Lone Wolf by Linwood Barclay Page A

were on the highway, Leonard said, “God, I love it up here. I could go anywhere, you know, Club Med, you name some fancy place, I could afford it. But there’s nothing like being up here.”
    “There a Mrs. Colebert?” I asked.
    “Not at the moment, but you never know, that could change,” Leonard said, puffing out his chest. “I’ve had my share of ladies over the years, that’s for sure. But never really found the right one.”
    There had to be a girl somewhere, I figured, who wanted to listen to diaper talk all day.
    The road took a slight bend to the right when Leonard shouted, “Here! Here’s the spot! Slow down.”
    I pulled over onto the shoulder and brought the truck to a halt, leaving it running in drive with my foot planted on the brake. Leonard was pointing into dense forest. The lake was probably no more than a couple hundred yards away, but you couldn’t see it.
    “Okay, this is where you’d drive in, there’d be a big sign here, maybe something like ‘Colebert Lodge,’ I don’t know, and a huge neon fish jumping out of the water, a line coming out of its mouth. Can you picture it? It’d be super vivid, like a Vegas sign, but tasteful, you know?”
    “Right,” I said.
    “It’d be bright in the daytime, but at night, it would light up the sky, you know? There’s nothing like that around here, let me tell you.”
    “You’re right about that.”
    “So we take down about two acres’ worth of trees over there to put in some parking, and once we do that, you’ll be able to see right through to the lake, where there’ll be the main hotel, about five stories high, I figure, and restaurants and snack bars, a huge bait shop. Just huge.” He shook his head in wonderment. “Can you imagine it? Huh? Can you?”
    “Actually, yes,” I said, doing a very good job of concealing my excitement, and wondering, for the first time, what Leonard, sitting next to me, was wearing under his khakis.
    “Come on,” Leonard said, already opening his door. “I’ll show you.”
    He was out of the truck before I could say no, so I killed the engine and followed him through the tall grass at the edge of the highway and into the forest. For a short, not particularly fit-looking guy, he was hard to keep up with.
    “You think we’re going to need the bear spray?” he called back to me.
    “Let’s chance it,” I said.
    “Okay,” he said, once we were shrouded in trees. “Okay, hotel over there, maybe a swimming pool over there, although we’ll have lakeside swimming, too. There’s some weedy areas, a bit of marshland along the shore, but we can backfill that in, landscape it, you’d never know there was anything natural there before.”
    “Well,” I said.
    “Hey, here’s an idea,” Leonard said. “Looks like I’ve already got Bob Spooner talked into working for me, running a charter.”
    “I wouldn’t be so—”
    “But there’d probably be something here for you, too. You could help me write up press releases, the literature, that kind of thing? Be my PR guy, my media relations officer. Because every big resort, you gotta have one of those. I’d make it worth your while.”
    “I don’t think so,” I said.
    We were climbing now, the ground gradually sloping upwards. When we got to the top, I instinctively leaned back. We were standing at the edge of a sharp dropoff. It was a good thirty feet down to another section of heavily wooded forest.
    “Down there, we clear the trees, that’s where I’m going to put in the children’s playland. I’m thinking of a huge model of a whale, the kids can run through it, pretend they’ve been swallowed by Jonah. And there’ll be a fountain, shooting water out of the blowhole, the water’ll come down the side, like one of those splash pads. Even from out in the middle of the lake you’ll be able to hear the kids laughing and screaming.” He smiled with self-satisfaction. “I’ve got lots of conceptual drawings, if you’d like to see