Sometimes the Wolf (7 page)

“That’s taking it too far,” Drake said. “Gary gave me my job after my father went away. For Christ’s sake, he lives in a two-bedroom apartment over the Laundromat. He’s not a rich man.”

“I know where he lives,” Driscoll said. “I even know how much money he has in his bank account. Look, we’ve gone through just about everything. Before you gave up being a basketball star and came back from Arizona we even went through your house.”

“And you didn’t find a thing, did you?”

Driscoll laughed. “This is just like old times, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Drake said. “I’m just waiting for you to accuse me of being a criminal mastermind. You got anything more you want to tell me?”

“That’s it. That’s all there is. I thought I owed you a talk at least. I thought you should hear it from me.”

“Don’t give it to me like that, Driscoll. What is it you really want?”

“I just want you to keep your eyes open. Stay sharp. Weeks from now I don’t want to see you across the table from me in a federal interrogation room.”

“You want me to tell you if my father starts spending ten-thousand-dollar bills.”

“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. We’re friends, aren’t we? I’m only asking you to keep your father close for a little while. If nothing comes of it, then I’ll go back to sitting around the office, throwing the tennis ball at the wall. No harm done.” Driscoll slid a card out across the table. “In case you lost the last one I gave you.”

Drake picked up the card and read the title and name: Regional Director, Agent Frank Driscoll. “If you’ve got all this information on my father why didn’t you just threaten him with life in prison for killing those two men?”

Driscoll smiled. “If there was evidence to prove it, I would have.”

“You’re out on a limb here, aren’t you?”

“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re right, either.”

“I’m here to help you out, Deputy. I tell you about the fact that maybe you brought a murderer into your home and on top of that, your boss over at the Sheriff’s Department might have been involved, and you think I’m the one doing you a disservice?”

“You’re a fucking cheery guy, you know that, Driscoll? I ought to have you over for more barbecues.”

“Yeah, well, tell that to your wife and see how it goes.”

DRAKE GOT INTO
the department thirty minutes late and went straight into Gary’s office.

“I bet you’re wondering why I set you up with Fish and Wildlife,” Gary said. He was sitting at his desk, looking through the morning paperwork.

Drake nodded, his eyes casting out around the office like he might find a bloodstained sack of money in the corner. He had to check himself and keep his focus on Gary.

“I know you’ve been helping Ellie out with that poaching thing, and this didn’t seem too much of a stretch,” Gary said. A few years younger than Patrick, Gary had been like an uncle to Drake growing up. He’d given Drake his job, even loaned him money till Drake could sell off some of his father’s land to buy groceries and pay for the mortgage on their house. Since then Gary had begun to show his age. The uniform rounded on his stomach and the hair that had once been red now gone thin on his pink scalp. Worry lines across his forehead deep and defined on the skin.

“The truth is,” Gary was saying, “your fellow deputies, Andy and Luke, could have done it, but you know the valley better than anybody and you’re the one who keeps getting the calls as it is.” Gary shook his head like something was funny. “Hell, you’re about the only one besides Ellie that gives a shit about that wolf. I think a lot of people would rather you just shot it, and to be honest, I’m one of them.”

Drake had his hat sitting in his lap and as Gary talked he turned it slowly with his fingers. “You know my father is out?” Drake said.

“I know,” Gary said. “I was the one who approved your day off.”

“You ever visit him in Monroe?”

Gary cracked a smile, the flesh beneath his chin drawing tight. “You know I did. I haven’t in a long while, but I did.”

“Except for one time, I didn’t visit him at all,” Drake said.

“He’s staying with you and Sheri?”

“He has my old bedroom.”

Gary nodded; he leaned back in the chair and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. The office had been Patrick’s at one time. Now all the pictures that had lined the walls were gone and Gary had replaced them with his own. Pictures from the fishing trips he took to Alaska, one with Drake holding a king salmon and looking proudly at the camera. The trips a yearly vacation for Gary, sometimes on his own but often with one of the deputies from the department. And Drake knew, too, that if Patrick had never gone away to prison it would have been his father there in the picture instead of him.

“You guys were close when I was a kid.”

“Yes, we were,” Gary said. “It’s a shame how it all turned out.” Other photographs showed Gary in the Cascade foothills, kneeling next to big bucks he’d shot, their antlers turned up in his hand and the buck’s eyes staring out at the camera, dull and black as those of the deer Drake had seen the other day. “You should tell Patrick we say hello. Me, Andy, and Luke, all of us, tell him that and say we’ll get a few beers one of these nights.”

“What I mean to say is that my father just got out yesterday. I don’t know if I should be headed off into the hills on a wolf hunt.”

“I can stop by and check up on him, if that helps you out at all,” Gary said. “I don’t think that wolf can wait more than a day.”

Drake thought about what Driscoll had told him only thirty minutes before. The image in his mind of two old lawmen sitting on Drake’s porch counting the cash they’d stolen twelve years ago. Drake was having a hard time keeping his focus. All the things Driscoll had said to him earlier at the doughnut shop were crawling up his spine like spiders through a tin pipe. “Maybe I’ll just take Dad with us,” Drake said.

“Is that you or Ellie talking? I already told her that was a bad idea.”

“I told her the same,” Drake said. “But I’m not going to leave him around the house doing who knows what.”

Gary smiled. “Don’t trust the old man yet?”

“Something like that,” Drake said. He was having a hard time trusting anyone at this point. “Did Ellie mention when she wanted to head out?”

“She was thinking you’d go out tomorrow, early, as soon as the sun is up.”

Drake collected his hat and stood. He was holding it in his hand and about to turn when Gary said, “Son, don’t put too much faith in your buddy Driscoll. He was around here a good amount when your father went away. There was a lot of media and law enforcement throwing crazy theories around and he was one of the main guys throwing the mud.”

Drake ran his fingers under the band of his hat. His eyes on the floor, feeling exposed.

“Andy’s oldest daughter went to school with that girl over at the doughnut shop, Cheryl. Maybe it comes with the job, but the girl likes to get in people’s business—she likes to talk, too, and it just worked its way up through the grapevine. It’s the nature of a small town. I wouldn’t think too much on it. I’ve been expecting we might see Agent Driscoll around here again at some time.”

Drake let himself out and closed the door. Andy and Luke at their desks. Drake went and sat in his chair. He felt defeated. He had no clue what to think about any of it, but mostly he just felt pissed off. Until an hour ago he’d thought Driscoll was his friend, now he was saying one thing and Gary was saying another. Two people Drake had always trusted.

Drake sat at his desk and looked around the office. Whatever seed Driscoll had planted was growing. Roots coiling around his chest like a vine on a tree and Drake there in the office scared to see how it bloomed.

DRAKE MADE IT
into the early afternoon before he went back into Gary’s office and asked to take the rest of the day off.

When Drake pulled up to the house he saw his father one hundred feet away at the edge of the clearing where the apple orchard ran out and the alder fence had once sat. Patrick stood there for a moment and then bent a knee into the grass, where with one hand he seemed to be looking something over. He wore a set of jeans and one of his old flannels. His scalp and beard shaved clean. And the newly exposed skin white and puckered in places where the razor had nicked his neck and jawline.

Drake slipped the car into park. For a while he watched his father where he knelt at the edge of the clearing. He didn’t know what to think about the man. And it was only when Drake got up out of the cruiser and closed the door that his father raised his eyes to Drake.

By the time he made it across the orchard to his father, Patrick was standing again. “I’ve never seen you in the uniform,” Patrick said. His eyes on Drake, taking in the cop browns he wore.

Drake tried to smile. He looked Patrick over and then he looked back at the house, where he could see Sheri’s profile through one of the kitchen windows.

“You get off early?” Patrick asked.

“Yes,” Drake said, turning back to his father. “Gary let me go. I thought I’d just come home for a little while. What’s been going on?”

“Sheri showed me around. We picked up some groceries, had lunch, really just took it easy.”

“And now?”

Patrick bent and lifted something from the grass. “I came to look the fence over.” In his hand was a rotted piece of alder. “I was thinking maybe I could help you build it again—maybe this weekend? With the two of us we could finish in an afternoon.”

“Yeah,” Drake said. “I don’t see why not.” He looked his father over one more time and then made an excuse about getting out of his work clothes. He said good-bye and then, halfway to the house, turned and saw his father still there at the edge of forest, picking pieces of rotten alder from the ground.

Later, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, Drake came into the kitchen and stood watching Sheri peel carrots over the sink. “You never left him alone the whole day?”

She told him that his father had slept until ten. Then they’d walked to the lake, and gone shopping for that night’s meal.

“How long has he been out there?”

“Not long,” Sheri said.

Drake took the few remaining steps to where she stood. Through the window he watched his father carry a load of wood and dump it into the burn pile out behind the house. “So you never left him alone the whole day?”

“He went to the bathroom on his own,” Sheri said. “I didn’t sign up for anything like that.” Sheri was laughing now, looking to Drake like she thought the joke was so funny. Like she belonged on a stage in front of a packed house.

All Drake could think about was the money and if his father had somehow stashed it under the bathroom floorboards, or in a waterproof bag in the porcelain tank. All of his ideas ridiculous. He was turning into his father, seeing things that were not there.

Chapter 4

T
HE MAN CAME IN
wearing a black suit, ill fitted to his skinny body, and ordered two coffees and a Danish to go. While he waited he tapped his fingernails in rhythm to the stereo playing behind the counter and watched the girl walk away to the coffee machine, where she filled the two cups. When she came back he thanked her and paid.

He balanced the two coffees in the claw of his upturned palm. And as he went out the door, holding it with his hip, he already saw how the Danish had begun to stain the small paper bag. The paper turned waxen with pastry grease in the cold early evening air.

When he took his seat in the car again, he gestured to the glove box, asking the big man for a pen and paper, all the while watching the shop and drinking from his cup of coffee. As the minutes passed, they kept time by checking a prepaid cell phone they’d picked up at a convenience store and that they’d charged while driving.

They sat in the car for an hour before the girl closed the shop. When she was about a block up they started the car and pulled forward, coming even with the girl as she stopped at the corner.

The skinnier of the two men drove, slowing to make pace with the girl. He put the window down and called to the girl by name.

The girl paused, her eyes searching the face that looked up at her from the driver’s-side window. “Hello?” she said, unsure at first. And then as she recognized the face staring out at her from inside the car. “How was the coffee?”

“It’s Cheryl, isn’t it?” the man said. His hair was slicked back and the suit was too big on his thin bones. He had one arm out the window and he moved his hand while he talked, gesturing to the uniform she wore. “It’s right there on your name tag.”

She turned and looked back toward the shop and then looked around her. The sun was almost gone down, a pale light now hanging in the air to the west and the street blue with shadow.

“You know Deputy Drake?” the man asked. “And maybe you met our boss Frank Driscoll today? They were in your shop earlier.”

“You guys work for the DEA?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and then stepped forward, bending a little to take in both men.

“Have you seen either of them?” the skinny man went on. “Driscoll asked us to come up. He said there might be some trouble with Deputy Drake’s father. Driscoll gave us the address but we’re having a hard time.” He held out a coffee-stained piece of paper for her to see. The address, written in blue ink, clouded and distorted with dried liquid.

She stepped up to the black car, a foot’s distance from its open window, and took the small piece of paper from the man. She looked the address over and then gave it back. “I can see why you’d have trouble with this,” she said.

“Some of the coffee spilled. It’s important we find the deputy’s place.”

“Is Bobby in some sort of danger?”

“We don’t think so but Driscoll asked us to come up. We heard they had coffee in your shop this morning. Would you mind showing us the address?”

The girl looked around on the street. The sound of plates and cutlery could be heard far down the block from the open kitchen window of the Buck Blind. The girl hesitated, looking to the restaurant a few hundred feet away. “You can’t call your boss?”