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Authors: Urban Waite

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Sometimes the Wolf (8 page)

BOOK: Sometimes the Wolf
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“That’s the thing,” the skinny man said. “We’re already late. He probably wouldn’t be too happy.”

She looked in at the two men and told them it was only a couple minutes away. The big man in the passenger seat was dressed informally in a worn pair of jeans and a padded flannel button-up. The last few buttons on the shirt left loose at the collar to allow for the rolls of skin that appeared below his jaw.

The driver turned and looked back down the street and then when he turned back, still holding the coffee-stained address between his fingers, said, “You show us where it is and we’ll have you back in five minutes.”

“Five minutes?”

“Yep, you’d really be helping us out.” He reached behind him and pushed the door open from the inside. “Get in,” he said. “We’ll bring you right back.”

She stepped in and brought the door closed behind her.

When they came to the intersection with the dangling caution light she told them where to turn and they followed the lake road. The shadow of the mountains over much of the lake, but far to the east a sliver of gold was still visible on the water.

“You heard what Driscoll was saying to the deputy today?” the man asked.

“Some of it,” she said.

The man smiled up at her reflection in the rearview. “So you were eavesdropping?”

“No, of course not.”

“It’s okay if you were,” the man said, kidding her still, his smile wide beneath his thin lips. “If the deputy is in trouble it’s better we hear about it sooner than later.”

“I didn’t hear anything really. They were talking about his father,” Cheryl said. “You’re here about his father, right? So you must know the story about him.”

“We’ve heard some stories.”

The man watched her in the rearview and when they came to the driveway leading to the Drake property Cheryl pointed it out and told them how far up the house was. “Are you two here to take him back to prison?” she asked.

The man looked up at her in the rearview again and then broke away. He was driving on the lake road still, Drake’s driveway now a quarter mile behind them. “What’s up ahead here on this road?” the man asked.

“Nothing. Logging. A couple more houses.”

“Can you keep a secret?” the man asked. His eyes were on her again and with his free hand he touched a button and dropped all the locks on the doors.

The sound made Cheryl jump, her fingers to the door handle before she knew she had placed them there. When she looked back to the front, the big man was climbing over the seat with one large hand outstretched toward her.

Chapter 5

D
RAKE SAT ON THE
back stairs, drinking a beer and staring out on the orchard. The sky tinged a deep blue in the west and the first stars already showing. The little garden Sheri kept, dug out and lined with earth-turned rows.

He put the beer to his lips and tipped the bottle back. He’d given it a lot of thought through the day. What Driscoll had said, what Gary had tried to tell him, his father. It was all a mess. Drake kept running it around in his head. A footrace that never seemed to have an ending, just around and around until someone dropped dead.

He scuffed the heels of his boots over the dirt at the base of the stairs, digging a hole. The apple trees set in lines all the way to the forest. A patch of disturbed earth at the edge of the orchard where they’d buried their child in a grave the size of a shoebox. No one but them—and now Drake’s father—knowing anything about it. All of their lives somehow entwined by this fact.

The new knowledge about his father adding to it all and piling on. He didn’t think he would tell Sheri about Driscoll’s coming to see him that morning, about what he had to say. He didn’t want her trying to guess, as he was now, whether there was any truth in the story. He didn’t want to add to the pressure. A feeling that had settled over Drake all through the day. Like everybody had agreed to take a ride on Drake’s back—Driscoll, Patrick, and Gary—all at once and none of them offering to get off.

Drake took a swallow of the beer, tipping the bottle back, trying to calm his nerves. There was nothing he could do but wait it out, and when the spring on the kitchen door opened and then snapped shut, Drake already knew it was his father simply from the way the boards on the back porch took his weight. Drake didn’t turn and he waited for Patrick to come down the steps and sit next to him. His father’s hand on Drake’s shoulder as he sat. The first time they’d touched in twelve years. The feeling strange on Drake’s skin.

“Thinking some deep thoughts?” his father asked. He was holding a beer in one hand and he twisted the top off with his other. When Drake didn’t respond, Patrick said, “This was always where I found you when you lost a basketball game.”

“It’s been a while since high school,” Drake said. He finished the beer in one pull and set it on the step beside him. The smell of the yard all around him, fresh turned earth from a few days before, left to bake in the sun.

“Sheri asked me what she should plant this year,” his father said. “I told her I don’t have a clue about that sort of thing. Your mother was always the one who dealt with the growing season.”

Drake nodded. A desire in him to just come out with it. To tell his father everything.

“You’ve made a life of it here,” Patrick said.

“I’ve tried.”

“Your mother kept a garden in the exact same spot.”

Drake nodded again. “I remember.” He felt dazed, his body thrown off balance as he looked into the rows of turned earth, avoiding his father’s eyes.

“I know you didn’t choose this life. Coming back here. Taking the job with Gary. I should have told you that earlier on,” Patrick said. “I meant to tell it to you years ago. I’m sorry about that.”

Drake nodded.

“It was easy money for me,” Patrick said. “Your mom died and by the time you finished high school there was so much debt. I couldn’t figure any other way. I was the sheriff, there was no moving up, there was no way to make more money. I really didn’t know what else to do.”

Drake turned and looked Patrick over. The clean shave on his face. The way he used to look when Drake was a boy. The same familiar way Drake remembered seeing him every day. His hand running over the skin of his cheek and along his jawline as he talked, his fingers searching out the small imperfections, the little scrapes he’d given himself.

“I could have waited,” Patrick went on. “There were things I could have done. Legal things. But I didn’t have the patience for it and the bank was telling me I needed to make my payments or they were going to take the house away. It felt like they were trying to take your mother away from me all over again.” Patrick held a hand to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose. The sound of his breath amplified in his palm, whistling between his fingers. “I know it was wrong,” he said. “It was all wrong . . .”

Drake didn’t say anything, he didn’t want to speak, even knowing it was his turn, that his father wanted him to say something, Drake couldn’t do it. Patrick wanted him to tell him it was okay and the past was the past. At one time Drake thought maybe he could, but there just was no doing it now, not after everything he’d heard that morning. And now Drake feared if he said anything it would come out hateful, the words tearing up out of him like blood from a wound.

“When your mother got sick I knew things would be different. And when she didn’t get better, when she kept getting worse, I knew the life we’d planned would never be.” Drake listened as his father took a sip off the bottle and then set it back on the wood. “Somewhere in there we jumped the tracks,” his father said. “One life going on the way it should have been, and another taking a completely different path.”

“Dad, don’t talk to me about this anymore,” Drake said. His voice quivering in his throat. “I don’t want to hear it from you.” He felt the words slip up over his tongue and lash out. Nothing he could do to stop them, and a desire to simply spill it all out into the night air and be done with it.

So much hate for his father. For the last twelve years, and more, he realized, all the way back to when he was a boy and his father had brought him to see his mother in the hospital. Hours away. The clinic in Silver Lake not equipped to handle things like cancer, like people who needed to be held up on life support, wired up into the electricity while machines did the work the body no longer could.

Next to him on the stairs, he felt his father stand. “I needed to say that to you.”

“You’ve said it.”

“I’ll see you inside, then.”

Drake heard his father turn and move up the stairs, the grit working beneath his shoes on the wood. “Dad,” Drake said. “I was going to tell you later, over dinner.” Drake paused, trying to get the words right, trying to calm the dangerous beat he felt in his heart. “I’m headed into the hills tomorrow, west of the lake. We’ll be tracking that wolf. Ellie asked if you would come. I think I’d like you there as well.”

A long silence followed. Drake picked up the empty bottle next to him and ran a fingertip over the top, finding the slight imperfection in the glass where the two edges had been sealed together in the factory. He thought about his father twenty-five years ago, his mother in the hospital bed, he thought about the years that followed. He thought about all that had happened twelve years before. He thought about the money, about Driscoll, and Gary, and his father.

“Good,” his father said. “I’ve been meaning to get up into those hills.”

AFTER DINNER DRAKE
lay in bed next to Sheri and tried to close his eyes. The thoughts in his head going around and around without end.

Sheri sat there with her back to the headboard. “You going to tell me what’s up?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Drake said. His eyes still closed and his arms crossed over his chest beneath the sheets.

“You didn’t say much during dinner, and those questions you were asking me before, about your father and where he’d been through the day. He can’t be that bad.”

Drake turned away, opening his eyes and staring at the wall until Sheri put out the light. She was resting with her face to him and he felt her breath on the back of his neck and her body close into his. After five minutes had passed Drake asked, “What makes you trust him so much?”

“What makes you not trust him at all?”

“A lot has been said about him.”

“You’ve heard it all before,” Sheri said. “It’s not like you haven’t gotten used to the things people say.”

“Not all of it.”

“Well, you know him better than me,” Sheri said, sarcasm in her voice.

Drake had his eyes open still, the dark room was coming back into focus and he saw the nightstand and the wall farther on. “What makes you so certain about him?”

“I just feel for him,” Sheri said. “For where he’s been and what he’s had to do to get here with us. It took a lot for him to come back here after everything. To the house he used to share with your mother and you. For him to come to Silver Lake. I have sympathy for him, but I also think it takes a lot of courage.”

Drake turned so that he could face her, hoping that she could see the smile on his face when he said, “You’ve got a soft heart, Sheri.”

“Well, you’ve got a heart made of stone,” she said, pushing at him a little beneath the sheets, her own smile now visible.

“He’s here because he has to be. We said we’d take care of him, didn’t we? It was one of the conditions of his release.”

“I know he seems like a loner but he’s not really to blame for what he is. Not totally.”

In the dim light of their bedroom Drake lay watching his wife. He didn’t know what else to say to her. The trip into the woods with Ellie was less than eight hours away. All the things people had said about Patrick Drake over the years and now he was here. Sleeping in the room down the hall, resting up for his chance at the mountains.

Drake lay there for a long time thinking it over. Sheri falling asleep and the thoughts in his head whistling around like leaves over an empty lot, nothing to catch them or anchor them to the earth as they moved. All the while, Drake simply trying to see the world through Sheri’s eyes, but he just couldn’t.

He didn’t want his father to be any of the things people were saying about him. Mostly, though, he didn’t want his father to be a murderer on top of everything else he’d already been convicted of.

PART II

THE HUNT

Chapter 6

T
HE SUN WAS JUST
up over the mountains when Drake pulled his cruiser past the cattle fence. The barbed wire stained black where the deer had been, but little else to say what happened two days before. Patrick sat in the passenger seat watching the houses go by as they rounded the lake. The smell of coffee thick inside the car from one of the old chipped cups Patrick held in his hands, amplified by the closed-in air packed tight between the windows.

Drake had half expected to see Driscoll at the end of his drive that morning, sitting there on the hood of his Impala, just waiting for them. Only he hadn’t been there and Drake turned south along the lake and followed the road, feeling loose and untethered from his day and the expectations he usually had for himself. The home he’d made the last twelve years in Silver Lake shattered by what Driscoll had said. No way of knowing how any of this would turn out. His father next to him in the passenger seat and all they’d need for the wolf hunt loaded up in the back.

BOOK: Sometimes the Wolf
13.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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