Sometimes the Wolf (25 page)

“I’m not,” Morgan said.

He paid and left through the front door. The bell chiming again. When he started up his truck he could see the clerk staring at him through the glass door. Morgan reversed out and then brought the wheel straight. He ran the engine a bit hard and he heard the gravel pinging in the wheel wells.

A quarter mile on he pulled over and just sat there with the engine running. “Damn it,” he said.

When he came back into the little town he could see the shades were down at the post office and he checked his watch and then looked at the shades again. The woman’s car was still in the lot and he pulled in next to her and then went up the stairs. It took her a minute to pull back the shade and then undo the lock. “Oh, hi,” she said as he came into the small office. A little counter where she sat with the sorting room behind and about twenty wooden slots on the opposite wall for mail.

Morgan looked around the office. There was room to stand but little more. If he took more than a couple steps in any direction he’d come to a wall. “I was in town,” Morgan said.

“I see that.” She was smiling at him a bit. She wore the blue fleece vest with the eagle on the breast but little else to say she worked there. Her hair was slightly curly and the blond dye had started to go out of it, but it was still there in certain patches. Her figure was plump in the way Morgan liked; he thought about the rabbit stew again. He liked the way they had sat together and she had broken the bread with her hands and used it to clean out her bowl.

She looked him over. The counter flipped up behind her. “I have some mail for you, I guess.” She turned and went back into the mailroom, bringing the pass down behind her. For a moment she was gone. The sound of her somewhere in the back as she rummaged for the right box. “I needed something to read and I almost opened one of your packages. Looks like you got a few good books here.” She came back to the counter and set the box down on the floor. She brought up the mail and placed it on the counter between them.

He looked it over. “How can you tell they’re any good?” he asked.

She was smiling at him again. “I peeked.”

“That’s a federal crime.”

She didn’t say anything back to him. He was stone-faced and she was looking up at him and trying to decide what he meant. “I just thought—”

He broke into a laugh and he saw the relief go across her face. “Go ahead,” he said, opening the package up right there. “I’m happy to let you read any of them first.”

She took one of the books off the stack and looked it over, turning it front to back and then reading the rear flap for a time. She held it close to her chest like a schoolgirl and it made Morgan smile to look at her.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded and then began to collect his things.

He was at the door when she said, “That was nice, wasn’t it? You and me a few weeks ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “It was.”

DRISCOLL CAME INTO
the diner parking lot at full speed, grille lights going, and the dust kicked up from his tires rolling past him as he came to a stop. Patrick sat there on the tailgate of a red pickup with his feet dangling over the lot. He wore the same canvas jacket and jeans Driscoll remembered him wearing at the Buck Blind. While the two days of white growth on his head and face made him look ten years older.

The Impala was parked at an angle, blocking the truck. Patrick still sitting there watching him as Driscoll got up from his car. “Raise your hands,” Driscoll said. He watched Patrick do it and then he told him to slide off the tailgate and turn around. Driscoll came around the Impala and pressed him then, bending one of Patrick’s arms back and then the other. The handcuffs out in one of Driscoll’s hands as he held Patrick’s wrists with the other.

With Patrick turned on the tailgate, Driscoll went through his pockets, throwing anything he found onto the tailgate. Inside the diner there was a waitress and a cook staring out at them. The waitress had a hand to her mouth as if something had jumped out at her.

Driscoll set Patrick down again on the tailgate, letting him lean on the metal. His legs straight out and his hands behind him in the cuffs. “Hello, Driscoll,” Patrick said.

Driscoll ignored him and ran his hands down one leg and then stood and patted down the other. When he was finished he rose and stepped back. He was looking at all that he’d taken out of Patrick’s pockets. Keys and a wallet, and a receipt from the diner inside.

Driscoll pulled Patrick up and started to walk him to the Impala.

“Easy,” Patrick said.

“You don’t fucking get it, do you, Patrick? Bobby’s gone and so is Sheri. You deserted them.”

“Slow down,” Patrick said. He made his best effort to turn and look at Driscoll but Driscoll had a good grip on his arm and levered him against the metal body of the Impala before Patrick could say more.

“Something happens to them it’s on you,” Driscoll said. He opened the door of the Impala and put one hand over Patrick’s head and put him in the backseat. He slammed the door as soon as Patrick was inside and then he went back to the truck and went through the cab.

In the glove box he found the registration and read the name. He stood and walked to the back of the tailgate and cleared Patrick’s things from the bed and then closed the tailgate. Inside the waitress and cook were still standing at the window looking out at him.

He looked the registration over again and then he walked back to the Impala and sat in the driver’s seat with his eyes up on the rearview.

“I called you,” Patrick said.

Driscoll held up the registration in his hand. “You’re a selfish son of a bitch.”

Patrick fixed on Driscoll’s eyes for a moment in the mirror and then he looked away. “What the fuck, Driscoll?”

“Bobby and his wife are missing because of you,” Driscoll said. “You don’t give a shit about anyone, do you? No one matters to you. No one should ever trust you. I just came from your buddy’s place. The house is still burning.”

Driscoll waited. He watched Patrick mull that over, he watched the muscles beneath the man’s cheeks tighten. When Patrick turned back he said, “You come all the way up here on your own, Driscoll? No one to watch your back? No one to say this ever really happened?”

“I came because you said you wanted to turn yourself in.”

“Where are the marshals?” Patrick asked. “You trying to keep me for yourself?”

“I’m trying to save your son and your daughter-in-law,” Driscoll said.

Patrick looked up at the mirror. “I know you,” he said. “I know why you came out to see me every year—deep down somewhere you think we’re the same in some way.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your marriage,” Patrick went on. “Your daughter. You think I didn’t hear about your family?”

“That has nothing to do with you.” But he knew it did. He knew in some way he needed something to show for all the time he’d taken away from his family—all the work he’d put in on this one solitary goal.

“I think you should ask yourself who deserted who,” Patrick said. “I think you should ask yourself if you’re trying to save Bobby or if you’re trying to save yourself.”

DRAKE LOOKED DOWN
the long hallway, light fading away into the darkness beyond. He sat in a solitary dining room chair with his wrists still taped behind him and John Wesley’s hand resting like ten pounds of meat over one of Drake’s shoulders. Three minutes had passed since Bean took Sheri away down that hall. A door far down opening and only a sliver of light visible now as Drake strained to hear what he could from the darkness.

“What is this place?” Drake asked.

“Just the first place we found,” John Wesley said.

For a long time they’d driven east into the fading light. The night moving up through the sky and the sun disappearing behind. When it was over Drake hadn’t been able to tell where they were, or even how far they’d come, and he looked around the house now searching for some beacon of information to help him get a bearing.

Two silver candleholders sat on the table, their wicks burned almost to the metal and the wax pooled at their bases. Everything in the house seemed like something from a forgotten time. The hutch sitting there across from them with the old china plates displayed along its surface. A pile of mail by the door, built up and then toppled across the floor in a collection that seemed to take in weeks. The night out there beyond the windows like a fine silk cocooning them all within the house.

But more than any of this it was the slight odor, acrid and deep, that hung in the air that bothered Drake the most. Just beyond comprehension. Like the basement door had been left open and the fetid, black air was slowly beginning to infect the house. Like some unlucky soul had fallen and lay there still. And for the first time Drake wondered if John Wesley had meant it was the first place they’d found tonight, or if it was the first place they’d found a week before when they killed the prison guard and disappeared.

Down the hall there was a muffled scream and something crashed to the floor and moved away, the sound fading until there was only silence again. Drake tried to rise from the seat but was pressed down. He heard the scream again and he knew it was Sheri and then he heard Bean say something Drake couldn’t make out. The sound of a human body being dragged kicking across a floor and then the sound of bed springs depressing under the body of another. And then the screaming started again and did not stop.

Drake fought to get his feet beneath him but there was no moving out from beneath John Wesley’s hold. With his eyes centered down into the darkness he couldn’t do anything but listen.

“Bean wanted you to know you can stop this at any time.” John Wesley was bent down beside Drake now, speaking to him like he was speaking to a stubborn child. “It’s just money. It’s just money and nothing more.”

Drake wished he’d taken the money, he wished he’d hidden it somewhere new. But he hadn’t wanted anything to do with it then, standing there with Morgan, looking down on it like he was looking down on something that had never had the chance to live—a life that had come and gone too soon and now was better left behind. He didn’t know. And he sat there struggling under the weight of John Wesley’s hand as his mind wrestled with the fact that if he was going to keep Sheri alive he would need to give them something. He would have to tell them whatever he knew, directions possibly, Morgan, the property. If he hoped to keep his wife alive he would have to lay it out like crumbs for them to follow, little by little, feeding them and buying time. Because eventually, he knew, there would be nothing left to tell.

“I’M THE ONE
who called you, Driscoll,” Patrick said again. He sat with his back resting on the rear bench seat and the yellow lights of buildings and streetlamps passing by in the night outside his window. “I’m the one trying to make things right.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Driscoll said, looking up at the rearview again. Patrick only a shadow, an outline of a human being.

“I called you for a reason, Driscoll. I didn’t call Gary or the marshals. I called you.”

“Once you’re in the lockup downtown we can talk.”

“You want to be right,” Patrick said. “I understand that. After all these years you want to prove you were right all along.”

Driscoll didn’t say anything. He was watching the interstate ahead. At sixty miles per hour they’d reach Seattle in thirty minutes. “You deserted your son twelve years ago and now you’ve done it again,” Driscoll said. “You just don’t change.”

“You’re right. I did those things. But I did them for a reason. You should understand.”

“We’re not anything alike,” Driscoll said. He could feel the blood rise in his face for a moment and the words strain at his lips.

“No,” Patrick said. “I thought maybe we were but I see now that we aren’t.”

“Good.”

Patrick shifted in the back so that he could look out the window, watching the lights of a mall until they were gone. “I messed everything up,” he said. “Do me just one favor. Bobby and Sheri are out there somewhere. If they’re looking for me I want them to know where I am.”

Driscoll looked up at the mirror. “What if they’re not looking for you? What if they were taken because of you?”

“Then I want you to let the men who took them know where they can get their money.”

Chapter 18

B
EAN FLIPPED DRAKE’S PHONE
open and looked at the text. He smiled a bit to himself and then held the phone to the cage for Drake to see. “What do you think?” Bean said. “Should we call him?” He was having fun with the idea, rolling it around in his head like a marble. Patrick had been picked up by Agent Driscoll, which meant one way or another Patrick was going back in.

He turned and looked behind but Drake had already gone away from him and was looking out on the fields. They drove on the county roads now, keeping to the speed limit, taking Drake’s directions turn by turn and avoiding the highway. What trees they saw on the sides of the road were squat as the grass, everything else nothing but black ink spilled across the landscape.

No one had said anything in a long time. Sheri off to herself now, her head leaned to the window, looking groggy. Bean knew he hadn’t done much to her except throw her around a bit. Perhaps a little too hard at times. Just a little roughhousing, nothing more than he’d do to a dog that had snapped at his hand. Some liked it that way, they saw it as fun. Others didn’t, and Bean was still deciding which one Sheri had been.

“What will we find out here?” Bean asked. He spoke to himself, looking to the back to see if Drake was listening.

Bean toggled down until he found the text message again. A single line from Agent Driscoll to Drake, “I’m with Patrick.” He put the call through and waited. When Driscoll picked up he told him to put Patrick on. “Hello,” Patrick said, and then, “Hello? Hello?” Bean was enjoying himself. He liked listening to the desperation grow in Patrick’s voice.

Bean said Patrick’s name and then listened as Patrick tried to get his bearings. “Hello . . . Hello? Hello?”