Sometimes the Wolf

Chapter 7

IN THE EARLY LIGHT of morning the old man, Morgan Drake, crossed the grass field and went down into the hollow before the house, then up through the cottonwoods. His breath hard to come by and the beat of his pulse thumping in the thin flesh of his forehead. On a string he carried two prairie dogs and a small rabbit over his shoulder, all swaying to the cadence of his walk, slow and labored as he climbed toward the house. His balance measured with caution as he moved his weight to the next foot, making his way up out of the hollow. The creek there barely an inch deep and the water flowing fast and cool from the rain the night before. His pant legs wet to his knees from the grass and sage he had passed through just before morning, the sun inches below the horizon and the eastern sky glowing red like a cold thin fire along the prairie.

He came up out of the cottonwoods and stood catching his breath. The little house there before him. Two front windows and a door. A porch of wood slats and the tin roof he’d put on himself five summers before. The rolling plains all around spotted with bunch grass and deepening growths of cheatgrass. Grown almost to his hips and darkened with the rain.

Morgan crossed the last hundred or so feet and came out of the grass. He’d lived in the place for fifteen years. Through snowstorms that left drifts up to his windows, and through summers where the air thickened to the color of charcoal and huge plumes of smoke could be seen coming off the distant mountains, climbing dark into white clouds. Every morning his porch dusted with gray ash as if from some volcanic explosion.

Except for the septic he’d done most of the work on the small house himself. The dirt road almost a mile in length patched and repatched with gravel he brought in on the bed of his pickup every spring. The grasslands all around slowly trying to take it back by growth or destruction. Mud holes and wallows forming in the depressions and corners when the land softened away from winter and the snow melted and bogged every low point on the plain. Often he stood on the porch and watched how the sun moved across the land, catching the light on the pools of water. The creek loud in the hollow and the leaves of the cottonwoods green with the snowmelt.

Morgan left only once a month to run errands at the store. Buying those things that he could not grow or hunt for himself. His shopping list always much the same: propane, cigarettes, flour, butter, powdered milk, bacon, and whatever fresh greens were on hand. At times he bought things like chocolate and jam, and once a year he made a trip into the big Walmart outside Spokane for birdshot, trapping wire for snares, soap, shaving razors, and kerosene. Often taking his time to wander through the aisles, getting a sense of the way the world had changed around him in the year since.

He was always alone and had grown used to it. At eighty-six he was older than most of the people he met at the little store in town and certainly older than even the retirees who greeted him at Walmart. Three summers before he’d met an old veteran from the Second World War who was eight years older than him and the two had sat on one of the benches outside the Walmart pharmacy for an hour comparing their lives. The next year he looked for the veteran but did not see him, and asking around, he heard that the man had passed sometime that spring.

For a number of years Morgan’s only regular connection to the world had been his son. The two sending each other letters that Morgan would sit up and read again and again by the kerosene lamp he kept on his table, or by the light of the small iron stove. The words dancing on the page as the firelight in the belly of the open stove lit the room.

The old man’s life had not been good and for a time he had felt that his son’s would be better. Only it hadn’t, and the same things that had seeped slowly but accurately into Morgan’s life had seeped into his son’s as well. Guilt and disappointment, hope for something better that never came, and a desire for relief that always seemed just beyond. This feeling of dissatisfaction the old man had come to understand, because it was how the world sometimes worked and he knew—through reading his son’s letters—his son had not yet concluded.

DRISCOLL KNEW THE girl as soon as he saw her. The neck broken and the skin bruised a deep purple just beneath her jawline. They were a quarter mile up the lake on one of the muddy logging tracks. The early morning light starting to break through the trees and slip down among the trunks into the undergrowth. To the side of the road one of Gary’s deputies was vomiting and the other stood back a ways with a roll of police tape he hadn’t yet fed across the road, but that he was supposed to.

“You recognize her?” Gary asked. He stood to the side of the open trunk, giving Driscoll his room.

“She worked at the doughnut shop in town.”

“Yes she did.” The deputy dry-heaved once more and Gary went on. “Andy’s daughter grew up with her. They graduated high school together.”

“You wanted me to see this?”

“I called you, didn’t I? You had a conversation with Bobby in this girl’s doughnut shop. I want to know what you talked about. I want specifics. I want to know why this girl goes missing the very same day.”

Driscoll could feel Gary’s eyes on him. He could feel the hate, the way the man seemed to blame him for this. Driscoll didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if this was his fault. He just kept staring down at the girl, her chin pointed up and to the side like some sort of seabird washed up on a beach. Only it wasn’t a beach, it was the trunk of a black Lincoln Town Car.

“How far is this from Bobby’s place?” Driscoll asked. He was looking over the girl still, unable to take his eyes from her. Behind, pushed back within the shadows of the trunk was another body. A man stripped to his boxers. His face a bloody mash, the cheeks and nose so swollen that the eyes were pinched shut.

“Close,” Gary said. “It’s the next drive south of here.”

“Did you call Bobby about this? Have you seen or talked to him this morning?”

“I went by there on my way out here. No one was home. With Patrick gone I don’t blame them for keeping up the search.”

Driscoll turned and looked to where the other deputy was tying the police tape off at the side of the road. The forest to the south now visible and the shadows gathered dense between the trunks. The big pines for a hundred yards almost a singular living thing. And then, kneeling with his calves pushed into the backs of his thighs, Driscoll squinted and saw farther on the first of the apple trees in Drake’s orchard. “We need to get over there right now,” Driscoll said.

MORGAN DRAKE DID not have a phone nor any way to get ahold of him except the mail, and when he went into town for his necessities he stopped by the small post office and picked up his letters. He was a reader of books and many times when he picked up his mail there would be a number of packages from the store up in Spokane he subscribed to. His letters and packages bound together with twine usually amounted to no more than a couple inches altogether. It was only through the books that he had made his first friend in a long time. A woman who worked at the post office and who was fifteen years younger than him, a widow, who had started quizzing him about the books he received. They started an exchange in this way. Every month, talking about books on her lunch hour. Trading stories.

She’d been to his place only once and he made her a rabbit stew with wild onions and carrots he’d grown himself, browning the rabbit first in bacon grease and flavoring it finally with some of the sage that grew on his property. He’d been proud of it at the time. Though it was nothing special to him, it had made the woman very happy and they’d sat in front of the woodstove for an hour after to talk over books as they did on her lunch hour. Afterward he walked her out onto the small drive where she’d parked and for a moment he thought he would kiss her. But the moment passed and he regretted it deeply, knowing he had let something slip by that he could not replace.

It was the woman he was thinking about as he came up out of the cottonwoods, the rabbit and two prairie dogs on a string over his shoulder. He wanted to cook her something and he was planning it out in his head as he walked. Stopping to catch his breath again, he leaned a hand to the porch railing and kicked the mud from his boots before going into his house.

There was little light inside and he could see that the coals in the stove had burned themselves to white ash, almost dead except for a small pocket of red deep in the belly. He broke kindling and stoked the fire. Leaving the rabbit and prairie dogs in the sink to be skinned and washed in the next hour, he went out onto the porch and sat in a chair watching the way the road wound away from him over the rises of land. Grass everywhere turning from winter gray to something like gold.

From inside his jacket he brought up a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. He put it to his lips and lit it, letting the smoke into his lungs and watching the world around him. It was nearly as cold in the house as outside and he pushed the lapels of his hunting coat up and pulled the collar close around his neck. Holding it there with one hand and smoking with the other.

After a few minutes he went in to check on the stove, threw more wood on, and then came back outside. He liked to sit there in the morning and let the heat build inside the house as the dawn light spread through the sky. The two seeming linked in some cosmic way. He was smoking another cigarette when he saw the sheriff’s deputy car break over the far rise in the road and come down the long slope toward his house. It was a car he had seen a few times before and he only stirred slightly as it drew to a stop and the young man got out. The face older than Morgan remembered but still recognizable.

PATRICK SAT FOR an hour in the old logging truck, watching the sun crest the mountains to the east. The lake fog everywhere in the trees and a haze of it floating like a slow river over the fenced-in asphalt parking lot. Through the night he’d kept himself warm with a wool blanket he’d found in the doghouse off the back of the truck’s cab. Too worried to climb up into the bunk, he’d sat watching the road through the windshield most of the night. The Silver Lake Sheriff’s Department cruiser going past twice while he sat there, and the unmarked Impala patrolling the streets like a shark through clouded water, feeling its way around.

He hadn’t meant to run, but he had. The decision coming on him all at once, just like that, there for only an instant and then his feet moving, veering off the road into the forest, jumping thick stands of sword fern and dodging past tree trunks as he went into the darkness. The rich peat smell of the spring earth released with every step, soft and silent as his feet went. A good fifty yards gone by in only a matter of seconds before Patrick turned and watched a single golden flashlight beam spring up behind him.

It was Gary who told him about Driscoll. Both Gary and Patrick waiting for Luke to leave before they could talk. Those two men dead all those years before outside Bellingham. Something terribly wrong about the whole thing, about how it had been handled by both Patrick and Gary. And the bleak promise for the future that had been left for Gary and Patrick when it was done.

“You know he’ll never let it lie,” Gary was saying. The two of them in the Buck Blind sitting close over the last of their beers.

“I know he won’t,” Patrick said. He’d already looked toward the door twice, and now he did it a third time, watching for movement, expecting any minute for Driscoll to come through that door and force Patrick’s face to the table as he had twelve years before. “I’d be disappointed if Driscoll gave up that easily. All this time he’s had his nut out for us.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Gary asked.

“Those men had wives,” Patrick said. “They had children. It’s a hell of a legacy we left them.”

Gary shook his head and looked off at the bar, where Jack was starting to clean up. “It was an accident,” Gary said. “I was all nerves. I didn’t mean to shoot them.”

“I know you didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened.”

“He’s telling things to your kid.”

“I know,” Patrick said.

“Well,” Gary said, drawing the word out long before going on again, “what are we going to do about that?”

“Christ, Gary,” Patrick whispered. “That isn’t on the table. He’s a fucking federal agent.”

“I’ve shot bigger animals with my hunting rifle,” Gary said. He was grinning and he looked away at Jack where he stood clearing glasses from a far table. The logger who had been playing the music was long since gone from the bar. When his eyes came back to Patrick, Gary said, “It’s just a joke. I’d never suggest something like that. I was just asking the question.”

“Good,” Patrick said. “I didn’t go away for twelve years just so I could go back in.”

“He’s telling stuff to your kid, doesn’t that get under your skin? Doesn’t that piss you off?”

“I know what he’s saying. I know all about it. I wouldn’t have left anything around to get Bobby in trouble and I wouldn’t do it now.”

“You should tell that to Driscoll,” Gary said.

“I’d say it to him and he’d go through Bobby’s place regardless.” Patrick laughed. “If there’s anyone I know after being gone for twelve years, it’s Driscoll. He came to see me every year. Like we had an anniversary.”

“He’s a real sweet guy,” Gary said.

The man had thought one thing about Patrick for twelve years and he’d been right. Patrick had stolen that drug money. Driscoll wasn’t going to give up just because Patrick said he didn’t do it.

“Fuck,” Patrick said. He finished the last of the beer and sat waiting for something from the universe, anything, some sign to tell him what he should do. Nothing came and he looked over his shoulder at the bartender and watched the son of their old friend Bill bring the glasses behind the bar, then go back to the table and wipe the wood laminate down with a towel. They were the only ones left in the Buck Blind. “I’ll call you from the road,” Patrick said to Gary.

“I can come with you.”

Patrick made a watery circle on the table with the bottom of his glass. “How would that look? Twelve years away and I haven’t screwed you over. You think I’ll do it now?”

“It’s a lot of money,” Gary said.

“That’s about the only thing that got me through,” Patrick said. “My life’s already gone, Gary. I wish I could say it to you another way, but that’s it. All I’ll ever be has already come and gone. And now all there is is the money. It’s the only thing I can look forward to. You’ve still got your life.”

“You’re going to run?”

“Do the smart thing, Gary. Wait it out. The money will be there for you when you retire, just like it’s been there these last years. Nothing is going to change. You’ve still got a life here. I don’t have anything like that and I don’t see Driscoll giving up on me any time soon.”

“You know that kid Jack over there?” Gary said, gesturing to the bartender. “He’s a good kid. You need me for anything you give the bar a call.”

“He is Bill’s son,” Patrick said.

“He is that.” Gary tipped the last of his beer back, then waved to Jack for the total.

Five minutes later they were standing outside the bar. No stars above in the sky and the moon visible only as a faint orb of white light behind the clouds. Rain coming. Down the street Patrick saw Driscoll’s Impala waiting for him in the shadows.

Gary turned and followed Patrick’s gaze. “You don’t think Driscoll will ever give up, do you?”

“I don’t think he has it in him,” Patrick said.

They said their good-byes and when Patrick was halfway home, he went into the woods.

The truth was that the life he’d led in Silver Lake was gone. It had disappeared the moment Patrick had tried to run twelve years before and Driscoll had been waiting for him, forcing his face down onto a restaurant table. Possibly the life Patrick had always wanted had disappeared even before, when he’d sat in the Seattle hospital listening to the machines pump life in and out of his wife. And it was sure enough gone as soon as he cut through the woods only hours before. Climbing the fence of the logging outfit and waiting inside the cab of the semi.

Patrick saw, too, that his son and Sheri had done good with what was left to them. He could see that just as plainly as he could see his own situation. The land Patrick had shared with his wife was no longer his. It never would be again, never needed to be, and Patrick expected that his presence there would always be a reminder of what had once existed. What had once been his life there and what he had lost.

With the set of keys he’d taken from the steel box at the end of the lot, Patrick started the logging truck. The sun now completely up over the mountains and a sheen of water from the night’s rain visible on the asphalt. No sight of a Silver Lake cruiser or Driscoll’s Impala for two or three hours. He shifted the gears until he had a feel for the big semi and then he moved out of the line, bringing the front of the truck around and aiming for the gate.

He came out onto the road dragging the chain link beneath him, the sparks visible in the mirrors as he made the turn toward the lake and ground the gears up through second and into third. He knew he could make good time before anyone showed up at the lot, and he hoped he could make the interstate before the first call came in about the broken-down fence and missing truck.

MORGAN QUARTERED THE rabbit, separating the skin first and then running the knife along the joints to break down the carcass. He boned out the legs and pounded the meat flat on the cutting board, leaving it lean and opaque as chicken thighs. When he was done he warmed a pan, letting the grease grow smoky with heat before laying the rabbit sections down against the metal. The oil spitting in the ancient cast-iron pan.

His grandson, Bobby Drake, sat behind him at the table, watching the window that looked toward the road and the slight rise a quarter mile away.

“You hungry?”

Drake turned and looked at the old man and then looked back to the window.

Morgan stood there at the stove listening to the snap of the grease in the pan. He salted the rabbit and turned it, listening again for the familiar sizzle. When he was satisfied he covered the pan, turning the propane down to let the meat cook.

They ate on the porch and watched the road. Morgan smoking a cigarette and letting the meal cool. Drake, with the plate in his lap, picking the meat apart with his fingers. The morning still cold around them and a slight haze beginning to rise off the dew-covered grass with the sun.

“There’s more if you want it,” Morgan said. “A few pieces of fry bread I made yesterday by the stove as well. I could heat them up.” He finished his cigarette and ground it out on the railing.

Drake shook his head. He rubbed his hands over his thighs several times, cleaning the grease from his fingers.

“There’s still two pieces of rabbit left,” Morgan said.

Drake looked over at his grandfather and then away again. They had said little more than a greeting to each other since he showed up, and Morgan hadn’t expected much more. Drake’s wedding was the last time they had seen each other. Morgan sitting off to himself for much of the time, smoking cigarettes at a steady pace, at times acknowledging what others said to him, but never offering comment. He was on the road again, headed back east over the mountains and down into the plain, before the wedding had even come to a close. Thankful for the return to the life he’d accustomed himself to.

Besides the widow from the post office, he hadn’t had another human being on his property in more than ten years. The chair Drake sat in having to be pulled from inside so they could both sit on the porch.

“You going to tell me what this is about?” the old man asked. He had begun to pick at his own rabbit, careful to keep the plate level on his lap and the juices from staining his pants.

Drake opened his jacket and brought out a series of worn envelopes. Bound with a single rubber band and collected in a stack just the same way Morgan received his mail once a month. Morgan sucked the grease from his fingers and set the plate on the porch again. He leaned forward and took the collection of envelopes from his grandson and turned them over in his hand. He recognized his own scrawl there on the outside of the envelope and looked back over the postmark dates. More than ten years of letters written in his own hand.

“How long has he been out?” Morgan asked.

“A few days. He’s been staying with me.”

“But he’s gone now?”

Drake turned to take in the old man. “A couple men have been looking for him.”

Again, Morgan looked down at the collection of letters. “Who has been looking for him?” Morgan asked.

“They said they knew my father from Monroe. They’d like to talk with him.”

“In what kind of way?” Morgan asked.

“In the bad kind of way.”

Morgan slipped one of the envelopes from the rubber band and opened the letter within. Blue ink and paper yellowed with time.

“I’m hoping you have the other end of those letters,” Drake said.

“That’s why you came?”

“Those two men almost drowned me last night. They came into our house,” Drake said, his voice straining. After a while he went on. “They say he promised them some money.”

“Patrick?”

Drake shrugged. “If my father did have some money he didn’t trust me with it. I was wondering if he said anything to you. I’d like to see those letters he sent.”

Morgan rose from his chair. He tried to think about the letters, bound up with twine. Aged. Sitting away in a hidden place. How many times had he gone through them? Late at night with just the light of the fire burning deep in the stove. Feeling the paper beneath his fingertips, the way the creases had begun to wear and the ink to fade. Months since he’d received the last. He was at the door when he turned. “They’re going to hurt Patrick if they find him,” the old man said.

“Probably.”

“You don’t care?”

“They took Sheri.”

“Your wife?” Morgan stood looking back at Drake, his body half turned in the doorway. “Did they hurt her?”

“I don’t know,” Drake said. “I don’t know anything.”

“You could call someone.”

Drake shook his head.

“You don’t want to?”

Drake didn’t say anything, he’d fixed his eyes on a place at the old man’s feet and he looked to be trying to find the bottom.

“They have to know hurting her isn’t going to help them,” Morgan said. “They have to know that.”

“I need to get her back. And in order to do that I need to find my father,” Drake said.

DRISCOLL STOOD IN the doorway and looked inward at the bedroom. The comforter lay on the floor with two of the pillows. A single red sheet was still attached at the bottom of the bed, though it, too, had been yanked down and stretched along the floor like blood dripping from a wound.

He turned and went out into the living room and found one of the deputies fingering a half-full milk carton on the counter. “Don’t fucking touch that,” Driscoll said. He stood watching the deputy till the man put the carton down. “Where’s Gary?”

The deputy pointed outside.

They’d found the front door unlocked after they came out of the woods, Driscoll in the lead with Gary close behind. The logging road, where the deputies had found the Town Car early that morning, only a hundred yards through the forest. Driscoll’s leather shoes wet from the night’s rain as he came out of the trees and stepped into the orchard.

Driscoll found Gary looking at the driveway a few feet past the bottom of the stairs, a pair of long scrapes in the gravel like parallel rows in a garden. The gravel raised on either side and the dirt showing brown beneath. “Did you try Bobby again?”

Gary looked up and nodded. “No answer.”

“Try Sheri.”

Gary pulled his phone out and put the call through. Driscoll watching. From somewhere inside they heard a phone begin to ring. The deputy came to the door and Gary told him to look into it.

Twenty seconds later the deputy was back with the news the phone was on a charger in the bedroom.

“These are drag marks,” Gary said. “I didn’t even think to look for them this morning, but now…”

Driscoll raised a hand. “I know,” he said. “They’re both missing now and I don’t think they left by choice. The television was on when we came in, there’s a half-full carton of milk just sitting on the counter, and the sheets in Bobby and Sheri’s bedroom look like someone fought pretty hard to stay in bed.”

“And a hundred yards away there’s a Town Car with two dead bodies in the trunk,” Gary said.

“There’s that, too.”

Gary’s phone began to ring and Driscoll watched him answer. When Gary finished he put the phone away in his pocket and told Driscoll a foreman had just called in about a broken-down chain-link fence and a missing truck.

“WHAT WILL YOU do when you find Patrick?” Morgan asked. He stood by the window, looking out on his property.

Behind, at the table, Drake stirred, pushing one foot across the wood floor. The sound of grit beneath the sole of his shoe. “Arrest him, I guess.”

“You don’t seem sure of that.”

“I’m not.”

SHERI WOKE IN darkness with a thin prick of light the only thing visible before her. Her hands were bound and the arm resting on the floor had gone numb. Still she could feel the movement of the car and for a while she lay there trying to think back on how it had all happened. Waking to the sound of someone in her bedroom. The figure of a man moving toward her in the darkness.

She closed her eyes and felt the swelling over her left cheekbone. The flesh raised and tight. The slim prick of light like the only star in a dead sky shining back at her. There was the dusty smell of the trunk and the creak of the springs any time the car moved from one cement panel to another. She didn’t know how long she’d been out but she guessed it had been a while.

With her tongue she wet her lips and tasted blood like flaked, rusted iron. A dry crust of it lay along her upper lip, softening as she brought her tongue across the skin again. She was in trouble and for the first time she thought about Drake. She didn’t know where she was or who had come into their house.

She moved closer to the light, lifting her neck to get one eye over the hole. With one lid closed she could make out a long country road, cattle wire running both sides, and fields of wheat stalks shining gold on either side. No cars behind and only the yellow dividing line feeding away from her as the road went on underneath the tires.

She let her head drop. The muscles in her neck tight from the effort and the constant thump of the car wheels moving over the concrete. Again she thought of Drake. She was alone and she was scared. She raised her head and placed her eye to the small hole. The road went on behind just as it had before. No one was there, and though she hoped for it, she knew no one was coming.

THE OLD MAN came away from the window and sat in one of the chairs across from his grandson. “That’s all of them there.” He reached a hand out to touch the worn top of an old shoe box sitting on the table. The feel of the cardboard soft beneath his fingers. “If it’s not in there I don’t know where it is.”

“It?” Drake said.

“Whatever you’re looking for.”

Drake opened the box and removed the stack of letters. He flipped through the envelopes one after the other, examining the dates before laying them on the table. “What will I find in these?” Drake asked.

“I don’t know. Something, but I can’t tell you what that something is.”

“You can’t?”

“I have a friend in town I exchange books with. I read a book and then I give it to her. Some of the things we see in these books are the same, but a lot of it, scene to scene, page to page, is always different. You understand?”

“But you could describe the book for me, couldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then what would you say?”

“I would say Patrick was sorry about the way things turned out. He worried over the past. He worried over the present. Mostly, though, he worried over the future. What would happen to you. To him.”

“That’s what’s in here?”

“That’s what fathers always worry about.”

Drake let that sink in before he opened one of the letters and scanned the words. Morgan watched him for a time before he got up and walked to the stove, where he’d left the remaining rabbit to braise over low heat. He lifted the top of the pan and touched the meat with one of his fingers, feeling the bones move beneath.

He was at the sink skinning the two prairie dogs when Drake’s phone rang. The old man turned and watched his grandson look at the number on the display, then slip the phone back into his pocket.

“You don’t want to get that?”

“It’s nothing,” Drake said. “I’m waiting on a call but that wasn’t it.” He was bent over the table, reading one of the letters. It was the third letter Morgan had seen him open.

“What call are you waiting on?”

“The call that tells me Sheri is okay,” Drake said. “The call that tells me what I can do.”

“I’m sorry about this,” Morgan said.

“I’m sorry, too.” He held one of the letters up to the light. Something there he was trying to make out. “What are the dates and times at the bottom of each letter?” Drake asked.

“Times when I could see him,” Morgan said.

Drake turned and looked at his grandfather. “You went to Monroe?” Drake’s phone rang again and he looked at the number and then put the phone away. “How often did you see him?” Drake asked.

Morgan cut a piece of sinew away and brought the skin down another inch. “When I could. Almost any date you see there in the letters. Sometimes I had to wait a bit for the guards to find him but he usually showed within a half hour or so. I brought him things. Books, cigarettes, things he needed.”

“I didn’t know he smoked.”

“I don’t think he does, not like me at least. But he could use them. They helped him avoid trouble.”

Drake was staring at his grandfather in total disbelief when the phone rang again.

DRISCOLL STOOD IN the orchard. He had his phone out and he listened to the message click on a third time and Drake’s voice asking him to leave a number, and then he hung up. Driscoll didn’t have a clue and he kept wondering why Drake wouldn’t pick up, or if it was Drake at all who had the phone.

The night was starting to come together. Thirty minutes earlier Driscoll had returned from the truck lot, where the foreman had played the closed-circuit cameras back for him. From one angle they saw Patrick climb the fence, then go over, slipping into the lot. From another angle they picked out Driscoll’s Impala as it passed by and then came back. They saw Drake’s cruiser several times as well. The ghost in the shadows—Patrick sitting there in the truck cab—watching each vehicle pass. By the time Driscoll returned to the house a set of prints had come back and two U.S. marshals were on their way out to see them.

The prints belonged to two guys from Monroe. Convicts, Gary said, who had spent time with Patrick when he was inside. Two violent men who had escaped a week before while being transferred from Monroe to Walla Walla, killing a guard and taking his handgun with them.

Driscoll looked at the phone in his palm once more. He figured he had an hour before the marshals showed. An hour before they came in and took the scene over and Driscoll went back to sitting in an office in Seattle.

He began to walk to the house. The sun above shone pale beneath a thin layer of clouds. The heat in the grass causing the dew to rise and the apple trunks—obscured in places—seeming to float a foot above the ground.

One night and everything had changed. Two people murdered and stuffed in the trunk of a car. Drake, Patrick, and Sheri all missing. And now two escaped prisoners.

He didn’t know where any of them were and even seeing Patrick take the truck, Driscoll didn’t know whether Patrick was working with these men or against them. He had an hour to figure it out.

PATRICK CAME OUT of the Indian casino onto the lot, looking back over his shoulder as he went. He knew they had cameras in there but he’d kept his head down, trying only to get through the casino floor and then out the opposite door.

It had taken only two hours for the police to track down the big semi. The biggest thing in the lot except for the few RVs that had set up on the perimeter where the cars were fewer and something as big as an RV or a semi could be parked sideways across several spaces.

If he’d really wanted to hide the thing he would have dropped it by the cranes and container ships down by the Port of Seattle, but he hadn’t had the time to get south, the semi too big and too visible among all the cars on the highway.

Now he walked across the lot, weaving between cars as he went, looking behind him every thirty seconds or so. His nerves going like little electric shocks inside his chest, and an awareness to his movements that he had to force on himself, counting the seconds before he could turn again to look behind toward the semi and the growing flicker of police lights.

Certain that he could not turn around, and that all he’d left behind was waiting for him in the lot by that semi. Prison and possibly worse. There was no going back, and he felt himself committed to whatever would come next, and what that would hold for his future.

Ahead, he saw the cars were beginning to thin. The lot surrounded the casino on all sides. A building that hadn’t even existed when he’d been put away, at least not in the form it was now. Ten stories tall, like something off the Vegas Strip, all glass and neon lights.

All down the access road off the highway, he’d passed fast food joints, cell phone stores, and even a Safeway. He looked to these now. The Safeway the closest building. If he was going to make the big grocery store, he’d need to get out of the casino parking area and move across two lanes of traffic and a wide open lot that looked ready for development. It was too much ground to cover.

Looking behind him, he saw two of the officers had already broken away from the rest and were headed toward the casino doors. For a long while he just stood and stared at them, both officers a good hundred yards away across the lot, their attention not on him at all, but on the casino doors.

Patrick was standing between a big Ford pickup and a smaller Toyota. No idea what to do. If he went any farther he’d be on open ground, obvious as a flashing beacon to anyone looking.

He knelt between the two vehicles and felt his chest beating. Moving low on his haunches he made his way through the small alleyways between the cars. At first trying every door he came to, and then, after finding them all locked, he stood for a second and canvassed the nearby lot with his eyes. Most everything a new-model car with a computer doubtless inside and an alarm ready to spring.

When his eyes fell on an old Camry three rows up, he made his way to it with caution, watching for people or cars before scuttling from one row to the next. With his elbow he took out the glass and waited for the alarm. When none sounded he eased the lock up and let himself in. The car model just as he remembered it from before he’d gone away to prison. The number one stolen car in America for almost his entire time as sheriff.

Working quickly, he pulled the harness down from behind the steering column and found the wires he needed. With the sharp edge of the key from the semi, he stripped the rubber sheathing and then dashed them together. The engine came on right away and he put the car in reverse and came out of the parking spot, cautious not to move too fast. The officers he’d seen heading for the casino nowhere in sight. When he let himself look again, he was already on the access road, heading for the highway. The lights still flashing by the abandoned semi.

DRAKE LOOKED AT him and then brought up one of the letters. “What does this mean?” He held the letter in one hand and even without Drake pointing it out to him, Morgan knew the date on the letter and why it had been sent.

Morgan walked the few steps to the table and sat opposite. He took the letter and scanned down through the writing. Patrick had sent it two years ago, just after Drake had come to visit him for the first and only time.

“He was messed up when he wrote this,” Morgan said.

“He didn’t seem all that messed up to me,” Drake said. “He didn’t seem like he even gave a shit I’d come to see him.”

Morgan shook his head. He wanted to drop the letter, to push it away and dismiss it. But he couldn’t.

“I know they censor the letters,” Drake said. “I know that’s part of it—that sometimes you can’t say exactly what you mean.”

Morgan’s eyes dropped to the letter again. He scanned over it, picking out the text:

Morgan knew that was as close as it came. He knew, too, whatever Patrick had expressed in that letter was still important to him. Drake. Any future Patrick might have with his son.

“You know what he’s talking about?” Drake asked. “Your half?”

Morgan looked up. He could see the desperation in Drake’s eyes—the need for answers.

“Tell me,” Drake said. “If you know something—tell me.”

Morgan wet his lips. He wanted to tell Drake everything. All there was to know, however it might help. But he didn’t know if it would. The letters were filled with sentences about the future. Patrick had filled his life with them. What he would do when he was out, where he would go, the man he was meant to be. They were simply plans that had not come to be and Morgan did not know if they ever would. But, like Patrick’s letters, Morgan hoped one day for something more.

“Please,” Drake said.

Morgan looked up at his grandson. A long time ago he’d promised to protect him. Whatever that meant.

DRISCOLL STOOD IN the casino security office looking over the television screens. There were twenty of them total, all showing different angles of the casino. The head of security stood next to Driscoll and he had one of the clerks play the video back a third time.

“You know him?”

It was Patrick. The cameras showed him by the north doors and then seeing the police in the lot next to the truck; they showed Patrick cut across the casino floor and exit through the south entrance. “Can you zoom in on that?”

Using a joystick the clerk brought the image up. It was of an old Toyota Camry in the south lot. “We’ve put it out over the PA system already but no one’s come forward.”

“You don’t have the license?”

The head of security shook his head. He had straightened and he was looking down at Driscoll where he hunched over the television screen, now working the controls himself. It was no good.

Even if Driscoll had been wrong about the man, the semi made the connection back to Silver Lake. The tape showed Patrick parking and then getting out. No one else had been inside. Which meant Drake and Sheri were still out there. It meant the killers were out there, too.

Driscoll pushed himself up. “Do me a favor. There’s going to be two marshals out this way in thirty minutes. If you get a license for that car, I want to be the first to have it.” Driscoll found a card and gave it over to the man. He tried to smile but it came off a little loose and desperate. He was clutching at straws and he knew it.

Looking once more at the displays there he couldn’t help but feel some relief. If that’s what Driscoll could call it. There on the monitor was proof that he’d been right. All those years ago—all those trips to Monroe to see Patrick. It was all coming together. It was the reason Driscoll had come up to Silver Lake to see Drake, to tell the deputy what he suspected. Patrick was running.

PATRICK THOUGHT ABOUT it for a long time. Just sitting there in the stolen Camry and watching the house before he finally pulled away. He parked the car five blocks over and then walked back through the lengthening shadows. The sun almost down in the west and the streetlights beginning to pop on overhead.

When he came to the house again he paused for only a moment to examine the city street before going up the stairs. He was tired from the night before, huddled beneath the blanket as he sat in the big truck watching the road. His mind numb from the lack of sleep and his hands and face windburned and chapped from the drive down on the interstate. The Camry’s one smashed window whistling all the way into Seattle. Mostly though, he didn’t have anywhere else to go and he went up the stairs to the house with the singular hope that he would find a bit of rest within.

The stairs creaked underneath him as he climbed, the paint worn down from the constant rain, and the wood beneath showed green as an algal bloom. It wasn’t a very nice place, but Patrick hadn’t expected much and he went up the stairs with an even lower expectation of the man inside. The house only an address he’d been able to memorize in his time away, a series of numbers on an envelope that he’d dutifully addressed month in and month out for nearly half the time he’d been away in Monroe.

When he got to the door he rang the bell and listened. Somewhere inside there was a television going, and he heard a basketball commentator say, “It’s up and it’s good.” Just around the corner of the house, parked in the driveway, was a new-model red Ford pickup. The only thing about the house that Patrick thought out of the ordinary and made him doubt he was at the right place. Everything else, down to the sagging eaves of the porch roof and the rotten railings, fit into Patrick’s assumptions about the man inside.

Patrick pressed the bell again and listened for the chime. Nothing sounded and the basketball game kept going. Looking down the block he saw a few kids riding their bikes around in circles where the cross streets came together. The pavement beneath them almost black in the twilight and the lazy pull and swing of their laps seeming somehow, to Patrick, like vultures on the wing, circling high over some prey.

He sniffled with the cold and dug his hands into his pockets. He was dressed as he’d been the night before, in a padded canvas jacket and jeans. Work boots on his feet and a flannel shirt his son had given him. He watched the kids for only a moment longer before he turned and knocked on the door, listening for a second as the sound on the television lowered.

The only real time Patrick had ever spent in the city of Seattle was when his wife had been in treatment. He looked around at the neighborhood and tried to measure his memories of it then against what he saw today. Lines of waist-high chain link all the way down the block, dividing the sidewalks from the houses. Everything on this block simply built, worn away with time, but still holding. Craftsman-style wood frames over cement foundations.

He heard the latch go on the lock and then the door swung open. “Patrick?” a man’s voice said as the overhead porch light went on and Patrick stood looking into the eyes of a man six foot in height, wearing gray sweats, his head shaved to the skin, but a grizzle of white coming through in places along his scalp.

“How’s it going, Maurice?”

“People call me Maury out here,” Maurice said. “Come on in, Patrick. I’d heard you just got out. I thought you were living with your son, though. I didn’t expect to see you in the city.”

Patrick followed Maurice in through the door. There were piles of mail and magazines everywhere. Most of the magazines showing glossy pictures of women bodybuilders on the front, tanned almost to the point of rawhide, wearing nothing but G-strings and tops only large enough to hide a quarter of their veined breasts from view. Patrick stood taking it all in while Maurice went into the living room and turned the television down, so that only an aura of subdued excitement emanated up out of the speakers, occasionally an air horn cutting through it all.

“Maury is the name of a sixty-year-old Jewish man,” Patrick said.

Maurice looked away from the television and smiled. “Yeah, well, people don’t want to hire a man named Maurice. Makes them think I’m a sixty-year-old black man.”

“You are a sixty-year-old black man,” Patrick said. He cleaned a stack of mail from one of the chairs in Maurice’s living room and sat, his vision passing across the room in one sweep. One door leading off toward a kitchen, and another closer doorway that looked to go into a hallway and possibly some bedrooms. “You live alone?” Patrick asked.

“My grandmother left me the house when she passed a few years back.”

“Rent-free living?” Patrick asked.

“Yep, I needed it, too. Like I said, no one was hiring an ex-con with the name Maurice.”

“That why you changed it up?”

“Uh-huh.” He was back to watching the television again.

“You got any work now?” Patrick said.

“Turns out no one is hiring a sixty-year-old ex-con named Maury, either,” Maurice said, and then smiled, flashing a grin toward Patrick.

“You look like you’re doing all right,” Patrick said. “I saw the truck in the driveway.”

“Don’t be fooled by that. I leased it out. As long as I manage to make my payments it’s mine.”

Patrick tried not to let his eyes shift over the mess of a living room Maurice was seated in. “I guess you do have to look good while you look for a job, don’t you?”

“Appearance is everything,” Maurice said. He looked around on Patrick, running his eyes over him like he was appraising Patrick’s worth. “You want something to drink? I know you’re not supposed to imbibe, at least it’s not encouraged, but who’s really checking, you know?” Maurice laughed. He was already up and headed for the kitchen and when he came back he gave Patrick a tallboy. “You do okay in there without me?”

“Have you been reading the letters I sent?”

Maurice grinned again and looked around the room. “They’re in here somewhere. Looks like you survived at least. How many years has it been?”

“Almost six.”

“Shit, man. Time flies.”

“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t,” Patrick said.

“Well,” Maurice said, slapping two hands down on the meat of his thighs and looking around the room like he might find whatever he was looking for right there. “There ain’t no business like ho business. You want to make a night of it, or what?”

“Not that kind of night.”

“Don’t be like that, Pat. You telling me twelve years away didn’t get you ready for what’s going down tonight? I mean what else are we going to do? You want to sit around and watch the wall? Because you know we did that for six years in Monroe and I’ll tell you it’s going to be just about as fun. Get your dick wet. Live a little. I tell you it’s all I’ve been thinking about since I woke up this morning, and you showing up tonight makes it all the better reason.”

“I’m not into that sort of thing.”

“What?” Maurice laughed. “Women?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Prostitutes? Okay, okay,” Maurice said, raising his hands up, palms out. “The man says it’s not his thing, it’s not his thing. But how about we go down the street to this place I know and see what we can find. We’ve got to do something about that limp dick of yours. You’ve been living like a monk for the last twelve years and you don’t want to cut it up a bit? You just got out of prison, brother. Let’s live this night up like it ought to be lived. You feel me?”

“I didn’t come here for this,” Patrick said.

“Tell me about it at the bar,” Maurice said. “Too much time in this place and I get claustrophobic.”

THE LIGHT WAS fading when Morgan came out onto the porch. He put two hands to his back and worked the muscles till his vertebrae cracked. Then he sat in the chair and simply stared out on his land.

Drake had followed him to the threshold and stood waiting behind him in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking things through.”

“How’s it looking?”

“Not good.”

“I’m asking for your help,” Drake said. “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”

“I know that,” Morgan said. “But I just don’t know what I can do.”

Drake walked out and leaned on the porch railing with his hands down supporting his weight. He didn’t say anything for a long time. “They have my wife.”

“I can’t tell you where Patrick is,” Morgan said. “I just don’t know.”

“These men, you ever hear Patrick talk about them?”

“I heard Patrick talk about a lot of things. But I never thought about anything like this. You say one was bigger than the other?”

“Yes. His speech was a little slower, too. The smaller one seemed to be in charge.”

“They said they were friends of Patrick’s?”

“That’s what they said.”

Morgan shook his head. The sun was in the grass now, a low red light that seemed to emanate up out of the ground. “I don’t know about that,” Morgan said. “Your father didn’t have many friends.”

SHERI FELT THE car come off the pavement. The springs bounced down, and through the floor she heard the sound of gravel under the tires. Raising her head to look out through the small hole at the back of the trunk she saw the paved country road move away from her and the wheat grass build, the road narrow and the swish of the blades moving past the metal sides of the car as a wake of dust rose off the dirt with the car’s passage.

She could tell it was late afternoon by the orange light filtered in through the haze coming up off the road and she could also tell which direction was west. She had grown up in Chelan County, dry as tinder in the summers and white with snow in the winter months. The land she looked on now reminding her of that area, grasslands all the way to the Rockies. Wheat and alfalfa fields, hops and industrial apple orchards, all of it to the east of Silver Lake.

With her neck muscles cramping and her eyes straining to catch anything that offered a clue to where she was, she lay there, bouncing to the rhythm of the springs. One pothole after another and the gravel pinging in the wheel wells. Her vision so limited that she could barely make out a thing but the road and the grass all around.

The car came to a stop and she heard the brakes grinding on their discs. The engine stayed on and a door opened. She felt the weight release and the car rise an inch or so. She didn’t know what to do and she pressed herself back into the recesses of the trunk, readying herself for whatever might come.

The gunshot she heard tensed every muscle in her body and she rocked back into the darkness, hitting her head against the metal. Nothing had changed inside the trunk. Her world still only the single prick of light at the rear of the trunk lid. Outside only the sound of the wind as it worked through the wheat.

Straining, she heard a chain grate over metal and then fall away into the dirt. Next a gate was pulled open and then the car depressed again and the door closed. They were moving again and Sheri inched her way back toward the small hole of light and watched a cattle gate of some kind as it disappeared around the edge of the road. The wheels beneath continuing down along the gravel.

It wasn’t till the car came to a stop again that Sheri felt completely trapped. Tree shadows had worked their way over the road and somewhere in the near distance the sound of water flowing could be heard. She didn’t know where she was and her eye strained against the hole, trying to make out anything it could before the trunk opened and the big man who had come into her bedroom stood there looking down at her in a wash of light.

DRISCOLL SAT IN his office looking out over the city. He was seven stories up and through an opening between two of the downtown buildings he watched the bay and West Seattle farther on across the water.

The late afternoon sun was setting over the Olympics and no one but him was in the office. For the better part of an hour he’d sat bouncing a tennis ball against the wall beneath the window. He watched the ferries come and go. Their white bulk moving slowly past and then docking somewhere out of sight beyond the buildings. Occasionally a seagull would swing by, moving past the window seven stories up with its wings still and its head pivoting slightly as it went.

He threw the ball down again and watched it bounce first on the floor and then rocket up off the wall and back into his open hands. He did it three more times before he swiveled on his chair and sat looking at the closed door to his office. He leaned forward and placed his forehead flat on the desk, closing his eyes and breathing in the stale smell of the air. He hadn’t been in the place for four days and for two days he’d worn the same suit and shirt.

There wasn’t anything he could do anymore. He sat up and pushed himself away from the desk. His jacket lay folded over one of the chairs opposite and he took this up as he went out the door.

For about thirty minutes after leaving the casino and heading south on the interstate Driscoll had been in a kind of euphoria. He’d been right. All those trips to see Patrick—to question what part he played, what role he’d had. All those times Driscoll had asked Patrick just to come clean. To give Driscoll something—just get the killings of those two men off his conscience—and Patrick hadn’t budged an inch. Now Patrick was running and it proved something to Driscoll that he’d known he wanted but had never quite been able to imagine.

And for thirty minutes Driscoll had felt satisfied. Driving on the highway, thinking it through, cars passing, cars being passed, suburb after suburb going by as he made his way south to Seattle, and then it occurred to him that Patrick might actually get away with it all.

Driscoll didn’t have a license number for the stolen car. He didn’t really have anything. And that’s what he found himself with now—with less than he’d had four days before. He had almost nothing.

The elevator dinged and when the doors opened he was standing in the lobby level of the federal building. He walked through, the heels of his shoes the only thing to be heard as he made his way across the granite tile. Coming to the door he passed through a series of transparent safety-glass walls and metal detectors, and went out onto the Seattle street. A couple blocks later he sat at the bar of the downtown Sheraton. The bartender nodded to Driscoll and brought over an old-fashioned without even needing to be told.

“You in town this weekend?”

Driscoll rolled the glass around on the counter, watching the liquor coat one side and then the other. He looked up at the bartender. “Yeah, a new case.”

“Anything good?”

“No, just a dead end. Thought I’d step out for a little. Get some fresh air.”

The bartender nodded again. Silent acknowledgment was really all Driscoll wanted from the man. He existed. He was here. And by the time Driscoll had raised the glass to his lips the bartender was on to a group of executives who had come in out of the lobby.

Driscoll liked the place simply because there weren’t any regulars. It was a big chain hotel where the closest thing, besides Driscoll, they got to repeat customers were the flight crews that stayed one night and then were gone again the next. The bartenders were all pretty good at shooting the shit and none of them ever asked anything too personal. Perhaps they just knew how to act when most of their clients might come in once or twice a year, or might never come in again. It was friendly without being prying and Driscoll liked it that way.

A year ago he’d stayed in the hotel for two weeks. The story he’d told them was that he was working a big case, but the truth was he was getting divorced from the woman he’d loved for twenty years. From the woman he still loved. But who didn’t love him anymore.

Perhaps if Driscoll had spent more time with his wife or with his daughter instead of in places like this he’d still be married. Though, even thinking it, he knew he probably wouldn’t have been. And the time he spent at the office, moving up the ladder, chasing things down, had really been the undoing of his marriage.

He tilted the glass back and finished the old-fashioned in one long swallow. His Adam’s apple moving beneath his collar and a thin layering of perspiration collected at his temples. He set the empty down and signaled for another. Driscoll raised a cocktail napkin to his forehead and wiped it clean. He had no fucking clue. Over twelve years he’d worked on this case, picking it up and putting it down.

When the drink came he thanked the bartender and then watched him walk back down the bar. He sipped at his drink and thought it all through again.

Driscoll pulled up his phone and checked for missed calls. There were two text messages from the marshals, but nothing Driscoll could use. He toggled down through the contacts and found the number for his wife. He found his daughter’s cell phone number.

Driscoll looked at the highlighted contact in his cell. He read his daughter’s name three, then four times, and then he put the phone facedown on the bar and picked up the old-fashioned again. Beads of water had grown on the sides of the glass. The cocktail napkin on which it sat stuck to the bottom as he tipped it back and took another long swallow of the sugary bourbon.

For a long time after his marriage came apart Driscoll had wondered if they’d ever been happy, his wife, his daughter, him. Or maybe they’d never been happy and he just thought of them that way because it was easier for him to deal with. His wife and daughter like something out of a dream, half remembered the next morning, slipping slowly away with the coming light of day.

But the thought was too painful and when the bartender came by Driscoll ordered another drink. Driscoll had no fucking clue and he knew it.

MORGAN SET THE log and then hefted the ax, bringing the blade down into the wood and sinking the metal deep as the handle. He raised the log in this way and brought it down again, listening to the tear as the two sides came apart and fell aside. The work had been waiting for a week now and he went after it, breathing hard, while sweat beaded on his forehead and the back of his shirt grew wet with perspiration between his shoulder blades. He bent and hefted the two sides of the split to the pile nearby and set another. Pausing to wipe a sleeve across his forehead and look to the cabin.

He knew he was being a coward. He’d never set out to hide anything from his grandson, and now that’s what he was doing. Patrick had abandoned them both and now Morgan was left trying to set it all straight. He thought of Patrick again. Where was he? What was he doing? Did he have any idea what was going on?

For a time Morgan just stood there with the ax in his hand, wondering about a great many things, and thinking about Bobby inside his house, back at the table with the letters, reading every page as if it was going to reveal some great secret, though Morgan knew there was nothing like that to be found, and the things that his grandson searched for were not so easily located.

After splitting the next log Morgan paused to sit. He ran his hand down into his jacket for his cigarettes. He brought out his pack and shook a smoke out. Placing it to his lips and then feeling the weight of the pack in his hand, he thought better of it, took the cigarette from his mouth, and then slipped the pack back inside his pocket. He smoked too much but it hadn’t hurt him much till a year or so before. Whether it was old age or some cancer growing inside him, he couldn’t tell, but he thought it was probably both, and he went on through his days with the weight of it over his shoulders like a lead harness, pulling god-knows-what behind.

He wiped a sleeve across his forehead again and looked at his grandson in there at the table. Sheri was missing and he didn’t know what he could do about that, but he knew he had to try. “Well,” he said, leaning one hand to the seat and angling himself up. “I guess I’m old enough.”

He came up the stairs and stood on the porch looking in through the front window. He didn’t know what he was protecting anymore. “Old,” Morgan said, in a whisper only audible to him, “and now I’ve begun to talk to myself.” He put a hand out and turned the doorknob. “What’s new about that?” he said, answering his own voice.

Drake looked up at him as he came into the cabin. “I don’t know if it will help but I want to tell you something about those men who took your wife,” Morgan said. “I know them and they know me. The skinnier one is named Bean and the bigger one is John Wesley. They looked out for Patrick while he was inside. And for a long time I helped them by bringing whatever they needed from the outside.”

Chapter 8

BEAN CHECKED THE SIGNAL on the prepaid phone, the green light of the display open in his palm. A primordial glow showing on the lines of his face before he closed the thing in his palm and took a step away into the night. The day gone behind the mountains and the light from the fire barely visible through the small thicket of trees. He paused to take it all in, the country road a mile off but no car seen or heard for over an hour now. The place he’d picked for them close to a drainage stream, no bigger than a creek, the trees grown tall and thick around the water’s edge.

He stood there looking it all over, the creek heard from time to time, and the wind shifting and moving the branches overhead. Smoke pulled one way from the fire and then another, gray as it rose, and then turned black, all of it lit from beneath and then fading away into the night sky above. At the fire Bean could see where John Wesley stood with a slender branch of willow in his hand, tending to the coals with his eyes fixed downward into the flames, and Drake’s wife sitting there with her hands still taped together in front of her.

They hadn’t talked more than to offer her some food. Cans of chili they ate cold with their fingertips. A few apples they’d stolen from Drake’s kitchen. They ate and threw the empty tins into the shadows of the thicket. Only letting Sheri eat when they had finished.

Now Bean stood beyond the fire wearing the black suit, his legs knee-deep in the wheat field. The lapels of his jacket turned up to ward off the cold and the black material scuffed with dirt in places from the few days of work he’d used it for. He pulled the lapels closer around his neck and walked a few more feet through the grass, holding the lapels of his jacket to his skin and watching the empty space in the wheat fields a mile off where the road came through.

In his other hand he depressed the power button on the phone and listened to the music play and then when he was satisfied he turned the phone back on and watched the display light again. The same signal as before.

Chapter 9

THE BAR MAURICE TOOK him to was a small neighborhood spot a few blocks up. Dimly lit with blue and purple neon lights all down the wall, and the windows tinted almost black. It was unlike any place Patrick had ever been, low ceilinged with a pearly light of neon on every surface. The beer was mostly in bottles and the liquor in plastic jugs. The customers a mix of the young taking shots at the bar—their heads tipped back and their nostrils flared with each progressive slug of alcohol—and the older crowd closer to Patrick’s and Maurice’s age. Mostly single men who looked to have come in after work for a cheap beer and a view of the younger crowd.

It wasn’t the type of place Patrick had been expecting. Nothing like the Buck Blind back in Silver Lake, where he could grab a beer and have a discussion. Maurice’s bar was loud and dirty. Patrick wanting nothing to do with it as he looked around the crowded room for the nearest exits while music pumped like an artery in his ears.

Still, Patrick tried to talk to Maurice about why he was there, but the music was too loud and the man simply nodded at everything Patrick said, watching the crowd behind them in the mirror. Every once in a while taking sips from a glass of whiskey. The place so crowded that Patrick hadn’t noticed the girls behind them until Maurice turned to talk to them. Maurice introduced them each in turn, telling Patrick how he knew them. Patrick struggling to hear above the music, but the girls not seeming to care as they danced in place to the rhythm.

SHERI WORE ONLY a set of sleeping shorts and a tank top and she squatted next to the fire feeling the heat on her skin. She extended her bound hands toward the flames, feeling the fire on her palms. The night cold behind her and the frozen feel of her clothes any time they touched the skin. She was shivering with her teeth chattering and the tremors rolling up her spine almost as constant as the wind that came over the wheat fields.

Opposite, John Wesley sat on a log and watched the fire. He was at least a foot taller than her and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He looked slow and cumbersome in the padded flannel he wore. His jeans too tight and the bulge of his stomach showing where it came over the waistline and protruded pink and hairy from beneath his shirt.

The other man had gone to lie down in the car and she could hear the soft pull and give of his breath from time to time. She looked up at the big man and then looked away again. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the fire in more than ten minutes.

Already the fire was dying, sputtering on the meager collection of fuel they’d managed to cull from the grasslands. The flames licking past the dried edges of wood while Sheri listened to the crackle of grass and sage. John Wesley watching the small twigs blacken, then falter, curling in on themselves like the last spasm of life in a dying spider.

She stood and turned to catch some heat on the backs of her legs, watching the night beyond the thicket of trees and listening to the drainage stream flowing past. Out in the fields the wash of a single car went past on the nearby road. It was the only sound besides the crack of the fire and the rolling waters of the stream she had heard in over four hours.

“This time of year it can get into the teens at night,” John Wesley said. He’d risen from the log he sat on and he stood now looking across the fire at her. Her legs white from the cold and beyond the flicker of firelight echoing out through the trunks of the trees into the night. John Wesley took off his flannel and brought it around to her. “This will help.”

He laid the jacket over her shoulders, and she felt herself jump and then tense, waiting for some punishment that didn’t come. He was gone back to his side when she turned. The white undershirt he wore stained in the armpits and around the collar from days of wear. “Thank you,” she said, crouching again so that the tails of the flannel fell over her thighs.

She turned and looked to where the car sat. The doors closed and the windows fogged with the heat from Bean’s lungs. When she turned back she asked John Wesley if Bean was waiting on a call. “I’ve seen him look at his phone a few times,” she said. “Is it my husband he’s waiting on?”

“Something like that,” John Wesley said. He picked up the willow switch and played with the fire.

“And you’re looking for Patrick?”

“Yes.”

He played with the stick for a long time, letting air into the belly of the fire and watching as the oxygen bloomed red with flame. When he looked up at her he asked, “Does it hurt?” gesturing to the welt at her cheekbone.

“No,” she said, bringing her wrists up and laying the back of her hand to the swollen side of her face. “It’s better now.”

“I’m sorry about it.”

She tried to give him a good-natured smile but it came out ghoulish across the fire. “I need to use the bathroom,” she said.

“I can’t untie you.”

“You don’t have to.”

He rose and came around the fire and pulled her up with one hand and she felt the power as he lifted her onto her toes and then placed her down again. They walked out past the fire to the edge of the trees and she felt his arm loosen and then release. “This good?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. She looked around at him where he stood, only a couple feet off. “Can you at least turn around?” she asked.

He looked her over for a second and then half turned, his eyes faced away from her as she squatted. Working with her hands bound she had to shimmy the shorts down. Her bladder at the point of exploding and steam rising from between her legs as she peed, the blue light of the moon everywhere in the night and the wheat shifting like waves across a distant ocean.

She felt abandoned and set adrift. What mountains she’d been able to see in the last long beams of sun lost from view and the night beyond black as it had ever seemed to her. She squatted, looking over the wheat field like a sailor looking for land.

She thought of Drake out there somewhere. She thought of Patrick. She hoped for all of this to go away but she didn’t know how it could.

Behind, the crack of a twig in the fire. She turned her head to look at John Wesley, the corner of his eye on her. “You done?” he asked.

She nodded and looked once more toward the open wheat fields. John Wesley waited for her to pull her shorts back up before reaching a hand to her arm. She dodged his grip and before she thought any more about it she was into the wheat, high-stepping as fast as possible and trying to keep low. John Wesley somewhere behind, crashing after her. The wheat cut at her bare thighs as she ran and the flannel John Wesley had given to her fell behind somewhere in the field.

“YOU’RE SAYING YOU know those men.”

Morgan stood with his weight to the sink and his hands behind on the counter. He was looking back at his grandson where he paced the small room. “I’ve known them for a long time,” Morgan said. “They looked out for Patrick while he was away—made sure no one messed with him.”

Drake stopped and put his hands to the back of a chair, the window black with the night beyond. “And how did they do that?” Drake asked. He was not looking at Morgan, but at the old man’s reflection in the window.

“It wasn’t easy for Patrick. You should know that. I’m sure you’ve heard what it’s like for a lawman in there.”

“He promised them something, didn’t he?” Drake hadn’t moved and Morgan could see his hands tighten on the chair back, the knuckles grown white.

“He did.”

“More than cigarettes and little things from the outside,” Drake said. He turned and fixed his grandfather.

“Yes,” Morgan said.

“And now they’ve followed my father into our lives. Into my life with my wife, and into our home.”

“I don’t think Patrick meant for it to happen this way,” Morgan said.

“But it has.”

“Yes,” Morgan agreed. “Your father just wanted to get home. That’s all there was to it. He wanted to make sure of that. I don’t blame him for what he did. I don’t even blame him for what’s happened now. With all the wrong your father did it was always for the right reason. It was for you.”

Drake stared back at his grandfather, his jaw held tight and the muscles tense against his temples. “For me?”

“That’s all he ever talked about when I went to see him.” Morgan gestured to the letters once again collected in their box. “You can read it right there. You can read it for yourself if you don’t want to hear it from me.”

Drake just shook his head. His body now half turned to take in the box of letters on the table. He was shaking slightly and there looked to be little control left in him.

“I’m sorry,” Morgan said. “I’m sorry about how this has all turned out.” He patted his shirt pocket, looking for his cigarettes. “From what you’ve told me already I don’t even think Patrick knows these men are looking for him.”

“Why’s that?”

Morgan found his pack of cigarettes and thumbed one out. He replaced the pack again and began patting at his pockets once more, looking for his lighter.

“Why’s that?” Drake asked again.

Morgan stopped and looked back at his grandson. “Because technically they’re not supposed to be out of prison for the next twenty years.”

“WHY DON’T YOU call him Maury?” the girl asked.

“It’s not his name,” Patrick said. “His name is Maurice.” They were sitting on the couch in Maurice’s house. The second girl was back in the bedroom with Maurice and occasionally—over the sound of the living room television turned, still, dully on—Patrick would hear Maurice say something and then he would hear the girl laugh.

“I’d be more worried about your own name.”

“Why’s that?” Patrick asked.

The girl considered the question for a time, as if weighing the outcome of her answer. “Your name is Pat,” she said, smiling at him and putting a hand across his thigh. “Isn’t it a woman’s name?”

“It’s short for Patrick,” he said. He tried to move away on the couch, but felt the girl’s nails tuck in under the inseam of his jeans and pull him closer.

“Pat, Patty, Patricia,” the girl said.

“How old are you?” Patrick asked.

“Old enough.” The girl grinned, keeping her eyes on his. She had one leg up and over him before he thought to move. Straddling him like some beast she meant to ride. “Maury says you just got out.”

“That’s right,” Patrick said. He was looking up at her where she sat. His nerves going berserk beneath his skin and the warmth from the undersides of her thighs now pressed on his lap.

“Maury is a good guy,” the girl said. “He’s a friend of ours.” She pushed in beneath his chin and he felt her nuzzle up under his jaw and begin to kiss his neck. His eyes not seeming to focus anymore, and an anxiety for the thing that he couldn’t explain, but, at the same time, elated him.

He found his hands wrapped up behind her, reaching up the skin of her back beneath the clasp of her bra, moving one way against her skin and then retreating. Something pleasurable and animal about it all, the catch and pull of his palms against her bare skin, the dig of his fingertips as they moved over her ribs. He brought his hands around and clutched her sides, pulling her into him.

All of it feeling like something beyond his control, an act of God, a storm approaching, something there was no defense for.

He ran his hands over her back and sides, tight skin everywhere on her body that he didn’t know what to do with, but at the same time felt bound up within and committed to—a man fallen into a river, fighting against the coming falls.

He’d been with only one woman since his wife died. A woman ten years younger than him and a teacher at the local school, someone who had worked with his wife, and who, at the time, taught his son. The whole experience rushed and awkward, something sudden in the backseat of a car after a night of drinking. No words spoken or heard, just the act in its barest form. Performed and then quickly pushed away, never to be spoken of at parent-teacher meetings or when their paths crossed on the street or in the grocery store.

It had been a mistake, and Patrick had thought about it often when he’d been away in Monroe. Dreaming up other outcomes and conclusions for that night, but never truly being able to put it behind in any better light.

The girl slid off him onto the floor, her two hands gripped on his belt and pulling him lower against the couch. The cool press of her fingernails inside his waistband.

He felt bubbled inside the room, like there was no outside world, and it was only here alone that he existed. The girl between his legs as her hands worked on his belt. He heard her laugh and he felt momentary fear as she pulled his pants from his thighs and over his knees. “Guess you are a Patrick,” she said, laughing still, and then standing to take her pants down and then step out of them, one foot after the other.

In that brief second he tried to think of something to say, something he thought she might enjoy. But nothing came and he looked at her body there before him, two skinny legs, her body marked red in places by the pass of his own hands against her flesh. He sat forward and helped her with her shirt until she took it in one hand and pulled it off. So much bare skin, he thought.

“How old are you?” he asked again.

“Old enough to be your daughter, or your granddaughter,” the girl said, watching Patrick, a cruel little smile on her lips. “Whatever you like. Whatever you’re into.”

His mind suddenly wanted to be anyplace but here. A desperation fighting inside of him to just get up and walk out of the house. Though he knew he never would, and that he was already committed to how things would turn out.

He closed his eyes and he felt her legs again on top of him. Different now, as she put her hands to his shoulders and eased him back.

SHE RAN UNTIL she couldn’t feel her legs anymore. Cold as stone with the pale skin slashed red with blood from the blades of wheat. She slowed, crouching with her hands bound in front of her, fingers splayed into the earth for balance. The night air on her immediately and her own heat rising from her in a pale blue tangle of mist. Not a sound behind her but the wind working through the wheat.

The road was only fifty yards on but her thighs felt heavy on her legs already. She dropped to a knee, listening to the wheat move. No John Wesley; his footsteps faded away behind her as she ran, fading away until he wasn’t there at all. Now she didn’t know where he had gone. Whether he was behind her still or ahead of her, moving around on her as she rested.

For a full minute she waited. The cold of the night everywhere now. She looked to the road, just a matter of yards away and up a small rise. She knew it would be the easiest thing to follow.

She ran her eyes over the field one more time, left to right, watching the wheat bend in the breeze. Her heart beating in her chest and an elevated awareness to everything around. Turning, she went on, slowing four or five times as she went to look behind and listen to the wheat. In the night there was nothing to tell her which way to go, no mountains to show her the way home and the moon high overhead, fixed in the sky at its midpoint.

She came to the road almost by accident, stumbling out of the wheat into a small drainage ditch. The road raised slightly in front of her. With her two hands out in front she scrambled up the loose gravel onto the pavement. Keeping low she started to move down the road in the direction she thought they had come from.

She didn’t have any way to tell if she was going the right way and for a second she turned to study the road behind. Nothing but the lightless night behind her, going on and on, her breath curling away in front of her face before it thinned into the air. The cold felt now where the sweat had begun to show and cool her skin.

She went on, the cuts on her legs tearing at her thighs and the sweat stinging her eyes. Her only hope was to find a farmhouse or town. Anything that would offer the least bit of protection.

Up ahead she saw a pair of headlights break over a low rise in the wheat and move toward her. Sheri slowed, jogging and looking behind her at the open road. She raised both hands in the hope she would be seen. The light from the car headlights now everywhere around her.

She watched the car draw to a stop twenty feet before her and the man inside get up out of the driver’s-side door. His silhouette just visible behind the glare of the headlights. His head turned toward where Sheri stood, her arms still raised into the air.

“Thank God,” she said, trying to catch her breath. The man moving out from behind the headlights toward her as she kept speaking. “I’m—” And then she stopped short.

“Good run?” Bean asked. He was almost to her now, the gun in one hand while the other reached for her arm.

She put a foot behind her, pivoting, her head half turned, and then something heavy hit her full in the face and the last thing she remembered was the numbing heat of her own skull hitting the pavement.

MORGAN CAME IN out of the cold carrying a pail of stream water in his hand. His right side burdened with the weight as he closed the door, then set the pail near the stove. At the window Drake was watching the road leading away up the hill. Morgan could see also that the boy had found the old double-barrel. The shotgun and a weathered box of bird shot there on the table behind Drake.

Morgan sat and rested on one of the dining room chairs. He picked up the box of shells and examined the cardboard. He hadn’t used the things in a while. No reason to. Not enough time or energy left in his life to sit and wait for something to chance in front of him. And no one to give the meat to if he did. The rabbits and prairie dogs enough for him in the spring and summer. In the colder months his hands had begun to hurt. His fingers not as steady and the joints often aching, making the Arctic birds fat from their summer feeding harder and harder for Morgan to shoot.

Morgan knew Drake was still angry about it all. The boy had barely spoken to him in the last hour, not since he’d told him who the men were. Or, more aptly, who they were to the best of Morgan’s knowledge. Killers through and through, and Morgan knew, too, that he should be scared of them, but he just wasn’t. They had never been unkind to him in all his dealings. They had protected Patrick. And Morgan could not deny them his gratitude.

He set the box of ammunition down on the table and pushed it away from him. He looked up at Drake where he stood at the window. “What’s this for?”

“They can come into your life just as easily as they came into mine.”

“They don’t know where I live,” Morgan said. “They don’t know about this place.”

Drake stepped away from the window and sat opposite Morgan. He picked up the shells of bird shot and fed two into the bores of the shotgun. And then he placed the gun back on the table, pushing it with his fingers toward Morgan.

“What will you do if they come here?”

Drake brought out his service weapon and showed it to the old man. He put it away at the back of his waistband almost as quickly as he brought it out, looking away from Morgan until he could find his words. “I’m angry, that’s all. I’m just angry and I have no place to go. I know almost as much now as I did this morning and that’s nothing at all.”

Morgan rested his eyes on the shotgun again but didn’t comment. After a while he asked, “You and your wife have any children?”

Drake turned and looked at his grandfather and then looked away again. After a moment he said, “No,” to the empty pane of glass.

Morgan thought to leave it, but he thought he’d see it through. “You ever wonder what it would be like?” Morgan asked.

Drake stirred but didn’t say anything.

“It replaces all there ever was in your life and all there will ever be,” Morgan said. “Even if you turn your back on them the feelings you have will still exist, knowing they’re out there, knowing something that came from you is out there in the world.”

Drake got up from the table and walked to the stove. Taking his time he turned on the propane and lit the small burner. He poured water from the pail into a pot and set it to boil. “What if you found out your child murdered someone?” Drake said. “What would you do then? Would you still love him?”

Morgan thought that over. He knew why the killers had come into his grandson’s life. He knew what they’d been promised and how it was Patrick had come to possess what they were looking for.

Money. It had existed out there in the world for many years and it would exist out there in one form or another for many more. And it meant nothing to Morgan. Not a thing. “I still love Patrick,” Morgan said.

“No matter what he’s done?”

“I don’t like what he’s done. I don’t think he was right or that many would forgive him. But, yes, it doesn’t change anything in me.”

Drake took two tin cups from beside the sink and then turned to his grandfather and gestured to the boiling water. Morgan told him where to find the tea and then Drake poured and brought the cups to the table. Both sat at the table with the hot tin between their palms. Finally Drake said, “You get lonely out here? No phone? No neighbors? No one to talk to?”

Morgan told his grandson about the woman at the post office. He told him about the meal they’d had. About the way they sat and talked through her lunch hour. He told Drake about the old veteran from Walmart and how the man—even with all he’d done in his life—had seemed dissatisfied. Like he had one eye on the past and the other on the afterlife.

“I’m worried about Sheri,” Drake said.

“I know.”

“I’m not a killer,” Drake said.

“I know that, too.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot in the last few hours. I’ve thought about what I will do when I find those men—just doing it, but I don’t know if I can.” He raised his eyes and Morgan could see the worry painted on his face. “I tried to shoot a man once,” Drake said. “He put two bullets in me and sliced up my hand. I couldn’t do it. I should have but I didn’t and I think about that a lot. Reliving how it went wrong.”

“You’ve got to let that go.”

“My father told you about that?”

“He did.”

After a while Drake asked. “Are you scared? Those men out there—you worry about what they might do when they have what they want?”

“No,” Morgan said. “I imagine they’re making their minds up about all of us, but I don’t feel threatened by it.”

“You think my father would feel the same?”

“I think if he knew you were here with me, Sheri taken by those men, he’d do something about it. I think he’d have to.”

THE GIRL WAS gone when Patrick woke. He lay on the sofa looking up at the ceiling of Maurice’s living room. Night outside and the occasional wash of headlights going past on the road. He didn’t know what time it was but didn’t think he’d slept for very long. With one hand he pressed the thin sheet Maurice had given him to his waist and swung his legs to the floor. With his other hand he searched the sofa for his underwear and then pulled them on.

In the bathroom he pissed a stream of urine that smelled of whiskey, his free hand held out on the wall for balance. From the window over the sink he could see Maurice’s red pickup still parked there in the drive. The reflection of the streetlights shining brightly on the waxed paint.

Patrick ran the faucet and then cupped the water and washed his hands and face. He didn’t know what he’d thought to accomplish coming here. He only knew that he’d needed to come, that he owed Maurice that at least.

When he was done he dried his hands and came out of the bathroom. The house dark and the clock on the stove telling him it was nearly one A.M. The door to Maurice’s room cracked and Patrick stopped just beyond. Maurice a dark shadow on the white sheets of his bed. The gray pants pulled up and no shirt to cover his chest. Patrick pushed the door open a foot. “You awake?” he asked.

Maurice shifted and then looked up. “Some night, eh?”

“Yeah.”

Maurice was smiling now, a big grin showing on his face. “You won’t want to wash that smell off for days,” he said. “There’s nothing like it. You feel me, right?”

“I came here because I thought we should talk. I’m out now. I owe you. You took care of me in Monroe. I didn’t want you to think I forgot.”

Maurice pulled a cigarette from somewhere and lit it, offering one to Patrick.

“No,” Patrick said.

“I didn’t forget, Pat. I knew you’d come by. I’m glad you did.”

“I need you to help me get the money. I need that truck out there.”

“Sure, Pat. We can go in the morning. I don’t have a problem with that. I know you came here for more than just a good time.”

“It’s a lot of money,” Patrick said.

“I know it is.”

“I just thought it would be on your mind.”

“It has.” He smiled again and then took a long pull off the cigarette and let the smoke roll up out of his lungs into the room. “You did have a good time, didn’t you?”

Patrick watched his old friend. He hadn’t moved but to light the cigarette and he lay there in his bed. On the nightstand beside him, Maurice’s wallet, cell phone, and keys neatly stacked one on top of the other like a cairn of rocks marking a trailhead. “Yeah, the best,” Patrick said. “Better than being in prison.”

Maurice laughed again, looking around on Patrick. Smoke escaping the line of his teeth. “You’re goddamn right,” Maurice said.

Chapter 10

JOHN WESLEY LIFTED SHERI’S head in his hand, turning her one way, then the other. In one hand he held a burning log from the fire. The flicker of light playing across one of Sheri’s cheeks while the other cheek lay in darkness like a cool, worn-away river stone waiting somewhere in the recesses of a dried-out creek.

They’d picked her up off the road and put her in the backseat of the car. Now John Wesley waited for her to wake. Their fire fifteen feet off and the car door pulled open. And he could see that if she stayed with them for a day more she’d be broken. He hadn’t meant to lift her off her feet with the punch but she was such a fragile little thing and she’d come up off her toes almost like it hadn’t been him at all.

He turned and looked to the fire. Bean waiting there and the shadow he cast stretching away behind him into the trees. With one hand John Wesley closed the door, the log in his hand smoldering now and the embers beating to the pulse of what little wind there was. He’d never taken someone from their home, though he knew Bean had, and he wondered how it would turn out for all of them. The three of them now connected in some irrevocable way.

When he came back into the firelight, Bean was waiting for him, standing in the same place he’d been before. Half there and half somewhere else entirely. “Is she going to live?” A cruel smile on Bean’s face as he said it and the lapels of his coat pushed together in one hand, while his other hand reached for the warmth of the fire.

“I think so.”

John Wesley knelt and dug the log into the coals. When he stood again, Bean was holding the phone, the green light of the display flashing in his hand and the low pulsing sound of its vibration.

Bean depressed a button and held the phone to his ear. He listened for a time and then when he was finished, he looked over at John Wesley, the grin growing across Bean’s face. “Yeah, man, I feel you,” Bean said, and then closed the phone, already turning toward the car, Seattle a few hours’ drive away.