I turned to Chief Thorne and said quietly, “Didn’t anyone call around to see if my dad might be in town? You two spoke to each other by first names, like you know each other pretty well. I had a two-hour-long heart attack driving up here, expecting the worst. You couldn’t have asked around?”
Thorne’s tongue poked around the inside of his cheek. He was taking his time to come up with an answer, like maybe he hadn’t expected this to be on the final. After a few seconds, he said, “We’re basically in the middle of our investigation here, Mr. Walker. Our first concern was finding out who this man over here is, and when we couldn’t immediately locate your father, well, you can understand why we were concerned.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Couldn’t you have made some calls?”
Thorne said, “We saw his vehicle over there, the boats were in, there was no reason to think he might be in town.”
“And why would he have taken a cab back?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t he have taken his truck into town?”
Thorne ignored that. A few steps away, on the ground, my dad said, “Christ on a cracker, that hurts!”
Thorne tipped his hat back a fraction of an inch and said to me, “I’m sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced, Mr. Walker.”
“Inconvenienced?” I said. “Inconvenienced? Is that what you call dragging me into the woods to show me a corpse I had every reason to believe was my father?”
The chubby guy in the nice threads said, “Orville, didn’t you call your aunt, see if she might know where Arlen was?”
Thorne coughed again. I said, “Your aunt? Why would your aunt know where my father was?”
I suppose it didn’t make a lot of sense for me to be as angry as I was. I mean, I’d just learned that my father was alive. I should have been relieved, perhaps even joyous. Leaping about, even. But instead I felt enraged at being made to look at that body hidden under the tarp, to have been led to believe by this incompetent rube, for however briefly, that it was my father, looking like he’d been fed through a meat grinder. Maybe, too, I was reeling from the shock of it all. Losing a parent and getting him back all within a matter of minutes. How often did that happen?
Whatever it was, I was losing my cool.
“Mr. Walker,” Chief Thorne said, trying to put some authority in his voice and placing a hand on my arm, “I think maybe you need to calm down and—”
“Get your hand off me,” I said, shaking it loose and—I honestly don’t know how the hell this happened—shoving Thorne away from me at the same time as he actually grabbed on to my arm, and his foot caught on a small rock, and then he was going down and taking me with him. The guy was a one-man tripping industry.
I was just going along for the ride at this point, but from Thorne’s point of view, I was attacking him, so he scrambled wildly to get out from under me, scurrying sideways like a crab, looking wild-eyed, his hat gone, and then, suddenly, there was a gun in his hand and he was shouting at me, his voice squeaking a bit, “Freeze!”
Well, I froze. Except for the parts of me that were shaking. I may not have actually appeared to be quivering, but I sure felt that way inside.
Thorne’s gun was visibly shaking. He put a second hand on the gun to help steady it, both arms outstretched, and there was something very Barney Fife about him at that moment. Not as thin and spindly, but equally erratic. He might not intend to shoot me but end up doing it anyway.
“You just hold it right there!” he shouted, glancing at me and then over to his hat and then back to me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, a bit winded from the fall. I shook my head back and forth slowly, raised both my palms to suggest a truce.
“Christ, Orville, put that fucking gun away!” my father shouted from the ground. “That’s my goddamn son, for crying out loud!”
“He started it!” Orville Thorne whined.
Even with a twisted ankle, my father had the energy to roll his eyes. “Orville, for God’s sakes, put that thing away before you hurt yourself.”
Thorne got to his feet, lowered the gun slowly and slipped it back into his holster, brushed himself off. I went over and got his hat and handed it to him.
“Sorry,” I said.
Thorne snatched the hat away and put it back on, shielding his eyes, unwilling to look at me after being scolded by my father.
“Yeah, well,” he said.
“It’s just, I thought my dad was dead. And then he drove in. I guess I went a bit crazy, having just seen that body and all.”
“Sure,” he said.
I stuck out a hand. Without being able to see Thorne’s eyes, I wasn’t sure he saw it, so I took a step closer.
“Go on, Orville,” said Arlen Walker. “Shake his hand.”
He took my hand, half shook it, then withdrew. We both had reason to be embarrassed, I guess, but Thorne looked particularly red-faced.
“Okay,” said my father. “Now that that’s settled, could someone tell me what the hell is going on around here?”
Bob Spooner spoke up. “Arlen, there’s a body in the woods. A man’s body.”
“Jesus,” Dad said. “Who is it?”