Lone Wolf

by Linwood Barclay

  “That’s comforting,” Dad said. “We’re gonna be rescued by a poofster.” I decided to let that one go, figuring Lawrence himself would be able to dispel the stereotypes once he got here.

  As I took a sip of my coffee, Dad said, “I did a little checking on the Internet while you were outside.”

  “Yeah?” The notion of Dad surfing the net was still difficult to imagine.

  “I looked up ammonium nitrate. Fertilizer.”

  I said, “Go on.”

  “What McVeigh did was, he used four thousand pounds of the stuff and mixed it with diesel fuel, and some blasting caps, then put everything in fifty-five-gallon plastic drums, loaded it up into that Ryder truck, lit a fuse, and ran like stink.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said, “even if you stole a lot less than four thousand pounds of that stuff, you could still make a hell of an explosion.”

  “I suspect,” Dad said.

  “A day ago, you didn’t even want to consider the possibility that something other than a bear ripped that man apart, and now look where your mind’s taking you.”

  “You haven’t thought the same thing?”

  “Of course I’ve thought the same thing. You know what kind of paranoid I am. I’m this close to pinning the Lindbergh kidnapping on the Wickenses. But we don’t have anything to suggest that Wickens had a thing to do with the murder of Tiff Riley. If we hadn’t seen that picture of Timothy McVeigh on their wall, hanging where most people might hang a picture of Jesus Christ, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You know, the Wickenses aren’t the only crazy people in the world, probably not the only crazy people in this county.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “Maybe we should be calling the FBI or something,” I said. “Don’t they handle this sort of thing? Or Homeland Security? What color alert are we at when the neighbors have murderous pit bulls?”

  “Let’s give Orville another chance,” Dad said. “You were almost nice to him on the phone, which must have nearly killed you. We’ll lay it all out for him. You know, you really haven’t given him a chance. From the moment you got here you’ve been picking on him. And by the way, who loaded that dishwasher last? You or Lana?”

  “Wasn’t me,” I said.

  Dad shook his head. “She put the knives in blade up. Almost slit my wrist unloading it.”

  “So many faults, so little time to correct them,” I said.

  Dad tossed the paper at me. “Read the piece on the front.”

  I grabbed the paper off the coffee table that separated us. “Which?” I said.

  “The main piece.”

  Had I bothered to read the headlines before asking Dad, I would have been able to figure out which one he meant. The headline on the lead story, written by Tracy, who also had all the other bylines on the front page, was “Mayor Mulls Canceling Parade.” It read:

  Braynor mayor Alice Holland says she may cancel the fall fair parade on Saturday if she thinks the appearance of a gay activist group could lead to violence.

  “Either the Fifty Lakes Gay and Lesbian Coalition will be in the parade,” the mayor said, “or there won’t be any parade at all.”

  Mayor Holland said to exclude the coalition from the parade, something many people in Braynor want, would subject the town to a potential civil rights suit that could bankrupt the municipality.

  “People are going around collecting names on petitions to keep the parade straight, and if they don’t mind seeing their property taxes double to pay the costs of going to court to defend a foolhardy decision, well then, fine. But if they have a problem with that, and still want the coalition banned from walking down Main Street, then we don’t have to have a parade at all.”

  Charles Henry, manager of Henry’s Grocery, which puts a float in the parade every year, has been spearheading the petition to “Keep the Parade Straight” and he reacted angrily to the mayor’s comments.

  “I can’t help but wonder,” he said, “whether the mayor is a lesbian. It would explain a lot.”

  Henry said the mayor may not need to cancel the parade, that many of the participants may back out instead. “She can ride in her convertible all alone,” he said, but refused to say whether Henry’s Grocery would withdraw its own float, which this year was to depict a large cow, its body covered with dotted lines to depict different cuts of meat.

  Stuart Lethbridge, of Red Lake, who heads the Fifty Lakes Gay and Lesbian Coalition, promises a tasteful display. “There’ll be a good crowd of people in the parade, carrying the Rainbow Flag, plus we’ll be displaying the number for our counseling line, which, as you can imagine in a community like Braynor, gets a lot of calls from gays and lesbians looking for a sympathetic ear.” Lethbridge said the coalition would not back out of the parade, even if that’s the only way it can be saved.

  The Braynor council is divided on what to do. Most members are united in wanting to avoid a lawsuit, but a number are in favor of scrapping the parade altogether, even though it is a tradition.

  But even if the parade is canceled, all other fall fair activities, including the pie-eating contest, the lawn tractor races, chainsaw competition, and cow-pie-tossing contest, will go ahead as planned.

  “What’s a cow pie?” I asked.

  “Shit,” Dad said.

  I nodded. “And this chainsaw competition. What do they do? Juggle them?”

  “You’re starting to annoy me.”

  “And I see the lawn tractor races are still on. Too bad I won’t be able to help you there. I have a predisposition to whiplash.”

  “I might be well enough by then,” Dad said. “I was putting some weight on my ankle today, and it didn’t seem that bad.”

  “You think the mayor’s a lesbian?” I asked. “There’s no picture of her here.”

  Dad started to answer, then could tell by the look on my face that I was still working at being annoying.

  “But seriously,” I said. “Have you met her? She a nice lady?”

  “Yes, and yes. She’s a bit too reasonable for this crowd up here. She moved up here from the city a few years ago, and she’s still a bit too sophisticated for her own good.”

  “I wonder if she’d be worth talking to,” I said quietly, almost to myself. “Are you okay with gays in the parade?”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Dad said. “You think we could look any more foolish when we’ve already got a marked-up cow in it?”

  “How about Lana?” I asked. “Her business is on Main Street, right by Henry’s Grocery. She signed the petition yet?”

  “Lana, and I, are a lot more tolerant, and forgiving, than you’ll ever know,” Dad said.

  There was something in the way he’d said that that stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon, which I spent doing more chores around the camp. I felt we were in a holding pattern, waiting for Orville Thorne to show up, and, with any luck, Lawrence the next morning.

  I was down by the docks, replacing a board that looked like it was about to break through, when Bob Spooner returned from an afternoon out on the lake. Once he’d killed the motor, I said, “Get anything?”

  Bob lifted up the stringer from the bottom of the boat, revealing two good-sized pickerel and a large-mouth bass.

  “Not bad,” I said. Beyond Dad’s cabin, I could hear a car approaching. I looked back and saw that it was a police car.

  “The law,” Bob said ominously.

  “I got an idea,” I said to Bob. “Let me get your picture with your catch.”

  “Oh, I’ve done better than this.”

  “No, come on. I want to get some pictures with Dad’s digital camera, send a couple snaps back to my wife, Sarah.”

  Bob shrugged and secured the boat to the dock while I ran back for the camera. Orville was out of his car and walking toward the cabin. “Two seconds!” I shouted to him, burst into the cabin, grabbed Dad’s camera from the study, and ran back out the front door for the shoreline.

  Chief Thorne, curious about what was g
oing on, which seemed so unlike him, followed. Dad, on crutches, was coming down as well.

  The commotion was attracting others. Leonard Colebert had been inside making himself some dinner, and Betty and Hank Wrigley were sitting on their porch, reading, but as is generally the case at a fishing camp, when someone comes in with a good catch, everyone wants to pass judgment.

  Bob, his arm in a muscle-making position that kept the stringerful of fish from dragging on the ground, smiled proudly as I held up the camera.

  “Nice!” said Leonard.

  “Where’d you get ’em?” Betty wanted to know.

  “What were ya using?” Orville asked.

  I took a couple of shots, then said, “Hey, let’s get some other people in here.” I moved Betty into the frame on one side of Bob, then Hank on the other, and took a picture. Leonard took no persuading at all to have his picture taken with Bob.

  “Tomorrow morning, early, we go on our hike, right?” Leonard said. Bob nodded resignedly.

  “Hey, Chief, how about you?” I said, bringing Orville forward.

  “No no, that’s okay.”

  “No, come on, come on.” I had my hand around his back and was moving him up next to Bob.

  “Hey, Orville, think you could lose the hat for a second?” I said. “The way the sun is, your whole face is in shadow.”

  Orville obediently removed his hat. I fired off a series of shots. For a couple, I used the zoom lens, cropping out Bob and his fish and coming in tight on Orville Thorne’s face.

  “Hey. That’s great,” I said. “Thanks, everyone. Don’t forget to leave me your e-mail addresses before you go home so I can send you all—”

  The sound of something being knocked over caught us all by surprise. Over at the fish-cleaning table, the bucket of guts underneath, which couldn’t have had much in it since I’d emptied it only a few hours earlier, had been tipped over.

  The Wickenses’ two pit bulls, Gristle and Bone, had their heads jammed into it, and their maniacal snarls and growls echoed within the metal chamber.

  I turned to Bob, standing there with his fish. “Get inside as fast as you can,” I said. But he was already making a beeline for his cabin, and just as he had his hand on the porch door, the two dogs withdrew their heads from the bucket, their fish-finding sonar evidently beeping in their thick skulls.

  Gristle and Bone both looked about for a second, slobber and fish innards dripping from their massive jaws, and then, in a shot, they were on the move, their legs like pistons. Even though they barely came up above my knee, I could feel their charge through the ground, like a pair of horses running past.

  Betty screamed. Leonard, figuring the dogs wouldn’t go after him in the lake, ran off the end of a dock. Hank put himself in front of Betty. And Orville was unholstering his weapon.

  The dogs didn’t care about us, however. They were after Bob Spooner, who was inside now and putting his weight against the flimsy wooden screen door. The dogs hit it like a pair of battering rams, growling, trying to bite at the wood.

  “Help!” Bob shouted. “Get back, you fucking monsters!”

  “Shoot them,” I said to Orville.

  He had his gun out and was running toward Bob’s cabin when we heard someone shout: “Bone! Gristle! Stop!”

  The dogs were making such a racket they didn’t hear the command. Timmy Wickens’ stepson Wendell came around the corner of the cabin and shouted at them again, louder this time, and the dogs suddenly stopped barking, panting heavily, their tongues hanging over their jagged teeth.

  Two leather leashes dangled from Wendell’s hand.

  He hooked them back up to the dogs and grinned stupidly at the rest of us.

  “They kind of got away from me there,” he said, and laughed.

  18

  “BAD DOG!” Wendell scolded Bone. Then, to Gristle, “You too, bad dog!”

  Bad? Bad? How about fucking terrifying?

  Even though Wendell had the two leashes reattached, and the grips looped securely around his wrist, Bob Spooner stayed behind the slightly chewed screen door of his cabin, and Betty and Hank were slowly moving toward theirs, no doubt thinking that if the dogs could get away from Wendell once, they could get away from him again.

  Orville had not yet holstered his weapon, but was holding it at his side, pointed toward the ground. Neither he nor I had moved for the past half a minute, waiting to be certain Wendell had control of those two beasts.

  Dad was the one most at risk. Probably none of us could outrun those pooches, but Dad didn’t stand a chance. I glanced back at him, saw the fear in his eyes.

  “Well, sorry about that,” said Wendell offhandedly. The dogs kept swiveling their heads around, looking back at Bob’s cabin, whimpering, knowing there were goodies in there they couldn’t get. Wendell gave a tug on their leashes and started walking back to the road that would take him back to the Wickens farmhouse.

  We all stood for another moment, shell-shocked. It was Dad who spoke first. “Orville, why don’t you come in.”

  Chief Thorne slipped the gun back into its holster and he and I followed Dad into the cabin. I slipped into the study to leave the digital camera by the computer, then took a seat with Dad and Orville in the living room.

  Orville forced out a laugh, and said, “Well, that was a bit of excitement, wasn’t it? Good thing he got those dogs back on the leash. I’m sure Wendell won’t let something like that happen again. They probably just got away from him for a second there.”

  “Great,” I said. “We haven’t even got started, and you’re already making excuses for them.”

  “I’m doing no such thing,” Orville objected.

  “Zachary,” Dad warned, “I want you two to be nice.”

  Nice?

  “I think,” Dad said slowly, “that we’ve got some real problems here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got a few problems of my own,” said Orville. “I’m investigating a murder, you know.” He made it sound like bragging. Like “I got an A+ on my paper, you know.”

  “And how’s that investigation coming?” I asked, struggling not to add “Sherlock.”

  “Well, not great,” said Orville. “There’s no witnesses, of course. It happened after the co-op was closed. And the owners never felt there’s been enough of a crime problem up here to justify putting security cameras in, so we’ve got nothing to look at there. But we’re asking around, checking into Tiff’s friends, seeing if anyone of them might have had a grudge against him, you know?”

  “You think it’s personal?” I asked.

  “You have to be thorough,” said Orville authoritatively, like he had a clue what he was doing. “We’re looking into all the angles, even if we’re not convinced they’ll pan out. That’s just good police work.”

  Hold the tongue. Hold the tongue.

  “What about the missing fertilizer?” Dad asked.

  “Yup, for sure, it’s missing, but then again, they can’t be sure it went missing last night. It might have gone missing earlier, who knows? So we can’t even say for sure it has anything to do with Tiff’s death.”

  “But,” I said, “you’re considering that there might be a connection, right? I mean, that would just be good police work.”

  Orville gave me a look. “Of course we are. And what’s it to you, anyway? You didn’t say you wanted to talk about Tiff Riley’s murder. What business have you got asking me about the progress of an investigation that has nothing to do with either one of you?”

  “Now just hear me out here, Orville,” said Dad. “And I’d be the first to admit that we’ve not got a lot to go on here, not what you’d call proof, but have you ever been inside the Wickenses’ place up there?”

  Orville eyed Dad suspiciously. “No.”

  “So you haven’t seen whose picture they’ve got up on their wall?”

  “No.”

  “Timothy McVeigh.”

  Orville waited, like this was supposed to be some great revelation, then looked
at me. “You mentioned that name this morning.”

  “It rings a bell, right?” I said. “Oklahoma City, big big bomb, the perp walk in the orange jumpsuit?”

  “Okay,” Orville said evenly. “Now I know who you mean.”

  Would he know the name Lee Harvey Oswald? Charles Manson? Son of Sam? Should I put a quiz together?

  “Don’t you think it’s odd, that they’d have his picture on the wall, that they’d see him as some kind of hero?” Dad said.

  “This is it,” Orville said. “You want me to go arrest Timmy Wickens and the rest of his family because of a picture on the wall.” He looked, in turn, at both of us.

  “Well, it is kind of odd,” Dad said, a bit defensively.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’d have to look that one up in the statutes,” Orville said. “Being odd. Maybe I should get together a posse, we’ll round up everyone in the county who’s odd. Hey!” He smiled. “We could call it The Odd Squad.”

  This hurt. Orville was right. We had nothing. What an unexpected and unwelcome turn of events.

  “Okay,” I said, wanting to move on. “But couldn’t you look around their place anyway? See if they have the fertilizer? Because if they do, well, they’d have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “You want me to search their place. You’ve got no evidence, no witnesses, nothing. What sort of judge would give me a warrant based on what you’re telling me here?”

  “Well, couldn’t you tell him we’ve got a feeling?” Dad said.

  Don’t give Orville the easy ones, I thought.

  “And besides,” Dad continued, “would you even need a warrant? I mean, I own the place. If I say it’s okay, can’t you go ahead and do it, even if they object?”

  I could see Orville’s discomfort growing. I suspect the last thing he wanted was to confront the Wickenses. “I’m not sure,” he said hesitantly, which I took to mean that yes, he could search. “But what am I going to say? I’m just going to walk up there and start snooping around?”

  “You’ve got another reason to go up there,” I said. “You could go up and talk to them about their dogs. Remind them that they have to be penned up, kept on a leash, kept on a chain for fuck’s sake, so that they don’t come down here and bother Dad’s guests again.”