Linwood Barclay - Lone Wolf

“I’m really lucky,” Jeffrey said, shifting gears, “because I don’t have to go to school. I go to school at home. I’m kind of on a recess break now, but I have to go back soon. I love to skip stones.”

“Do you learn about these things at home?” Lawrence asked. “About which races are inferior, and which ones are superior?”

Jeffrey nodded. “My grandpa helps my mom figure out what to teach. My mom mostly does the spelling and arithmetic and geography, and my grandpa does a lot of the other stuff. Like how a lot of stuff they teach in history class in regular schools is wrong or never even happened. He gets really upset about that. One time I was telling him about my friend Richard? When I still went to regular school? And Richard’s grandfather, or his great-grandfather, I don’t remember, but when he was a kid he was in this huge prison camp where they put people in ovens and burned them all up. It was called Awwshits.”

“Close enough,” Lawrence said.

“So I told my grandpa, and he made me go to bed without any supper and when I snuck down later? To the kitchen to make a sandwich? He caught me and gave me a whooping.”

He said this without an ounce of malice or sorrow. He was just making conversation.

“So that’s why he helps me with history, because he knows that a lot of stuff that some people say happened never did.”

“Well,” Lawrence said, glancing at me. “Aren’t you lucky that he takes such an interest. So, Jeffrey, you got any friends up here?”

“Not so much,” he said. “I used to, before Mom and I moved up here, when I went to that real school. But up here, there aren’t even any neighbors. But Grandpa says that’s okay, because it reduces the number of bad influences.” As he said it, he blinked, suddenly realizing that he might be talking to one. “There are bad influences all over the place, even in Braynor.”

Lawrence reached down and ran his fingers through the wet stones. He found a smooth, flat one. “Try this,” he said, handing it to Jeffrey. “But when you throw it, try to tip it up a bit, so you can skip it right over the waves.”

Jeffrey took the stone and looked back out to the lake. He took a moment to get his grasp right, leaned into it, then snapped his arm.

The stone hit the water, skipped once, skipped twice, then disappeared under the water.

“Not bad,” Lawrence said. “Not bad at all.”

“Thanks,” Jeffrey said. He looked at me. “I didn’t know you had any Negro friends.”

“I got all kinds of friends,” I said.

“Well,” he said, stepping out of the water and finding a pair of shoes that he’d left behind a tree, “I better get back. Mom’ll get mad if I’m late for my lesson. If I’m late, Grandpa might take the strap to both of us, and I always feel bad if Mom gets it because of me.”

I thought of the red welt I’d seen on May Wickens’s arm as she was leaving the coffee shop. “Sure,” I said.

“Nice to meet you,” Lawrence said.

Jeffrey slipped on his shoes. “Bye!” he said, and ran back up the road to the Wickens place.

Lawrence watched him run off, and I looked for a trace of anger in his eyes, but all I saw was sadness.

Our previous surveillance work together, when I was doing a feature for The Metropolitan on what it was like to be a detective and was hanging out with Lawrence waiting for some bad guys to rob a high-end men’s store, did not go particularly well. Lawrence would be the first to admit this. But at least attempting surveillance in the city has its advantages. It’s a lot easier to spy on people when you have side streets and alleys to hide in, and plenty of other cars on the road to blend in with.

But up here in the country, well, that was an altogether different thing. “You try to follow somebody on these roads,” Lawrence said, “it’s not going to take your subject long to figure out what you’re up to. You’re the only two out there.” And as far as sneaking up on the Wickenses’ farmhouse went, well, that presented a host of difficulties, it struck me, night or day. You couldn’t get inside the fence without being seen or running into the dogs. We could probably stay hidden on the other side of the fence, in the woods, where all we had to worry about now, evidently, was the bear.

“No, we’ll be better off watching them at night,” Lawrence said. “We’ll go through the woods, come around the back way.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can see a whole bunch of problems.”

“And your idea would be?” Lawrence asked.

“You know, there’s a lot less chance of being spotted if there’s one of us instead of two,” I said. “You could head off into the forest, and I could hang in back here, with the cell phone, and you could call me if you needed backup.” As soon as I’d said it, I recalled you could barely get a cell signal up here, but I didn’t want to confuse Lawrence with useless details.

“Backup,” Lawrence said. “That’s what you are.”

“Hey, I can do backup. I was born to do backup.”

Lawrence gave that some thought, but not for long. “It’s not that I don’t see merit in your idea. Taking you along is a bit like having to take your little sister on a date because your mom feels sorry for her.”

I didn’t much like the comparison, but felt this was not the time to take offense. Enduring some insults seemed a small price to pay if it meant I wouldn’t have to go anywhere near the Wickens place. “You see?” I said. “I knew you’d agree.”

“But seeing as how I’ve taken this project on for somewhat less than my usual fee, and by somewhat less I mean sweet fuck all, I think I’m entitled to a bit of assistance.”

“Like?”

Lawrence shrugged. “I might need you to take a bullet for me at some point.”

“Maybe if we just paid you.”

“Won’t hear of it,” Lawrence said. “Now that we’ve got that settled, we need to decide how to use our time most productively before it gets dark.”

“What’s the plan, Stan?”

“Okay, there are a number of things going on in this town that may or may not be related. Why don’t we assume, just for fun, that they are, which means if we make progress in one area, it might end up benefiting us in another.”

“Okay.”

“Why don’t you show me the co-op, where this Tiff Riley was killed, then the mayor, and then we can pay a visit to your local gay rights leader.”

“Fine. Just as soon as I bury the fish guts and make sure we’re not low on worms.”

I returned to the cabin, with some trepidation, to tell Dad that Lawrence and I were heading off to do real live detective work, but he was in his study, on the phone, speaking in low tones. The mess on the floor had been cleaned up, the salt and pepper shakers put back on the kitchen table. I tried to get his attention, poking my head in, but he swiveled in his office chair so he wouldn’t have to look at me.

“I’ll catch you later,” I said to his back, and left.

We took Lawrence’s Jag, which was not exactly an undercover car. In Braynor, you saw a lot of Fords and Chevys and Dodges, often in the shape of pickups and SUVs, but not a great many Beemers, Saabs, or Jags. There was a small Ford dealer on the south side of town, heading in, with a one-bay service garage and barely half a dozen new vehicles out front, and the GM dealership on the north side wasn’t much grander.

At the co-op, we found the owner, a woman named Grace. I introduced myself as a reporter, and Lawrence identified himself as a private detective, but artfully declined to divulge on whose behalf he was working. We were, truth be known, just being nosy.

“This was where Tiff died,” Grace said, taking us out to the warehouse and leading us down an aisle where stacks of bagged goods-topsoil, feed, and fertilizer-were stored on pallets. There was nothing much to suggest that this had been a murder scene only a day and a half earlier. Traces of sawdust, presumably remnants of what was used to soak up Tiff’s blood, dusted the concrete floor. There wasn’t a lot to see.