Sometimes the Wolf

Chapter 6

THE 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.

As he pulled past the field he saw the Fish and Wildlife truck waiting beneath the trees. The brown vehicle tucked into the shadows up a small access road that wound back into the forest and ran the perimeter of the property, ending at the farmhouse. Ellie standing there with the tailgate down and a rifle pitched skyward. The red tufts of tranquilizers sitting there beside her on the metal with the rest of her gear.

Drake parked the car off the side of the road and got out. He came and stood next to the truck with his arms resting over the top of the bed. A good amount of gear laid out below. “You really think you’re going to take her down with one of those?” he said.

Ellie finished packing the tranquilizers into the case and then zipped it closed. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“You’re supposed to use silver bullets, aren’t you?”

Ellie smiled. “You think this wolf is going to turn into a person after we catch up to her?”

“It might explain why she’s all alone. The last of her kind.”

“A wolf in these mountains is just about as rare as Bigfoot.”

“Some might tell you a wolf is rarer than Bigfoot,” Drake said.

Ellie laughed, hitching the strap of the rifle over her shoulder and leaning into the bed to grab up her pack. “Well, we’d probably have to put Bigfoot on the endangered species list as well, wouldn’t we?” Over the uniform she wore a green fleece vest. Her hair, kept back from her eyes with a rubber band, bobbed from shoulder to shoulder as she moved one item after another out of the truck bed, setting them on the ground in a wide circle at her feet. “What about him?” Ellie nodded toward Patrick where he sat in Drake’s backseat with the door pushed open, pulling on his boots. His coffee cup and pack on the ground near his feet. “Is he going to come over here and tell me to wear garlic around my neck and make sure to stab the beast in the heart with a wooden cross?”

“Don’t be silly, Ellie. We may be talking werewolves here, but not vampires.”

Ellie gave him a wry look, raising her hands in mock surrender. “Of course. But you know after all the rumors that have been going around the last dozen years, your father’s probably going to be the scariest thing in these woods the next couple days.”

Drake looked back to where his father sat, lacing his boots. In the last twelve years, he knew, Patrick had been called a number of things, which in their own way had reflected on Drake. He didn’t know what to say about that. He knew Ellie was joking with him, and he wanted to laugh and play it off like it didn’t matter, but the comment had hit too close to home and he was struggling to find anything to say.

He was still trying to find a way to keep the darkness out of their conversation when he heard gravel popping beneath tires as a car came down the ranch access road. The headlights cutting through the shadowed tree trunks for only a moment before they came around the corner and Drake saw the bubble lights on top of the car.

Ellie straightened at the sound and then moved some of her gear to the side of the road, close in to the wheels of her truck, leaving enough room for the cruiser to go past.

“You tell Gary where we would be this morning?” Drake asked.

Ellie turned and looked to Drake for a moment. “I asked Gary to go talk to the rancher for us. I thought asking for a spot to leave our vehicles would be better if it came from him. Fish and Wildlife aren’t exactly the ranchers’ favorites right now. They’d all rather see this wolf shot than have us out here trying to save her.”

Drake glanced to his right and found his father up now, standing about three feet off, watching as the cruiser drew to a stop close by.

“It’s been a long time,” Gary said to Patrick through the open window. His arm up over the passenger seat as he spoke to Patrick. “I hope your boy told you Andy and Luke say hello. We’d like to have you down to the Buck Blind when you’re finished here. We can catch up over a few drinks.”

Patrick nodded. “Just like old times out here, isn’t it?” he said, bending at the waist so that he could look in through the passenger window at Gary.

Gary glanced back over his shoulder to where Drake stood. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Pat. Going on a wolf hunt a few days after being let out of Monroe. I already told Bobby and Ellie how I feel about all this. Making you the third wheel. If you want, I can give you a ride back into town and we can grab breakfast. You shouldn’t be going up into the mountains your first week out.”

“It’s good for me to get back into the hills. Maybe it will help me tame some old demons.”

“I guess it is just like old times, then,” Gary said. “We’ll catch up, don’t worry. I wouldn’t have much time today anyway.”

“You sure you don’t need me?” Drake asked, stepping closer to the car.

“No. It’s nothing,” Gary said. “Cheryl didn’t make it home last night. Her parents called us pretty late. You know how this goes. She’s probably shacked up at a boyfriend’s somewhere.” He nodded back toward Patrick and said, “You just watch out for your father, Bobby. I don’t want anyone else going missing around here.”

Drake nodded, watching as a thin smile slipped across Gary’s face.

“I don’t want it to be anything like old times out here,” Gary said. “Make sure your father doesn’t step out from behind a tree with a couple sacks of BC bud under each of his arms.” Gary laughed. “See you both in a day or so, okay? Pat, let’s grab that drink when you get back.”

“Okay,” Patrick said, stone-faced and impossible to read. “You and the boys.” He moved back from the door and straightened up.

Gary laughed once more. “Happy hunting.” Then he pulled away down the road and they watched him take the turn and head north toward Silver Lake.

SOMETIME AROUND NOON they lost the trail. No tracks in the moist ground. No broken branch, or scat, or tuft of hair. Nothing to go on. The forest all around them, dense and black with shadow. Sword fern and moss all across the forest floor. The large trunks of fir and hemlock stretching down from above and the sky only visible through slim blue cracks in the canopy.

Ellie stood and marked their location on the map. She was holding a GPS in her hand and as she looked around at the forest, she measured their bearings against the map. Drake found an old deadfall. The bark beneath his fingertips, grown thick with rough moss, felt spongy to the touch. He put his full weight to it and sat, the log buckling slightly as the rot compressed.

On his knee he wore a metal brace, with Velcro ties and padded fittings. The material beneath wet with his own sweat. For nearly five miles they’d been making a straight line upward through the mountain, veering often before coming back on path, heading almost parallel to the lake below, but always climbing.

Next to him, Patrick swayed on his feet, his hands tucked under the straps of his pack and a half circle of sweat stained into the shirt below his neck. “So what’s the plan here?” he said, raising his eyes to Ellie. “We’re just going to track this girl, shoot her, and then put a collar on her?”

“You make my job seem so easy,” Ellie said.

“Well, there is the hiking part.”

Ellie grinned and studied her map. When she looked back up, searching the hillside above, she said, “And the finding her part.”

Drake worked the muscles beneath the brace, feeling the familiar pain. He knew this was good for him, all of it, pushing himself till the new muscles formed over the old, cutting out the scar tissue. He carried with him his old .270 hunting rifle, the gun strapped to the side of his pack, and a scope zipped into one of the pockets. He wasn’t expecting to use it, but he was nervous about this whole thing and had packed it that morning, thinking about stories he knew were myths, but that somehow had worked their way into his reality. When he looked back up at Ellie she had walked off a ways and then come back, GPS in one hand and her own rifle in the other.

“How long since the last wolf sign?” she asked.

“It’s been a while now,” Drake said.

Ellie turned and looked to Patrick. “You see anything?”

Patrick had produced a water bottle from his pack and stood drinking. When he was done he passed it along to Drake and said, “What did you think? This wolf was just going to pop out of the woods so we could shoot her?”

“That wasn’t exactly it,” Ellie said.

“You bring any kind of bait?”

“This one seems to be attracted to dead bodies.”

“That why you had us come along?” Drake said. “Human sacrifices?”

“The way you’re both breathing it’ll probably turn into something like that,” Ellie said. “I brought along some urine from a male wolf, and a distressed-elk call. I figure between the two we can hope to get her coming our way.”

“Where to now?” Patrick asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ellie said. She ran the back of her palm along her hairline to wipe the sweat away. “You got any hideouts for us to hole up in?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Two years smuggling drugs over these mountains and you got nothing, huh?”

“Well, the idea was not to leave a trail.”

“Makes sense,” Ellie said. “I’m just starting to think about how it took them two years to find a guy in these mountains and we’re looking for one wolf who’s only been here a few weeks.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly howling at the moon, either,” Patrick said.

Drake finished drinking from the water and then offered it to Ellie. When she turned it down he handed it back to his father. “Still,” Drake said. “You did get caught.”

OUT IN THE darkness they heard the wolf call.

Drake and his father sat around a small fire Ellie had allowed them to make on Forestry land. The two tents they’d set up just beyond the light in the shadowed forest. Ellie already asleep in her tent and only Drake and Patrick sitting up with the fire. No words spoken between the two of them in thirty minutes or more as they sat looking inward. Transfixed by the dance of the flames while out in the forest the wolf called and called without response.

The feeling Drake had carried with him through the day brimming at the edge. The simple question he feared to ask. He felt it all circling around them in the night. The threat out there and all it held with it. His father returned to the valley for only a few days and already Drake’s life felt more tenuous than perhaps it had ever felt. But still he wouldn’t say a thing, fearful of what response might come, of what truths might be revealed. Miles from home in the middle of the woods it was either the best or the worst place to confront his father.

From the pile by his feet Drake grabbed a piece of wood and threw it into the fire, the sparks dancing for a moment and then settling again. The fire small but strong where the coals burned bright and iridescent in the belly. Nothing to be said. In the morning they would bury the black coals in the ground and move on.

The wolf called again and Drake raised his head, trying to fix a location. The night all around them now and the cold that came with it. A bright half-moon above in the sky and the pathways of moonlight visible on the ground in all directions. The flicker of the fire reaching only so far into the forest, where the blue-black light began and the ferns feathered out of the shadows. No idea how far or close the wolf might be. Only the lonely rise and fall of the howl trailing through the trees.

DRAKE WOKE IN the morning with the air thick around him. The tent he’d packed for his father and him zipped up and stale with the smell of their breath. In the night he’d dreamed about Ellie. The two of them sitting up in her truck on another night, waiting, not for poachers this time but for something else, something that had gone—like most dreams—painfully unnamed. What they’d said to each other and how they’d acted as indistinct as fresh ink smeared on paper. Words only half-legible. His hand at one time during the night held toward her.

Rolling over, remembering it all, he brought his arm up and lay looking at his hand as if it had acted alone in some brutal conspiracy that implicated them all. Above, through the thin tent walls, a pale light came streaming down. A slight hiccup to his breathing as he tried to calm whatever thoughts had been churning inside him. It was a full minute before he realized his father was missing.

Unzipping the tent, Drake stood up into the forest. The trees all around him as they’d been the night before. His eyes skipping over the landscape, settling on their packs for only a moment before skittering on. No sign of his father. The question he’d wanted to ask the night before never having come to his lips and the two men simply watching the fire until it died away and they, too, went to sleep.

He stood now with his feet bare on the forest floor, the dry needles like a mat beneath his heels, and the green moss over everything else. The sun was up, slanting in sideways from the east, and where the sun did not touch the shadows felt cold and damp with mountain dew. The only thing to hear was the slight breeze roaming in the branches high above, washing the treetops one way, then another.

He didn’t have an idea where his father had gone and he looked from their packs to the opening of the tent, only a few feet behind him. He sat in the entrance to the tent and pulled his knee brace on, then his socks and boots. He didn’t want to worry Ellie, and in some way he knew, too, he wasn’t ready to admit to her the unease he’d felt all through the night and the guilt he now felt for bringing his father along.

When he checked the packs a minute later he saw that Ellie’s rifle was gone. He looked around the camp, trying to remember if she had stashed it somewhere, or if it was in her tent. No memory of either, and a certainty he’d seen the rifle right here, strapped to the side of her pack when Drake had gone to sleep.

For a moment his eyes scanned the dense forest. The camp made in a little clearing among the trees. Dark soil beneath his boots and nothing but the endless wall of tree trunks in any direction. A slope to the ground about twenty feet east of the camp, where the valley opened up below and the lake sometimes could be seen through the trees.

Taking his eyes off the surrounding forest, he unstrapped his own rifle from his pack and slung it over his shoulder. Driscoll’s words from the day before playing in Drake’s head and not the first idea which way his father had gone, or why he’d wanted to come along with them in the first place.

There was a small stream a tenth of a mile downslope and this is the way Drake went, hoping his father had simply gone for water. He could feel the breeze strengthen as soon as he came off the even ground. The valley floor far below him down the slope, and the rush of air felt rising upward through the trees.

With his boots loosely tied, the land fell away quickly and felt dense and fragile beneath his feet. The deep scent of fungus and turned soil rising from the ground any time he took a step. His heels landed heavily on the downward slope, sinking in as they pushed a mixture of detritus that clumped and fell away before him.

The rifle felt heavy on his back as he walked, the butt bouncing against his waist. No sound in the forest except for his own footsteps and the rush of wind in the trees. Farther on he heard the stream, a slight gurgle of water, endless as the slope he now found himself descending.

As he came down and found the bottomland before the stream, he saw his father a hundred feet on. Crouched with his back to Drake and his arms outstretched over a deadfall. A bright green wall of salmonberry leaves and currant bushes separating the streambed from the dark undergrowth of the forest. Patrick so still that it forced the words to Drake’s mouth before he quite knew he was saying them. Throwing his voice forward as he called to his father.

Only then did Drake catch the movement far down the stream, the brief wheel of fur as something bounded up from the water and moved for the forest. He saw too the quick snap of his father’s arms and the red dart flush out of the gun. The sound loud in the silence of the forest, as the wolf sprang up, visible for a second in the morning sun, yelping in pain. The red dart now hanging from her hindquarter.

THE WOLF LAY on her side fifty yards from the stream. The slight pulse of her lungs as she took air and then gave it back, moving the dirt beneath her snout. She was bigger than Drake had thought. A full six feet from tail to head, standing on her hind legs she would be as big as a man, and looked to weigh between ninety and a hundred pounds. Lying there, drugged, under all that fur it was hard to say. Drake knew just by looking at her that she was older, or perhaps sick, the gray and white fur matted in places where she had ceased to care for herself.

“A hell of a shot,” Drake said. It was the first thing he’d said to his father since he found him at the edge of the stream. A sheen of sweat visible on Patrick’s skin. The wolf leading them up a steep grade before collapsing under the power of the tranquilizer.

With Ellie’s rifle still in Patrick’s hands he pushed the barrel into the side of the wolf, testing her. “You didn’t make it any easier.”

“They keep a rifle range in the prison for you to practice on?” Drake saw his father smile for a moment. His teeth there, then gone again in a flash. “How’d you even know the wolf would be down there?”

“I followed her.”

“Followed her from where?”

“From the camp,” Patrick said, glancing back in the direction they’d come from. “She was out there circling us most of the night.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe whatever you want,” Patrick said. “You get real used to picking up on small sounds when you’re locked up in prison. Especially if you’re an ex-cop.”

“I still don’t believe it,” Drake said, shaking his head.

Ten minutes later he came back with Ellie and the three of them got the wolf weighed. Ellie put a GPS collar around the neck, then started down through the list, taking samples of fur and blood, swabbing the mouth and checking the teeth. To Drake it seemed like there were a million things she had to do, checking them off on a laminated sheet as she came to them. The animal unconscious through it all.

Drake helped Ellie as she worked, pulling the fur away for her as she took the blood, or holding a small penlight to better view the wolf’s dark pupils and yellow corneas. The whole while Patrick squatted close by, keeping to himself as he watched.

Afterward, when Ellie had finished and Patrick had gone back to camp ahead of them, Ellie said, “You have any idea what he was up to?”

“My father?” Drake asked, watching the animal from about fifty feet away, waiting for it to wake up. “He said he heard her outside the tent last night.”

“Could you have made that shot?” Ellie asked.

Drake shook his head. He knew shooting a tranquilizer wasn’t like shooting a bullet. It was slower. The shot had to allow for the lag. If an animal stayed still at that distance, there was a chance of getting the dart in where you wanted it. If the animal was running it was a lot harder, and if the animal was surprised, as this one had been, it was nearly impossible. “It was a hell of a shot,” Drake said.

DRAKE’S FATHER HAD been the one to teach him how to shoot. Nine years old with the rifle raised over the alder fence out behind their house, aiming at apples. The echo of the shots carried far up the valley, bouncing from one slope to the other. Silver Lake much smaller then, simply a few houses, a general store, and one diner. No one to care about the sound of a hunting rifle carried in the air. The yellow-white flesh of the apples spread everywhere in the grass. One shot out of three hitting its mark. And his father telling him how to hold the gun, how to keep it cradled into the meat of his shoulder, where his deltoid met the muscle of his breast.

The skin bruised from one weekend to the next. More apples and more shooting until he missed only one shot out of six, and then one out of seven. The apples bursting up out of the grass with every shot, and the rich warm smell of the dirt beneath coming to him out of the orchard. His own boyhood encompassed in this.

The smell of Ivory soap on his hands, the tang of gunpowder in the air like the crack of fireworks on the Fourth of July. And always the deep sweetness of the apples everywhere as he shucked one shell and loaded another, taking aim where his father pointed. Wanting more than anything for his shots to fly true.

IT WAS FOUR hours before Drake came in the door with his father close behind. The hike down had taken them less time than the day before; they stopped fewer times as they moved down the slope with the blue sheet of the lake laid out before them. The wolf somewhere behind, groggy but awake, the GPS collar already sending its signal to a satellite far overhead.

With the door open, Drake let the air into the house. Crisp spring air smelling mineral as cracked rock, and the cool feel of the lake air spreading through the house. The windows all closed up and a note from Sheri telling Drake she’d gone in to cover a shift for one of the other girls.

Drake ran the water from the kitchen tap, watching the sun filter in through the windows. His father in Drake’s boyhood room and the packs left out on the living room floor with their boots. When the water was cool enough, Drake put a hand beneath the tap and cupped the water to his face. The grit coming off in muddy whorls that showed like tree knots in his palms.

He washed his hands and dried them by running his fingers up over his thin hair. All through the forest he’d thought about how he’d picked up his rifle that morning, ready to use it. But ready to use it for what? The wolf? His father? He didn’t know what he had been afraid of. He knew only that he had been.

He looked in on the living room. The rifle still there, still strapped to his pack as it had been all down the mountain. His father’s pack and boots not far off. His own boots tucked away by the door, the toes caked with forest mud, and the laces frayed from long use and many days away in those same hills his father was so familiar with.

There wasn’t a thing Drake could say about what he was feeling. No one he could talk to. What Driscoll had told him about Patrick, about Gary, it wasn’t right. None of it was, and Drake knew it would eat away at him until he knew the truth. He couldn’t go on like this, mistrusting his own father, feeling like every minute of every day he needed to know exactly where Patrick was.

Drake turned away from the packs and boots and went down the hallway. He stopped outside his old room and looked in through the open doorway. Patrick lay on the bed in his hiking clothes, his feet dangling off the side of the bed as if he didn’t want to sully the sheets.

Drake stepped inside and sat at the computer desk, looking across the room at his father. “I want to ask you something.”

“Go ahead then.” The same smile on his face that Drake couldn’t read. Crooked and then gone again before Drake got a feel for it.

“When I picked you up from prison you told me you wouldn’t cause me any trouble. You said you were done with that.” Drake took his time. He was trying to get the words right. He needed to know the answer, but first he needed to know how to ask the question. Something he’d wanted to ask his father ever since Driscoll had met him at the front of his driveway. “You meant what you said to me?”

Patrick stared mutely back at him from the bed. He raised a hand and rubbed his cheek, feeling the white scruff that had covered his face in the last day. “I don’t plan on being around here long,” Patrick said, “if that’s what you’re asking. I’d like to make my own way. I don’t need to depend on you and Sheri. This place hasn’t been mine for a long time now and I see you two have made a home here.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Drake said. He felt embarrassed. He hadn’t meant to make his father feel unwanted. “This is your house, too.”

“We both know that’s not true anymore.”

Drake looked around the room, if only to focus his thoughts. Sky-blue paint and the colors of sunset. “I meant to say you’re welcome here.”

“I just need a few days,” Patrick said; he was up now, sitting on the bed with his feet on the floor, moving his hands as he talked. “There’s outreach programs for people like me. If I stay in town I can chop logs, or I can maybe see if there’s some work with the Department of Forestry. I don’t know if they’d take me, but I’d be willing to give it a try.”

“That sounds fine,” Drake said. He tried to imagine who his father would have been if he hadn’t gone to Monroe, if he’d just stayed the sheriff of a little town in the North Cascades. The thought seeming foreign even to Drake. Patrick’s whole identity wrapped up in the fact that he’d smuggled drugs, that he was a crooked sheriff from a place no one had ever heard of until Patrick put them all on the map.

Drake went on trying to discern a future for his father as he looked at the man, sitting there on the bed. Worn out. Burned out. Busted up from a life that hadn’t been meant to be. There were programs for people like him. Support groups, ways for men like Patrick to make their own way in this world. Even with a history like his father’s.

“I never meant to say you weren’t welcome here,” Drake said. He knew he was backpedaling but he couldn’t help it. He got up from the computer chair and walked to the doorway, putting one hand on the frame.

“I’ll talk to some people,” Patrick said. His words hesitant, stumbling one after the other. Patrick just sitting there looking up at his son where he stood at the entrance to the room. Drake knowing he’d come in to talk to his father about one thing, but, in the end, forced the issue of another.

“That sounds fine, Dad.” Drake could feel himself shrink back inside as he watched his father. The man seemed oblivious to what Drake was hinting at. Desperate, too. The veneer of his words beginning to crack and Drake wishing he could make what he’d said disappear.

“We okay?” Patrick asked.

“Yes,” Drake said.

HIS FATHER WAS in the shower when Drake came back to the room. For a good minute he stood there in the doorway looking everything over. Forcing himself to see the crib and changing table, the bands of color on the walls and the pale stars fixed to the ceiling.

Down the hall he could hear the shower through the bathroom door. The water going and the sound of his father in there.

All the dreams Drake had had for the room. All they had filled it with. All that it was now.

He knew there were other times he could come to the room, when his father was out with Sheri, or away looking for work, but Drake couldn’t wait any longer. He didn’t want to believe what Agent Driscoll had told him. He needed to know whether his father was guilty or not. He needed to know for sure.

The changing table was opposite the bed. Patrick’s clothes kept in the drawers beneath. Drake went through this first, opening each drawer and going through them top to bottom. By the time he finished he was on his knees with every drawer open in front of him. He turned and looked around the room. Not sure what he was looking for, but knowing he had to look, that if he didn’t he would always wonder.

It was only when he came to the bed that he saw the cardboard box pushed in under the frame. The container of mementos barely visible from the darkness.

Drake got up and went to the bed. Sitting, he removed the box and pulled it out onto the floor. Twelve years of his father’s life in one container, wooden figurines made in the prison shop, the letters Drake’s grandfather, Morgan, had sent to Patrick. A few letters from Sheri, a couple worn paperbacks without their covers, and the manila folder Patrick had tried to show Drake on the drive up from Monroe.

Drake pulled this up and opened the folder, looking down at the aged clippings. The newsprint gone yellow, cracked and dotted with pinholes or marked with tape at the corners where his father had probably secured these relics to his cell wall. Patrick said he’d kept them all, every article. And Drake went through them one by one. All of them in order, from the ten-page Silver Lake Weekly announcing Drake’s basketball scholarship to Arizona, to the Seattle Times article the day after he got himself shot in a North Seattle neighborhood.

He laid them on the bed as he came to them. Articles he didn’t even know existed. A high score from when he’d shot twenty-eight in one game. Speculations by the local papers on the team’s chances for a tournament, or even who among them might go on to a higher level of play. All of this carefully stacked, one after the other, in the folder. The clippings aged and yellowed, kept together with paper clips and bits of tape. All like some sort of family album locked up for years in the basement safe.

It was a long time since Drake had allowed himself to think of those years. When he’d been a young man, a couple years past high school, living in another state, in a city a hundred times bigger than Silver Lake, playing basketball.

Drake loved it all. The running endlessly, one end of the court to the other. The quick shots, the passes from player to player, the fade, the rebound, the way the world never seemed to pause in all that time and one action fed into the next like a flood of water carrying everything else along.

It was the beginning of his third year when he went into his coach’s office to tell him about the trouble back home. Telling his coach all the things the newspapers were saying about his father. And the coach standing up from his desk and walking around to sit facing Drake, trying to work through it all, trying to tell Drake he would always have a place on the team. Though Drake knew—no matter what the coach said—that the offer could wait only so long.

Drake sat in his father’s room, a room that had once been his own, and looked the articles over. Many of the clippings were about him, but the majority of them were about his father, about his arrest and then later conviction. That time in Drake’s life almost a complete wash. Like he’d been there and not there all at the same time. Gary had come to the airport to pick Drake up and told him how Patrick had been led into the courtroom for his sentencing. How even in the week since he’d been arrested, Patrick seemed to have lost weight, shrunk back into himself. The jumpsuit too big on his frame and the shuffling, almost hesitant, steps he took as he came out into the court, his eyes downcast on the floor.

Drake had tried to picture it all then, but he couldn’t get a grasp on it. The man Gary was describing so unlike the man Drake had grown up with, leading him on horseback through the hills. Camping in the high meadows in the years before he’d left for Arizona and listening to the rut of elk as they brought their antlers together late in the evening. Drake and Patrick rising from the small butane stove to stand watching as the big animals clawed the earth a hundred yards away, diving at each other with lust-filled abandon. The clash of their fighting echoing off the rocks high above while Drake and Patrick looked on.

Later Drake would sit in the courtroom with his grandfather and listen to the charges laid against Patrick. The trial going on for five days and then the judge waiting as the jury gave their verdict, listening to the foreman go down through the charges. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Drake shuffled the articles in his hand. He’d read them all. He’d been a part of many of them, seen most of it with his own eyes as the reporters sat a couple rows back scribbling notes on paper. All of it taking shape. Drake’s vision of his father slowly cracking, until finally it had all crumbled, flake by flake, as his father was led away and Drake sat watching.

The articles dropped off until Drake saw his own name mentioned again in the Seattle paper. The story not about his basketball career anymore, but his role as a deputy, his father’s history, and the arrest Drake had tried to make in the mountains outside Silver Lake ten years after his father had gone away. An attempt that would eventually get him shot, leaving him as close to death as Drake ever cared to be.

He looked at them all, shuffling back through each clipping on the bed, trying to make sense of it. His life in this valley. His father’s life. The two so dissimilar from each other, but in many ways the same.

Everything his father, Patrick Drake, had ever done. Every highlight and failure. His rise as sheriff, the death of his wife to leukemia, and his eventual fall, outlined there for the world to see. And not a single article in his father’s collection mentioning the two dead men outside Bellingham.

What had Patrick said to Ellie on his first day out? Don’t get caught.

Drake looked up from the articles and saw his father staring in at him. His bald scalp still wet from the shower. His eyes red and worn from the water. “Is this why you came in here earlier?” Patrick asked.

Drake followed his father’s eyes to the open drawers beneath the changing table, all of the clothes in disarray, hanging loose over the sides. The cardboard box on the bed next to Drake with the articles spread everywhere on the mattress.

“You don’t trust me,” Patrick said. He was wearing a towel around his waist, standing there in the doorway. He was staring at Drake with an intensity Drake could only remember from when he’d been a child.

“There have been things said about you that I can’t ignore,” Drake responded, keeping his eyes focused on the door frame near his father’s head. Looking but not looking.

“By who?”

Drake took the box off the bed and set it on the floor again. “The DEA has been following you around.”

“Is that a fact?”

He met Patrick’s eyes. “They say you had something to do with two men getting killed outside Bellingham before you went away.”

“And you want to know if I did it?”

“I want to know if it’s true in any way. If you knew these men, or had anything to do with their deaths.”

“I told you a long time ago when you visited me that I wasn’t going back in.”

“I know what you told me,” Drake said. “What I want to know is if you killed those men.”

Patrick looked at the open drawers again and then looked back at Drake. “I didn’t do anything to those men.”

“But you know of them?”

“I know of them.”

“Then you know about the money, too.”

“Yes,” Patrick said. “There’s a lot of people who’ve heard about the money.”

“That’s how you got into all this, isn’t it? For the money. So that you could pay off Mom’s medical bills.”

“That’s what I’ve always said. I took on that second mortgage and never was able to pay it.”

“You did it for the money then?” Drake didn’t know why he was repeating himself. The emphasis he put on the end of the sentence more of a command than any kind of question and he realized he really didn’t want to know.

“There was no other reason. That was it, that was all there was,” Patrick said. “I never did intend to do that type of work for long, and I don’t intend to do it now that I’m out.”

Drake moved his hand over the articles. Gathering them up and putting them back into the folder. He knew he should let it go. His father had said he didn’t kill those men. Drake knew that should have been enough. But a lot of time had passed since Drake had gone away to college and his father had made the decision that would ultimately change both their lives.

“I’m a deputy now,” Drake said. “I know it’s been twelve years, but there are still plenty of people who probably question what I knew about you, and what I know now. I don’t want you to put me in that position again. If the DEA is still looking into this then there’s a chance Sheri and I could lose the house.”

“The only way that would happen is if I was stashing money or drugs on the property.”

“Are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“A convicted drug smuggler,” Drake said.

Patrick laughed. “You really don’t trust me.”

Drake stuffed the folder back down into the box and turned away from the bed. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to.”

“You’re supposed to because you’re my son.”

“That’s a lot to ask,” Drake said.

“You’ll see,” Patrick said. “I’m not going to be a bother to you. I’m going to be out of your hair just as soon as I can. Living my own life.” He walked over and took a set of clothes from beneath the changing table, taking his time.

“I don’t think the DEA is going to give up just because you say you didn’t do it.”

“I’d be disappointed if they did,” Patrick said.

DRAKE TOOK a long shower. Letting it run cold before he allowed himself to shut off the water and pull the curtain back. Standing in front of the mirror he listened to the house beyond the door. Outside the sun was setting and the light came through the bathroom window with a low pink hue. The slight movement of air felt on his bare feet where the cool air from the hallway slipped in beneath the door. He half expected his father to be gone when he came out of the bathroom, never to be seen again. Simply to have walked off into the woods, where the darkness might eat him.

Drake ran a hand up his forearm, pressing his thumb to the purple scar tissue. One hole all the way through. Clean and simple. It felt like nothing now, just a raised circle of skin. Only really identifiable to those who knew the story that went with it. He rubbed his thumb up his forearm several more times, watching the pink flesh go white, then fade away again as his thumb moved on. Nothing he could do about it now.

When he came out of the bathroom Patrick was sitting in the living room drinking one of the beers Sheri had bought a few nights before. Patrick’s attention turned to one of the catalogs that came every month in the mail. One of the home magazines Sheri liked to dog-ear and leave around the house even though they barely had enough money to buy groceries some months.

“You want to go by the Buck Blind?” Drake asked. He was standing at the entrance to the hallway in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, his towel over his shoulders and his hair mussed. “Sheri can get us a good price on a pitcher.”

“Yeah,” Patrick said, “we can do that.”

WHEN THEY GOT to the Buck Blind Sheri was just finishing up her last couple tables. She gave Drake a kiss and sent him and his father ahead to the bar. “I’ll be just another forty-five minutes,” she said. “Gary and Luke are in there if you want to say hello.”

Drake led his father through the doorway into the bar. Dim compared to the restaurant, the bar had been built when the grocer next door went out of business and the restaurant decided to expand. The walls all brick and mortar, and a doorway from restaurant to bar opened up halfway down the wall. Tables ran one side, while opposite, a wooden bar took up almost the full length of the place. Only open for five years, the bar already had the smell of spilled liquor, sweet and dusty in the air, while in the summers the air felt thick and closed up by the brick walls. Everything, even the random kitsch along the walls, gave the feel of a bar in someone’s home basement.

“I heard you guys caught your wolf,” Gary said. He was sitting midway down the bar with his face turned toward them as they came in. Luke sat on the stool beside him, still in his uniform.

“My dad actually got her,” Drake said, motioning back over his shoulder toward Patrick.

“You let the ex-con shoot the wolf?” Gary asked. “With a gun?”

“Come on, Gary,” Drake said. “You know it was a tranq gun. There’s nothing to that.”

“Just warning you. Because that’s not how the court will see it.”

“I know the rules,” Patrick said.

They sat in a line down the bar next to Gary. Luke raised his head to look at Patrick and then eased off the stool for a moment to shake the old sheriff’s hand. “Good to have you back,” Luke said.

Drake watched and after Luke sat back down he asked about Cheryl.

“False alarm,” Gary said. “One of her friends thought she remembered Cheryl saying she planned to go down to see a boy in Seattle.”

“And the parents?”

“She’s done this a few times now. Andy is still out looking for her but we’re thinking she’ll show up tomorrow or the next day.”

The bartender came by and they ordered a round, and then Drake ordered two more for Gary and Luke. Gary kept smiling, running his fingers over the edge of the pint glass and looking at Patrick. Finally saying, “You don’t recognize the bartender?”

“No,” Patrick said, turning to follow the man as he tended to a customer at the other end of the bar.

“It’s Jack.”

Patrick leaned farther into the bar, trying to get a good look. “Bill’s son?”

“Yeah, same kid. Only a dozen years older now.”

When Jack came over their way again Patrick caught the kid’s eye. “You’re the bartender here?”

“He owns the place,” Gary said.

“No shit.”

“I’m a partner,” Jack said. “I don’t own it.” He was leaning against the back bar now, his arms crossed. Skinny with acne scarring along the line of his jaw. Drake had known him his whole life. He was a little older than Drake. They’d been in high school together.

“Jack is one of my hunting buddies. Aren’t you, Jack?” Gary said, looking to Jack where he stood on the other side of the bar.

“If you call going up into the woods to drink a fifth of bourbon and stare at some trees hunting,” Jack said.

“Sounds about right,” Patrick said. “How’s your father doing? How’s Bill?”

“Passed away five years ago. The money he left me went into this bar, though, so it seems fitting. He was always putting his money into booze as it was.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well it happened. That’s how it goes,” Jack said. A man at the other end of the bar signaled for service. Jack was off the back bar and beginning to walk away when he turned to Patrick and Gary. “Look, next round is on me, okay? It’s good to see you, Pat.” He was already halfway down the bar before any of them could say anything.

They moved over to a table after they finished the round Jack bought them, sitting for a long time bullshitting about the weather and giving Patrick a hard time about being back in the world. Luke making several prison-shower jokes that never got any of the other men to laugh, but Patrick nice enough to smile and let the comments roll past him. One of the old loggers down at the other end of the bar was playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox and they listened to “Free Bird” for what seemed like twenty minutes.

“So you’re the sheriff?” Patrick said. He whistled a bit as he said it, letting the air escape from his lungs for a long time. “How’s that working out for you?”

Gary looked up from the beer in his hands. He’d been listening to the song playing on the jukebox. “To be honest: it’s tiring,” he said. “I chase down every little thing people have any concern over.”

“A cat goes missing I bet you’re on it,” Patrick said. He was smiling now and Drake could see he didn’t envy the man.

“Something like that. Luke and I spent half the day looking for that girl from town. She never was much for staying around here as it was.”

“She’ll turn up,” Luke said, his voice a little loose with alcohol. “She always does.”

When Sheri came in they’d finished off two pitchers and were ordering a third. Whatever tension Drake had felt between Gary and Patrick at the trailhead was now gone. The two of them telling stories that Drake barely recalled from when he was a child. Gary doing most of the talking as Patrick nodded his head and filled in all the little details Gary had skipped over.

Sheri pulled a chair to the end of the table and sat with her purse in her lap, the strap still on her shoulder, ready to go.

“You want a glass?” Drake asked, raising his hand to signal Jack.

When the next pitcher came Sheri said she’d just share with Drake. The guys crowded up around the table as the logger at the end of the bar started in on some Zeppelin. Nobody left in the place and Jack—with his arms crossed over his chest and a distant look in his eye—kept watch over the logger at the opposite end of the bar.

“You want to get out of here soon?” Sheri asked quietly.

Drake turned and looked at the three other men and nodded. Luke halfway through the story about a young bear that had gotten itself stuck in an outhouse the summer before last.

“If I leave,” Drake said to his father, “you think you’ll be fine to get home on your own?”

“You’re going to trust me?” his father said, a smile half cocked on his lips.

“It’s fine,” Drake said, feeling a little loose with the alcohol. “You know the way home. We’ll leave the door open for you.”

Drake was tired, too, and they left the three men talking over their beers, saying good-bye to Jack and giving the logger a wide berth as they went by. The man singing along to the music now and Drake wondering how much more Jack was willing to take.

A LITTLE PAST one A.M. Drake got up to answer the door. It was about the time he estimated that his father would have been kicked out of the bar, give or take fifteen minutes for the walk home. The door had been left unlocked so that Patrick might let himself in. But Drake got up anyway, figuring maybe his father was drunk and hadn’t even tried the doorknob yet.

Drake came into the living room a little fuzzy from the pitchers they’d drunk, leaning his weight on the handle and pulling back on the door. He was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of his old basketball warm-ups, planning to go right back to bed as soon as he let his father in.

Agent Driscoll stood on the porch when Drake opened the door. He pushed through and came into the living room, giving the room a quick once-over and then coming back to Drake. “Is he here?” Driscoll asked.

Drake studied the Impala parked in their drive for a quick second, looking to see if anyone else was inside before he closed the door. Driscoll was standing in the middle of the living room, the hallway light on behind him. His suit jacket crumpled at the armpits and along the sleeves.

“Your father?” Driscoll said.

“No,” Drake said. “Not that I know of.” Drake walked by Driscoll and went down the hallway to his father’s room. He opened the door and flipped on the lights. No one there and the sheets looking just as they had earlier in the day when Drake and Patrick had sat talking.

Drake came out of the room and went into the bathroom, throwing on the lights. He even went as far as to pull the curtains back on the shower and look in on the tub.

Driscoll was there in the bathroom doorway when Drake turned around. “I lost him about thirty minutes ago,” Driscoll said.

“You’ve been following him?” Drake came out of the bathroom and looked down the hallway toward his own bedroom. There was a light on under the doorway.

“You thought because I told you to keep an eye on him, I’d just hand it off?”

Drake led Driscoll back into the living room. He spread his fingers up into his hair and brought them down across his eyes. “He didn’t do it, Driscoll. He’s not the guy you’re looking for.”

“You told him?”

Drake turned and looked at Driscoll, the man waiting on a response. “What did you think I was going to do?”

“I thought you’d remember your duty as a law officer.”

“He’s my father, Driscoll.”

“Christ.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“Two years ago, when we first met, you were ready to throw away the key. Now you’re acting like he never put you in this position.”

At the far end of the hallway Drake saw the bedroom door open and Sheri come out wearing her robe. She was looking at Drake, but her eyes darted toward Driscoll for a moment and Drake saw the surprise in them, followed quickly by disgust. The last time they’d had a full conversation together Driscoll had said something about not wasting taxpayer money on repeat offenders, preferring instead if they just got offed beforehand. Drake liked to think that Driscoll had been joking. Sheri had never seen the comedy in it.

“Long time no see,” Driscoll said to Sheri as she took a seat on the sofa and kept a steady watch on Drake.

“What’s this about?” she asked Drake.

Drake shrugged, wishing his father would walk in and they could all just go back to bed.

“Your father-in-law has disappeared,” Driscoll said.

“What do you mean disappeared?” Sheri asked.

“He’s missing. Gone. Vanished off the face of this earth,” Driscoll said. “Though I think the better definition of what happened is he’s on the run.” Driscoll had his arms crossed and each of his hands buried in his armpits. He was bouncing slightly on the heels of his feet.

“What is this man doing here?” Sheri asked Drake.

Drake didn’t have an answer for her that would make the situation any better and he asked Sheri if she would stay up and wait to see if Patrick came home, and if he did to call Drake straightaway. Drake led Driscoll out onto the porch and closed the door.

“She still doesn’t like me very much,” Driscoll said.

“It’s late,” Drake said. “She’s tired.”

“I don’t know about all that,” Driscoll said, “but thanks for trying.”

“So what happened, Driscoll?”

“I was waiting on your father when he came out of the bar and halfway home he goes running into the woods.”

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Then why did he run?”

“I was walking behind him, two or three hundred feet back. I don’t know how he would have noticed me.”

“You didn’t try to go after him?”

“Of course I chased after him. I was shining my light around. It’s a fucking funhouse in there, everything looks exactly the same: tree trunk, fern, tree trunk, fern… you want me to go on?”

“I get it,” Drake said. “He really took off running?”

“I’ve called in a favor with some of my guys from Seattle, but they won’t be here for a couple more hours.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Drake said. “I’m here. I can help you find him.”

Driscoll looked to be thinking that over. “Fine,” he said. “It would take them too much time to get here as it is.”

“What channel are you using on your radio?”

Driscoll told him the channel and where Patrick had gone off the road.

“I’m going to take my cruiser out,” Drake said. “I want to shine the spot around a bit and see what I can see,” Drake said.

“I know he’s your father but I want you to be careful, Drake. Don’t do anything stupid and get yourself hurt. I want you to call me on the radio if you see anything. Even if it’s just a flicker of something, you’ll let me know first.”

“I know,” Drake said. He was watching the forest beyond the fall of the house lights. The gravel shining white under the reach of the exterior lights, and the dark forest all around, circling them in. “Maybe he saw you, Driscoll. Maybe he just spooked? He’d been drinking a lot at the bar. This could all be one big mistake.”

“If he’s not guilty, what does he have to hide?” Driscoll said. He was down at the Impala now with the door open. “No heroics, Drake.” Driscoll closed the door and pulled away. His red taillights still visible up the drive when Drake got in his own vehicle and brought it around toward the lake road.

Drake ran a circuit around the lake, as far south as he was willing to bet his father could get on foot, then again north. When he’d finished, he turned up into the forest and followed the road past the Fish and Wildlife Quonset hut, shining the spot all over the parking lot and down the sides of the metal exterior. He went all the way up to the border crossing and talked with the guard there, giving the man a description of his father. Not a single car gone past in the last two hours, either south or north.

When he came into town he was feeling frustrated and betrayed. His father was out there and he was running. There was no other explanation.

Driving past the Buck Blind he eased the car to a stop. He sat there with the engine running. The dash lights giving the inside of the car a green aura of light and the bar shut down with its windows dark. Drake got out anyway just to feel the air on his skin. Cool in the night with the smell of pine resin like menthol on the wind.

He sat back down in the cruiser and took the radio in his hand, intending to contact Driscoll, but as he sat there his eyes caught the reflection of an upstairs window in the rearview mirror. The window was a block down on the opposite side of the street and Drake knew it right off as Gary’s place over the Laundromat.

Drake knocked and waited. He was standing at the top of the wood stairs that led to Gary’s place, a good view back toward the lake and the moon shining on the water. No one came to the door and he looked around at the window with the light still on and then he pounded the door several times with the heel of his palm.

Gary came to the door almost as soon as Drake finished. “I figured it was you,” Gary said. He stepped aside and let Drake into the crowded apartment.

“You know he’s gone, then?”

“I know.”

“And you were waiting to tell me…”

Gary shook his head. “More of a feeling,” he said. He crossed to the kitchenette and took a beer from the fridge. He offered it and then when Drake wouldn’t take it he opened it himself. “Driscoll wasn’t going to leave him alone. You know that.”

“That doesn’t mean he can just run out on his problems.”

Gary grinned. “That’s what you think?”

“What else is there?”

“You sure you don’t want a beer?” Gary asked. He stood waiting for an answer and when none came he walked back into the living room and sat heavy in the solitary lounge chair. “Driscoll’s fucking obsessed with the man.”

“Should he be?”

“Your father’s trying to make things right, that’s all I know. He fucked up.”

“Where is he?” Drake asked, his eyes darting over the apartment. Pictures on the wall that had been there as long as Gary lived in the place, a gun rack against the back wall, and the old television in a corner below the kitchen counter. The whole place lit dull yellow by a single floor lamp standing at one end of the room. “He’s not here, right?”

“Be my guest.” Gary waved at the open room, telling Drake to have a look.

When Drake came back into the living room Gary was still sitting there sipping from the beer. “I think I might be going crazy,” Drake said. He rested his back on the door and then slid to the floor, cupping his face in his hands and rubbing at his eyes with his fingers.

“It’s okay, son. Driscoll has that effect on people.”

Drake looked up. “My father has that effect on people.”

“Don’t worry about Patrick. He knows what he’s doing.”

“He said nothing to you?” Drake asked. “He just took off? He doesn’t have a car. He doesn’t have more than twenty dollars in his wallet.”

“Honestly,” Gary said, “I don’t know where he is. All I know is he’s a resourceful guy.”

For a time, after coming out of Gary’s apartment, Drake sat in his cruiser listening to the blank fuzz of the radio, not knowing what to do. Every once in a while he took a call from Driscoll, relaying his position, and then letting the radio go silent again. No one was out on the streets, and Drake didn’t see a single car pass in all the time he sat watching the road. Eventually Driscoll got Drake on the radio and told him to go home.

Sheri was still up. A pot of coffee steaming on the counter when he came in, Sheri sat on the couch waiting on him to say something. He shook his head and went through to the kitchen and poured himself some of the coffee. The clock on the stove said it was three A.M.

“I’ll wake you up if anything happens,” Drake said. He was back in the living room now and he put a hand out for Sheri and helped her up off the couch.

“How long have you known about Driscoll?” Sheri asked.

“A few days now.”

“Do you believe whatever he’s saying about Patrick?”

“No,” Drake said. “But Driscoll is saying things about other people besides my dad. I don’t know what to think, really.”

“Like who?”

“Like Gary,” Drake said.

Sheri shook her head and he knew she didn’t believe him. “Patrick is smarter than this.”

“I hope so.” He led her back through the hallway and closed the door behind her. After a time he saw the light go out under the door and he walked back to the living room. His coffee cup sat steaming on the table. He picked it up and drank a quarter of it in one long gulp. He was sitting on the couch with the television turned on low to the late-night infomercials when he began to nod off. His eyelids falling once, then twice, and his chin diving onto his chest for a moment before rising once again. The clock on the stove said four thirty A.M. There were birds chirping in the trees outside, but the sky was still dark.

WHEN HE WOKE up there was a big man wearing a padded flannel—eating milk and cereal from a bowl—in Drake’s kitchen. Another man, blond and slightly built, sat across from Drake on the opposite couch wearing a black suit. Both were staring at Drake.

“Help yourself to some Frosted Flakes,” Drake said.

The man in the kitchen took another spoonful and stood chewing it like a cow with its cud. He was much larger than the other man, the muscles beneath his pink temples working in parallel motion with his jaw. His forehead glistening slightly with oil or sweat and his dark eyes appearing like two pinpricks beneath the girth of his brows.

“You Driscoll’s guys?” Drake said. “I told him we didn’t need the help.” Drake could feel a little drool at the corner of his lip from where he’d sat sleeping. His neck ached from resting his head on his chest and he was aware for the first time that no one except for him was making any effort to speak. “You just let yourself in?”

“It was open,” the man behind the kitchen counter said. He took the cereal box up and poured another helping, then walked to the refrigerator and poured some more milk, leaving the carton out on the small bar that divided the living room from the kitchen. “We didn’t want to wake your wife.” He was back behind the counter now and he was watching Drake.

Drake wiped two fingers across his lips and then wiped the drool on his pants. The television was on and an old TV star from the eighties was trying to sell a juicer to an audience of retirees. Drake was still dressed in the same warm-ups from the night before. Outside he heard rain falling. The sound of big drops hitting against the roof above. “You guys find my father yet?”

“We were hoping you might have something to say about that,” the skinnier man said.

Drake looked at him for a long time trying to judge the man’s age. Blond hair slicked tight to the edges of his skull, with irritated eyes and a rough unshaven quality to his cheeks and neck. Where his hands rested in his lap Drake could see scars on every one of his knuckles, like he’d spent years punching through glass windows or grinding his fists into cement. The skin strangely pigmented at the back of his hands. Drake kept staring at him, trying to figure it out until the man crossed one hand over the other, then raised his eyes to Drake.

“You do a lot of bare-knuckle boxing when you were a kid?” Drake asked.

“We always heard you were a smart guy,” the skinny blond said.

“You guys work for the DEA, right? You’re Driscoll’s guys?”

“We know Driscoll,” the big man said from behind the counter, taking another bite of cereal and sucking on the spoon.

Drake ran his eyes back and forth between the two men. The clock on the stove said six A.M. When he moved to get up, the blond raised a Walther pistol from where it had rested, out of sight, on the other side of his lap. He was pointing the gun at Drake’s chest.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” the big man said, waving his spoon back and forth in his hand like a finger.

Drake’s eyes were on the gun and then they went searching down the hallway toward his bedroom.

“She’s fine,” the skinnier man said. “She’s asleep. She doesn’t even know we’re here and if you want to keep her safe you’ll be quiet as a mouse. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Who are you guys?”

The big man made a wave of his spoon in the air, taking in the room and speaking through a half-finished mouthful of cereal and milk. “Old friends of your father’s.”

“I see,” Drake said. “You guys were in Monroe.”

The skinny one smiled and looked back at the big man. He never let the gun waver. “Your father was right about you. He always did say you were a smart boy.”

“I didn’t see this one coming,” Drake said.

“Recently, a lot of people have made the same mistake,” the big man said. He put his bowl of cereal down in the sink, watching Drake.

In the background, the eighties TV star was telling the audience he woke up every morning feeling twenty years younger. “You won’t regret it,” the eighties star said, the enthusiasm surging through his voice like an incoming tide as the audience applauded.

“You’ve got to smarten up, Deputy,” the blond man said from the opposite couch. “Was your father wrong about you all these years? I don’t know if you’ve noticed but he left you holding the bag.”

Drake looked away toward the door and the sound of rain beyond. “The bag is empty,” Drake said.

“I hope you give some thought to the situation you’re in. It’s not a good one and it can get a lot worse if it’s ever going to get better.”

“Does it get better?”

“That’s up to you.” With the Walther he motioned toward the door. Drake got up and walked across the living room. He could hear the rain again. Falling heavy on the gravel outside, eating up any sound he might be able to make. Behind him, he heard the big man move out from behind the counter.

Drake walked outside and stood in the gravel at the base of the stairs, his back to the porch as he watched the edge of the forest beyond the drive. The rain falling hard on his bare head and the water running on his face. No idea what would happen to him, or what he could do about it.

Nothing out there in the night and the sound of gravel crunching under the feet of the skinnier man as he trailed Drake out onto the drive. His breath curling past Drake’s left shoulder and the barrel of the gun felt on his spine.

“You have any idea where your father has gotten to?” he heard the skinny man say behind him.

“I don’t have a clue where my father went. I don’t think he planned on telling me, either.”

“That’s too bad,” the skinny man said. “We need your help on this but if you’re not willing, well, we can take this another way.”

“What way is that?”

“Any way we like,” the skinny man said. “But I don’t think your wife would like it very much.”

Drake shivered for a moment with the night air, the tremor going up his back in a wave and shaking his shoulders. Wind was coming off the lake and he smelled the minerals in the water. Cold as an incoming storm, the energy in the air charged with electricity.

The skinny man put the pistol to the nape of Drake’s neck and the barrel felt solid and heavy against the base of his skull.

No one spoke for a long time and Drake listened to the rain. The wind moved in the tops of the pines and the shadows at the edge of the clearing seemed to flutter with darkness.

Drake shuddered with the cold. He heard the big man come down off the porch now and he listened to the shuffle of the man’s weight on the gravel as he drew closer. “You get snow geese on this lake?” the big man asked, only a few feet behind.

Drake stood in the rain, getting soaked, feeling the water seep into his clothes and his skin bristle with the cold. The lake only a hundred yards away. His mind turning thoughts over like stones in an ancient dried-out riverbed, something lost beneath that he couldn’t find.

“Most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen,” the big man went on.

The thoughts in Drake’s head had come to a stop and it seemed there was nothing but silence waiting for him. He moved to turn. The house lights spread out along the gravel, the old glass jam jars Sheri had collected lined along the kitchen window.

“It’s a pity you can’t help us,” the skinnier man said. Drake heard the gravel shift for a second. A blinding pain at the base of his skull. The trees around him falling away, the house, the light, all shattering into pieces before everything went black.

DRAKE WOKE IN darkness, liquid and heavy around him. The cold tingling at his scalp and his whole body feeling weightless as a cloud, something tethered to his shirtfront holding him in stasis.

Fighting the darkness for air, he breathed in only water as his body flared and convulsed, aware finally of what surrounded him. The dull sound of rain above on the surface like hail on a roof fifty feet above.

He came up out of the water a man newly born. The thick hand of the big man held tight to Drake’s shoulder and the other to Drake’s chest. Water splashing the surface of the lake where he struggled and the early morning dark all around them.

There was a pain at the back of his head but he didn’t quite understand it. He felt turned around, beyond himself, not dead, but slowly dying. The big man let him breathe. On shore, standing below the bank of the lake road, he saw the other skinnier man through the rain, watching the two of them. The big man up to his thighs in the water and Drake on his back, his heels touching the silt at the bottom of the lake.

He was breathing hard with the shock of the water. His lungs constricted in his chest from the cold, one hand held to the underside of the big man’s arm, as if clutching a life preserver. “There’s something you’re…,” the skinnier man said from the shore. Drake felt himself pushed under. The big man’s hand pressed to his chest as he went down, fighting for air, his legs kicking at the muddied bottom of the lake, gripping at nothing but the soft detritus below. He came up gasping. “… not understanding, Deputy,” the skinnier man went on. “We’re looking for Patrick.”

“I don’t know anything,” Drake managed to say. He went under again. His eyes open, taking in the murky shape of the big man’s oval face above.

He came up spitting water. There was water in his sinuses and he felt it trickling down the back of his throat. “Until a few days ago I hadn’t talked to him in years.” He coughed. “I can’t tell you more than that.”

He was under again, trailing bubbles, the dark all around. “You better get familiar,” the man said from the shore as Drake came up. Water glassing over Drake’s skin and dripping from his earlobes. “You get familiar and you find your way after him or things will not be good. You think you can handle that, Deputy?”

Drake nodded.

“There you go,” the skinnier man said. “We just want to ask him a few questions now that he’s out. See if he remembers us, or the money he owes. We don’t need to make it complicated.”

Drake nodded again, his heels resting on the lake bottom below. “Complicated?”

The big man dunked him and Drake came up sputtering. “How many times you going to put me under?” Drake yelled. Water running cold on his face.

“As long as it takes,” the big man said, pushing him under again.

Drake came up gasping for air, his shirt clenched tight in the big man’s fist.

The skinny man bent on his knees and squatted next to the shoreline, picking over the small rocks there. When he satisfied himself he flicked one out over the water, watching as it skipped along the surface and then disappeared within the rain. “Don’t call on the law and expect it to turn out for you, Deputy,” he said, cleaning his palms by rubbing one on the other. “Don’t complicate things for you and yours.”

Drake looked at the man till he saw him turn away and climb up the bank toward the road. The big man still holding him there and Drake cold all the way through, his body shivering in the water and wavelets shaking out around his shoulders and head. “What do you mean ‘you and yours’?”

The skinnier man didn’t look back. Drake called after him again and then he looked to the big man. “What does he mean?”

“Find your father,” was all the big man offered, his fist gripped tight to Drake’s shirt.

“If I find him, what then?” The cold was all the way through him now, his clothes like lead, dragging him down.

The skinny man was at the edge of the road looking down on them. No cars or light anywhere Drake could see. “We have your cell number,” the skinny man said. “We won’t be far off.”

He felt the big man’s hand tighten and then send him down through the water again, the grip coming loose on his shirt and Drake out of his depth. He came up treading water, adrift in the lake, watching as the big man waded to shore and stepped onto land like a creature out of the swamp, bent on some unknown destruction.

DRAKE HEARD THE doors clap shut and then somewhere in front of him a car engine start. He was halfway up the incline when he saw headlights flare out over the water and then turn south on the lake road. The red taillights of the car already distant by the time he stood on the road, cleaning the grit from his hands. His clothes soaked through and a tired, frozen feel to his muscles.

They could have killed him but they hadn’t.

For a time he stood there trying to steady his heart in his chest. The night air filled with the sound of falling rain as he tracked the taillights around the lake. He spit a mixture of saliva and water onto the pavement and turned, searching down the road to either side. He was a hundred yards south of his driveway and as soon as he found his bearings he was running.

The wet clothes grated on his skin but he didn’t stop. He took the turn to the driveway and ran, increasing his speed as he came to the house. Drake’s Chevy was missing and Drake turned and looked back down the drive. He spun and took in the clearing, his lungs heaving in his chest and a vein in his neck beating a constant rhythm under the skin. His cruiser was still there and as he passed he saw that the shotgun had been taken from the stand between the passenger’s and driver’s seats. He cursed under his breath and went up the stairs, still rushing to get inside.

He called his wife’s name as soon as he was through the door. Only the television there to greet him. A rerun of some show from the seventies playing dully on the screen. Drake called his wife’s name again as he crossed the living room and entered the hallway. There was no response. When he came to the bedroom door and pushed it open he found out why.

“Sheri?” he said. Slower now, letting the name linger there like he expected a response. None came.