Sometimes the Wolf (16 page)

He was at the sink skinning the two prairie dogs when Drake’s phone rang. The old man turned and watched his grandson look at the number on the display, then slip the phone back into his pocket.

“You don’t want to get that?”

“It’s nothing,” Drake said. “I’m waiting on a call but that wasn’t it.” He was bent over the table, reading one of the letters. It was the third letter Morgan had seen him open.

“What call are you waiting on?”

“The call that tells me Sheri is okay,” Drake said. “The call that tells me what I can do.”

“I’m sorry about this,” Morgan said.

“I’m sorry, too.” He held one of the letters up to the light. Something there he was trying to make out. “What are the dates and times at the bottom of each letter?” Drake asked.

“Times when I could see him,” Morgan said.

Drake turned and looked at his grandfather. “You went to Monroe?” Drake’s phone rang again and he looked at the number and then put the phone away. “How often did you see him?” Drake asked.

Morgan cut a piece of sinew away and brought the skin down another inch. “When I could. Almost any date you see there in the letters. Sometimes I had to wait a bit for the guards to find him but he usually showed within a half hour or so. I brought him things. Books, cigarettes, things he needed.”

“I didn’t know he smoked.”

“I don’t think he does, not like me at least. But he could use them. They helped him avoid trouble.”

Drake was staring at his grandfather in total disbelief when the phone rang again.

DRISCOLL STOOD IN
the orchard. He had his phone out and he listened to the message click on a third time and Drake’s voice asking him to leave a number, and then he hung up. Driscoll didn’t have a clue and he kept wondering why Drake wouldn’t pick up, or if it was Drake at all who had the phone.

The night was starting to come together. Thirty minutes earlier Driscoll had returned from the truck lot, where the foreman had played the closed-circuit cameras back for him. From one angle they saw Patrick climb the fence, then go over, slipping into the lot. From another angle they picked out Driscoll’s Impala as it passed by and then came back. They saw Drake’s cruiser several times as well. The ghost in the shadows—Patrick sitting there in the truck cab—watching each vehicle pass. By the time Driscoll returned to the house a set of prints had come back and two U.S. marshals were on their way out to see them.

The prints belonged to two guys from Monroe. Convicts, Gary said, who had spent time with Patrick when he was inside. Two violent men who had escaped a week before while being transferred from Monroe to Walla Walla, killing a guard and taking his handgun with them.

Driscoll looked at the phone in his palm once more. He figured he had an hour before the marshals showed. An hour before they came in and took the scene over and Driscoll went back to sitting in an office in Seattle.

He began to walk to the house. The sun above shone pale beneath a thin layer of clouds. The heat in the grass causing the dew to rise and the apple trunks—obscured in places—seeming to float a foot above the ground.

One night and everything had changed. Two people murdered and stuffed in the trunk of a car. Drake, Patrick, and Sheri all missing. And now two escaped prisoners.

He didn’t know where any of them were and even seeing Patrick take the truck, Driscoll didn’t know whether Patrick was working with these men or against them. He had an hour to figure it out.

PATRICK CAME OUT
of the Indian casino onto the lot, looking back over his shoulder as he went. He knew they had cameras in there but he’d kept his head down, trying only to get through the casino floor and then out the opposite door.

It had taken only two hours for the police to track down the big semi. The biggest thing in the lot except for the few RVs that had set up on the perimeter where the cars were fewer and something as big as an RV or a semi could be parked sideways across several spaces.

If he’d really wanted to hide the thing he would have dropped it by the cranes and container ships down by the Port of Seattle, but he hadn’t had the time to get south, the semi too big and too visible among all the cars on the highway.

Now he walked across the lot, weaving between cars as he went, looking behind him every thirty seconds or so. His nerves going like little electric shocks inside his chest, and an awareness to his movements that he had to force on himself, counting the seconds before he could turn again to look behind toward the semi and the growing flicker of police lights.

Certain that he could not turn around, and that all he’d left behind was waiting for him in the lot by that semi. Prison and possibly worse. There was no going back, and he felt himself committed to whatever would come next, and what that would hold for his future.

Ahead, he saw the cars were beginning to thin. The lot surrounded the casino on all sides. A building that hadn’t even existed when he’d been put away, at least not in the form it was now. Ten stories tall, like something off the Vegas Strip, all glass and neon lights.

All down the access road off the highway, he’d passed fast food joints, cell phone stores, and even a Safeway. He looked to these now. The Safeway the closest building. If he was going to make the big grocery store, he’d need to get out of the casino parking area and move across two lanes of traffic and a wide open lot that looked ready for development. It was too much ground to cover.

Looking behind him, he saw two of the officers had already broken away from the rest and were headed toward the casino doors. For a long while he just stood and stared at them, both officers a good hundred yards away across the lot, their attention not on him at all, but on the casino doors.

Patrick was standing between a big Ford pickup and a smaller Toyota. No idea what to do. If he went any farther he’d be on open ground, obvious as a flashing beacon to anyone looking.

He knelt between the two vehicles and felt his chest beating. Moving low on his haunches he made his way through the small alleyways between the cars. At first trying every door he came to, and then, after finding them all locked, he stood for a second and canvassed the nearby lot with his eyes. Most everything a new-model car with a computer doubtless inside and an alarm ready to spring.

When his eyes fell on an old Camry three rows up, he made his way to it with caution, watching for people or cars before scuttling from one row to the next. With his elbow he took out the glass and waited for the alarm. When none sounded he eased the lock up and let himself in. The car model just as he remembered it from before he’d gone away to prison. The number one stolen car in America for almost his entire time as sheriff.

Working quickly, he pulled the harness down from behind the steering column and found the wires he needed. With the sharp edge of the key from the semi, he stripped the rubber sheathing and then dashed them together. The engine came on right away and he put the car in reverse and came out of the parking spot, cautious not to move too fast. The officers he’d seen heading for the casino nowhere in sight. When he let himself look again, he was already on the access road, heading for the highway. The lights still flashing by the abandoned semi.

DRAKE LOOKED AT
him and then brought up one of the letters. “What does this mean?” He held the letter in one hand and even without Drake pointing it out to him, Morgan knew the date on the letter and why it had been sent.

Morgan walked the few steps to the table and sat opposite. He took the letter and scanned down through the writing. Patrick had sent it two years ago, just after Drake had come to visit him for the first and only time.

“He was messed up when he wrote this,” Morgan said.

“He didn’t seem all that messed up to me,” Drake said. “He didn’t seem like he even gave a shit I’d come to see him.”

Morgan shook his head. He wanted to drop the letter, to push it away and dismiss it. But he couldn’t.

“I know they censor the letters,” Drake said. “I know that’s part of it—that sometimes you can’t say exactly what you mean.”

Morgan’s eyes dropped to the letter again. He scanned over it, picking out the text:

The boy has come to see me. It’s the first time . . . He’s grown. I know you haven’t seen much of him but I . . . I need to make sure everything is set. If I can . . . I’ll be out in two. I need to know that you’ll watch over your half.

Morgan knew that was as close as it came. He knew, too, whatever Patrick had expressed in that letter was still important to him. Drake. Any future Patrick might have with his son.

“You know what he’s talking about?” Drake asked. “Your half?”

Morgan looked up. He could see the desperation in Drake’s eyes—the need for answers.

“Tell me,” Drake said. “If you know something—tell me.”

Morgan wet his lips. He wanted to tell Drake everything. All there was to know, however it might help. But he didn’t know if it would. The letters were filled with sentences about the future. Patrick had filled his life with them. What he would do when he was out, where he would go, the man he was meant to be. They were simply plans that had not come to be and Morgan did not know if they ever would. But, like Patrick’s letters, Morgan hoped one day for something more.

“Please,” Drake said.

Morgan looked up at his grandson. A long time ago he’d promised to protect him. Whatever that meant.

DRISCOLL STOOD IN
the casino security office looking over the television screens. There were twenty of them total, all showing different angles of the casino. The head of security stood next to Driscoll and he had one of the clerks play the video back a third time.

“You know him?”

It was Patrick. The cameras showed him by the north doors and then seeing the police in the lot next to the truck; they showed Patrick cut across the casino floor and exit through the south entrance. “Can you zoom in on that?”

Using a joystick the clerk brought the image up. It was of an old Toyota Camry in the south lot. “We’ve put it out over the PA system already but no one’s come forward.”

“You don’t have the license?”

The head of security shook his head. He had straightened and he was looking down at Driscoll where he hunched over the television screen, now working the controls himself. It was no good.

Even if Driscoll had been wrong about the man, the semi made the connection back to Silver Lake. The tape showed Patrick parking and then getting out. No one else had been inside. Which meant Drake and Sheri were still out there. It meant the killers were out there, too.

Driscoll pushed himself up. “Do me a favor. There’s going to be two marshals out this way in thirty minutes. If you get a license for that car, I want to be the first to have it.” Driscoll found a card and gave it over to the man. He tried to smile but it came off a little loose and desperate. He was clutching at straws and he knew it.

Looking once more at the displays there he couldn’t help but feel some relief. If that’s what Driscoll could call it. There on the monitor was proof that he’d been right. All those years ago—all those trips to Monroe to see Patrick. It was all coming together. It was the reason Driscoll had come up to Silver Lake to see Drake, to tell the deputy what he suspected. Patrick was running.

PATRICK THOUGHT ABOUT
it for a long time. Just sitting there in the stolen Camry and watching the house before he finally pulled away. He parked the car five blocks over and then walked back through the lengthening shadows. The sun almost down in the west and the streetlights beginning to pop on overhead.

When he came to the house again he paused for only a moment to examine the city street before going up the stairs. He was tired from the night before, huddled beneath the blanket as he sat in the big truck watching the road. His mind numb from the lack of sleep and his hands and face windburned and chapped from the drive down on the interstate. The Camry’s one smashed window whistling all the way into Seattle. Mostly though, he didn’t have anywhere else to go and he went up the stairs to the house with the singular hope that he would find a bit of rest within.

The stairs creaked underneath him as he climbed, the paint worn down from the constant rain, and the wood beneath showed green as an algal bloom. It wasn’t a very nice place, but Patrick hadn’t expected much and he went up the stairs with an even lower expectation of the man inside. The house only an address he’d been able to memorize in his time away, a series of numbers on an envelope that he’d dutifully addressed month in and month out for nearly half the time he’d been away in Monroe.

When he got to the door he rang the bell and listened. Somewhere inside there was a television going, and he heard a basketball commentator say, “It’s up and it’s good.” Just around the corner of the house, parked in the driveway, was a new-model red Ford pickup. The only thing about the house that Patrick thought out of the ordinary and made him doubt he was at the right place. Everything else, down to the sagging eaves of the porch roof and the rotten railings, fit into Patrick’s assumptions about the man inside.

Patrick pressed the bell again and listened for the chime. Nothing sounded and the basketball game kept going. Looking down the block he saw a few kids riding their bikes around in circles where the cross streets came together. The pavement beneath them almost black in the twilight and the lazy pull and swing of their laps seeming somehow, to Patrick, like vultures on the wing, circling high over some prey.

He sniffled with the cold and dug his hands into his pockets. He was dressed as he’d been the night before, in a padded canvas jacket and jeans. Work boots on his feet and a flannel shirt his son had given him. He watched the kids for only a moment longer before he turned and knocked on the door, listening for a second as the sound on the television lowered.

The only real time Patrick had ever spent in the city of Seattle was when his wife had been in treatment. He looked around at the neighborhood and tried to measure his memories of it then against what he saw today. Lines of waist-high chain link all the way down the block, dividing the sidewalks from the houses. Everything on this block simply built, worn away with time, but still holding. Craftsman-style wood frames over cement foundations.