Bob nodded. “Yeah, he told me that, too. Good paper. Don’t see it all the time, but when I do, there’s lots to read in there.”
We were coming round the bend now, approaching the gate decorated with its numerous warnings for trespassers.
“I guess they don’t like visitors,” I said.
“They don’t like much of anything,” Thorne said.
The three of us stood at the gate, Bob resting his arms atop it. About fifty yards away stood the two-story farmhouse, and it didn’t look much the way I’d remembered it from when my father first purchased the property. Back then, the shutters hung straight, there wasn’t litter scattered about the front porch, there weren’t half a dozen old cars in various states of disrepair, the lawn out front of the house was cut, the garden maintained. Now, none of that was the case. There was an old white van up near the barn, a couple of run-down pickups and a rusting compact out front of the house. There was an abandoned refrigerator shoved up against one side of the building, a rusted metal spring bed leaned up against it, a collection of hubcaps hanging on nails that had been driven into the wall, half a dozen five-gallon red metal gas cans scattered about.
“Has my dad seen all this?” I asked of either Thorne or Bob. “The place is a dump.”
“It is a bit of a concern to him,” Bob said. “And by ‘a bit’ I mean huge. But he doesn’t exactly know what to do about it.”
“How many live here?” I asked.
Thorne said, “It depends on the day, I think. But right now, I think there’s the old man, well, he’s not that old, but he runs the family. Timmy Wickens.”
“Timmy?” I said.
“And Timmy’s wife, Charlene, and they’ve got a couple of boys, early twenties. Arlen tells me they’re her boys, from some other marriage. I think their last name is Dunbar. And there’s a daughter, Timmy’s actual daughter, she must be about thirty, thirty-two or so. Her name’s May. She’s got a boy of her own, he must be about ten, he lives here, too. I think she’s got a boyfriend, lives here with the bunch of them, but I’m not sure. And they all got their like-minded friends, dropping in now and then.”
“What do you mean, like-minded?” I asked.
Thorne shrugged. “They just don’t like mixing with everybody else. I mean, look at the signs.” He pointed to the ones we were leaning up against. “They think the world’s out to get ’em, I guess. And they’re not what you’d call fans of the government, large or small. They’ve had a few run-ins with other locals over things. Pissed so many people off the last place they moved that they had to come here. Sometimes, it’s just easier to leave them alone out here than have to deal with them.”
“Why would my father have rented to them if they’re a bunch of whackos?”
Bob said, “I don’t think he had any idea. Timmy came to see him when he saw the house was up for rent, all cleaned up, looking respectable. Wasn’t till afterwards that your dad saw what he’d got himself into.”
“Oh man,” I said, still surveying the landscape. I spotted an old washing machine beyond the fridge. “So, are we going in?”
“Why don’t we just try calling them,” Thorne said. He straightened up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Hello!” He waited a few seconds, then again, at the top of his voice: “Hello? Mr. Wickens? Hello?”
The house remained quiet.
“Can’t you just go up to the door?” I suggested to Thorne.
He pointed to the “Beware of Dogs” sign. “Can you read?”
“I don’t see any dogs,” I said. “And I know you’ve got a gun. Can’t you defend yourself against some puppies?”
Thorne said, “Let me try calling again.” He took a breath. “Hello!”
Still no sign of action at the house. No one at a window peeking out. Nothing.
“If you’re not going to go, I guess I will,” I said. I had my foot on the bottom board of the gate, the other foot on the board above it, then a leg over the top in a couple of seconds. “I’ll go knock on the door,” I said. I was feeling a bit wired still. The discovery of the body, the drive up, the mistaken identity, it all had me a bit rattled, and I was eager to get some answers. Also, there was a part of me that was enjoying showing up Chief Thorne in a way I found hard to explain.
“Mr. Walker, I think you’re making a mistake,” Thorne said. But I had both legs over now, and had hopped down to the other side.
I had taken maybe a dozen steps in the direction of the house when, up by the barn, I saw two brownish-gray blurry things heading toward me. Blurry, because they were moving so quickly. They were low to the ground, galloping, coming at me like a couple of torpedoes, and as they closed the gap between us, I could hear their rapid, shallow breathing and deep-throated growling.
The sign was right. These were dogs.
“Yikes,” I said, stopping for maybe a hundredth of a second, then turning back and bolting for the gate. Never did such a few steps feel like such a great distance.