Linwood Barclay - Lone Wolf

May’s eyes moistened. “For my son,” she said. “Would you want to see a boy raised this way, on a daily diet of racism and hate?”

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked. “Just get in your car with Jeffrey and keep on driving.”

May swallowed. “Because he’d find us. He and Charlene, and those boys of hers. They’d find us. And they’d make us come back. Daddy said to me once, he said, ‘Don’t you go thinking about leaving, May,’ he said, ‘unless you’re happy to leave Jeffrey behind.’ ”

I realized that my heart was pounding. “He threatened to hold your son.”

May bit her lip. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I guess, I took a chance telling you because you might have some idea.”

I had no idea whatsoever. The best idea I could come up with was to run back to the city as quickly as I could. To leave all these problems behind. Dad got himself into this mess, renting that house to the Wickenses, and he could just find a way out of it.

But looking into May Wickens’s face, I knew I couldn’t succumb to my first instinct to cut and run.

“Let me think about this,” I said, tossing a couple of bills onto the table. “Right now, I have to get Dad back-”

“Oh my God,” May said. “What time is it?”

I glanced at my watch. I told her it was nearly noon.

“I have to go,” she said, her voice laced with panic. She shifted out to the edge of the seat, and as she did her sleeve caught on a chip in the tabletop. There was a red welt on her arm, a couple of inches above her wrist.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.

She quickly pulled down her sleeve. “It’s nothing,” she said. She got out of the booth and headed for the door, with me right behind. “He’ll start looking for us if we’re gone too long,” she said. “I’ve got to get Jeffrey and-”

Timmy Wickens was standing outside the cafe door, looking inside at us, and he was clutching the hand of young Jeffrey, who stood obediently at his side.

“Hey, Mr. Wickens,” I said. “Timmy.” I extended a hand. “Good to see you. Thanks again for dinner last night.”

Timmy Wickens wasn’t buying it. His face seemed made of stone. He wasn’t even interested in talking to me, at least not yet. He had his eyes on May.

“You know where I found this boy of yours?” he said.

“I ran into Mr. Walker,” she said.

“Do you know where he was?”

“I had to go to the drugstore,” May said. “I had,” and she lowered her voice to a whisper, “some personal, feminine things to buy.”

“Where are they?” Timmy Wickens asked. “I don’t see a bag. Where’s the stuff you bought?”

“Do I have to empty my purse?” she said, trying to be indignant. “You want to haul out my box of tampons right here on the main street?”

He recoiled a bit at that, but he was ready to go in a different direction. He yanked on Jeffrey’s arm for dramatic effect. “I found him playing video games,” Timmy said, tightening his grip on the boy. I tried to catch the boy’s eye, but he was looking at the sidewalk.

“I gave him a few quarters,” May explained. “So I could run my errand. I didn’t think it would do any harm.”

“You know I won’t have him hanging around places like that. And this don’t exactly look like the drugstore to me,” he said, casting his eye across the front of Lana’s.

“I just ran in to get a coffee,” she said. “To go. To drink on the way home. And I saw Mr. Walker here.”

“That’s right, Timmy,” I said. “May was just-”

Timmy turned on me. “Am I talking to you right now?”

I took half a step back. “Hey, listen, back off-”

“Because I’m pretty sure I’m talking to her. When I’m talking to you, you’ll know it.”

Up the street, a horn honked. I could see Dad leaning over in the front of his truck, hitting the steering wheel.

“Daddy, stop being so rude to Mr. Walker. He just offered to buy me a coffee as a way of saying thank you for our having him and his father to dinner last night.”

“You been in there a long time being thanked,” Timmy said. “I been up and down this street twice looking for you. When you weren’t back soon, I went looking, and can you imagine what I thought when I saw my grandson standing in the doorway of a video game parlor? Can you?”

“I was just play-”

“Shut up, Jeffrey,” his grandfather said. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to your mother.”

“Honest to God, Dad,” May whispered. “We’re in public. Let’s just forget about this and go home.”

She grabbed Jeffrey’s hand out of her father’s and started down the sidewalk. She’d gone about five steps when she stopped and turned to say, “Thank you, Mr. Walker, for your kindness.”

I started to go, too, but Timmy Wickens suddenly had hold of my upper arm. His hand felt like a vise.

“Let go of me,” I said. I was full of rage, but a good part of me was rapidly turning to jelly.

With his free hand, Timmy made a fist with his index finger sticking out. “You want to talk to my daughter, you go through me.”

“Why should I do that?” I asked. I don’t know what part of my brain, exactly, made me say such a thing, when I was just as inclined to say “Okey dokey.”

“Excuse me?” Timmy said.

“She’s a grown woman. She’s got a son. Why should it be up to you who she talks to and who she doesn’t? If she doesn’t want to talk to me, she doesn’t have to.”

Timmy’s hand squeezed harder on my bicep. It hurt. He leaned in close to me, and his breath was hot and foul. His teeth were brown at the gum line, and for a moment, he reminded me of Gristle. Or maybe Bone. Or some creature that hides in the forest at night, waiting for you to walk past.

“I look out for her,” he said. “I take care of her, and I take care of her boy. And that gives me the right, way I see it.”

“Sure,” I said, deciding it might be wise to back down not for my own protection, but to mitigate whatever punishment Timmy might decide to mete out to his daughter once they all got back home. “Whatever you say.”

Timmy’s grip on my arm relaxed and he nodded slowly. “Good. Now, in the future, I think it would be best if you didn’t talk to my daughter or my grandson. That way, I think we can continue to remain good neighbors with your pa. Because I figure you’ll be going back home pretty soon, wouldn’t you say?”

“Soon as Dad’s ankle gets better, I guess I will.”

Timmy nodded agreeably. “That’s great. I bet they miss you back home. You got a wife, right, and kids?”

My mouth was getting very dry. “Yes,” I said.

“I’ll bet they want to see you just as much as you want to see them. Hey, you know what might be fun? Maybe sometime, I’ll drop by and have a coffee with them when you’re not around. Works both ways, you know.”

He let go of my arm, but not without tossing me up against the window of the cafe at the same time. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.” And with that he walked off in the same direction that his daughter had gone.

Lana stepped outside. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Nothing,” I said, and headed back to Dad’s truck.

I was shaken. My legs felt wobbly, my heart was pounding, things seemed to be spinning around me. I paused by the phone booth, put my hand up against the glass, but it felt papery under my hand. It was another flyer for the fall fair, taped to the glass. And below it, another one of those flyers, plastered on with duct tape, that said “Keep Our Parade Straight.”

My only purpose in coming up here had been to make sure Dad was okay. Aside from a twisted ankle, he was okay. But now I felt held here, as stuck to Braynor as those flyers were to the phone booth. Bad things had already happened up here. A man ripped to shreds in the woods. Another man fatally stabbed. A lawyer’s house burned to the ground.