“You understand, Orville?” Timmy said, smiling. “Just. Walk. Away.”
Orville, his face ablaze with shame, took the weapon and slid it back into his holster. Then he turned and started walking back to the gate.
“Hold on,” I said. “Aren’t we—”
“You better go with him,” Timmy said, feigning concern. “You know what? Take him into town, get him an ice cream. Make it all better.”
19
ORVILLE WAS MOVING so quickly I had to run to catch up with him. “Orville, wait,” I said. He was out the Wickenses’ gate and walking down the hill toward his patrol car. “Would you hold up for a minute?” I shouted.
He stopped abruptly and whirled around. “You wanna make a joke? You wanna have a good laugh? Go ahead. Laugh. And then just keep the fuck away from me.”
“Orville,” I said. “Listen, I don’t know what to say.” And I didn’t. I knew I didn’t want to make fun of him. I had no smartass remarks ready to go. Maybe, being a cop in Braynor, you didn’t have to deal with that many like Timmy Wickens. And when you ran up against one, you didn’t know what the hell to do.
It was clear Orville Thorne wasn’t much of a cop. It wasn’t that he was a cop on the take, as far as I knew. I’d had to deal with at least one of those in the past. Thorne just didn’t have the stuff. Which made him, in many ways, a lot like me. At some level, I was sharing his shame.
“Why don’t we go talk to my dad,” I said gently. “Those guys, look, those guys are nuts. If I’d been you, I don’t know what I would have done. I mean, it wasn’t like you could just shoot them all dead, as much as you might have liked to. We just, we just need to figure out another way to—”
“Shut up, Walker,” Orville said. “Just shut the fuck up.”
I felt badly for him. You couldn’t watch someone get humiliated like that and get any pleasure out of making it any worse. Orville Thorne knew what he’d failed to do, and he didn’t need me to remind him of it. Back up the hill, beyond the gate, we could hear Dougie and Wendell laughing, making whooping sounds.
“Orville,” I said, “I have a friend coming up, someone who’s had some experience dealing with all kinds of things and—”
“That’s great,” Orville said. “It’ll be great, won’t it, to get someone up here who knows what he’s doing. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Someone who can show me up real good.”
I held my arms out at my sides in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m just saying this guy might be able to give all of us some ideas about a fresh approach, is all.”
Orville reached his car, got inside, turned it around, and stopped as he passed me. “Tell your dad we’ll be out in the morning to look for the bear.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell—”
And then he hit the gas, kicking up gravel on his way out.
I went back into Dad’s cabin. “How’d it go?” he asked.
I ignored him and went into his study and downloaded the shots I’d just taken from the digital camera to Dad’s computer. “Hey,” he called out. “Are you gonna tell me what happened up there or not? Where’s Orville?”
I found two good pictures of Orville, one straight on, the other a three-quarters shot, and e-mailed them to Sarah’s work address with a note. This is the police chief, Orville Thorne. Does he look familiar to you?
I closed the mail program and went back into the main room.
“Would you tell me what in the hell is going on?” Dad said, anger creeping into his voice. “Every time I ask you about things, like what happened out front of Lana’s, what happened up there just now, you don’t tell me a damn thing.”
I decided it was time to start doing a bit of work on my own. I dug out the phone book he kept in a drawer in the kitchen area. “What’s that mayor’s name again?” I asked.
“Huh? What do you want her name for?”
“The name?”
“Holland. Alice Holland. She’s mayor for Braynor and the surrounding county. Are you calling her? What are you doing?”
I ran my finger down through the listings of the slender phone book. There was only one Holland, but no A. Holland. “There’s only a G. Holland here,” I said. “On Connor Bay Road.”
“That’s her husband. George Holland.”
“So she’s not a lesbian,” I said.
“Far as I know,” Dad said.
I asked Dad where Connor Bay Road was. “North side of town, half a mile or so, road runs off to the east, you hang a right, it’s kind of windy,” he said. “Are you just going to go out there? You’re just gonna show up? Don’t you think that’s a bit rude? Shouldn’t you call first?”