Sometimes the Wolf (24 page)

A brief pause while the deputy cleared his throat. “Gary told me to wait around and see if anyone called. I didn’t think it would be you, Pat.”

“What do you mean you didn’t think it would be me? Where’s Bobby, Luke? Where’s Sheri?” Patrick leaned into the phone; he had the receiver held tight to the side of his face and his eyes scanned back over the diner. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. Why are you at my house?”

“They’re missing. It looks like they were taken, both Gary and Driscoll are out searching for them.”

“Together?”

“Two marshals were here. Gary went with them and Driscoll is on his own.”

With his free hand Patrick pinched two fingers over his eyes until the blackness swam behind his lids. He didn’t understand what was happening. “Marshals?”

“I thought you knew. I thought that was why you were calling. They killed a girl in town. Stuffed her in the back of a car with another man they’d killed the day before,” Luke said. “It was in the news last night.”

“What are you doing at my house, Luke?”

“I’m sorry about this, Pat.”

“Again,” Patrick said, “why are you at my house, Luke?”

“Gary told me to wait—I thought you’d have seen it on the news—in case Sheri or Bobby showed or the two men came back.”

“Who?” Patrick managed to say. He was holding the phone tight, the plastic growing slippery with his own sweat.

“They’d been following you since you got out. The marshals said it was two prisoners you knew in Monroe. They got transferred a week ago and killed one of the guards in transit. I’m sorry,” Luke said. “I thought you would have known all this.”

“I guess I haven’t been paying that much attention.”

“None of us knew anything about it till the marshals showed up. I guess they thought the men had gone over into Idaho or up to Spokane.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“What do you mean, Pat?”

“The car they found the bodies in.”

“It was a black Town Car.”

He told Luke to hold on. He took the phone away from his ear and let it dangle by his thigh. He heard Luke call his name several times but Patrick wouldn’t answer. From where he stood he could see Maurice’s truck out there in the lot. The interstate just fifty yards farther on.

THE HOUSE WAS
burning. Driscoll stopped the Impala in the middle of the street and was out of the car and up the stairs before the heat turned him away. The temperature too much and his hand raised across his face as he backed away to the sidewalk. Flames already beginning to show at several windows toward the back. The drapes in the front on fire and the glass panes crashing to the porch.

All down the street there were people beginning to come out of their homes. Several of them on their cell phones. Driscoll looked around at it all. The rush of the flames heard now like a constant wind. Neighbors gesturing with one arm raised toward the flames as they tried to make their voices heard over the crackle of wood and heat.

Driscoll came back to the car and put his elbows down across the roof, cradling his face in his hands. So close, he thought, always so close.

In the distance he heard the sound of fire trucks. He turned and looked back toward the house. Flames were beginning to come through the roof. This is the house, he thought. This has to be the house.

Up on the main street the first fire engine made a wide turn to get the corner. He knew he should stay. Already the neighbors were looking to him like he was the first part of some rescue. Only Driscoll knew he wasn’t and that if he stayed he’d have to answer the question of what he was doing there in the first place.

Up at the corner the fire truck had come up short on its turn and was reversing out into traffic to bring the big square body straight so it could fit down the side street. He dropped down into the seat and brought the transmission into drive. Several boys on bicycles staring at him as he went past, moving fast with the grille lights of his Impala pulsing a silent flash. The big red body of the fire truck pulling to a stop in front of the house all he saw before he went around the corner.

He parked a block down and sat there. For a full minute he sat there staring out at the street through the front windshield. “Fuck—fuck—fuck!” he yelled, beating his fists against the wheel in quick succession.

When he looked up at his own reflection in the rearview mirror he saw the blood in his face, the skin pulled red with tension. He felt the beat of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, wetting his throat, and the slow rise and fall of his chest. His hands now resting, useless, palms up on his thighs, with his head played back against the headrest.

He looked back in the direction he’d come from. How did he even know Patrick had come here?

“Because the house is burning,” he said, speaking aloud like it wasn’t he who had asked the question.

“It could be a coincidence. It could mean anything.”

“But it doesn’t mean anything, it means something,” Driscoll said.

Driscoll pulled himself up in the seat. He had his hands gripped on either side of the steering wheel. He hadn’t seen the Toyota Patrick took from the casino lot anywhere on the street. Maybe Patrick never came this way. Maybe John was wrong about Maurice. Maybe he was wrong about Patrick.

Driscoll looked up again at his eyes in the mirror. He was tired. He could see that. He was failing. Failing Bobby and failing Sheri, but mostly he was failing himself.

The house was burning and the Toyota Patrick had stolen from the casino lot was nowhere on the block.

Ten minutes later he found the Camry parked five blocks away. The window was broken out on the driver’s side and Driscoll opened the door and sat in the old Toyota examining the wire harness pulled free below the steering column.

Driscoll shook his head, almost like he didn’t believe it himself. Where the fuck was Patrick?

Two more fire trucks went by while he sat there and he was staring up at the empty space where they had been when his cell phone rang. He checked the display. It was a number he didn’t know and after a second he picked up the call.

“Agent Driscoll?” a voice asked.

He answered, listening, waiting for the voice to go on.

“It’s Luke, the deputy from Silver Lake. Patrick just called and he wants you to call him back.”

Chapter 16

B
EAN SAT SHOTGUN WHILE
John Wesley drove. Drake’s cruiser radio was turned on and Bean listened as the codes came in but as far as he could tell none of them had anything to do with them.

He’d taken the jacket off Drake and gone through the pockets. One cell phone, a set of keys, a wallet, and a note in a plastic envelope that looked to be from Patrick to Drake. He read the note twice. When he was done he looked up and watched the road for several beats and then read the note again.

He looked to the back, where Drake lay unconscious in the rear cage, bleeding from a split of skin over his right eye. His face badly bruised where it rested against his wife’s lap. And Sheri sitting there with a look of hate on her face and her hands still duct-taped.

He pursed his lips and kissed the air, watching as Sheri turned away.

John Wesley came to the on-ramp for the interstate and looked to Bean for direction.

Bean studied the note in its plastic envelope. “It’s time we got a few things straight,” Bean said, looking to the back, where Sheri sat.

Chapter 17

M
ORGAN SAT OUT ON
the porch for a long time before he went in. He made fry bread in the pan and then got out some of his preserves and ate the sweet jelly slathered on the warm bread. Except for the warmth from the propane burner the house was cold and he walked back outside to sit in the sun and take in the land.

A muddy patch of earth sat halfway up the hill from the rains two days before. Stained into the gravel. He leaned back in his chair and brought one leg over the other. Up above a hawk was circling over something in the fields and he thought of his snares and wondered if it was something he’d caught.

He was tired and his lids dropped once, then again. The hunting jacket buttoned over his chest and the collar turned up. When he came awake he didn’t know what time it was and he had to take the hour from the sun. The hawk gone from the sky.

He lit a cigarette with a match and then sat there till the paper felt hot between his fingers. He mulled it over for a while before he went back inside and found the box of bird shot Drake had left out on the table. He looked this over and then crossed to where he’d put the shotgun away. He broke open the breech and looked in on the two shells. He closed the breech and found his truck keys.

PATRICK SIGNALED THE
grill man and asked for the bill. A minute later the grill man came back with the waitress behind him.

“Sorry,” Patrick said. “That reunion just got moved up and I’ll be taking off soon.”

“Don’t worry about it, honey.” She was at the register now and she put in the figures and brought up the total. When she came back over he could smell the cigarette smoke on her. “I hope it all turns out for you.”

“I hope so, too.” He brought out a few bills from his wallet and laid them over the counter. It was enough to cover the total and then some. He didn’t have anything left in his wallet but a few old receipts and expired credit cards. The leather still smelled like the lockup. “Can I have a refill on the coffee?” he said.

She poured the coffee and he watched her as she did it. She’d probably be the last good memory he had in this life. After she was done he toasted her with his mug and saw the little smile come across her lips before she went to check on the other customers.

He was waiting on the phone at the other end of the diner to ring and he wasn’t surprised when it did a minute later.

He answered and Driscoll said, “I bet you weren’t planning on talking to me.”

“I wasn’t planning on ever hearing from you again.”

“Then you should have stayed where you were.”

“I think you know I didn’t have that option.”

“You’re talking about the two men who came by your house?”

“And others,” Patrick said. He held the receiver close, his back turned away from the diner.

“Maurice?”

Patrick didn’t say anything. He was still thinking about what Maurice had tried to do to him. All that time inside and Maurice had tried to cut him out of the deal.

“You still there, Patrick?”

Patrick listened to the empty sound of the phone in his hand. He could tell Driscoll was driving. “I’m here,” he said.

DRAKE WOKE IN
the back of his cruiser. He lay there with his knees pushed up against the seat. His head hurt, the pain centralized over his left eyebrow. The skin hot and swollen, he held his eyes closed and he listened to the breath enter through his nose, feeling it swell in his chest and then release. When he opened his eyes he realized what had happened.

Above, through the back windows of the car, he saw telephone poles passing one after the other, the wires falling and then rising again in a never-ending series of waves. He felt the late sun on his face, and the pants he wore were hot against his thighs. But it was fading now, like it had been hotter at one point in the day. There was blood on him, too, on his pants and crusted to the front of his shirt. He could feel it under the material and on his skin.

It was only when he tried to move that he found his hands had been duct-taped behind him, and it was this movement that brought the realization of where he truly was. His wife’s thigh under his head, and the two killers in the front, Sheri looking down on him, her eyes unwavering, and Drake thinking maybe he’d been too late, maybe she was dead. And then she blinked and Drake watched a single tear roll down her cheek.

“Reunited at last,” Bean said.

MORGAN PUSHED OPEN
the door and listened to the bell chime. He turned and closed the door, wooden with glass at its center. He looked out on the county road and his truck there in the gravel drive. The last time he’d been to the store there had been snow on the ground and he remembered how his truck had left muddy tracks all the way off the road and onto the drive. No more than a couple cars in the lot. Just as there were now.

The clerk was waiting for him at the counter when he turned. The clerk wiped a paper napkin across his lips and brought it away with the slight stain of mustard. Morgan knew the man’s name but simply nodded to him as he went down the first aisle, passing the Popsicle case and magazine rack on one side and the chips and soda pop on the other. He came to the back of the store and looked in on the dairy coolers there.

“You’re early,” the clerk said. He had taken another bite of the sandwich he was eating for a late lunch and he wiped at his mouth again, standing there at the counter watching Morgan.

“How do you mean?”

“Just early,” the clerk said. He took another couple bites. Finished the sandwich and then said, “You usually don’t come in till the end of the month.”

Morgan nodded at that and then looked away. The store was a mash-up of kerosene, fishing hats, T-shirts, beer, chips, hot dog buns, work pants, shoes, even horse feed and birdseed. Anything and everything was sold there and if they didn’t have it they could get it in a week. Morgan liked that about the place and he went down to the next aisle and looked over the fishing supplies. He’d never taken it up but he thought maybe he would someday. The green tackle box with the money inside the only piece of gear Patrick or Morgan had ever owned.

He came up the aisle and looked over the wares behind the counter. Cigarettes and lottery tickets, an old Budweiser shirt and matching hat that had hung in the store for as long as Morgan could remember. “What do you have for deer shot?” Morgan asked. He was looking over the ammunition now, about ten rows of boxes were dedicated to it and he was examining the various measurements and sizes on the boxes.

The clerk turned and looked to the place Morgan was studying. He selected two boxes and then brought them back to the counter. He laid them out for Morgan to see. “I never took you for much of a deer man, Morgan.”