Sometimes the Wolf (3 page)
Y
OU GOT SOME TIME?
” Drake asked as they came into Silver Lake, the houses all strung together along the road. Prefabs with vinyl siding and patchy lawns farther out, and as they came into town, two-story clapboards with wood-frame windows and lopsided porches. A single yellow caution light dangling where the two main roads came together and then split apart again.
“Plenty of time,” his father said, leaning into the windshield to take in the town. “Hasn’t changed much, has it?”
“A few more logging outfits,” Drake said. They came to the blinking yellow and Drake turned the steering wheel to the left, heading away from the lake.
When they came to the metal Quonset hut five miles up the road, Drake pulled into the gravel and set the brake. “This is new,” Patrick said.
“Fish and Wildlife put it in a few years back. I’ve been helping them out. This morning on the way to pick you up I spotted a wolf just off the lake road.”
“A wolf?”
Drake nodded. “Positive.”
“No shit?” Patrick said, leaning forward to take in the hut like he might see the wolf standing there before them. “Your grandfather used to tell me stories about the old packs that ran in the North Cascades. Nothing like that when I was around. This must be the first wolf in fifty years.”
“At least.” Drake pushed the door open and moved to get out, pausing and looking back at his father. “You hear from him at all? Grandpa? Is he still crazy?”
“He wrote me a few times. Says he’s getting old. Told us to come visit when we had a chance. Says he’s been shooting gophers and prairie dogs. Sent me a recipe for chili a few years ago. Same crazy old man.”
“What kind of chili?”
“It wasn’t beef.”
“Sounds about right,” Drake said. “I’m surprised he wrote you.”
“Living out where he does I think he gets lonely,” Patrick said.
Drake told his father he’d be only a moment and then got up out of the car and closed the door. He could smell the tree pollen in the air. The first buds of spring showing on the stink currant branches off the road.
Nothing up the road but forest, and then eventually, thirty miles on, the border crossing into Canada. A single booth set in the middle of the road with red-and-white pole gates hanging off either side, like a trawler on the ocean. Drake took a breath and felt the sweet air at the back of his throat, cold and mineral as snowmelt. He nodded to his father and then went on to the hut.
He smelled the deer by the time he had the door open and he put a hand to his nose to quell the stench. “How long did she sit in the sun before you brought her in?” he asked.
Ellie Cobb leaned out from behind a metal cabinet. Eight years younger than him, she wore a pair of safety glasses over her dark eyes, her brown hair tied back and the green Fish and Wildlife uniform visible beneath a yellow rubber apron. With a gloved hand, she removed the glasses and stood. “When you left the message this morning you didn’t say anything about the deer being half-eaten.”
“She wasn’t half-eaten when I left her,” Drake said. He was standing close by Ellie now and he could see how the wolf had cleaned one of the flanks to the bone. A strong light focused down on the remaining muscle. The musk of the deer floated in the air, and an underlying smell of the wilderness.
The room they stood in a mix of salvaged wood furniture—culled from some government office in Olympia—and the more modern stainless examination tables toward the back, where a series of freezers lined the wall and filled the room with an electric hum. Each freezer containing the various remains of one thing or another, finds either Drake or Ellie had brought in over the last few months: a frozen coyote, a flattened porcupine, and the remains of a diseased elk.
Drake picked up a pair of surgical tongs and folded open the stomach cavity. The innards torn and the ribs snapped in a jagged fashion Drake knew had not been done with human hands. When he looked over at Ellie to tell her about the wolf, the Fish and Wildlife officer’s eyes were looking past him.
Drake turned and found his father there, the big canvas coat on his shoulders and a hand held to his nose.
“Ellie Cobb,” Drake said, “this is my father, Patrick.”
“The convict,” Ellie said, a playful smile on her face as she said it. “I’d heard your time was coming up.”
“Ex-con,” Patrick said, extending a hand to Ellie.
She looked down at it a moment and then gave him a weak wave with her gloved hand. “Sorry,” she said. “Blood.”
His father nodded and forced a smile. He was standing about two feet away from where Drake leaned over the carcass. “My son tell you I was getting out?”
“Actually, no. The sheriff, Gary, said you might be around soon. Bobby only told me about it when I pressed him a little.”
“Gary is the sheriff now?”
Ellie looked to Drake.
“Gary was my deputy,” Patrick explained.
Ellie’s eyes locked on Drake. “I thought Bobby would have told you.”
“Bobby doesn’t tell me much of anything. I half expected I’d be catching the bus this morning.”
“Bobby seems pretty good at keeping secrets. You have any advice for me if I decide to go rogue?”
Patrick ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking it through. His eyes dancing over her and then away again. “I can tell you what not to do,” he said. “Don’t smuggle drugs in across international borders. Don’t let anyone know you’re doing it. And . . .” He looked around the room in mock suspicion. “Don’t get caught.”
“I see you’ve been rehabilitated,” Ellie said.
“Totally cured.”
Drake watched Ellie to see how she was taking it. There was an undeniable level of sarcasm in Patrick’s voice and it was hard to know what to do with it.
“You feel guilty about any of it?” Ellie asked.
“I’d take it back if I could,” Patrick said. “I messed a lot up. I was the sheriff and I was arrested right here in town. I tried to run but I didn’t make it far. I got cocky. Of course I didn’t know it at the time. But sitting in Monroe for all those years I can see how it all spiraled out of control for me. I tried to sell too much at one time. People start to take notice.”
“Those people being the DEA?”
“When I started out in this I didn’t have a lot of options. No one wants to do business with a sheriff and I rushed into it. I needed the money. The DEA offered my contact down in Seattle a deal and that deal involved me. I walked right into it. I really didn’t even need the money at that point.”
“And you got out this morning?”
“Only three hours ago.”
“It must feel pretty good, like a birthday or something.”
“Yeah, a birthday I only get to celebrate every twelve years.” Drake’s father blew air through his teeth and looked around at the room. “Bobby told me about the wolf, I thought I’d come in for a second. I didn’t expect to meet anyone like you in here.”
“Is that a good thing?” Ellie asked.
“You’re the best thing I’ve seen in twelve years.”
“The state prison offering charm school now?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Just before shop class and after basic auto maintenance. It’s real popular.”
“I bet.” Ellie looked from Patrick to Drake and then dropped her eyes to the half-eaten carcass on the table.
Drake turned and looked at his father. “You think you could give us a moment?”
“Yeah, no problem. I just came in to give the place a look.” He nodded a good-bye to Ellie and then smiled toward Drake. “Bobby, I’ll be out by the car when you finish up here.”
Drake watched his father walk back toward the front entrance. When the door drew shut, Ellie said, “You definitely didn’t mention he was such a smoothy.” A playfulness showing on her face again.
“I didn’t know you were into older men.”
“Only if they’re old enough to be my father,” Ellie said. She gave Drake a wink. “That bad-boy thing really gets me going, you think he’d wear a leather jacket if I asked?”
“You can stop anytime, Ellie.”
“Just having some fun. Just being polite. The guy has been locked up for twelve years.”
“Uh-huh, and it’s your job to cheer him up?” Drake said. He could feel the flush of blood on his cheeks. He didn’t know why he felt this way about her, or what to call it. Protective? Maybe. Ellie was like a little sister to him. She’d grown up in the town and then left for college, later applying to Fish and Wildlife. She’d been something like twelve years old when everything had gone down with Drake’s father. And just like everyone else in Silver Lake, she knew almost every detail about the case.
“He could probably use some good times,” Ellie said.
Drake shook his head, trying to get a handle on it. He thought if he opened his mouth to speak his voice would break like a teenage boy’s. He swallowed, wetting his throat, knowing it was all talk, and that Ellie was giving him a hard time like she always did. “You thought you’d just flirt with him a little?” Drake said. “Show him a good time?”
“The convict thing? It’s the one thing he’s known for, isn’t it? That and knowing every inch of these mountains.”
“That’s what happens when you spend a couple years smuggling drugs over them.” Drake laughed, but it felt forced, and he looked to the front door of the Quonset hut and wondered what his father was doing outside.
With one gloved hand, Ellie pushed the light back from the carcass and flicked off the power. “I didn’t know it was for that long.”
“Not everything was in the papers.”
“I guess not.”
“I tend to think people know things about our family before they’ve even met us. I’m surprised Gary never told you that part.”
She took the gloves from her hands and threw them into the trash can beneath the table. A dappling of sweat showed at her hairline where the examination light had caught her. “Gary barely says a thing and you won’t talk about him at all except to tell a few stories from his childhood. You’re not exactly forthcoming with all the information sometimes.” She walked over to her desk, where a topographical map of the surrounding mountains was spread. Little red marks all up and down the valley floor. “When you called this morning, you didn’t say anything about our wolf.”
Drake shrugged. “I didn’t want you getting all excited about it.”
“She’s becoming a problem.”
“Better the deer than someone’s cow.”
“That’s the problem,” Ellie said. “It’s only a matter of time before one of those ranchers starts shooting at her. She’s on her own and starting to look for the easy meal.” Ellie put a hand to the map, running a finger from one red mark to the next. “These are all the places where she’s been seen. She’s not just passing through at this point. Wolves hunt in pairs. Without a pack she’s pretty much just going to go for the easiest meal she can find. A calf, trash cans, or roadkill. All of which are related to humans.”
Drake looked at the thin corridor of sightings, north to south along the lake, following the main road.
“I want to collar her and see where she goes,” Ellie said. “When I can prove it’s an individual wolf, and I have her movements worked out, I can start to put a plan together. I want you to help me out.”
Drake looked around the room, wondering for the slightest moment if she might have been talking to someone else. “I’m a little busy being a deputy,” Drake said.
“I’m trying to save her,” Ellie said.
“That’s all fine and good but I still don’t see what it has to do with me.”
Ellie got up from the desk and untied the yellow apron from around her waist. Standing she came to Drake’s shoulders, petite with a swimmer’s broad arms and sculpted legs. Her size alone reminded Drake of how young she was, and how brand-new to Fish and Wildlife she seemed. Nothing worn away on her or piled up against the surface of her skin, like a cabin in the winter under all that snow. No scars, or pieces of her missing. Drake wanted her to stay just the way she was, twenty-four years old, doing exactly what she wanted with her life.
Drake watched as she turned and hung the apron up on a hook by the door. By the time she turned back around she was already looking at him like something funny had been said. “I already talked this over with Gary.”
“Christ,” Drake said. “You want to go on a wolf hunt? I’m people police. You understand that, right?”
“He says you probably know the valley better than anyone.”
“Christ,” Drake said again, this time hoping a prayer might be answered. “When?”
“Tomorrow or the next day. Sooner the better.”
“My father just got out.”
“Bring him.”
“No.” Drake waved off the statement, both hands in the air. “No way.”
“After all these years you’d think you’d want to spend time with your father.”
“You might think that, but I don’t.”
“Like I said, he’s famous for knowing every inch of these mountains.”
“And for being a convicted criminal,” Drake said. “Your words, not mine.”
WHEN DRAKE GOT
to the car his father was sitting in the passenger seat with the windows down looking toward the forest. The light slanting in through the trees, rich with pollen, and the sword ferns a nuclear green at the edge of the road.
“Gary is the sheriff now?”
Drake pulled open the door and then sat there looking at his hands on the wheel. Gary had been Patrick’s best friend. And when Patrick went away Gary had stepped in to help Drake get situated, taking Drake fishing, even giving him the job at the department.
“He was the interim sheriff when you went away,” Drake said. “And then he was elected a year after.” Drake brought out the car keys from his pocket. “I thought you would have heard.”
“I’m not surprised,” Patrick said, turning to Drake. He smiled a bit, coming out of whatever place his mind had taken him.
His father had been gone a long time and Drake knew there were going to be times like this. Moments when the flash of a memory came across his father’s face and then went away again. A decision that was made a long time before and that absence in time—what could have been—the only thing left to regret.
Patrick went on smiling and then he nodded toward the Fish and Wildlife hut as he came back to himself. “Did I cut in on your action?”