Lone Wolf

by Linwood Barclay

  “You’ve seen this bear?”

  Wickens nodded slowly. “Big bastard.” Another pause. “Has one ear missing, left one I think, like it got cut off, or he lost it in a fight with another bear, which is more likely.”

  Bob raised an eyebrow, imagining a bear fight, maybe.

  “What’s going on?” May asked. Her voice was filled with worry. “Why are you here? Has something happened to Morton? He’s been gone a long time.”

  Thorne swallowed hard, put the hat back on his head. He must have been confident that no one would hide his hat when there were life-and-death matters to be discussed.

  “Mr. Wickens,” Thorne said, “there’s been a bit of an incident, just down over the hill a ways, by Arlen’s cabins.”

  “This to do with Arlen’s ankle?” Wickens asked.

  “Uh, no, not exactly. But I wonder if you’d mind coming to have a look with me at what we found.” Tentatively, he added, “You might want to leave your daughter here.”

  May stepped forward. “No, I’m going, too.”

  “Ma’am,” said the chief, “I don’t know that that’s such a good idea.”

  “I’m going,” she said again, her teeth clenched in determination.

  Timmy Wickens produced a set of keys and undid the padlock on the gate. He swung it open a couple of feet, enough to let himself and his daughter out, then closed it, hanging the padlock in place without driving it home.

  We walked back, the five of us, no one saying anything. Thorne led the way back into the woods, and when the tarp became visible, May put her a hand to her mouth.

  “It’s a man, that much we’re certain of,” said Thorne. “But he’s a bit hard to identify. I wonder, this Morton fella, did he have any what you might call distinguishing marks?”

  May was staring straight ahead, slowly shaking her head from side to side, as if she could deny what was about to unfold. Wickens said to her, gently, “Miss, uh, May, does Morton have some kind of mark, maybe a tattoo, anything like that?”

  I was thinking, if he had a tattoo, it had probably been eaten off him, if this was Morton Dewart.

  “He’s, he’s got a dagger tattoo on his, his…” She was thinking now. “His left chest, on the left side, his left.”

  Thorne breathed in through his nostrils. Clearly, that was not going to be adequate. “He got any markings or tattoos anyplace else?”

  “Uh, um,” said May, tears already starting to form. “His ankle, like, a little ways up, a snake. I think, his right leg.”

  Thorne nodded. This was a possibility. I sidled up next to him, alongside Dr. Heath, who’d been waiting around for our return. He lifted the tarp from the other end, revealing the dead man’s boots. Gingerly, he rolled down the thick, gray, bloody work sock, and there it was. A snake, shaped like an S, about two inches long.

  Wickens and his daughter couldn’t see the leg from where they were standing, but when Thorne looked over at them, I guess it showed in his face, and he said, “I’m sorry.”

  May threw her arms around her father, and began to wail.

  5

  IN THE FOLLOWING COUPLE OF HOURS before Dad phoned for me to come and pick him up at the hospital, I accomplished a fair bit.

  First, I went into his cabin, the first in the line of five nearly identical buildings along the shore, and bear-proofed it. No way Yogi was coming in to get me for dinner. The cabin consisted of one large room that was a combined kitchen, living, and dining room; two bedrooms, one of which Dad used as an office; and a bathroom. I went to each window in every room, made sure they were all properly latched. Lakeside, there was a screened-in porch with a door, then a second door into the cabin itself. I figured screens didn’t offer much protection against a bear, so I didn’t worry too much about that door, but the one from the porch to the cabin I made sure was locked, as well as the door that came in from the back. I didn’t know whether bears had the smarts to turn doorknobs, but no way they had keys.

  I rummaged around in the kitchen cupboards until I’d found a kettle and some teabags, and made myself some tea. I was feeling a bit chilled, which I attributed as much to the whole experience as the weather. In the living room area, where an old couch and a couple of worn easy chairs were positioned around a television, there was a woodstove, a pipe running straight up from it and through the ceiling. Dad had outfitted this cabin with a furnace for year-round living, but the stove was a nice touch. I crumpled up some newspaper in the bottom, laid on some kindling followed by logs that Dad kept in a neat pile next to the stove, and got a fire going.

  The cabin screamed Dad. Wood piled neatly, out of the way where you couldn’t trip on it. A fire extinguisher hanging on the wall by the back door. No knives pointing up in the cutlery basket of the dishwasher. A textured floor in the base of the tub so as to prevent slipping.

  Once I had my hot mug of tea, I took it with me into Dad’s office. There was a computer on the nearly empty desk. Dad, being something of a neat freak in addition to a safety freak, kept the desk uncluttered. Shelves that lined one wall of the room contained, among other things, neatly labeled file boxes. I jiggled the mouse and the computer screen came to life, the on-screen desktop as tidy as his real one. I clicked on the round blue “E” at the bottom and opened up the Internet.

  I entered “bear attack human” into the Google box and was reading my third article when the phone rang.

  I grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Zack?”

  “Sarah, hi,” I said.

  “I’ve been trying your cell, but you haven’t been answering.” She was worried, and pissed.

  “I guess you can’t get much of a signal up here,” I said. “Sorry. I was just about to call you.” I was, honestly, about to do just that.

  “What’s going on? Is your father, is he…”

  “He’s alive,” I said. “He’s okay. Well, he’s got a twisted ankle, but that had nothing to do with a bear.”

  “Then who—”

  “A neighbor. Or a friend of a neighbor. Went out looking for a bear, guess the bear found him first. Who was that writer? Said, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you?”

  I gave Sarah more details, how Dad had hurt his ankle, the confusion, the confidence-inspiring Chief Orville Thorne.

  “So, does this mean you’re coming straight back?” Sarah asked.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “I sort of offered to stay a few days, help my dad until he’s back on his feet again.”

  “Oh,” Sarah said, clearly some hesitation in her voice. “Is that such a good idea? I mean, isn’t there a bear wandering around there?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going to be careful. I’ve already been on the net, reading up on bear attacks, and when I go into town, to get Dad, I’m going to get some bear spray.”

  “Bear spray?”

  “They’ve got this stuff, I just found it on the net, it’s like pepper spray, you shoot some in the bear’s face, he leaves you alone.”

  “Really.”

  “The main thing, they say, is don’t run.”

  “Don’t run,” Sarah said. “So a bear’s coming at you, you’re supposed to just stand there. What are you supposed to do, tell him you’re a close personal friend of Smokey?”

  “Throw something at him,” I said. “Scare him off.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Or punch him. Right in the nose.”

  Sarah was quiet for a moment. Then, “You. Punch a bear in the nose. I can see that.”

  “The fact is, bear attacks on humans are very rare,” I said, quoting from an article on the screen. “Bears don’t naturally want to attack humans, will even try to avoid them most of the time. Unless, you know, they’re hungry or something.”

  “Isn’t there someone else up there who could help your father?” Sarah said, changing gears.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But at least for a couple of days, I think I should hang in. You think you can swing them into letting me h
ave a few days off?”

  “Yeah, I imagine. What are you working on, anyway?”

  Although Sarah was often my editor when I was doing a story for cityside, I also reported to editors for other sections that ran features. Such was the life of a reporter at The Metropolitan, that you served several masters all at once who wanted different things and conspired against one another in their bid to get them. In just a year I’d seen several reporters gunned down in editorial crossfires.

  “A feature on people never going out anymore, they’ve got home theater systems, Jacuzzis, all that shit, the whole cocooning thing.”

  “Wow, great idea,” Sarah said. “I don’t think we’ve done that in, I don’t know, two months, at least. We’ve done that story twice a year for the last ten years.”

  “It’s for Weekend,” I said. “I think they just heard about it.”

  “I’m going to talk to Magnuson about this,” Sarah said, invoking the name of our much-feared—at least by me—managing editor. “This is stupid.”

  “So you’re saying don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” I said.

  I sensed Sarah smiling at the other end. “I know,” she said tiredly. “But you have had lapses.”

  Not more than a minute after I hung up, the phone rang again. “I’m finally done,” Dad said. “Can you come get me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you planning to pick me up in that little car of yours, or are you going to bring my truck?”

  I did a brain-sigh. “It’s a safe car, Dad. It’s also good for the environment. It’s a hybrid.”

  “Oh jeez, say no more. Why don’t you come in the truck. Extra set of keys in the drawer. I’ll have more room to stretch out my leg, which hurts like the bejeezus.”

  “Twenty minutes,” I said. “But we have to pick up some things on the way back.”

  “Like what?” Dad asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said, and hung up.

  Dad’s truck was like his cabin: immaculate. Except for a few dead leaves on the driver’s floor mat, it was spotless inside, and the gas gauge was only a needle’s width from full. Dad had never let the tank on any vehicle he’d ever owned go below the halfway point, and any time I’d ever borrowed his car as a teenager, I made sure to never leave it with anything less than three-quarters of a tank of gas. “It’s simple preparedness,” he’d say. You get an overnight oil crisis, and you’re all set.

  Braynor District Hospital wasn’t hard to find. It sat on a hill on the road going out of Braynor to the north, and driving into town from the south you could see the blue “H” atop the building in the distance. I swung through the entrance to Emergency and saw Dad waiting for me behind the glass doors, sitting in a wheelchair with a pair of crutches in front of him, propped on his shoulders.

  I left the truck running, exhaust spewing out the tailpipe, and as the electric doors parted, Dad said, “What are you doing, leaving the truck running?”

  “Dad, I’m right here, I can see the tr—”

  “Someone could just run up and make off with it,” he said.

  “For Christ’s sake, Dad, we’re like, twenty feet away from it,” as I reached over to take the crutches. “Can you just crank it down for a second?” I went back to the truck, slipped the crutches in the short cargo area behind the seats, then returned to my father.

  “We taking the wheelchair?” I asked.

  “No, just wheel me to the truck, and then you leave it here.”

  I nodded, pushed the chair close to the truck, opened the passenger door, then wheeled the chair a bit closer. Dad reached out, grabbed the truck’s inside door handle, and started hauling himself out of the chair, resisting my attempts to assist him. “I’ve got it,” he said, putting his weight on one foot only. The other was clad in just a thick sock, which was pulled up over whatever bandaging they’d wrapped around his ankle.

  Once he was in the truck and seatbelted in, I closed the door and returned the wheelchair to the lobby. Then I was back in the truck.

  “Where’s a good sporting goods store?” I said, putting the truck into gear.

  “What?” asked Dad. “You’re not going to help me? You’re just up here to do a little fishing?”

  Just hold it together, I told myself. “Bear spray,” I said. “It’s like pepper spray. It was a friend of your neighbors became dinner for a bear in your woods. So I figure, unless you want to be his breakfast tomorrow, maybe we should get ourselves a can or two.”

  My father considered that a moment. “That’s a good idea,” he said, apparently surprised that I could come up with one. “You can’t be too safe, you know.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said.

  6

  WE DISCUSSED BUYING FIVE CANS of bear pepper spray—one for each of the cabins—but when I ran into the sporting goods store and found they were about fifty bucks each, I knew Dad would be relieved to find that they only had a couple cans of the stuff left. There was dust on the tops, indicating that the product was not exactly flying off the shelf.

  I popped into a men’s shop on the main street for some extra underwear and socks, since I’d left the city without packing. When I got back into the pickup, Dad said he was thinking about inviting everyone from the other cabins to his place for dinner and beer.

  “Everyone’s probably kind of shook up, with what happened and all,” Dad said. “That poor son of a bitch, getting eaten by a goddamn bear. And I don’t want everyone bailing on me either, leaving me with a bunch of empty cabins. Cabin three’s already empty. You can help yourself to that one.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Dad pointed up the street to Henry’s Grocery, said I could get everything I needed there while he sat in the truck and nursed his ankle. “You know how to buy groceries?” he asked. “Or is that something Sarah does?”

  “Sometimes she takes me with her, puts me in the little seat so I can pick up some tips,” I said.

  Dad said that if Bob did well out on the lake today, he’d bring some fish that could be fried up. But Dad also wanted frozen hamburger patties, buns, stuff for making salad, chips, plenty of beer. He was very specific. “Not those buns with the sesame seeds on top. They get caught in my teeth. I hate that. And get the frozen sirloin burgers, not the mystery meat stuff.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “And none of that light beer. Nobody wants to drink that pony piss.”

  “Got it, Dad.”

  “Did I mention about the sesame seeds?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “I don’t want you to make a mistake, that’s all.”

  “Hey, what about the Wickenses?” I asked. “You inviting them to this shindig? They really took the hit on this one. It was the daughter’s boyfriend the bear decided to have for lunch.”

  Dad looked straight ahead through the windshield. “I think the best thing would be to let them deal with their grief in private.”

  “What’s the deal with them anyway?” I asked. “The Keep Out signs and the gate and the barbed wire. Isn’t that your property they’re on?”

  Dad swallowed, kept looking out the window. I noticed him clenching his right fist. “That’s none of your concern, Zachary.”

  “All I’m saying is, who are these people? The property looks like it’s going to ratshit. Old cars, a fridge outside, and Jesus, have you seen those pit bulls? They nearly took a leg off me when the chief and Bob and I went up there to talk to them. Who keeps fucking dogs like that? Nutcases, that’s who. Have you seen the teeth on those things? I’d rather go swimming with sharks than knock on their front door if—”

  “Zachary!” Dad bellowed. “Enough!”

  “Dad, look, they’re on your property. They’re renting your farmhouse. If you’ve got some problem with them, you should do something about it.”

  He turned and glared at me.
“Did I say I had a problem with them? Have I complained to you about them? Have I said one damn thing to you about them?”

  I slammed the truck door and headed up the street for Henry’s Grocery. I noticed along the way, taped to the light standards, flyers for the fall fair, which kicked off with a parade four days from now, on Saturday. And some other posters, taped just above or below the ones for the fall fair, headlined “Keep the Parade Straight!”

  I didn’t know what that meant, exactly. Perhaps, other years, it had taken a roundabout, serpentine route through Braynor that had somehow made the fall fair parade a less than spectacular entertainment. I didn’t bother to read the rest of the poster to find out. I was on a mission.

  Once inside Henry’s, I grabbed a cart with two front wheels so badly aligned and balanced I wondered briefly whether Braynor was built on a fault line. Working without a list, I made my way through the store, picking up a head of romaine, some croutons, a bag of hamburger buns without sesame seeds, God forbid.

  I was coming around the end of the aisle when I nearly ran the cart into a thin, white-coated man who at first I thought had escaped from some laboratory, but the absence of a pocket full of pens and the presence of blood splotches identified him as someone who had recently been behind the meat counter. Then I noticed the name “Charles” stitched to his jacket, and the clipboard in his hand.

  He peered at me over his wire glasses.

  “Hello,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Charles Henry,” he said, offering a hand. I didn’t have a chance to check it for blood before I took it. “Manager, Henry’s Grocery. I don’t believe I know you.”

  I thought, why would he? But then, in a small town, I guess if you’re the local grocer you get to know all the local faces.