When Wade looked up again, he saw Mandy standing outside of the restaurant staring at him, her arms folded under her chest. Her father came out behind her, wheeling his oxygen tank. The hookers and homeless and a lot of other people were stepping out of doorways and peering out between the bars of their windows to see what would happen next.
Hefting the tire iron, Wade strode across the street to the Escalade and took a swing at the windshield. The laminated glass radiated with cracks. He continued to swing at it until the windshield crumpled and caved in on the dashboard.
Wade walked around the car, smashing the windows as he went and busting the taillights. When he got to the front of the Escalade, he broke the headlights, caved in the shot?up grill, and took a few more whacks at the hood for good measure before he threw the tire iron into the SUV and walked back to his Mustang.
He opened the dented trunk, the metal groaning as he lifted it, and then opened his gun locker, which resembled an ice chest. He put on rubber gloves, gathered up the discarded guns from the street, and dumped them in the locker. Then he peeled off his rubber gloves, tossed them in the trunk, and closed the lid, which he had to slam shut twice before it stuck.
Wade put his right hand on his holstered gun and strode into the open intersection again, looking in all directions for a possible shooter as he headed back to the restaurant to finish his meal.
As he got up close to Mandy, the look on her face and the way she stood asked a question, but he didn’t know whether it was intended for him or for her to answer.
So he just said what was on his mind. “I hope my pancakes haven’t gotten too cold.”
Wade passed Mandy and her father and went into the restaurant.
Chapter seven
When Wade was facing down the Indian, he wasn’t really thinking about the situation. He was thinking about his father.
Glenn Wade wasn’t an imposing man, but he had strength. It wasn’t muscle; it was something in his eyes and in his bearing. His skin was dark and lined from a lifetime of living, working, and playing outdoors. He was a man who would’ve looked natural wearing a cowboy hat, but he wouldn’t have felt natural doing it. He would have felt ridiculous.
During the spring and summer, Glenn ran Granite Cove Park, the Loon Lake campground and resort that his grandfather built fifty miles north of King City and two miles west off the highway to Canada.
Granite Cove consisted of four red cabins, a general store, a boat dock, a camping area, and the two?story house that the Wade family lived in year?round.
Wade’s parents worked full time at the resort throughout the spring and summer. He and his younger sister, Elizabeth, helped out after school and throughout their summer vacations.
During the late fall and winter, when the resort was closed for the season, Glenn Wade worked full time as a deputy sheriff, one of only a handful enforcing the law on the lake and the surrounding community. He was a deputy during the summer too, but only part time. Since the resort and the boat dock were such a big part of the local economy, it was more important to the community to have him running the place than to have him out on patrol. But he was on call 24?7 if something came up.
Once in a while, Wade rode with his father in his patrol car or in his patrol boat, which was actually just their fishing boat with a county flag on the stern and a bullhorn under the bench. They didn’t talk about much during those ride?alongs, and that was fine with Wade. It was time alone with his dad that didn’t involve washing the boats, patching roofs, cleaning toilets, or raking the beach.
On one such night, when Wade was twelve years old, they were driving the pitch?black roads around the lake, keeping an eye on the empty lake houses, making sure nobody busted into them during the off?season, though it happened a lot anyway despite the patrol. There was too much lake, and too many houses, for Glenn to maintain a vigil on them all.
It hadn’t started snowing yet, but it was cold enough outside at night to keep a milk shake from melting. Wade and his sister had tried it. The darker it was at night, the colder it seemed to be. He could almost measure the temperature by staring into the darkness.
A call came in from the dispatcher in Silverton. The cook at the roadhouse and bait shack on Highway 99 was frantic. Four guys from the lumber mill were drinking their paychecks, beating up on the waitress, and trashing the place.
Glenn got there in about five minutes. They drove up to the clapboard roadhouse just as a chair flew through a window and landed in front of the two pickup trucks in the gravel parking lot.
Through the broken window, Wade could see the four men inside the restaurant. They were drunk, rowdy, and spoiling for a fight. If there’d been any other customers that night, they were long gone now.
His father parked the car beside the two pickup trucks, took the gun out of his holster, and placed it in the glove box, slamming the lid shut.
“No matter what happens, you stay right here,” his father told him.
“You’re going up against them without your gun?”
“I don’t want anybody to die tonight,” Glenn said. “Guns tend to bring out the death in a room.”
“But there’s four of them,” Wade said. “How are you going to protect yourself?”
“Most of the time, it’s not whether or not you have a gun in your hand that matters,” his father said. “It’s what you stand for and how strong you stand for it.”
That wasn’t the first time Wade had heard that “what you stand for” line from his dad. It was his father’s all?purpose explanation for every decision he made on any subject, whether it was whom he voted for, how much he’d pay for a shirt, or which kind of bait he chose for his hook. Now the line sounded not only hollow to Wade, but foolish.
Glenn got out and walked into the roadhouse.
Wade looked at the glove box and thought about his dad in the bar, outnumbered by a bunch of drunken, pissed?off mill workers.
He grabbed the gun, ran out of the car, and crept up to the window, raising his head just enough to peer over the sill to see what was going on.
It looked like a tornado had swept through the place, upending tables and breaking dishes. Three big men, about as wide as the pickup trucks they drove, stood proudly in the midst of the destruction, grinning drunkenly and sweating from their exertions. Another man sat on a barstool, his back to the bar, directing the show.
A waitress cowered in the far corner, holding a rag to her bloody nose. One of her eyes was already swelling shut. A fat cook stood protectively in front of her, holding a greasy frying pan up like a shield.
As Glenn came in, the man on the stool spun around to face him. It was clear that the guy was the group leader, or at least their spokesperson, by the way the others fell in behind him.
Glenn walked up slowly to the bar and addressed the man on the stool. “You want to tell me what happened here, son?”
“We’re just having a good time, that’s all,” said the man. “There a law against that?”
Glenn gestured to the waitress. “How did Phyllis get hurt?”
“She done that to herself,” the man said.
“Clete hit me!” she said. “Twice!”
“I put her in her place,” Clete said. “She ought to know better than to slap a man.”
“You grabbed my ass,” she said. “Nobody does that without an invitation.”
“Your ass is an invitation,” Clete said. “Ask anybody. Ain’t that so, Deputy?”
Glenn grabbed Clete’s head and slammed his face into the bar.
Wade heard Clete’s nose crack like a boot stomping on dry twigs, but it may just have been his imagination filling in the blanks. It was a startling sight. He’d never seen his father hurt anyone before. But what was more surprising to Wade was how fast and naturally his father lashed out.