw Field a long time ago. Michigan had produced over a billion barrels of oil, and even more natural gas over the last few decades. But nothing close to an “Elephant,” a giant field. Lucky to find a well that produces a hundred barrels a day. As an oil man, and a land man, Larry knew that there had always been speculation about deep oil fields in other areas of the upper Midwest due to the huge sedimentary basin that ran from the plains of central Canada to Eastern Tennessee. There had been small producing wells in Illinois for fifty years; Illinois even had a town named Carbondale. Oil men always dream of finding an elephant, a new field that holds more than five hundred million barrels of oil. The article was only two columns wide and didn’t take long for him to read. He carefully paged through each map and survey again, looking front and back to see if any additional errant pieces of paper had been left behind. Then he held the carrying tube under the light and searched the insides for any more materials, but found none. Tired from the day’s travels, he settled back into couch and enjoyed the crackling of the fire in the old wood stove. Jesus, he thought, Martin was a geologist; had he found an “elephant” oil field up here in northern Wisconsin? How would he have done that? The sweet smell of smoke wafted gently through the air. He closed his eyes and slowly inhaled and exhaled. After a while he rose from the couch, stoked the fire with the big old iron poker in the corner, used the bathroom, and finally crawled into the creaky, old iron bed.

  CHAPTER 24

  Larry finally called Hilton at work and dutifully reported in. “Hilton, this is Larry, you’re missing a wonderful vacation up here.”

  “Where the hell are you? I thought you were going to call me after talking to Wonderboy.”

  “Well I was, but then I had to scramble around and get my stuff together because he wanted me to get my ass up here ASAP. So, I just planned to call you first thing today.” Larry was trying to sound sincere, but on the inside, he was very pleased with himself. He worked with Hilton, but that didn’t mean Hilton owned him.

  “Flight? You flew somewhere? What flight did you get on?”

  “You’ll never guess this one. Your little friend, Martin, is getting into the paper business and wants me to lease a bunch of forest land in Wisconsin. I flew up here yesterday.” Larry paused.

  “Paper business? Where did that come from?” asked Hilton.

  “Martin said Basin Oil is diversifying and looked at mining and paper and said that paper had looked pretty good if they could get a good inventory of timber land leases before their competitors figured out what they were doing and tried to price them out of the market.”

  “The timber business? Basin is out of their mind. What do they know about the timber business?” Hilton snickered.

  “It looked to me like they’d done a lot of research. There’s a big market right now for paper because of all of the computer printing and all of the boxes for the overnight shipping business. According to Martin, half of the mills are technically obsolete and inefficient. Martin said if they got a few thousand acres forest land leased up, they’d probably move forward and hire a couple of manufacturing guys to help design a plant.”

  “There’s plenty of paper all right. I’ve got piles of it stacked up on my desk right now,” said Hilton, turning in his big, swivel chair to look out the window. “Well, if Mobil bought Montgomery Wards, I guess these bastards can go into the tree business.”

  “You know, this isn’t such a bad fit,” said Larry. “It’s just another natural resource, right? And Basin’s a natural resources company. The oil business has had some tough times over the last few years.”

  “Where’s the land he wants you to lease?” asked Hilton.

  “Right in the center of the northern part of the state of Wisconsin, surrounded by Chequamegon State Forest. He marked off eighteen fairly big landowners that he wants me to go after. Crazy, but it’s up around where I did that work with NPC a long time ago.”

  Hilton listened carefully to the whole story, asking lots of questions. Larry was able to answer nearly every question based on what Martin had told him, and the ones he couldn’t, he made up answers that seemed logical to him. And Larry didn’t mention a word about the “Elephant” article that he had found. He hated it when Hilton grilled him like this. At long last there was silence at the end of the phone.

  “Well, I’d love to know who’s behind this at Basin Oil,” said Hilton.

  “So, who do we know at Basin?” asked Larry. Larry had no idea of Hilton’s “relationship” with Anita.

  “Nobody I know. Jimmy left there three years ago,” replied Hilton. “Even if we knew somebody, what would we ask them?” Hilton wasn’t about to tell Larry that with Anita he really did have an insider at Basin Oil.

  “Well,” said Larry, “for starters, we could ask them if they’re getting into the timber business. Martin says it’s a top-secret project and not a lot of people inside Basin even know about it.”

  “I don’t see how they keep that a secret inside Basin,” said Hilton. “Let me dig around and see if I can come up with anything.”

  “So, do you want me to stay on this or not?” asked Larry. Larry was half hoping that Hilton would tell him to pull out, especially since they now thought it was timber and paper.

  “Yeah, I guess stick it out for a bit. I didn’t plan for you to go t
o Cheeseland to be a forest ranger. But I was the one who asked you to check this out, so I guess if I’ve hired you for ten days, you should see where it leads.”

  “Well, just so you know, I got Martin to pay me eleven hundred a day so I’m officially off your payroll.”

  “Well that’s nice. Now I know for sure that I want you to stay. But I’ll still pay you the thousand a day. Let’s see how this goes. Keep me in the loop. And call me in a few days to give me an update. I might nose around Basin and see what they’re up to.”

  “Okay, I’m going to go get some leases signed up,” said Larry. “But be careful when you’re poking around. Martin made it clear that if word got out on this deal, it could easily kill it. If you start asking questions, it won’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you and I and Martin are all talking.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m not an idiot. Like I say, I might just nose around a little bit if I get the chance. Not sure I know anybody over there anymore anyway since they chopped all those heads last year.” Hilton was lying again.

  “Just be careful. I haven’t been real busy over the last two months and I can use the eleven grand. And neither of us wants this in the business section of the Chronicle tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Hilton. “I gotta go.”

  From Larry’s perspective, the conversation had gone extremely well with Hilton. As long as Hilton didn’t poke around with the wrong guy at Basin, this would stay quiet. Larry shaved and got dressed in his favorite land man outfit: a nice pair of gray slacks, well pressed, and a long-sleeved shirt with the Sears Arnold Palmer logo over the pocket. Most of these farmers weren’t that much different from the ones in Texas or Oklahoma. They expected people to wear nice clean clothes, and if they owned a dress shirt, odds are they bought it from either Sears or Penney’s or Wal-Mart. He took his “leasing briefcase” out of his suitcase and set it up on the table. Larry smiled at the worn “AAA” and the “Go Army” stickers he had put on the side of it twenty years ago. Nice touch.

  Larry reached down into his briefcase and took out the stack of legal lease forms that Martin had given him, the box of business cards, the MEC checkbook and threw them into the fire in the big pot-bellied stove. Next, he took from his suitcase his own standard lease forms in the name of one of his companies that he had set up for prior work, Walker Resources LLC. He hadn’t used this company for a while, but he still had his own Walker Resources LLC check book and business cards. He looked them over carefully and then placed them into the weathered leather briefcase.

  This time Larry didn’t care who was paying him or how much. From the old newspaper clipping, Larry figured that somehow Martin must have discovered oil up here in northern Wisconsin. This time, Larry wasn’t about to let either Hilton or Martin get rich while he stood by and watched. These leases were going to be in Larry’s name. Picking up the briefcase, he stepped into the bathroom one last time to check his appearance, pushed his shoulders back and smiled his famous smile. Still had the “southern gentlemen” smile. This was the start of something very good for Larry Walker.

  CHAPTER 25

  Taylor had gotten up at 5:45 and sat in the cupola overlooking the capitol to the east. She didn’t always get up this early, but she always set her coffee pot to come on at 5:30 as an extra incentive. She didn’t merely sip coffee; she drank it down. She had an oversized mug at the office, too. Still, in one of the big, oversized flannel shirts she slept in, this one from her dad, she skirted down the stairs and headed for the kitchen. Her message machine was blinking emptily at her on the counter. She hit the messages button and began pouring coffee. The first two messages were hang-ups; she got a lot of those. A call from the movie rental place. Then the fourth call was odd, even by her standards—a long pause, a man breathing, and finally a simple phrase: “We’ve done our job, now you do yours.” Another long pause, and a loud clank of the receiver as the caller hung up. Even with her first taste of steaming coffee, a shiver rocked down through her body to the soles of her bare feet. She had unlisted her number a couple of years ago, but she still got her share of crank calls. This was not, however, a crank call. It could be an accident that she had gotten this unnerving call. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she wondered about a number of things, including the Superior deal. Lots of people had threatened to politically destroy her along the way, but she felt physically threatened by the blunt message from this unknown caller. Slowly, she walked to the bay windows around the back breakfast room and peered carefully around the yard. Nothing. Carefully, she walked to the front of the house, checked the street through the side windows on the porch, then quickly opened the door, grabbed the stack of morning papers, and slammed and dead-bolted the front door.

  Retreating to her sanctuary upstairs, it was still a few minutes before six. Like many mornings, relaxing a bit up in the third story of the big old house, she settled into looking over all of the documents on her PC that Jason and her staff had put together for the day. And at the same time, she would alternately find herself drinking her coffee, watching the city get going, and scanning the morning papers: The Cardinal, The New York Times, The Capitol Times and others. Nothing in the Cardinal, but her stomach knotted on page one of the Cap Times. It was buried in a larger article about the upcoming gubernatorial election—an unconfirmed source saying that Clark Everson, the lieutenant governor, might not seek re-election. She thought of the message on her answering machine. Her heart skipped a beat and she wanted to call Jason. She knew from her experience that state capitols all over the country had rumors like these floating around all of the time. This one was a bit unusual because she was reading it here in the paper instead of hearing it at work. Someone must have directly called the paper last night for the express purpose of getting it on the front page before it could be denied. They had done their job, now she was supposed to do hers.

  It was perfectly clear and crisp out. The sun was shining on the statue of Lady Liberty at the top of the capitol dome. It was time for Taylor to eat some cinnamon toast, get dressed and get to the office. She had a big day ahead. Any big press day was navy blue. She was dressed in ten minutes. Jason would pick her up at 7:15 a.m., but it was just after 6:30 a.m. She brushed back her earlier fears and took off for the three-block walk up to the Capitol.

  Three hours later, the hearing chambers at the capitol building were more crowded than she had ever seen. Last time, the press was composed mostly of campus communication majors, middle-aged reporters from the local papers and television, and a handful from northern Wisconsin; two from the Superior newspapers—now that it was clear that the hearing had statewide impact, and represented a battle between the big oil companies, liberals and the Greens. Both the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle had sent people; so had the St. Paul Pioneer Press. One of Jason’s guys had said the local stations were doing a segment for the national evening news. Not many knew it, but two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal had actually assigned a staffer to develop a story around this. Taylor couldn’t believe it hadn’t hit the press yet.

  For the last two hours Taylor and Jason had closely pored over the oil companies’ “best and final offer.” Even Jason had to admit that they had come along way. They had made some very nice concessions to conservation initiatives underway in other areas of Wisconsin, but then they had actually slightly expanded the refinery addition from what they had originally proposed. Their entire message was built around one of what they called “balanced growth,” and it would play extremely well in every place outside of Madison. Most of Madison residents wanted nothing to do with harming the environment, regardless of the economics. Taylor hadn’t made any promises to Jason. In fact, she had indicated that if things were going the right way, she would look for a deal. Finally, they headed off to the hearing.

  There was such a crowd that Taylor had to physically push herself behind Jason to get into the chambers. Suddenly inside, it seemed unnaturally quiet as her team unpacked the
ir briefcases and supporting materials for the hearing. The gallery was packed with reporters. All of her old buddies were here—Dick Jansen from Empire Oil and Sheldon Mack from Arbor Energy. At 9:30, the administrative judge brought the gavel firmly down on the old oak conference table and called the meeting to order. Taylor found herself in a tough position, if she didn’t work out something agreeable to the oil companies, they’d expose her and ruin her. If she went off too quickly in a conciliatory manner, her staff and most of Madison would sense betrayal. The environmentalists would be picketing her before she got back to her office. Of course, many would be unhappy no matter what she did. The gallery was packed full as the judge called for opening comments from big oil.

  “Your honor,” the oil company lead counsel began, “I want the court to know that under the leadership of Ms. Thompson and the DNR, the oil companies have arrived at a compromise solution. We believe this solution will provide new jobs and growth for the people of Wisconsin, and we believe it rightly reflects an investment we are ready to make in six major conservation initiatives already underway in Wisconsin. Not only have we made tremendous strides in reducing the environmental impact of our facilities, with some adjustments we have added a greater number of jobs to the entity with an addition of a high tech, state-of-the-art lubricants-blending and packaging facility.”

  The judge was shaking his head sternly back and forth. He had seen it too many times. This case had been dragging on for more than eight months, and now the oil companies were changing their design plans. His guess was that “Ms. Thompson” was going to live up to her TNT nickname and just explode. God, he hated running a circus for the press. Grimacing slightly, he looked down the DNR side of the table as Taylor sat calmly staring at the oil company counsel as he droned on. At one juncture, counsel handed out a two-page summary of the oil company final proposal that was actually slightly better than the draft she and Jason had been reviewing less than an hour ago. In the next minute, maybe five, it was going to be show time for Taylor. Even though the deal wasn’t so bad, she felt dirty giving in to them, especially under the circumstances. Momentarily, she had a flashback to the library back in the governor’s mansion less than a month ago. If these guys decided to crush her, they would probably be successful unless she somehow could outmaneuver them.