Linwood Barclay - Lone Wolf

Lawrence was stripping off his slacks and pulling on black jeans, tucking in the black shirt. He pulled at the shirt, tenting the fabric. “This kind of thing,” he said. It occurred to me that even his surveillance clothes looked more expensive than the stuff I wore in to the newsroom. “Dark clothes? So you won’t be seen? You’re new at this, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t exactly pack for hiding in the forest,” I said. “In fact, I didn’t get a chance to pack at all.”

Lawrence made a face. “How long you been wearing these clothes?”

I shrugged.

Lawrence sighed and tossed me an extra dark shirt. “Your jeans will be okay,” he said. “This shirt’ll help, but I don’t know what we’re going to do with that Ivory Snow face of yours.”

I unbuttoned the shirt I was wearing, slipped into Lawrence’s, which smelled of fabric softener or something. “This smells nice,” I said. “You do your own laundry?”

“What of it?”

“Okay, tell me this,” I said. “Can you iron?”

“You working up to some sort of gay joke?”

“No no,” I protested. “I just wanted to know whether I could add ironing to the list of things you can do that I can’t. With beating the snot out of people at the top, and ironing at the bottom. God knows how many things in between.”

Lawrence buckled his belt. “Let’s talk about the dogs,” he said.

“Well, you saw them this aft. There’s two. Gristle and Bone. And I’m not even sure, technically speaking, that they’re dogs. They may be very short velociraptors. All muscles and teeth. And from what I’ve seen, as deranged as they are dangerous. The other day, they tried to eat through one of the cabin doors. If your plan is to get into the Wickenses’ house to plant some bugs, you’re out of your mind.” The very thought was making my skin crawl, although that might have been the high neck on the shirt Lawrence had lent me.

“I mean, think about it,” I said. “If the dogs are outside, roaming about the property, you’ll never make it from the fence to the house, and if the dogs are in the kitchen there, where they eat and sleep, there’s no way you’re going to get inside the house.”

Lawrence said nothing.

“And,” I continued, “if it’s your plan to poison the dogs, which, even though I am not the sort of person who condones the murder of house pets, in this case I’d be willing to make an exception, that’s going to arouse their suspicions, don’t you think? Their dogs turn up dead, they’re going to be asking some questions, and I imagine the first people they’re going to ask are me and Dad, and now you, since you’ve made such a terrific first impression on them. And Timmy Wickens does not seem to be the kind of guy who asks questions nicely, even though he didn’t make a fuss about how you got the drop on his boys. Hello? You’re not saying a lot. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Am I coming through?”

Lawrence nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Tell me you’re not going to poison the dogs.”

Slowly, and thoughtfully, Lawrence said, “I am not going to poison the dogs. If I have to, I’ll shoot them.” My eyebrows went up. “But that’s not my plan at the moment.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Lawrence led me into the main room and opened up his cases filled with surveillance gear. He pulled out a gadget I’d noticed earlier, at the mayor’s place, that looked similar to a gun, but the entire barrel was covered in a soft, black, spongy material.

“Shotgun microphone,” Lawrence said. “You point at something, off in the distance, it picks up those sounds. But I don’t know just how effective it will be. Whether they’ll have their windows open at all. Whether they’ll come outside.”

Then Lawrence picked up those button-like microphones I’d spotted earlier. Each one was about as thick as three pennies, one side smooth, the other dense mesh.

“These are bugs?” I asked.

“Yeah. New model, pretty effective, they advertise that they can withstand moisture, pick up sounds through walls, but the walls have to be pretty thin, in my experience.”

“So, what, we stick it to the outside of the house, hear what’s inside?”

Lawrence shook his head. “No, I don’t think it would be strong enough to work through an outside wall. But I’m wondering…”

“What?”

“If we got one or two of these into the kitchen…”

“Lawrence,” I said, exasperated. “Were you listening two seconds ago? That’s where the dogs stay. You’re not going to get into that kitchen with those dogs there. And besides, there are six people living in that house. Maybe, just maybe, if I got to know May Wickens better…No, even though she wants to get herself and her son away, that doesn’t mean she’d be willing to plant a bug on her own father, and it’s pretty hard to get near her anyway, her dad’s watching her pretty closely.”

“What if,” Lawrence said, “we could use the dogs?”

“Huh?” I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“The dogs are our biggest problem. Why not make them part of the solution?”

“I still don’t get you. What, we hook them up with a Dog Cam? Like on Letterman? Sure, why don’t you do that. I’m sure they’d hold still while you rigged them up.”

Lawrence shook his head. “Nothing that obvious. What if we got some of these little guys”-he held the button-sized mike up between his thumb and index finger-“into the dogs?”

I smiled. “You’re kidding me.”

“I’ve never tried something like this before, but what the hey, it might be worth a shot. We give the dogs something to eat, we shove the mikes into the food, hope they swallow them whole. Dogs go lie down in the kitchen, bugs in their tummy, we listen in.”

“You’re serious.”

Lawrence smiled. “I’ve never been more so.”

I couldn’t conceal my admiration. “You know, at this very moment, I find you very hot.”

Lawrence studied the mike in his hand. “I’ve told you before, you’re not my type.”

“How many of these are you going to need? How many do you have?”

“I’ve got a half dozen of them. We get some Alpo, slip it into bowls and set it over the fence, they’re bound to sniff it out. We hide the mikes in the dog food, we might get lucky.”

“You know,” I said, “I can get something those dogs like better than Alpo.”

It took me a while to find the fish guts burial ground in the dark, but when the trees opened up and my flashlight caught the cottage shutter on the forest floor and the pile of dirt with a shovel already sticking out of it, I whispered to Lawrence, “Welcome to my new job.”

We’d found two metal galvanized pails back in the open garage that was attached to the workshed, tucked in behind Dad’s souped-up lawn tractor. I flipped the shutter off the hole, and about two feet down a layer of dirt covered the last load I’d dumped in. I’d gone first to the can of fish guts down by the lake, but recalled that I had emptied it earlier in the day, and when I lifted off the lid I saw there was nothing in it but a single filleted perch. It had been, evidently, a lousy fishing day at Denny’s Cabins. Not hard to understand, given that we’d lost one guest fleeing a bear, and Bob was probably too traumatized to do anything but sit in his cabin. Betty and Hank Wrigley just weren’t able to pick up the slack.

I yanked the shovel out of the dirt pile and drove it into the top layer of dirt. There was a soft, squooshy noise. I brought up a couple shovels full of dirt, then the main event.

“Oh my God,” Lawrence said as I displayed for him the array of guts and fins and scales and eyeballs on the shovel blade. “That is, without a doubt, just about the most horrible mess I have ever seen in my entire life, except for maybe Eyes Wide Shut . You see that movie?”