Sometimes the Wolf (29 page)
Sheri did it all with a quiet determination. There was no pausing or break in her labor. It was just her and the room. Two separate bodies that had once been and now were not.
THE DETECTIVE WHO’D
agreed to take Drake back to Silver Lake was waiting for him in the front drive of the hotel. A plastic container of 7-Eleven nachos in his lap that he ate chips from one at a time. He nodded to Drake and when Drake was seated in the car he wiped one hand clean with a napkin and drove out of the lot still eating chips with the other hand.
The man was twenty years older than Drake and from talking to him earlier, Drake knew the detective had been one of the first to respond to the two bodies found at the gravel lot outside town. The case Driscoll said Patrick was involved with.
The detective had been a young guy then, the incident one of his first investigations. Now he was aged past his middle and moving into the last years of his service. He talked and drove at the same time. Pointing out various places he’d made busts and pulled drivers over to find sandwich bags of meth in their glove compartments.
Halfway to the highway Drake stopped the man and asked him to turn the car back.
They made it to the gravel lot just as the sun began to set. The detective sitting in the car and telling Drake what had changed and what hadn’t. He gestured to an open spot just twenty feet away. “That’s where they were shot,” he said. The detective made a gun out of his fist. Bucking it with each shot. “Pop. One goes down. A clean shot to the temple, cracked his skull right down the middle. The second man turns to run. Pop, pop, pop. He gets cut up as he moves. Makes it maybe four steps and then falls right there.” The detective was still holding his trigger finger out on the scene, letting it quiver there in the air before him. A spot of nacho cheese on his fingernail. He brought the finger back and put it to his mouth and just sat there looking the lot over. “We found the bodies behind one of the big rock piles over there.”
“Where was the shooter?” Drake asked.
The detective pointed out the spot. It was about a hundred yards off. “Twelve years ago there was one of those big yellow excavators right there. The shooter was probably back behind it in the shadows.”
“Were they shot at night?”
“That’s what we figured.”
Drake opened the car door and got out. The evening cold around him and the lot out a ways from the city, built up against a few acres of wetland. Farther out, the white trunks of a stand of birch trees, the leaves just starting to sprout. He walked over and stood in the spot where the men had been shot.
He turned and looked to where the shooter would have been. Nothing there now but an empty space between two piles of gravel. He knelt and looked at the ground, running his hand over it and feeling the grit against his skin, expecting somehow that his fingertips would come back stained with blood. Still kneeling, he put a hand to his bad knee and pushed into the muscle, feeling the dull, familiar ache of his old injury. He imagined the shot. He felt the force of the bullet and the tear it made through human skin.
By the time he stood, the detective had come out of the car and was waiting a little ways off watching Drake. “The thinking on this has always been that there were two men. One waiting where you are now to distract the two victims, then the other back there in the shadows covering them all.”
“What did my father say when you interviewed him today?”
“Denies it ever happened. Says he’s not the one. Says we had it wrong all those years before and we still have it wrong.”
“Even with all that money?”
“Funny thing about it is I always thought it was going to be more. Two hundred thousand is a lot of money but it doesn’t seem like enough to kill for.”
“What happens now?” Drake asked. He was trying to put it all back together in his head. He was trying to picture his father here twelve years before.
“We’ve got statements from you and your father but it’s really not enough without the gun, or any direct proof your father was here. We can’t hold him. Driscoll will move him to the federal building in Seattle tonight and I’d guess it will be the last we see of your father. He’ll be back in Monroe in a week.”
“Even the money isn’t enough?”
“It’s drug money. It’s not like the bills were marked.”
Drake looked to the spot where the shooter had been. He paced it out, walking over and then looking back at the detective.
When he was finished he came back to the car. “It seems like a pretty good shot.”
The detective nodded. “It was.” He watched Drake where he stood. “They’re saying your father will be out again in a few years. That worry you?”
“Honestly,” Drake said, “I really don’t know.”
“And this other guy, your father’s buddy from Monroe. He’s still out there, too. He’s out there now.”
“The money’s gone,” Drake said.
The detective grinned and opened the driver’s-side door. “Like I said, it always seemed like too little.”
B
EAN SAT AT THE
edge of the wood and surveyed the clearing before the small house. His face dirty and his hands crosshatched with slivers of dried blood from the rock and grasslands he’d traveled through much of the night. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the jacket and his white shirt was stained gray with a mixture of dirt and sweat. The collar a jaundiced yellow where it rested against the exposed skin of his neck.
Most of the night had been spent making his way through the fields, grasslands and prairie giving way to wheat fields and then back to prairie. When the day came he followed small creek beds that had gone dry or still trickled with water and worked his way across the country in a zigzagging fashion, using what tree cover he could find to hide him from view.
Now, almost twenty hours later, he had come to the house at the base of the mountains. He sat watching it for a long time as he tried to make up his mind. The light fading and no sense that Drake or his wife had been able to lead the marshals back this way. Though Bean knew he and John Wesley had been careful enough coming here the night before.
He waited, watching the light fade till it sat over the fields in a blue haze of floating pollen and spring seedpods. The light catching it all like the filament of weeds in a stream.
After a long while he rose and crossed the clearing. His muscles cramped from his rest and his body aching. He came to the house and went along its side, peering through the windows at the darkness within.
The smell had grown worse in the day since they’d left and Bean put a shirtsleeve to his nose as he came through the door. He left the door open and walked into the house. When he came to the basement door he eased it open on the hinges and stared down into the depths at the cement floor below. He couldn’t risk the use of a light switch and after a time he went down the stairs. The sound of his shuffling through the darkness the only thing to be heard from the top of the stairs.
After a minute he was back again, standing in what little light fell from above, one hand held to his nose and the limp body of a woman supported on his opposite shoulder. He came up the stairs and walked, carrying the woman through her house and out into the yard. He dumped her there and then went back for her husband. The two lying faceup in the grass. Both in their early seventies, the blood drawn from their faces and the bruises John Wesley had left on their necks now only a slight yellow.
For a long time Bean simply sat there with them. He’d needed their house after he and John Wesley had made their escape and now he needed it again.
In an hour he’d have the couple in the ground, and in another hour he’d sit resting in their tub, windows open to let in the night air, cleaning the last couple days of trouble from his skin.
F
OR MOST OF THE
day Patrick sat in the holding cell watching the clock on the wall. He was alone in the cell and it had been two hours since anyone had come by to tell him anything. The empty dinner tray the only thing to say anyone had ever been there at all. Far down the hall he knew an officer sat at a desk but he could not see him, and besides the occasional murmurings of a drunk in a cell two or three doors down, Patrick felt very alone. More alone than he’d ever felt in prison.
He checked the time again. The clock in a metal cage, painted white like the walls. Gray cement floors all the way down the hall and into his cell. A single bench for him to sit on and not even a sink or toilet for Patrick to use if needed.
He stood and walked to the bars and tried to look down the hallway but there was nothing to see, not even a window. He looked to the clock and wondered if the sun had set, or if it was still twilight outside with the pale pink of sunset still in the air and the saltwater smell of Puget Sound drifting like far-off music.
He walked back to the bench and sat again. He’d been told he was going south that night, down to Seattle, where he’d be processed and then eventually sent back to Monroe. He set his face in his hands and rubbed the coarse hair on his cheeks, working his fingers up across his skin until his hands sat behind him, yoked across the back of his neck.
Fucking Bobby, he thought. He shook his head in disbelief. Smiling to himself as he brought his head up and stared for a beat too long at the overhead light. He was proud in a way. It had been a lot of money. But Patrick could see now that Bobby didn’t need it, probably never had, and in that way Patrick was proud of him.
He sat there and watched the hands of the clock go around and around. An hour later he heard a far door open and then something being said to the officer down there. There was the sound of rubber soles on cement and farther on the clack of hard-soled dress shoes. When Driscoll showed he was wearing the same rumpled suit from earlier in the day, the top button on his shirt undone and no tie. The service weapon visible beneath his coat. Two officers came before him, one with the keys and the other holding a shotgun in one hand while reaching for the cuffs on his belt with the other.
“You ready, Patrick?”
Patrick stepped back from the bars, the movement inherent now to who he was. Barred gates opening from one cell to another. He looked out on Driscoll and said he was. The door came open and the officer handed the shotgun to Driscoll and came forward with the cuffs. Patrick letting the man get the bracelets on him.
With the officer leading him, Patrick went down the hall, glancing over into the cells as he passed. The drunk now lay out on his own bench, snoring with his pants wet at the crotch and a pool of liquid beneath him on the floor. Patrick heard the other officer swear and then the keys came out and the door to the drunk’s cell was yanked opened. It was the last thing Patrick heard before they came out of the holding area and made their way to a side door. Driscoll followed while Patrick walked. The officer still leading and Patrick glancing up to check the time before they went out the door and the cool of night came over them like a soft cotton sheet.
Driscoll’s Impala sat there in the loading dock and Patrick heard Driscoll fumble for a moment with his keys. There was nothing around but a line of cars parked fifteen feet away, the headlights facing them, and the blue light of the overhead halogens giving the area a washed-out feel. Moths and small winged insects playing in the light as a single spider dangled from a web catching what it could.
He heard Driscoll grumble about something and then two high beams were on them in a flood. Bright and encompassing as a nuclear explosion. Patrick tried to raise a hand to ward off the light but found his hands pulled down by the officer.
The best Patrick could manage was to close his eyes, the light pink beneath his eyelids and then the rapid pop of gunfire very close and the thump of bullets finding contact. Two bodies dropped to the ground on either side of him, and he no longer felt the officer’s hand holding him back.
D
RAKE CAME IN FROM
the garage and found Sheri in the kitchen. The box of Patrick’s clothes had been put away atop a stack of other boxes. Now he crossed the living room and went in after the sides of the crib. It took him two trips to bring the four pieces outside to the garage, leaning them carefully against the wall with bits of cloth nestled between each layer to keep the paint from scraping.
He closed the garage doors and padlocked them. Luke still out there in the patrol car and Drake’s own cruiser now back in the drive. For a while he stood looking in at the inside of his house, golden with light. Sheri putting dinner together in the kitchen and the overhead lights in the hallway leading back into the house.
Drake nodded to Luke and then mounted the stairs. He paused at the top and looked out on the forest. He wondered how long Gary would have Luke or Andy sit outside the house. The two patrol cars in the drive reminding Drake of the crimes committed and how Sheri and he were living in the aftermath.
He opened the door and went inside.
When he’d come through Silver Lake earlier that day he saw the small memorial set up for the girl who had been killed. Flowers and ribbons placed beside the door to the doughnut shop. Candles that were no longer lit but that Drake could see had burned through the night and sat melted in an uneven mass on the pavement. A single picture of the girl, framed, showing her the year before when she was a senior at the local high school. He was thinking about this now, and thinking about Morgan and the way they’d found him sitting against the tree with his eyes on the darkness.
Drake took a seat at the kitchen counter and watched Sheri pour a steaming pot of water into the sink, straining pasta while a red sauce simmered on the burner. He tried to put the days together in his mind but they fell apart in front of him. He wanted to feel something about it all but he kept returning to a selfish thought, that Sheri was still alive, that he was. He looked out on the patrol cars there in the drive. He wondered how the foot of their stairs would look with candles burning, with ribbons and flowers. He wondered if anyone would have cared. He didn’t know if he had the answer.