“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.