Sometimes the Wolf (6 page)

He lay there until he was quite cold, feeling the chill on his skin but worried that if he moved to pull the sheets up and cover them both fully, she would wake. Eventually, when the goose bumps had risen and pricked his skin like chicken feathers, he got up from the bed and loosened the sheets from the bottom where Sheri had tucked them that morning. When he climbed back in, Sheri’s breath had changed and he knew she was awake.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel bad about what I said to you. About another life. About things being different.” He moved his fingers down the outside of her arm, feeling the little hairs that grew there, and for a while he wondered if she’d heard him.

“I thought tonight might be different,” she said, eventually. “Meeting your father for the first time. Having him out of prison finally. To anyone else this would be a happy day.”

Drake didn’t know how he felt about it, either. He ran his hand down all the way to her fingers and squeezed them in his palm. He wanted to let her know he was there but he couldn’t find the words to say it aloud.

“So you’ll leave tomorrow?” she asked, her voice muffled by his arm.

“The next day,” he said. “I need to go in to the department tomorrow. I need to talk to Gary about all this.”

HE WOKE EARLY
and made a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The sound of his father’s snoring coming from beneath Drake’s old bedroom door. All Patrick must have been thinking as he lay down in that bed last night, in that old room, painted now for a small child who had never arrived, while Sheri and Drake slept just down the hall in Patrick’s old bedroom.

Drake poured a cup of coffee and tried to imagine what his father had thought before he closed his eyes. The unfamiliar becoming the familiar again. Like watching an old movie that hadn’t been seen in years. The same lines replaying, the same scenes, and plot twists. A half-remembered life slowly coming back into focus.

Drake sipped at the coffee. He was barely awake. The thoughts in his head seeming random and disoriented, bumping around inside him with a sleep-starved stumble. After Sheri had drifted off, he’d slept poorly and in the morning he’d woken and dressed in his uniform. The light just up over the mountains and the back acre of their property—where the apple trees grew in unkempt lines all the way to the forest—bright with the morning sun.

He drank the coffee and watched the orchard. The year after his mother died, the apples had sat in the field unpicked. Drake, age nine, watching as a yearling bear wandered around, picking the apples from the ground. Going from tree to tree and eating what apples it could find. The bear drunk on rotting apples by the time it had reached the fourth tree.

His father had come to stand with him at the window as the yearling lay back against one of the apple trunks and rubbed its spine one way, then the other. Eventually falling back into the grass and rolling around with its arms half suspended in front of its face. The bear dozing for over an hour before lumbering off again.

Even now they didn’t care for the trees as they should and half had gone wild, their tops lopsided and unkempt. The apples sagging on the branches in the fall, deer and elk showing up out of the forest to pick over the rotting apples on the ground, or as he had seen once or twice, put their hooves to the trunks and reach for the apples like giraffes extending their slender necks toward the most tender leaves.

Drake set his empty cup in the sink. He left the coffee machine on and collected his hat from near the door. When he’d gone a hundred feet down the wooded drive in his cruiser, he saw a Chevy Impala waiting out on Silver Lake Road. A man in a suit getting out of the car and closing the door behind him.

Drake pulled forward and when he came closer, he put down his window and said, “I was wondering if you’d show up.”

The agent smiled and offered his hand. “How are you, Deputy?”

Drake took his hand and said, “Fine, Driscoll. It’s been a long time.”

Driscoll looked down the drive toward Drake’s house. “How’s the family? How’s Sheri?”

“Still doesn’t like you very much.”

“She’s got gentle sensibilities.”

Drake watched Driscoll for a time, trying to figure the man out. There were only a couple reasons the agent would be waiting for him at the entrance to his drive. And none of those reasons meant anything good for Drake. “I’m guessing you didn’t travel three hours from Seattle for a simple hello.”

“Your father was released from prison yesterday, wasn’t he?”

Drake thought of the two men who had been waiting in the McDonald’s parking lot the day before. He hadn’t thought much of them then but he was starting to reconsider. They hadn’t looked like DEA men. “Driscoll, I hope you’re here because you just wanted to make sure we got home all right?”

“Something like that,” Driscoll said. A car went by on the road, the tires moving over the asphalt. Driscoll watched it go by and then when it was gone, leaned in again. “You think I could talk with you for a moment before you head in?”

“You got somewhere in mind?”

“Sure,” Driscoll said, straightening up. “Follow me into town.”

“YOU’RE SO FUCKING
predictable,” Drake said, looking around the doughnut shop.

“Just blending in. I thought all you small-town cops hung out in places like this.” Driscoll took a seat in a far booth, away from the main windows. He gestured to the bench across from him.

Drake sat, throwing his hat on the table, and when the girl looked up from the counter, Driscoll ordered a black coffee and Drake asked for a maple bar. Their table far enough down the side of the doughnut shop that they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone driving by.

When the girl brought the doughnut and coffee over, she nodded to Drake, and Drake said, “Thanks, Cheryl.”

“I didn’t know you were on a first-name basis here,” Driscoll said, his head turning to watch the girl walk away.

“You’ve seen this town,” Drake said. “We’re all on a first-name basis. She probably even knows who you are—probably made you the moment you drove that unmarked Impala into town.”

Driscoll waited for the girl to go into the back before he spoke again. He fingered his coffee cup with two meaty hands and looked down into it for a long time, like someone wishing into a well. “I need to talk to you about something,” Driscoll said. “You remember how we first met?”

“Sure,” Drake said. “You accused me of being a dope runner like my father.”

Driscoll chuckled and looked up from his coffee. “I gave you a hard time, yes, but I wanted to make sure I could talk to you frankly. No beating around the bush. No leading you on, no feints.”

“You’re about to tell me why the DEA has been following me around.”

Driscoll gave him a dead stare. “What do you mean?”

A strained laugh escaped Drake’s lips as he looked around the doughnut shop like Driscoll was playing a joke on him. “The two men? The ones who followed us up the interstate yesterday morning in the black Lincoln. They were your guys, right?”

Driscoll took a sip from the coffee and then put it back on the table. He’d grown bigger in the two years since they’d last seen each other, his shoulders rounded and the jowls of his face thick on his jawline. White all the way through his hair in a way it hadn’t been before. “Deputy, I didn’t put any guys on you.”

“Are you sure?”

“They were following you?” Driscoll asked. He had taken a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and he wrote down “Black Lincoln.”

“My father thought they were. I told him he was being paranoid.”

“That’s probably true,” Driscoll said. “I’ll check it out for you, though, just in case. You remember anything else about them?”

Drake went down the list, two white males, one larger than the other. He gave Driscoll the exit number and a more thorough description of the vehicle they were driving. He couldn’t remember the license number. “Is this something I should be worried about?” Drake asked.

“Have you seen them since?”

“No.”

“Then I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re probably right, your father is being paranoid.” He tucked the notebook away in his jacket again and then sat forward with his forearms on the table and his fingers interlaced. “I think you know me and your father have a little history together. I think I made that pretty clear from the beginning. The thing I didn’t tell you before is that I was part of the team that eventually brought him in.”

“Just a little something you forgot to mention. Right, Driscoll?”

“I didn’t want you blowing it out of proportion.”

“You’d already accused me of being a criminal. How much worse could it have been?”

“I’m the guy who put the cuffs on him. Pushed his face into a table just up the street here.”

“What the fuck, Driscoll?”

The agent raised his hands from the table. “I needed you to think we were on the same team, you know?”

“Jesus. We were on the same team . . . we are on the same team.” Drake felt himself growing angrier, remembering how Driscoll had brought him into the interrogation room in the Seattle federal building and treated him like he was part of the problem, like he was the one smuggling drugs in from Canada. He reached down and straightened his leg, feeling his kneecap click. “I was shot twice,” Drake said. “How many times have you been shot?”

Driscoll smiled, obviously enjoying this. “Let’s not get into a pissing contest, Bobby.”

“Why are you here, Driscoll?”

“Well, your father is out.”

“Yes, and he served his time.”

“What are his plans now that he’s out?”

“So far his plans seem to be screwing with my life.”

“Look, Bobby, I want to be straight with you here. We made an example out of Patrick Drake. We put him away for a lot of years. But if we could have proved everything we had on him from the start, he’d still be in prison. He did a lot of bad shit.”

Drake took a bite of his maple bar, thinking it through. He didn’t have a clue what Driscoll was talking about or what his father was doing. What his father had planned now that he was out. Coming north on the interstate Patrick had told Drake not to worry about him. It was all covered. “I’m not helping you put him back in prison,” Drake said.

The smile spread across Driscoll’s face again. “I thought you said we were on the same team.”

“I remember now why my wife doesn’t like you,” Drake said.

“You could lose your house, Deputy. That’s as straight as I can give it to you. You’re in trouble, and your father is most certainly the root of your problems.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the fact that before Sheriff Drake went to prison, two guys were found dead in a gravel lot north of Bellingham.”

“That’s a whole other county,” Drake said.

“Well the thing about it is that they were two guys who had ripped off a lot of money from someone big. Someone your father worked for.”

“Sounds like they had it coming.”

“Who’s saying that?” Driscoll asked. “You or your father?”

“I’m not my father.”

“A lot of money went missing,” Driscoll said. “Hundreds of thousands. It was drug money and—from what I hear—a portion of it was your father’s. So, naturally, a big deal like this gets my attention, and I talk to my sources and they say Patrick was the one who tracked the two men down. Said they stashed the money before Patrick found them. Only I go around and start asking questions from the wives of these guys—real trashy sort of girls. Moss all over their houses, rent-to-own sort of lifestyle. You get what I’m saying?”

Drake nodded. His head turned toward the front windows, just looking at the sunlight outside, wishing he could be somewhere else.

“They say they don’t know anything about the missing money. They admit to everything else. What their husbands were up to, how they did the job, who put them onto it, everything. Only they don’t know anything about the money. Are you following me, Deputy? Twelve years later one of the wives is still living in the same house. She’s paid off her rent-to-own couch, but there’s still moss on her siding, and she’s taking in welfare checks to pay for the kids. The other one isn’t doing as well. Couldn’t make her house payments, lost her place, and is living with her brother’s family, working three jobs, all that horrible stuff.”

Driscoll took a drink of his coffee. Drake knew he’d paused just to push the knife in deeper. A grin on Driscoll’s face that heralded the coming twist of the handle.

“So you might want to ask: where’s the money?” Driscoll said. “Well that’s the interesting part. That’s the part that gets me up in the morning and keeps me watching those two poor widows. Because you know what, that money is gone. It never made it back to the smugglers up in Canada. The widows don’t have it. And little by little I start to wonder where it’s gone and who has it. It’s a lot of money to go missing, a lot of money that most anyone would do most anything to hold on to. And so I go to Monroe to ask your father this question a few years back. I tell him if he knows where it is and he’s willing to point the finger at the people he works for, who sent him to do what he did, he can get out of prison right then and there. Time already served. He’s off the hook. The murders weren’t him, I know that. I just want to know where the money is and who sent it down this way in the first place. Hell, we went hard on him, too hard. And you know what, I don’t think Sheriff Drake was in on it alone.”

“You’re saying my father didn’t kill those men?”

“For now I’m giving Patrick the benefit of the doubt.”

“How much are we talking about?” Drake asked.

“Two hundred thousand. Not much in this day, but twelve years ago it would have been a good amount. Enough to get out of the business. Maybe start a new life. For your father to settle his debts.”

“You think that’s what he was doing?”

“I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “That’s why I’m coming to you. I’m asking for your help on this.”

“Go talk to someone else. I’m certainly the last person my father would tell anything to,” Drake said.

“That’s right,” Driscoll said. “But what I’ve heard and what I keep hearing is that your father and his deputies were pretty tight back in the day. Bend a few rules. Get away with a little here and there. Wasn’t your current sheriff, Gary Elliot, one of his deputies?”