Sometimes the Wolf (20 page)
In the bathroom he pissed a stream of urine that smelled of whiskey, his free hand held out on the wall for balance. From the window over the sink he could see Maurice’s red pickup still parked there in the drive. The reflection of the streetlights shining brightly on the waxed paint.
Patrick ran the faucet and then cupped the water and washed his hands and face. He didn’t know what he’d thought to accomplish coming here. He only knew that he’d needed to come, that he owed Maurice that at least.
When he was done he dried his hands and came out of the bathroom. The house dark and the clock on the stove telling him it was nearly one
A
.
M
. The door to Maurice’s room cracked and Patrick stopped just beyond. Maurice a dark shadow on the white sheets of his bed. The gray pants pulled up and no shirt to cover his chest. Patrick pushed the door open a foot. “You awake?” he asked.
Maurice shifted and then looked up. “Some night, eh?”
“Yeah.”
Maurice was smiling now, a big grin showing on his face. “You won’t want to wash that smell off for days,” he said. “There’s nothing like it. You feel me, right?”
“I came here because I thought we should talk. I’m out now. I owe you. You took care of me in Monroe. I didn’t want you to think I forgot.”
Maurice pulled a cigarette from somewhere and lit it, offering one to Patrick.
“No,” Patrick said.
“I didn’t forget, Pat. I knew you’d come by. I’m glad you did.”
“I need you to help me get the money. I need that truck out there.”
“Sure, Pat. We can go in the morning. I don’t have a problem with that. I know you came here for more than just a good time.”
“It’s a lot of money,” Patrick said.
“I know it is.”
“I just thought it would be on your mind.”
“It has.” He smiled again and then took a long pull off the cigarette and let the smoke roll up out of his lungs into the room. “You did have a good time, didn’t you?”
Patrick watched his old friend. He hadn’t moved but to light the cigarette and he lay there in his bed. On the nightstand beside him, Maurice’s wallet, cell phone, and keys neatly stacked one on top of the other like a cairn of rocks marking a trailhead. “Yeah, the best,” Patrick said. “Better than being in prison.”
Maurice laughed again, looking around on Patrick. Smoke escaping the line of his teeth. “You’re goddamn right,” Maurice said.
J
OHN WESLEY LIFTED SHERI’S
head in his hand, turning her one way, then the other. In one hand he held a burning log from the fire. The flicker of light playing across one of Sheri’s cheeks while the other cheek lay in darkness like a cool, worn-away river stone waiting somewhere in the recesses of a dried-out creek.
They’d picked her up off the road and put her in the backseat of the car. Now John Wesley waited for her to wake. Their fire fifteen feet off and the car door pulled open. And he could see that if she stayed with them for a day more she’d be broken. He hadn’t meant to lift her off her feet with the punch but she was such a fragile little thing and she’d come up off her toes almost like it hadn’t been him at all.
He turned and looked to the fire. Bean waiting there and the shadow he cast stretching away behind him into the trees. With one hand John Wesley closed the door, the log in his hand smoldering now and the embers beating to the pulse of what little wind there was. He’d never taken someone from their home, though he knew Bean had, and he wondered how it would turn out for all of them. The three of them now connected in some irrevocable way.
When he came back into the firelight, Bean was waiting for him, standing in the same place he’d been before. Half there and half somewhere else entirely. “Is she going to live?” A cruel smile on Bean’s face as he said it and the lapels of his coat pushed together in one hand, while his other hand reached for the warmth of the fire.
“I think so.”
John Wesley knelt and dug the log into the coals. When he stood again, Bean was holding the phone, the green light of the display flashing in his hand and the low pulsing sound of its vibration.
Bean depressed a button and held the phone to his ear. He listened for a time and then when he was finished, he looked over at John Wesley, the grin growing across Bean’s face. “Yeah, man, I feel you,” Bean said, and then closed the phone, already turning toward the car, Seattle a few hours’ drive away.
M
ORGAN WOKE HIM BEFORE
sunrise. The dawn light at the horizon and Drake’s grandfather bent over him with a hand to his shoulder.
Drake came up like a man surfacing from below, air pulled deep in his lungs with his first waking breath. He sat straight up in the chair, the muted blue light everywhere inside the small cabin. No memory of closing his eyes or even laying his head down against the table.
“You’ve been asleep almost seven hours,” Morgan said, his hand taken back from Drake’s shoulder. Morgan waited a moment and then walked to the stove and lit the propane burner. He placed some water to boil and then turned back to Drake, still there where he had left him.
Drake pushed himself away from the table and stood. He ran a hand through his sleep-mussed hair to smooth it down and at the same time walked to the window. Bending slightly to take in the light coming up over the far rise. “What time is it?” he asked.
“Almost six.”
Drake looked around the room, everything the way he’d left it the night before. The shotgun on the table and the cast-iron stove there in the center of the room with the smoke pipe vented to the roof. The room seeming colder to Drake than it had at any point since he’d arrived the day before. He pulled up his cell phone and looked at the display. “Did anyone call?” he asked.
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“I know them,” Morgan said. “Until they have what they came for she’ll be safe.”
Drake watched the old man. The water began to bubble inside the pan and when it was ready the old man poured it into a shallow bowl. With a rag he cleaned his weathered face and ran the cloth beneath his neck. The excess water falling to the bowl while Drake tried to gather his senses for the day. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep . . . ,” Drake began.
Morgan looked up, placing the rag on the edge of the small washbasin. “I want to show you something. Would that be okay? Something I think is important for you to see.”
IT TOOK DRISCOLL
a moment to figure where he was. With his head tipped back and his mouth open he soon found he was looking at the ceiling tiles in his office. He snapped his mouth shut and swallowed to wet his throat.
He checked his watch and then stood, putting two hands to his back as he felt his vertebrae pop. The office was just how Driscoll had left it the afternoon before. He tried to play back his night but he came up short. There were only glimpses of things said and done. Two more old-fashioneds, the brief memory of shots being taken with the bartender, and then at another bar a basket of fries eaten and then washed down with a cold can of beer. He ran back through it, trying all the more. A life seen through the slats of a fence while Driscoll paced one side, peering through at the night before.
He turned and took in the office. Everything was there, his jacket on the chair, his gun on the desk next to his keys and wallet. He walked around and brought up his jacket. Holding it with one hand he patted the material down with the other as he looked for his phone.
Driscoll had missed a call from the marshals and then another from the head of security at the casino. He listened to them both and then sat back at his desk and thought it through. One of the blackjack dealers, a woman working a double, had noticed her car was gone when she left around eleven the night before.
The marshals were angry he hadn’t answered any of their calls, but Driscoll didn’t care. A quick check with the Seattle police and the state patrol came up with nothing on the Toyota Camry and he knew they were all still clutching at straws.
From a drawer in his desk he took out a bottle of ibuprofen and swallowed four pills dry. He went to the bathroom and cupped water into his hands, drinking it like some lost wanderer come in out of the desert sun. When he straightened and saw himself in the mirror there were dark circles beneath his eyes and a layer of scruff had grown on his cheeks and neck. The shirt he wore was greasy from three days’ wear and the top couple buttons left undone. No idea what had happened to his tie.
He came back to the office and stood in the doorway. In all the time Patrick had been locked away Driscoll had gone right to the source and now with Patrick missing he knew he had to find another source.
THE NIGHT COOL
was still in the cottonwoods when Drake and Morgan came down off the prairie and threaded their way into the stand. The sound of the creek there at the base of the hollow and the first white tufts of spring beginning to show in the branches above. They crossed and went up the opposite side, coming out of the trees and into the grasslands again.
Drake carried the shotgun in his hand as his grandfather led. The old man holding a set of the wire snares and watching his steps as they came up off the creek. Drake with no idea what his grandfather meant to show him, or why it mattered. No word from the killers. Sheri gone away somewhere and Drake worrying over where that place might be and who was at the end of it.
“Before your father went to prison he used to come out this way to visit,” Morgan said, the wheeze of his breath audible between words. “We’d set snares in the morning and then shoot some in the day. Then, in the evening, cook whatever we’d managed to pull from the prairie. Most times we’d leave a few snares till the next morning and Patrick would go home with a couple rabbits.”
“He came out here?”
“When he could.”
Drake walked with the shotgun faced outward and down as he had on so many other days with Patrick, following his father up the cut of a ravine so that they could find a high point to take in the terrain. The wood stock of the gun warmed by his hand.
As if sensing his thought, Morgan said, “I’ve been meaning to ask, don’t you have something in your cruiser that has a little more wallop?”
Drake kept walking. He didn’t want to tell his grandfather the two killers had emptied out the car. He was angry with himself for dropping his guard—for trusting Patrick. He still was. He didn’t want to tell Morgan the only protection he had left was his service weapon.
What the killers had taken from him was worse than anything they could have taken from within the cruiser. When they came into his house they took any sense of security he’d had. The life he and Sheri had made for themselves was fractured. Sheri pulled one way and Drake the other. And he was thinking about this now, watching the steps he took, feeling the grass bend beneath his shoes.
They walked for another five minutes. Drake watched his grandfather’s back. The grass as high as their thighs in places and the prairie rolling before them with the mountains far beyond in the west, the steam of Morgan’s breath floating back over his shoulder as he picked his steps.
“Let me ask you something,” Morgan said. “You had a good childhood, didn’t you? You lived a good life. You played basketball and Patrick took you camping in the mountains. You had friends. School was good to you.”
“Yes,” Drake replied. They had crossed a long stretch of flat ground and ahead of them was a fence of wooden posts and barbed wire.
“He wasn’t the man you think of now.”
“He wasn’t the man he is now,” Drake said. “He was a sheriff and now he isn’t.”
“Occupation defines him, then?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I think it’s easier for you to keep him in the box everyone else keeps him in.”
Drake wouldn’t respond. Behind him, the tops of the cottonwoods had dropped below the horizon and the prairie seemed to go on forever.
“I know when he was caught it shook you up,” Morgan said. “Everything you thought about Patrick was brought into question. And that scared you. It turned your life upside down. You blamed him for that, you still do.”
“Yes.”
“But yesterday when I asked you what would happen when you found him, you didn’t know.”
“I’m a sheriff’s deputy and he’s a criminal,” Drake said, feeling his voice tighten, struggling with the idea.
“So you would arrest him?”
“He messed his life up. Not me. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”
“So you think he did it all for himself?” Morgan asked. They had come to the fence marking the end of Morgan’s property. “You want to know what it was all about—the last twelve years your father was sitting in Monroe.” Morgan bent and found a small strip of black electrical tape wound to the bottommost wire. He rose and walked east to where the sun sat a few inches past the horizon. He looked north and then squared himself. “The county road down there can only be seen from this spot. If you’re not standing right here the grass hides it or, on the other side, the hills.” He looked over at Drake. “Come over here,” Morgan said.