Sometimes the Wolf

Chapter 11

MORGAN WOKE HIM BEFORE sunrise. The dawn light at the horizon and Drake’s grandfather bent over him with a hand to his shoulder.

Drake came up like a man surfacing from below, air pulled deep in his lungs with his first waking breath. He sat straight up in the chair, the muted blue light everywhere inside the small cabin. No memory of closing his eyes or even laying his head down against the table.

“You’ve been asleep almost seven hours,” Morgan said, his hand taken back from Drake’s shoulder. Morgan waited a moment and then walked to the stove and lit the propane burner. He placed some water to boil and then turned back to Drake, still there where he had left him.

Drake pushed himself away from the table and stood. He ran a hand through his sleep-mussed hair to smooth it down and at the same time walked to the window. Bending slightly to take in the light coming up over the far rise. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Almost six.”

Drake looked around the room, everything the way he’d left it the night before. The shotgun on the table and the cast-iron stove there in the center of the room with the smoke pipe vented to the roof. The room seeming colder to Drake than it had at any point since he’d arrived the day before. He pulled up his cell phone and looked at the display. “Did anyone call?” he asked.

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“I know them,” Morgan said. “Until they have what they came for she’ll be safe.”

Drake watched the old man. The water began to bubble inside the pan and when it was ready the old man poured it into a shallow bowl. With a rag he cleaned his weathered face and ran the cloth beneath his neck. The excess water falling to the bowl while Drake tried to gather his senses for the day. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep…,” Drake began.

Morgan looked up, placing the rag on the edge of the small washbasin. “I want to show you something. Would that be okay? Something I think is important for you to see.”

IT TOOK DRISCOLL a moment to figure where he was. With his head tipped back and his mouth open he soon found he was looking at the ceiling tiles in his office. He snapped his mouth shut and swallowed to wet his throat.

He checked his watch and then stood, putting two hands to his back as he felt his vertebrae pop. The office was just how Driscoll had left it the afternoon before. He tried to play back his night but he came up short. There were only glimpses of things said and done. Two more old-fashioneds, the brief memory of shots being taken with the bartender, and then at another bar a basket of fries eaten and then washed down with a cold can of beer. He ran back through it, trying all the more. A life seen through the slats of a fence while Driscoll paced one side, peering through at the night before.

He turned and took in the office. Everything was there, his jacket on the chair, his gun on the desk next to his keys and wallet. He walked around and brought up his jacket. Holding it with one hand he patted the material down with the other as he looked for his phone.

Driscoll had missed a call from the marshals and then another from the head of security at the casino. He listened to them both and then sat back at his desk and thought it through. One of the blackjack dealers, a woman working a double, had noticed her car was gone when she left around eleven the night before.

The marshals were angry he hadn’t answered any of their calls, but Driscoll didn’t care. A quick check with the Seattle police and the state patrol came up with nothing on the Toyota Camry and he knew they were all still clutching at straws.

From a drawer in his desk he took out a bottle of ibuprofen and swallowed four pills dry. He went to the bathroom and cupped water into his hands, drinking it like some lost wanderer come in out of the desert sun. When he straightened and saw himself in the mirror there were dark circles beneath his eyes and a layer of scruff had grown on his cheeks and neck. The shirt he wore was greasy from three days’ wear and the top couple buttons left undone. No idea what had happened to his tie.

He came back to the office and stood in the doorway. In all the time Patrick had been locked away Driscoll had gone right to the source and now with Patrick missing he knew he had to find another source.

THE NIGHT COOL was still in the cottonwoods when Drake and Morgan came down off the prairie and threaded their way into the stand. The sound of the creek there at the base of the hollow and the first white tufts of spring beginning to show in the branches above. They crossed and went up the opposite side, coming out of the trees and into the grasslands again.

Drake carried the shotgun in his hand as his grandfather led. The old man holding a set of the wire snares and watching his steps as they came up off the creek. Drake with no idea what his grandfather meant to show him, or why it mattered. No word from the killers. Sheri gone away somewhere and Drake worrying over where that place might be and who was at the end of it.

“Before your father went to prison he used to come out this way to visit,” Morgan said, the wheeze of his breath audible between words. “We’d set snares in the morning and then shoot some in the day. Then, in the evening, cook whatever we’d managed to pull from the prairie. Most times we’d leave a few snares till the next morning and Patrick would go home with a couple rabbits.”

“He came out here?”

“When he could.”

Drake walked with the shotgun faced outward and down as he had on so many other days with Patrick, following his father up the cut of a ravine so that they could find a high point to take in the terrain. The wood stock of the gun warmed by his hand.

As if sensing his thought, Morgan said, “I’ve been meaning to ask, don’t you have something in your cruiser that has a little more wallop?”

Drake kept walking. He didn’t want to tell his grandfather the two killers had emptied out the car. He was angry with himself for dropping his guard—for trusting Patrick. He still was. He didn’t want to tell Morgan the only protection he had left was his service weapon.

What the killers had taken from him was worse than anything they could have taken from within the cruiser. When they came into his house they took any sense of security he’d had. The life he and Sheri had made for themselves was fractured. Sheri pulled one way and Drake the other. And he was thinking about this now, watching the steps he took, feeling the grass bend beneath his shoes.

They walked for another five minutes. Drake watched his grandfather’s back. The grass as high as their thighs in places and the prairie rolling before them with the mountains far beyond in the west, the steam of Morgan’s breath floating back over his shoulder as he picked his steps.

“Let me ask you something,” Morgan said. “You had a good childhood, didn’t you? You lived a good life. You played basketball and Patrick took you camping in the mountains. You had friends. School was good to you.”

“Yes,” Drake replied. They had crossed a long stretch of flat ground and ahead of them was a fence of wooden posts and barbed wire.

“He wasn’t the man you think of now.”

“He wasn’t the man he is now,” Drake said. “He was a sheriff and now he isn’t.”

“Occupation defines him, then?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I think it’s easier for you to keep him in the box everyone else keeps him in.”

Drake wouldn’t respond. Behind him, the tops of the cottonwoods had dropped below the horizon and the prairie seemed to go on forever.

“I know when he was caught it shook you up,” Morgan said. “Everything you thought about Patrick was brought into question. And that scared you. It turned your life upside down. You blamed him for that, you still do.”

“Yes.”

“But yesterday when I asked you what would happen when you found him, you didn’t know.”

“I’m a sheriff’s deputy and he’s a criminal,” Drake said, feeling his voice tighten, struggling with the idea.

“So you would arrest him?”

“He messed his life up. Not me. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”

“So you think he did it all for himself?” Morgan asked. They had come to the fence marking the end of Morgan’s property. “You want to know what it was all about—the last twelve years your father was sitting in Monroe.” Morgan bent and found a small strip of black electrical tape wound to the bottommost wire. He rose and walked east to where the sun sat a few inches past the horizon. He looked north and then squared himself. “The county road down there can only be seen from this spot. If you’re not standing right here the grass hides it or, on the other side, the hills.” He looked over at Drake. “Come over here,” Morgan said.

Drake walked the twenty or so steps from the fence to where Morgan stood.

“You were five or six when your mother got sick and by the time you were seven she was dead,” Morgan said. “You probably remember that pretty well, don’t you? You think of her as a woman lying in a hospital bed with a bunch of wires connected to her. All you probably remember of her is the way the hospital smelled or what the waiting room looked like. If your father hadn’t kept a framed picture of the three of you, you’d probably have to guess what color her hair was or what her face looked like when she smiled.” Morgan stopped to gather his breath. He was looking toward the county road a mile away. Not a single car passing in the whole time they’d stood there.

“What you don’t think about when you think of your mother,” Morgan went on, “is how lovely she was—what a great person she was before she got sick.” With one leg he swept his foot over the grass, parting it and sweeping the dirt. The grainy sound of bits of rock and dirt rolling across a hard flat surface. “Everyone loved her and when she got sick it didn’t seem like it was really happening—it seemed like it couldn’t happen to her. Because things like that don’t happen to people like her. People with good hearts, with an easy laugh like hers or a face like hers, or any number of other things I still remember.” He knelt and Drake heard the old knee crack, his grandfather now bent to the prairie floor, his fingertips lifting a weathered board, one and a half feet long and eight inches in width. The hole below big and square as the grave Drake had dug in the apple orchard behind his house.

Morgan bent forward and brought up what looked to be a small tackle box. Green, with the metal clasps and pins all rusted and stained with time. “Patrick missed your mom more than anything. Having her there meant one thing in his life, and having her gone meant something altogether different. He loved her and when she passed it scared him. She really could have done anything—been whatever she wanted, had any life she chose—and for her to go like that, at her age, it didn’t make sense and it scared him more than anything he’d ever come up against,” Morgan said, still talking as he brought the box up and placed it on the ground next to Drake’s feet.

Drake knelt next to his grandfather and placed the shotgun away from him in the grass. He put his hands on the tackle box. “What’s in here?” he asked.

“You know what’s in there.”

“I don’t want to open it,” Drake said.

“He loved you,” Morgan said. “That’s all it proves.”

Drake undid one clasp, then the other. He bent back the lid and raised the small shelf beneath. A folded piece of paper with his name on it sat there in a plastic sheath. Underneath the letter, four stacks of bills. “How much is it?” Drake asked.

“Two hundred thousand, minus a bit Patrick asked me to bring him while he was in Monroe.”

“This is for me?”

“When Patrick put it here he told me to give it to you on his death.”

Drake brought up the piece of paper and slid it from the plastic. Drake’s name written there on the outside of the paper in his father’s hand. The first line written inside simply an apology. The next: “For the house and for whatever else you need it for.” Then a final signature from his father.

The message was short and to the point, like anything else his father had done. Still, Drake flipped the paper over looking for more. When nothing else could be found he slipped the paper back within its plastic envelope.

“You probably won’t believe me but Patrick was getting out when he was arrested. He was building up the money to pay off the house. He wanted to keep it in the family. He wanted to keep it for you.”

“But he didn’t get out,” Drake said. “He went to prison for twelve years.” His voice broke a little and he recovered himself. “He killed two men for this.”

“I don’t know what to say about that,” Morgan said. “You asked me last night whether it’s possible to still love a son who is a killer. I think it is.”

“That’s all you know about it?”

“I know what happened to those two men was an accident. It was a misunderstanding. Patrick was worried about it before he went and he asked Gary to come along and watch his back. Gary was too jumpy. He watched one of the men go for a cigarette and before the man could pull his pack from inside his jacket, Gary caught him at a hundred yards. The second man was a witness at that point.”

“That doesn’t make this okay,” Drake said.

“I don’t blame either of them,” Morgan said. “Gary was watching out for your father and your father was watching out for you.”

“Jesus,” Drake said. “I don’t want this. I never asked for this.” His voice held low and the words only a whisper. Drake looked down at the money. “You’ve had this ever since?”

“Yes.”

“Just waiting to give it to me?”

“Yes.”

“So he’s dead?” Drake asked. His eyes still on the open lid of the tackle box, the wind rustling the small folded piece of paper that sat on top; he didn’t want to raise his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Morgan said. He looked away to the road, where a pickup was cresting the far hill and then descending once again, out of sight, beyond the grass. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if we’ll ever see him again, but if those men get ahold of him before you do I know it will mean trouble for both me and you.”

Morgan told Drake all there was to know. He told him Maurice’s full name, how long they’d shared a cell for, where he lived now, how Patrick had asked Maurice for help, and how Maurice had been the one to make the connections with Bean and John Wesley. Patrick doing the rest, trying for protection and making promises he could back up with only the money as a reward.

Drake listened and when Morgan finished, Drake said, “So those men don’t know you have the money?”

“Besides Patrick and myself you’re the only other person who knows.”

“You think my father would bring them here?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“I can’t believe this,” Drake said. “All this time—” The anger in his voice cut into his words. “Do you know what it could mean for Sheri if my father isn’t with Maurice?”

“Outside Silver Lake it’s about the only place I could see him going.”

Drake didn’t have anything more to say. His grandfather didn’t have the answers. But the anger was there still. He couldn’t help it and he knew it wasn’t his grandfather’s fault.

“I had to show you this,” Morgan said. “You had to know. It’s your money.”

Drake bent his hand to the small piece of paper and brought it up. He tucked it within a pocket of his coat. When he was finished he dropped the tackle box back into its hole.

“Telling the truth can be a horrible thing,” Morgan said.

Drake thought that over. He thought about all the things he’d hidden away in his life—all the failings he’d had. “I lied to you last night,” Drake said. “We had a child. A miscarriage. I buried it in a hole behind our house. I never told Sheri it was a little boy. I think about him all the time.”

“Sometimes what you hope is at the end of the rainbow isn’t what you thought it was going to be at all,” Morgan said.

THE ASIAN MAN who came into the room to meet him was about thirty years old and had tattoos running up out of his shirt collar on both sides of his neck. Driscoll waited for him to sit before opening the file the warden had given him. The guard who’d escorted the inmate into the room now stood by the doorway about twenty feet behind.

“John Se,” Driscoll said. He had the file open and he was looking down at the man’s mug shot. The statement was not a question, but merely a fact. “You’re in here for second-degree murder. Correct?”

He leaned back from the table and grinned at Driscoll. “Is it going to surprise you if I say I didn’t do it?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

“Well that is the fact,” John said. “They have me in here because they picked me up for being an Asian male.”

“Case closed,” Driscoll said. “You Asians all look the same.”

“Now you’re getting it. I’ve been saying that for years.”

“How long have you been in here?”

“Too long.”

“How long do you have to go?”

“Too long.”

Driscoll flipped through the paperwork a few times and then looked up at John. “You know it says here that several witnesses saw a man of your height and build cave in another man’s head with the heel of his shoe. Says here that the tattoos on this perp’s neck matched yours exactly.”

“I don’t know what to say to that. Neck tattoos are pretty popular these days.”

“Not that popular,” Driscoll said. “Not the best choice either, especially if you want to go around smashing people’s heads in.”

“How does self-defense sound?”

“I’m not your lawyer,” Driscoll said. “I don’t really care. All I care about is how much time you’re doing in here and if you’re willing to reduce that time by helping me out.”

“Who are you?”

“DEA.”

“They didn’t tell me that.” John looked behind him at the guard. “DEA?”

Driscoll snapped his fingers. “You have trouble keeping your eyes on the chalkboard when you went to school, John?”

John turned around and looked Driscoll over. “This is when you make the joke about Asians being good at math.”

Driscoll didn’t say anything. He had the two mug shots of the escaped killers facedown on the table in front of him. Their combined crimes included seven counts of murder, one count of arson, two counts of armed robbery, and one count of kidnapping. One of the men was guilty of killing his parents, his uncle, and his grandmother in their sleep, then burning the house to the ground to cover up the murders. “Until a week ago you were Patrick Drake’s cell mate, weren’t you?” Driscoll asked.

John looked back over at the DEA agent. “Pat? What does this have to do with him?”

“Two people were found murdered a quarter mile from where he was staying in Silver Lake.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“No one is saying you do.”

“Well, you can never be too careful, you know. I’ve been mistaken for things before.”

Driscoll looked past the inmate to the guard who had brought him in. Perhaps just looking for some sign that John could give a real answer from time to time. The guard just shrugged, a smile beginning to show on his face before he dropped his eyes to his shoes.

Driscoll brought his attention back to the man before him. “You know these men?” Driscoll asked. He turned each mug shot over one at a time.

“I know them,” John said. His voice diminished, pulled back somewhere into the shadows.

“These guys scare you?” Driscoll asked.

“What are you offering me here? I’m not too crazy about how this is starting to look if someone finds out I’m talking to you.”

“The warden is the only one who knows what we’re doing here. The guards all think I’m a lawyer here for a meeting with you. Well, they did until you yelled out to that guard back there.”

“Sometimes my mouth gets me into trouble.”

“I can imagine,” Driscoll said. “What I can do is send that guard an early Christmas present this year. You know, the kind that makes sure he keeps his mouth shut.”

“You’re kind of dirty for a DEA agent.”

“I can’t protect you from any others you want to tell about this, but I can help you out if you’re willing.”

“Okay,” John said. “What are you looking for?”

“What’s Patrick’s relationship to these two men?”

“That’s a big question with a lot of zeros behind it.”

“I know about the money,” Driscoll said.

“Well then it makes sense that a lot of us in here knew about it, too,” John said. “It wasn’t common knowledge, but when you sleep in the bunk above Pat for as many years as I have, it gets out. Pat would have never said anything, but something like that gets out. He wasn’t exactly running the show in here, but he wasn’t wanting for anything, either. Pat wants something done, it gets done. Respect will do that, but mostly it’s power, and in Pat’s case that power came from the money he was supposed to have on the outside.”

“He kept himself safe.”

“That’s all he did. Counting the days till he could get out.”

“He never told you anything about the money?”

“I saw a bit of it from time to time. Someone was bringing it in for him. Just enough to keep people satisfied.”

“So, you don’t know where it is?”

“Would you tell someone where you’d hidden that kind of money?”

“Two hundred thousand isn’t as much as you think it is these days.”

“Who said anything about two hundred thousand?” John said. He leaned back in his chair and grinned at the DEA agent.

“How much?”

“I’ve got another nine years on my sentence,” John said.

“You’ll be out in four,” Driscoll said. He was leaning into the table now, waiting on John. Behind him, the door opened and the warden appeared. He whispered something to the guard and then asked to see Driscoll in the hall for a moment.

“We’re in the middle of something,” Driscoll said.

The warden shot him a sharp look. “There are people waiting to talk with you, Driscoll.”

John said something under his breath.

“What did you say?” Driscoll asked.

“Marshals,” John said.

The warden was still waiting on him but he couldn’t move. “How do you know about them?”

“They were here yesterday,” John said. “I thought with how close you always seemed to Patrick, visiting him once a year, you’d have shown before them.” John was smiling now, looking across the table at Driscoll, a wild look in his eyes.

The warden tried to get Driscoll’s attention again but Driscoll waved him off. “Just give me a few more seconds.” Driscoll waited for the warden to leave before turning to John. “You knew I’d come?”

“Patrick was like family to you.”

Driscoll didn’t look away. “He was something to me but it wasn’t that.”

“What happens when you catch up to him?”

“I don’t know, but I can tell you it will be a lot better than what will happen if the marshals or those two killers get him first.”

“Patrick is a good guy,” John said. “He helped me when I first got here. Everyone needs someone like that, you know?”

“You paying for protection like he was?” Driscoll asked.

“No,” John said. “I wasn’t a sheriff either, though. I don’t have the same kind of bills Pat probably does.”

“He must have built up a pretty big debt by now.”

“Twelve years,” John said. “What do you think?”

“So what would you do?” Driscoll asked. “What would you do to find Patrick?”

“Are you serious about getting me out of here?”

“Like you said, I’m kind of dirty, but if it’s within my power I’ll do what I can for you.”

John looked around to the guard, the low, muted hum of the halogen lights overhead. When John looked back to Driscoll he took his time, rolling his nails on the table as he thought it over. “I hope you can help Pat out. I really do,” John said. “I wouldn’t have told the marshals this, but when Patrick got here twelve years ago he needed someone just like I did.”

Driscoll thought that over. “For a criminal you’re not that bad.”

“I’m not a criminal,” he said. “I’m an innocent man.”

“So you keep saying,” Driscoll said.

PATRICK ROLLED OVER and put his feet to the floor. The sun was coming in through the front windows and the clutter of Maurice’s house looked even worse in the day than it had in the night. He rested his elbows on his knees and cupped his hands together, running his fingers over his face. The smell of the girl still on his skin and a memory of the night before like a cruel act from his childhood he hadn’t quite forgiven himself for.

He was hungover and when he got up to use the bathroom and splash water over his face, he could see Maurice still asleep in his bed, the covers pushed down to the footboard, and the man laid out full on his stomach still wearing his gray sweatpants. The windows covered up and the sun-warmed air in the room dead still and smelling of dust. His cell phone, keys, and wallet on the nightstand next to him.

He watched Maurice for a time and then walked away to the kitchen and filled a coffee cup with water and drank it full. He had one hand held down on the counter and the other around the empty cup as he looked out the window above the sink. He was thinking it all through again. The girl on top of him, the way she had felt, Patrick trying to resist what his body had wanted most. Something about it all not quite right, a nagging thought trying to break through the clouds. The cell phone on Maurice’s nightstand not where it had been a few hours before.

He went back to the room and looked in on his friend. Careful not to wake Maurice, Patrick took the cell off the nightstand and brought it out to the living room. After toggling through the menu for a second he found the number Maurice had called at two A.M.

Fuck, Patrick thought. There wasn’t one good reason he could think of for Maurice to call someone at that hour.

He stared at the number on the phone’s display for the better part of a minute before he pushed the send button and listened as the call went through. On the third ring someone picked up. In the background the dull fuzz of a car in motion. No one spoke to him and Patrick listened without saying a word. He was thinking it all through again. He was thinking about Maurice last night and how he’d seemed so disinterested in anything related to the money. Money Maurice had been waiting on twelve years.

An ambulance went by on the main street a block up from Maurice’s house, the sirens blaring and then fading away again as the emergency vehicle moved on. Ten seconds later Patrick heard the same siren begin to wail from the earpiece of the phone he held in his hand.

Patrick turned the phone off and moved for Maurice’s room. No time. He put the phone down on the nightstand and grabbed up the truck keys. Maurice turned slightly on the bed but didn’t wake.

With the keys in his hand Patrick came out the front door of the house and took the steps two at a time, jumping the last three and moving for the truck. He had the door open and the engine running almost before he knew what he was doing. With one arm pushed back over the passenger seat he reversed the truck out of the drive and locked the brakes, bringing the truck to a rough stop in the middle of the street. He put the truck in gear and floored the pedal. His eyes focused up on the rearview mirror and the main street behind. Nothing to be seen but the traffic going by as Patrick took the corner at almost forty miles per hour.

MORGAN RAISED HIS eyes and studied the sky. He held the last snare in his hand and the shotgun in the other. A dome of high blue from one horizon to the next and the sun distant and cold. For a while he just stood there watching the slight breeze work across the land, rolling over the far hills before it came washing over him.

Morgan looked over the path he’d taken. The grass shoots bent where he’d come through. But the trail gradually receding back into the landscape like footprints left in the sand of a beach. Nothing to say he’d been there fifteen minutes before.

After it was all done, after he’d shown Drake the money and explained everything to him and Drake had made whatever peace with it he’d needed to make, he asked Morgan if he felt like some sort of castaway out here. “All these rolling hills,” Drake said. “You might as well be lost at sea.”

Morgan thought that over. He was smiling already at the thought. Sharks circling, trying to take what they could from him. “If I was I’d be yelling at the heavens.” He laughed, snorting a bit and trying to catch his breath. He felt relief. He felt like he’d held the money for so long without anyone to tell about it. And now he had and he felt good about it all.

“Still,” Drake said, “I’d feel better if you stayed away from this place for a day or two. Go into town. Spend a few nights with that friend from the post office.”

Morgan thought about that. He knelt and set the last snare. When he was done he rose and watched the hills again. Lost at sea. He looked up at the sky again. When night came there would be stars thick as buttermilk.

Chapter 12

JOHN WESLEY HELD SHERI by an arm and rapped a knuckle against the door. Through a side window he saw Maurice rise from his seat on the couch and turn his head toward the window. He looked the big man over for a second, then turned and ran for the back. Twenty seconds later Maurice was at the front door again with Bean standing there behind him and the Walther pressed to Maurice’s skull, just behind the ear. The door came open and Maurice stepped aside to let John Wesley and Sheri through. As he passed John Wesley thanked him and then came into the house and stood looking at all the magazines stacked in piles around the living room.

He sat Sheri on the couch and then turned to take in what he could of the house. Messy and unkempt, the room had spiderwebs in the corners and some of the magazines showed a thin filament of dust over their glossy covers. He picked one up and thumbed the pages. A good-natured smile across his face as he came to the pictures he liked.

Bean pushed Maurice into the living room and told him to sit. “I’m guessing Patrick isn’t here,” Bean said.

“Why’s that?” Maurice said.

“Because someone called us from your phone and it wasn’t you.”

“How do you know it wasn’t me?”

“You’re wasting time,” Bean said. He gave the gun to John Wesley and left the room. John Wesley looked at Maurice and then looked toward the direction Bean had gone. There was the sound of the closet in Maurice’s bedroom being opened and the lamp on his nightstand being flipped; a dresser went over next.

“Come on,” Maurice said. “This is my grandma’s place.”

Bean came out of the back hallway breathing hard. He looked around the room. “Your grandma like you? Likes looking at whatever the fuck this is?” He bent and picked a magazine off the closest pile. He put it down without comment. “Where’s Patrick, Maurice?”

“He’s not in the closet back there?” A smile on Maurice’s face and his white teeth showing.

In less than a second Bean was on top of him. He beat him three or four times across the face in quick succession and then remained where he was, one knee into Maurice’s belly. “Where’s Patrick?”

There was blood on Maurice’s teeth now, he was looking up at Bean and he was smiling a big grin. “You mean he wasn’t behind the dresser, either?”

Bean beat Maurice with a savage intensity while John Wesley went into the kitchen and came back with some spray cheese and a package of crackers beneath his arm. The Walther now tucked in the back of his waistband. In his other hand John Wesley carried a bottle of water and when Bean rose from the couch, he used both hands to push his blond hair into place, smoothing his palms over it several times before John Wesley handed him the water.

John Wesley ate a cracker and watched Bean. He offered one to Sheri but she was too traumatized to move, all the way against the opposite side of the couch.

“He’s not here,” Maurice said, propping himself up on one hand to wipe at the blood on his lips with the other. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if he was?”

“I don’t know what you’d do,” Bean said. “You tried to sell out your old friend for a cut of his money. I don’t know what that is.”

“I tried to help us out.”

“So where is he now?”

“Shit if I know,” Maurice said. “He took off with my truck, though, took it right out from under me while I was asleep. We did six years together and that’s how he does me.”

“You see the humor in this, Maurice?” Bean said. “You here on the couch saying how Patrick screwed you over.”

“Shit, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. You feel me, Bean?”

“But you don’t know where he is now and you don’t know where the money is?” Bean looked to John Wesley and John Wesley placed the crackers and cheese spread down next to the television and started going through the room closing all the shades.

“He could show back up here,” Maurice said. His eyes tracked John Wesley as he made his way through the room, then they went back to Bean. “He doesn’t have anywhere to go. He told me that.”

Bean bent to the coffee table and shifted his hand through the mess there, searching through magazines and old fast-food wrappers. Maurice watched him and John Wesley continued to work his way through the room closing the blinds. He was at the window by the front door when Bean found what he was looking for and stabbed Maurice three times in the side with a ballpoint pen and then stepped back. A gasp was audible from Sheri but nothing more. She had risen up off the couch and stood now looking down at Maurice while Bean hovered over him, the pen held in his fist with his thumb pressed down over the blunt end. Maurice was crying and looking at his side where the blood was beginning to show.

“He’s not coming back here,” Bean said.

“He doesn’t have anywhere to go,” Maurice said, but even his voice sounded like it didn’t believe him. He was shaking his head and holding a hand tight to his side. “Okay,” he said, his other hand held prostrate in the air.

Bean moved toward him again and Maurice pushed himself off the couch and faltered a bit as he tried to get his feet beneath him. He was holding one hand to his side and when he turned away from Bean, John Wesley was there.

There was a brief sob and John Wesley felt the weight of Maurice’s body fall against him, but there was little else for John Wesley to do but stand there. Bean drawn up behind Maurice and the blood now on the floor at John Wesley’s feet as Maurice collapsed into him and Bean went to work with the ballpoint.

When it was done Bean rose and let the pen roll off his fingers and fall to the floor. Blood was on Bean’s face and in his hair. He ran one hand through the loose blond strands that had come out of place but it only helped to smear the blood farther along through his hair.

John Wesley looked away and then went back to the television, where he’d left the cheese and crackers. He sat on the edge of the coffee table and ate them one at a time. Bean was in the bathroom and John Wesley listened to the water come on as Bean cleaned the blood from his hands and face.

Sheri had moved to one corner of the room, where John Wesley—eating crackers, making an effort to put cheese spread on each—watched her slide down the wall till she crumpled into herself on the floor, her knees pulled to her chest and her eyes buried in her bare arms. “He tried to hurt Patrick,” was all John Wesley could think to say.

Sheri looked up at him. “What do you think Bean will do when he finds Patrick?”

“That’s up to Patrick,” John Wesley said. He looked away, running his eyes over the room, listening to the splash of water from the bathroom sink.

On the floor Maurice was still alive—just barely so. And when he started to pull himself little by little across the floor, John Wesley paused, his eyes oscillating between Bean in the bathroom and Sheri in the corner, then he looked to where Maurice had managed to cover a few inches of ground on his way to the door.

John Wesley wanted to say something to Bean but then thought better of it. Instead he got up from the coffee table and walked to where Maurice lay, struggling for escape, his chin upturned with the side of his face flat on the floor and his eyes looking toward the door. Each breath flaring his nostrils as he put one hand out and then the other, trying for a solid grip on the floor.

Bean came out of the bathroom with a towel in one hand and with his other caught Sheri by the throat as she tried to make a run for the back door. He should have been angry but he wasn’t, the pulse of Sheri’s neck felt in the skin of his palm as he made a slow turn of his head, taking in the room. John Wesley there beside Maurice, the blood spreading on the floor, and John Wesley crouched on his haunches like a little boy studying a snail making its way across a distance too far to travel.

Chapter 13

GARY WAS THERE IN the prison parking lot when Driscoll came out. The two U.S. marshals were there with him, too.

Gary stood next to the fence, smiling now and watching Driscoll as the guard showed him out onto the lot. The marshals a couple hundred feet away by their vehicle.

“These marshals have been looking for you.”

“Looks like they found me,” Driscoll said. “They ask you to come along? Help them track me down?”

“Thought you would have at least picked up your calls the last couple days,” Gary said.

“I’ve got nothing for them,” Driscoll said. His eyes moved over the two men at the other end of the lot and then came back to Gary. “It’s not my case, it’s theirs.”

Gary grinned. “You worried they’re going to take the glory away from you? All these years and nothing to show for it?”

“No,” Driscoll said. “You’re right. I don’t have anything. I wish I did but I don’t.” The guard latched the gate behind him and Driscoll felt alone and exposed in the lot, the marshals both on their phones but looking to where Driscoll stood now. “Plus, there’s always the worry that if I did have something the information might end up in the wrong hands.”

Gary fell into step next to Driscoll as they crossed the lot, walking away from the prison gates. “These men are trying to find two escaped convicts,” Gary said. “I’m just doing my part. If they’re looking for Patrick, and Bobby gets in the way, that’s something I have to live with.”

“The way you lived with Patrick being in prison,” Driscoll said.

“Be nice, Driscoll. Patrick went to prison for smuggling drugs. He was the sheriff and he got caught. That’s all.”

“You got a job out of it, though.”

“And so did Bobby,” Gary said, his voice drawn tight and his jaw rigid as they crossed the lot.

“I know you’ve been waiting on Patrick to get out,” Driscoll said. “Everyone except maybe Bobby has. And now he’s the one in trouble.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gary said.

“Yes, you do.” Driscoll looked ahead to where the marshals had taken notice of him. He didn’t know what to tell them. Whatever Patrick’s cell mate John had told them yesterday, it hadn’t been enough. Now he had something for them. Something that could help them all, but Driscoll didn’t know if he could share anything with them while Gary was still helping them out.

He watched one of the marshals drop his phone to his pocket and start to walk toward him. Driscoll pulled his own phone up and looked at the blank display. He pulled up short with Gary still next to him. Driscoll pretended to answer. “They don’t really care about Bobby, do they?”

Gary looked back at Driscoll, the marshal still fifty feet away. “They’ve got a job to do and they’re trying to do it.”

“Just like you,” Driscoll said.

“Yes, just like me.”

PATRICK PULLED THE truck off at the exit in Everett. He was hungry and he was having second thoughts. The diner he pulled up to had a counter running the length of the restaurant and at the end near the bathroom there was a pay phone. When he came into the place he could smell the potatoes going on the grill in the back. He sat at the counter and ordered coffee.

No idea what he would do next and a fear growing inside him that all he’d done to get to this point would amount to nothing. The money he’d saved just another shackle around his life, holding him back from the hopes he’d had for the future. Now he wanted to get home to Silver Lake. He was worried about that dead space on the other end of the phone that morning. He was worried about what it might mean for his son and Sheri.

He waited for the coffee to come, looking the menu over and watching the grill man behind the counter. The potatoes were making his mouth water and he ordered a big skillet of hash browns with a side of bacon as soon as the waitress came back with the coffee.

The turnoff for Silver Lake forty miles to the north and he thought about this for a long time. Drinking his coffee cup dry and then calling for another. He didn’t know what to do anymore. The phone at the end of the diner sitting there and a real need to just call Bobby and Sheri and tell them both what he’d been doing these last few days.

The only thing stopping him was the certainty that he’d be going back to prison the moment he made the call. He knew Driscoll was probably still out there looking for him. He’d switched cars three times since he’d left Silver Lake and he couldn’t be sure of anything really, but he was almost positive whoever had been on the other end of Maurice’s phone hadn’t been the law.

He didn’t know what to do and he looked behind him, out on the interstate going by just beyond the diner’s big windows. He didn’t know one damn thing, and he was a fool to have thought he did.

Up above, over the counter, there was a television going and he watched some soap opera play out in silence on the screen. Lots of people crying and a bunch of actors who looked like they’d never lived a day of their lives in the real world.

He looked away at the interstate again and then turned and watched the grill man. Patrick was jumpy and he looked it. Nothing he could do but try to sit still. The waitress came over with more coffee.

“You going far today?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Just up the road.”

“Well, you look like you’re worried the freeway is going to get away from you.” She filled his coffee to the top and then stood there at the counter. “It’s not going anywhere, honey.”

Patrick gave a polite laugh. Even his laugh had nerves in it and he looked again at the interstate. He had to stop doing that. He thought of the money again and all the trouble it had brought him. “Just a reunion I have to be at this afternoon,” he said.

“I hate those,” the waitress said. “How long has it been?”

“Twelve years.”

The waitress whistled and behind her the bell rang in the kitchen. When she came back with his food she said, “I hope you didn’t leave anyone waiting at the altar.”

“No, nothing like that. Nothing that special.”

“That’s good,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine then.” She asked him if he needed anything else and when he said no, she walked away down the counter and started pouring coffee for one of the other customers.

Patrick ate and watched the soap opera. Well aware that at any moment their perfect little world would start to fall apart around them, if it hadn’t already begun.

Chapter 14

JOHN WESLEY SAT NAKED on the coffee table staring at the fireplace. His skin had dried but the damp of the shower was still in his hair. Maurice was dead. Patrick was gone and they were running out of options. All they had now was Sheri and she wasn’t much better than a mute. Her hands and mouth taped with some duct tape Bean had found, she lay on the bed in Maurice’s room. John Wesley only able to see her spine where she’d turned away from him on the bed.

Gathering a few of the magazines together he approached the fireplace and squatted, crumpling paper in his fists and then rolling each new ball out onto the ash-stained cement. With a lighter he lit the collection of balled paper and watched it burn, feeding new pages from the magazine into the fireplace as it was needed.

Naked, he roamed the house looking for combustibles. When he passed the bathroom door he heard the shower going and the low croon of Bean singing to himself. Ignoring Sheri, John Wesley went on into Maurice’s room and found a wooden shoehorn in the closet. Next he took a cutting board and a pair of wooden salad spoons from the kitchen. For a long time he stood in front of the small fire and fed the wood into the flames, watching how each new item stained and blackened in the heat. The feel of warmth so good on his skin.

When Bean came out of the bathroom in his suit, John Wesley was breaking down the dining room chairs one leg at a time and feeding them to the fire. Bean simply stared at John Wesley until the big man turned and smiled at him, then went back to breaking down the dining room chairs.

Bean left and went into Maurice’s room and pulled Sheri to her feet. He brought her out and put her on the bloodstained couch and then went back into Maurice’s room. He selected some clothes and laid them out for John Wesley. When Bean came back out into the living room he told the big man to go dress and then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water from the faucet, staying close enough that he could keep his eyes on Sheri. It was a beautiful day, he thought. Out the window above the sink there was nothing but high blue sky and the sun just past its midpoint for the day.

When he returned to the living room John Wesley was dressed and standing over Maurice. A look of horror on Sheri’s face as she watched the big man squat and extend a hand toward the body. A skin had formed at the edge of the blood pool and John Wesley put a finger to it like a skater about to shove off across a half-frozen lake.

With four of the burning chair legs Bean went into Maurice’s bedroom and placed them beneath the bed frame. When he was done he called for John Wesley and waited while the big man dragged Maurice in by his ankles. They were hoisting him onto his mattress when they heard the knocking begin on the front door, the smoke already starting to roll up from beneath the bed.

Chapter 15

THE DRIVE FROM MONROE to Seattle was forty minutes if Driscoll kept the speed limit. If he ran the sirens it was thirty minutes, no accounting for traffic and the side streets he’d have to find his way through. He’d already lost enough time dealing with the marshals and Gary, and on top of that he’d taken his own time thinking it through—thinking what would happen to Patrick or Drake—before he made the decision not to tell the marshals what he knew.

He hit traffic merging onto the 405 and rode the bumper of the car in front of him for five minutes before Driscoll popped the sirens and sped past, one tire riding the grass and the other on the road.

He was being too cautious and he knew it. If Patrick’s cell mate was right then Driscoll might already be too late. He ran up on a driver in the HOV lane and flashed his lights, veering around him and hitting ninety as he passed.

The big software buildings went by on his right as he came down the 405 and sped through Bellevue. Twelve years, he thought, it was a lot of time to pursue one case. Gary and Patrick both wrapped up in the same thing and neither of them talking. Now Gary was helping the marshals while Driscoll tried to avoid them. And he knew they wouldn’t believe him, not after all he’d done to try to keep them away from this case.

Driscoll took the exit for I-90 and came around toward Seattle. The speedometer at ninety-five as he hit the bridge across Lake Washington, the city just on the other side.

DRAKE STOOD ON the porch. Down at the cross street a group of boys on bicycles were turning and turning. He didn’t know how long he’d watched them before he blinked. His eyes gone dry and a sense that he’d lost himself somewhere behind on the road over the mountains, or perhaps even before.

He knew standing there on the porch that he wasn’t thinking straight. The sight of the money in the grave had shaken something up in him. Everything he’d learned from Morgan, Drake’s own desperation to get Sheri back, and the anger he felt for his father all competing for space inside his mind. The thoughts crowded up, each yelling for the attention Drake didn’t have time to give.

He wet his lips, searching down the street for some sign he was in the right place. No one came to the door and he bent to the side window and tried to see what he could, but there was nothing for him—the shades drawn across every piece of glass and the interior of the house a complete mystery.

At the end of the block he watched the boys turn once, then twice. Nothing on the street to say Drake was in the right place. All that mattered now was Sheri. The money was nothing to him.

Whatever Patrick had done, wherever he was, it just didn’t matter to Drake anymore. A third of Drake’s life had gone by without knowing who his father really was and he realized at some point it had stopped mattering to him. Patrick made his own mistakes and Drake chasing after him wasn’t going to make them any better.

Drake looked to the windows again. Nothing to see but his own reflection in the glass—a slim figure standing somewhere between fog and light. His face as nondescript as a mannequin in a shop window. He stood staring at himself for half a minute before he turned, looking again toward the street, wondering if Morgan had been wrong about the place, when the door opened behind him.

By the time he got his body around, John Wesley already had him by his shirt and was dragging him through the doorway into the house. The smell of fire somewhere close by. Drake tried to get a grip but he found himself lifted from the ground and slammed into the wall once, then twice. The plaster cracking as his body bounced and he heard his service weapon clatter and slide away.

He lay on the floor trying to get his breath and then he was lifted once again. A brief feeling of falling as he went over. The floor coming up fast, blood all across the floorboards though Drake couldn’t tell if it was his.

PATRICK THOUGHT ABOUT running. He rolled the bottom of the coffee mug around on the counter, listening to the sound. He’d finished off the hash browns and he was working on the bacon. Dredging it through a small pool of syrup he’d poured himself on the plate.

The waitress was away having a smoke and had told him if he needed anything to ask the grill man. Patrick watched the man work for a moment. His back was to Patrick, chopping something up on a cutting board. Patrick looked to the door again, and the interstate farther on. Again he thought about running.

For the first time in a long time he felt scared. He felt like those characters up there on the soap opera. Fragile. Unaccustomed to life outside the walls.

He pushed his plate away. The sound of it on the counter loud in the silence of the diner. The grill man turned and looked at him and Patrick brought out a dollar and asked the man for change.

He rattled the quarters in his hand as he came off the stool and walked back toward the bathrooms. Patrick stopped at the pay phone and dialed the number. It was the only number he knew by heart. A number that hadn’t changed in twelve years and one he’d dialed a thousand times before.

He listened to the call go through. It was answered after the third ring and the voice there was familiar to him, but not the voice he was expecting. “Luke?” Patrick said.

A brief pause while the deputy cleared his throat. “Gary told me to wait around and see if anyone called. I didn’t think it would be you, Pat.”

“What do you mean you didn’t think it would be me? Where’s Bobby, Luke? Where’s Sheri?” Patrick leaned into the phone; he had the receiver held tight to the side of his face and his eyes scanned back over the diner. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. Why are you at my house?”

“They’re missing. It looks like they were taken, both Gary and Driscoll are out searching for them.”

“Together?”

“Two marshals were here. Gary went with them and Driscoll is on his own.”

With his free hand Patrick pinched two fingers over his eyes until the blackness swam behind his lids. He didn’t understand what was happening. “Marshals?”

“I thought you knew. I thought that was why you were calling. They killed a girl in town. Stuffed her in the back of a car with another man they’d killed the day before,” Luke said. “It was in the news last night.”

“What are you doing at my house, Luke?”

“I’m sorry about this, Pat.”

“Again,” Patrick said, “why are you at my house, Luke?”

“Gary told me to wait—I thought you’d have seen it on the news—in case Sheri or Bobby showed or the two men came back.”

“Who?” Patrick managed to say. He was holding the phone tight, the plastic growing slippery with his own sweat.

“They’d been following you since you got out. The marshals said it was two prisoners you knew in Monroe. They got transferred a week ago and killed one of the guards in transit. I’m sorry,” Luke said. “I thought you would have known all this.”

“I guess I haven’t been paying that much attention.”

“None of us knew anything about it till the marshals showed up. I guess they thought the men had gone over into Idaho or up to Spokane.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“What do you mean, Pat?”

“The car they found the bodies in.”

“It was a black Town Car.”

He told Luke to hold on. He took the phone away from his ear and let it dangle by his thigh. He heard Luke call his name several times but Patrick wouldn’t answer. From where he stood he could see Maurice’s truck out there in the lot. The interstate just fifty yards farther on.

THE HOUSE WAS burning. Driscoll stopped the Impala in the middle of the street and was out of the car and up the stairs before the heat turned him away. The temperature too much and his hand raised across his face as he backed away to the sidewalk. Flames already beginning to show at several windows toward the back. The drapes in the front on fire and the glass panes crashing to the porch.

All down the street there were people beginning to come out of their homes. Several of them on their cell phones. Driscoll looked around at it all. The rush of the flames heard now like a constant wind. Neighbors gesturing with one arm raised toward the flames as they tried to make their voices heard over the crackle of wood and heat.

Driscoll came back to the car and put his elbows down across the roof, cradling his face in his hands. So close, he thought, always so close.

In the distance he heard the sound of fire trucks. He turned and looked back toward the house. Flames were beginning to come through the roof. This is the house, he thought. This has to be the house.

Up on the main street the first fire engine made a wide turn to get the corner. He knew he should stay. Already the neighbors were looking to him like he was the first part of some rescue. Only Driscoll knew he wasn’t and that if he stayed he’d have to answer the question of what he was doing there in the first place.

Up at the corner the fire truck had come up short on its turn and was reversing out into traffic to bring the big square body straight so it could fit down the side street. He dropped down into the seat and brought the transmission into drive. Several boys on bicycles staring at him as he went past, moving fast with the grille lights of his Impala pulsing a silent flash. The big red body of the fire truck pulling to a stop in front of the house all he saw before he went around the corner.

He parked a block down and sat there. For a full minute he sat there staring out at the street through the front windshield. “Fuck—fuck—fuck!” he yelled, beating his fists against the wheel in quick succession.

When he looked up at his own reflection in the rearview mirror he saw the blood in his face, the skin pulled red with tension. He felt the beat of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, wetting his throat, and the slow rise and fall of his chest. His hands now resting, useless, palms up on his thighs, with his head played back against the headrest.

He looked back in the direction he’d come from. How did he even know Patrick had come here?

“Because the house is burning,” he said, speaking aloud like it wasn’t he who had asked the question.

“It could be a coincidence. It could mean anything.”

“But it doesn’t mean anything, it means something,” Driscoll said.

Driscoll pulled himself up in the seat. He had his hands gripped on either side of the steering wheel. He hadn’t seen the Toyota Patrick took from the casino lot anywhere on the street. Maybe Patrick never came this way. Maybe John was wrong about Maurice. Maybe he was wrong about Patrick.

Driscoll looked up again at his eyes in the mirror. He was tired. He could see that. He was failing. Failing Bobby and failing Sheri, but mostly he was failing himself.

The house was burning and the Toyota Patrick had stolen from the casino lot was nowhere on the block.

Ten minutes later he found the Camry parked five blocks away. The window was broken out on the driver’s side and Driscoll opened the door and sat in the old Toyota examining the wire harness pulled free below the steering column.

Driscoll shook his head, almost like he didn’t believe it himself. Where the fuck was Patrick?

Two more fire trucks went by while he sat there and he was staring up at the empty space where they had been when his cell phone rang. He checked the display. It was a number he didn’t know and after a second he picked up the call.

“Agent Driscoll?” a voice asked.

He answered, listening, waiting for the voice to go on.

“It’s Luke, the deputy from Silver Lake. Patrick just called and he wants you to call him back.”

Chapter 16

BEAN SAT SHOTGUN WHILE John Wesley drove. Drake’s cruiser radio was turned on and Bean listened as the codes came in but as far as he could tell none of them had anything to do with them.

He’d taken the jacket off Drake and gone through the pockets. One cell phone, a set of keys, a wallet, and a note in a plastic envelope that looked to be from Patrick to Drake. He read the note twice. When he was done he looked up and watched the road for several beats and then read the note again.

He looked to the back, where Drake lay unconscious in the rear cage, bleeding from a split of skin over his right eye. His face badly bruised where it rested against his wife’s lap. And Sheri sitting there with a look of hate on her face and her hands still duct-taped.

He pursed his lips and kissed the air, watching as Sheri turned away.

John Wesley came to the on-ramp for the interstate and looked to Bean for direction.

Bean studied the note in its plastic envelope. “It’s time we got a few things straight,” Bean said, looking to the back, where Sheri sat.

Chapter 17

MORGAN SAT OUT ON the porch for a long time before he went in. He made fry bread in the pan and then got out some of his preserves and ate the sweet jelly slathered on the warm bread. Except for the warmth from the propane burner the house was cold and he walked back outside to sit in the sun and take in the land.

A muddy patch of earth sat halfway up the hill from the rains two days before. Stained into the gravel. He leaned back in his chair and brought one leg over the other. Up above a hawk was circling over something in the fields and he thought of his snares and wondered if it was something he’d caught.

He was tired and his lids dropped once, then again. The hunting jacket buttoned over his chest and the collar turned up. When he came awake he didn’t know what time it was and he had to take the hour from the sun. The hawk gone from the sky.

He lit a cigarette with a match and then sat there till the paper felt hot between his fingers. He mulled it over for a while before he went back inside and found the box of bird shot Drake had left out on the table. He looked this over and then crossed to where he’d put the shotgun away. He broke open the breech and looked in on the two shells. He closed the breech and found his truck keys.

PATRICK SIGNALED THE grill man and asked for the bill. A minute later the grill man came back with the waitress behind him.

“Sorry,” Patrick said. “That reunion just got moved up and I’ll be taking off soon.”

“Don’t worry about it, honey.” She was at the register now and she put in the figures and brought up the total. When she came back over he could smell the cigarette smoke on her. “I hope it all turns out for you.”

“I hope so, too.” He brought out a few bills from his wallet and laid them over the counter. It was enough to cover the total and then some. He didn’t have anything left in his wallet but a few old receipts and expired credit cards. The leather still smelled like the lockup. “Can I have a refill on the coffee?” he said.

She poured the coffee and he watched her as she did it. She’d probably be the last good memory he had in this life. After she was done he toasted her with his mug and saw the little smile come across her lips before she went to check on the other customers.

He was waiting on the phone at the other end of the diner to ring and he wasn’t surprised when it did a minute later.

He answered and Driscoll said, “I bet you weren’t planning on talking to me.”

“I wasn’t planning on ever hearing from you again.”

“Then you should have stayed where you were.”

“I think you know I didn’t have that option.”

“You’re talking about the two men who came by your house?”

“And others,” Patrick said. He held the receiver close, his back turned away from the diner.

“Maurice?”

Patrick didn’t say anything. He was still thinking about what Maurice had tried to do to him. All that time inside and Maurice had tried to cut him out of the deal.

“You still there, Patrick?”

Patrick listened to the empty sound of the phone in his hand. He could tell Driscoll was driving. “I’m here,” he said.

DRAKE WOKE IN the back of his cruiser. He lay there with his knees pushed up against the seat. His head hurt, the pain centralized over his left eyebrow. The skin hot and swollen, he held his eyes closed and he listened to the breath enter through his nose, feeling it swell in his chest and then release. When he opened his eyes he realized what had happened.

Above, through the back windows of the car, he saw telephone poles passing one after the other, the wires falling and then rising again in a never-ending series of waves. He felt the late sun on his face, and the pants he wore were hot against his thighs. But it was fading now, like it had been hotter at one point in the day. There was blood on him, too, on his pants and crusted to the front of his shirt. He could feel it under the material and on his skin.

It was only when he tried to move that he found his hands had been duct-taped behind him, and it was this movement that brought the realization of where he truly was. His wife’s thigh under his head, and the two killers in the front, Sheri looking down on him, her eyes unwavering, and Drake thinking maybe he’d been too late, maybe she was dead. And then she blinked and Drake watched a single tear roll down her cheek.

“Reunited at last,” Bean said.

MORGAN PUSHED OPEN the door and listened to the bell chime. He turned and closed the door, wooden with glass at its center. He looked out on the county road and his truck there in the gravel drive. The last time he’d been to the store there had been snow on the ground and he remembered how his truck had left muddy tracks all the way off the road and onto the drive. No more than a couple cars in the lot. Just as there were now.

The clerk was waiting for him at the counter when he turned. The clerk wiped a paper napkin across his lips and brought it away with the slight stain of mustard. Morgan knew the man’s name but simply nodded to him as he went down the first aisle, passing the Popsicle case and magazine rack on one side and the chips and soda pop on the other. He came to the back of the store and looked in on the dairy coolers there.

“You’re early,” the clerk said. He had taken another bite of the sandwich he was eating for a late lunch and he wiped at his mouth again, standing there at the counter watching Morgan.

“How do you mean?”

“Just early,” the clerk said. He took another couple bites. Finished the sandwich and then said, “You usually don’t come in till the end of the month.”

Morgan nodded at that and then looked away. The store was a mash-up of kerosene, fishing hats, T-shirts, beer, chips, hot dog buns, work pants, shoes, even horse feed and birdseed. Anything and everything was sold there and if they didn’t have it they could get it in a week. Morgan liked that about the place and he went down to the next aisle and looked over the fishing supplies. He’d never taken it up but he thought maybe he would someday. The green tackle box with the money inside the only piece of gear Patrick or Morgan had ever owned.

He came up the aisle and looked over the wares behind the counter. Cigarettes and lottery tickets, an old Budweiser shirt and matching hat that had hung in the store for as long as Morgan could remember. “What do you have for deer shot?” Morgan asked. He was looking over the ammunition now, about ten rows of boxes were dedicated to it and he was examining the various measurements and sizes on the boxes.

The clerk turned and looked to the place Morgan was studying. He selected two boxes and then brought them back to the counter. He laid them out for Morgan to see. “I never took you for much of a deer man, Morgan.”

“I’m not,” Morgan said.

He paid and left through the front door. The bell chiming again. When he started up his truck he could see the clerk staring at him through the glass door. Morgan reversed out and then brought the wheel straight. He ran the engine a bit hard and he heard the gravel pinging in the wheel wells.

A quarter mile on he pulled over and just sat there with the engine running. “Damn it,” he said.

When he came back into the little town he could see the shades were down at the post office and he checked his watch and then looked at the shades again. The woman’s car was still in the lot and he pulled in next to her and then went up the stairs. It took her a minute to pull back the shade and then undo the lock. “Oh, hi,” she said as he came into the small office. A little counter where she sat with the sorting room behind and about twenty wooden slots on the opposite wall for mail.

Morgan looked around the office. There was room to stand but little more. If he took more than a couple steps in any direction he’d come to a wall. “I was in town,” Morgan said.

“I see that.” She was smiling at him a bit. She wore the blue fleece vest with the eagle on the breast but little else to say she worked there. Her hair was slightly curly and the blond dye had started to go out of it, but it was still there in certain patches. Her figure was plump in the way Morgan liked; he thought about the rabbit stew again. He liked the way they had sat together and she had broken the bread with her hands and used it to clean out her bowl.

She looked him over. The counter flipped up behind her. “I have some mail for you, I guess.” She turned and went back into the mailroom, bringing the pass down behind her. For a moment she was gone. The sound of her somewhere in the back as she rummaged for the right box. “I needed something to read and I almost opened one of your packages. Looks like you got a few good books here.” She came back to the counter and set the box down on the floor. She brought up the mail and placed it on the counter between them.

He looked it over. “How can you tell they’re any good?” he asked.

She was smiling at him again. “I peeked.”

“That’s a federal crime.”

She didn’t say anything back to him. He was stone-faced and she was looking up at him and trying to decide what he meant. “I just thought—”

He broke into a laugh and he saw the relief go across her face. “Go ahead,” he said, opening the package up right there. “I’m happy to let you read any of them first.”

She took one of the books off the stack and looked it over, turning it front to back and then reading the rear flap for a time. She held it close to her chest like a schoolgirl and it made Morgan smile to look at her.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded and then began to collect his things.

He was at the door when she said, “That was nice, wasn’t it? You and me a few weeks ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “It was.”

DRISCOLL CAME INTO the diner parking lot at full speed, grille lights going, and the dust kicked up from his tires rolling past him as he came to a stop. Patrick sat there on the tailgate of a red pickup with his feet dangling over the lot. He wore the same canvas jacket and jeans Driscoll remembered him wearing at the Buck Blind. While the two days of white growth on his head and face made him look ten years older.

The Impala was parked at an angle, blocking the truck. Patrick still sitting there watching him as Driscoll got up from his car. “Raise your hands,” Driscoll said. He watched Patrick do it and then he told him to slide off the tailgate and turn around. Driscoll came around the Impala and pressed him then, bending one of Patrick’s arms back and then the other. The handcuffs out in one of Driscoll’s hands as he held Patrick’s wrists with the other.

With Patrick turned on the tailgate, Driscoll went through his pockets, throwing anything he found onto the tailgate. Inside the diner there was a waitress and a cook staring out at them. The waitress had a hand to her mouth as if something had jumped out at her.

Driscoll set Patrick down again on the tailgate, letting him lean on the metal. His legs straight out and his hands behind him in the cuffs. “Hello, Driscoll,” Patrick said.

Driscoll ignored him and ran his hands down one leg and then stood and patted down the other. When he was finished he rose and stepped back. He was looking at all that he’d taken out of Patrick’s pockets. Keys and a wallet, and a receipt from the diner inside.

Driscoll pulled Patrick up and started to walk him to the Impala.

“Easy,” Patrick said.

“You don’t fucking get it, do you, Patrick? Bobby’s gone and so is Sheri. You deserted them.”

“Slow down,” Patrick said. He made his best effort to turn and look at Driscoll but Driscoll had a good grip on his arm and levered him against the metal body of the Impala before Patrick could say more.

“Something happens to them it’s on you,” Driscoll said. He opened the door of the Impala and put one hand over Patrick’s head and put him in the backseat. He slammed the door as soon as Patrick was inside and then he went back to the truck and went through the cab.

In the glove box he found the registration and read the name. He stood and walked to the back of the tailgate and cleared Patrick’s things from the bed and then closed the tailgate. Inside the waitress and cook were still standing at the window looking out at him.

He looked the registration over again and then he walked back to the Impala and sat in the driver’s seat with his eyes up on the rearview.

“I called you,” Patrick said.

Driscoll held up the registration in his hand. “You’re a selfish son of a bitch.”

Patrick fixed on Driscoll’s eyes for a moment in the mirror and then he looked away. “What the fuck, Driscoll?”

“Bobby and his wife are missing because of you,” Driscoll said. “You don’t give a shit about anyone, do you? No one matters to you. No one should ever trust you. I just came from your buddy’s place. The house is still burning.”

Driscoll waited. He watched Patrick mull that over, he watched the muscles beneath the man’s cheeks tighten. When Patrick turned back he said, “You come all the way up here on your own, Driscoll? No one to watch your back? No one to say this ever really happened?”

“I came because you said you wanted to turn yourself in.”

“Where are the marshals?” Patrick asked. “You trying to keep me for yourself?”

“I’m trying to save your son and your daughter-in-law,” Driscoll said.

Patrick looked up at the mirror. “I know you,” he said. “I know why you came out to see me every year—deep down somewhere you think we’re the same in some way.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your marriage,” Patrick went on. “Your daughter. You think I didn’t hear about your family?”

“That has nothing to do with you.” But he knew it did. He knew in some way he needed something to show for all the time he’d taken away from his family—all the work he’d put in on this one solitary goal.

“I think you should ask yourself who deserted who,” Patrick said. “I think you should ask yourself if you’re trying to save Bobby or if you’re trying to save yourself.”

DRAKE LOOKED DOWN the long hallway, light fading away into the darkness beyond. He sat in a solitary dining room chair with his wrists still taped behind him and John Wesley’s hand resting like ten pounds of meat over one of Drake’s shoulders. Three minutes had passed since Bean took Sheri away down that hall. A door far down opening and only a sliver of light visible now as Drake strained to hear what he could from the darkness.

“What is this place?” Drake asked.

“Just the first place we found,” John Wesley said.

For a long time they’d driven east into the fading light. The night moving up through the sky and the sun disappearing behind. When it was over Drake hadn’t been able to tell where they were, or even how far they’d come, and he looked around the house now searching for some beacon of information to help him get a bearing.

Two silver candleholders sat on the table, their wicks burned almost to the metal and the wax pooled at their bases. Everything in the house seemed like something from a forgotten time. The hutch sitting there across from them with the old china plates displayed along its surface. A pile of mail by the door, built up and then toppled across the floor in a collection that seemed to take in weeks. The night out there beyond the windows like a fine silk cocooning them all within the house.

But more than any of this it was the slight odor, acrid and deep, that hung in the air that bothered Drake the most. Just beyond comprehension. Like the basement door had been left open and the fetid, black air was slowly beginning to infect the house. Like some unlucky soul had fallen and lay there still. And for the first time Drake wondered if John Wesley had meant it was the first place they’d found tonight, or if it was the first place they’d found a week before when they killed the prison guard and disappeared.

Down the hall there was a muffled scream and something crashed to the floor and moved away, the sound fading until there was only silence again. Drake tried to rise from the seat but was pressed down. He heard the scream again and he knew it was Sheri and then he heard Bean say something Drake couldn’t make out. The sound of a human body being dragged kicking across a floor and then the sound of bed springs depressing under the body of another. And then the screaming started again and did not stop.

Drake fought to get his feet beneath him but there was no moving out from beneath John Wesley’s hold. With his eyes centered down into the darkness he couldn’t do anything but listen.

“Bean wanted you to know you can stop this at any time.” John Wesley was bent down beside Drake now, speaking to him like he was speaking to a stubborn child. “It’s just money. It’s just money and nothing more.”

Drake wished he’d taken the money, he wished he’d hidden it somewhere new. But he hadn’t wanted anything to do with it then, standing there with Morgan, looking down on it like he was looking down on something that had never had the chance to live—a life that had come and gone too soon and now was better left behind. He didn’t know. And he sat there struggling under the weight of John Wesley’s hand as his mind wrestled with the fact that if he was going to keep Sheri alive he would need to give them something. He would have to tell them whatever he knew, directions possibly, Morgan, the property. If he hoped to keep his wife alive he would have to lay it out like crumbs for them to follow, little by little, feeding them and buying time. Because eventually, he knew, there would be nothing left to tell.

“I’M THE ONE who called you, Driscoll,” Patrick said again. He sat with his back resting on the rear bench seat and the yellow lights of buildings and streetlamps passing by in the night outside his window. “I’m the one trying to make things right.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Driscoll said, looking up at the rearview again. Patrick only a shadow, an outline of a human being.

“I called you for a reason, Driscoll. I didn’t call Gary or the marshals. I called you.”

“Once you’re in the lockup downtown we can talk.”

“You want to be right,” Patrick said. “I understand that. After all these years you want to prove you were right all along.”

Driscoll didn’t say anything. He was watching the interstate ahead. At sixty miles per hour they’d reach Seattle in thirty minutes. “You deserted your son twelve years ago and now you’ve done it again,” Driscoll said. “You just don’t change.”

“You’re right. I did those things. But I did them for a reason. You should understand.”

“We’re not anything alike,” Driscoll said. He could feel the blood rise in his face for a moment and the words strain at his lips.

“No,” Patrick said. “I thought maybe we were but I see now that we aren’t.”

“Good.”

Patrick shifted in the back so that he could look out the window, watching the lights of a mall until they were gone. “I messed everything up,” he said. “Do me just one favor. Bobby and Sheri are out there somewhere. If they’re looking for me I want them to know where I am.”

Driscoll looked up at the mirror. “What if they’re not looking for you? What if they were taken because of you?”

“Then I want you to let the men who took them know where they can get their money.”

Chapter 18

BEAN FLIPPED DRAKE’S PHONE open and looked at the text. He smiled a bit to himself and then held the phone to the cage for Drake to see. “What do you think?” Bean said. “Should we call him?” He was having fun with the idea, rolling it around in his head like a marble. Patrick had been picked up by Agent Driscoll, which meant one way or another Patrick was going back in.

He turned and looked behind but Drake had already gone away from him and was looking out on the fields. They drove on the county roads now, keeping to the speed limit, taking Drake’s directions turn by turn and avoiding the highway. What trees they saw on the sides of the road were squat as the grass, everything else nothing but black ink spilled across the landscape.

No one had said anything in a long time. Sheri off to herself now, her head leaned to the window, looking groggy. Bean knew he hadn’t done much to her except throw her around a bit. Perhaps a little too hard at times. Just a little roughhousing, nothing more than he’d do to a dog that had snapped at his hand. Some liked it that way, they saw it as fun. Others didn’t, and Bean was still deciding which one Sheri had been.

“What will we find out here?” Bean asked. He spoke to himself, looking to the back to see if Drake was listening.

Bean toggled down until he found the text message again. A single line from Agent Driscoll to Drake, “I’m with Patrick.” He put the call through and waited. When Driscoll picked up he told him to put Patrick on. “Hello,” Patrick said, and then, “Hello? Hello?” Bean was enjoying himself. He liked listening to the desperation grow in Patrick’s voice.

Bean said Patrick’s name and then listened as Patrick tried to get his bearings. “Hello… Hello? Hello?”

“You didn’t think you’d hear from us so soon,” Bean said. He looked to the back and got a thrill to see Drake watching now, listening to Bean’s half of the conversation, trying to appear as if he wasn’t straining to hear what Patrick had to say on the other end. “I wanted to let you know we’re okay now. Me and John Wesley are just fine. I thought we should clear the air on that one.”

“That’s good,” Patrick said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Well, I don’t want to take up too much time,” Bean said. “I just thought we owed you a call. We’re sitting here with the deputy and his wife. I wanted you to know that. I wanted to make it very clear to you.”

“I think we all want the same thing.”

“How do you figure?”

“I owe you,” Patrick said. “You know it. I never forgot.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Bean said. “But you know, I can call you back in a couple hours. Don’t want to take up too much of your time.”

“Wait,” Patrick said. “Just hold on. Let me say something to Bobby. That’s all. You understand, don’t you, Bean?”

Bean looked to the back. It was obvious to him that the deputy hadn’t heard anything of what his father was saying. He held the phone off his ear now and he met Drake’s eyes. “You want to tell your father you love him?” Bean asked. “After all these years I know he’d like to hear it.” Bean held the phone to the cage and watched Drake come forward.

“I don’t know,” Drake said. “I guess I just want to say we’ll have to go fishing some other time.” He raised his eyes to Bean and then slipped away from the cage, back to his corner, where he looked out the window again.

Bean studied him for a time. The sound of Patrick breathing on the other end of the line. Bean considered it all, wondering if the risk had been worth it. And then deciding it had not, he closed the phone.

For a long time he sat and watched the centerline come toward them out of the darkness, one yellow dash at a time. “Fuck the speed limit,” Bean said. “Let’s just get there.”

Chapter 19

“HE’S GONE,” PATRICK SAID. He’d come forward in the backseat with his hands cuffed behind him and his ear to the phone. Now he fell away, leaning his weight to the rear seat and watching the road ahead.

Driscoll brought the phone back and stared at the screen. The whole call had taken less than a minute. “The man who called from Bobby’s phone?” Driscoll asked.

“He’s one of them, the more dangerous of the two. He’s one of the men who came into Bobby’s house a few nights ago.”

Driscoll couldn’t decide how to go on. He had Patrick now. It didn’t seem like any of this should be happening. “They didn’t want you?” Driscoll asked.

He saw Patrick thinking it over. “They don’t need me anymore,” he said.

Driscoll looked up at the rearview. “What do you mean by that?”

“I thought if I called you it would all go away,” Patrick said. “I thought they’d give up on me, or they’d come for me. I didn’t think they’d have Bobby or Sheri. I never thought it would happen like this. I mean I knew it was a possibility but I just didn’t—I couldn’t…”

“As a former lawman, you of all people have to understand why I’m taking you in.”

Patrick shook his head. He was looking out the window. He wouldn’t look at Driscoll. “You’ve waited a long time for this,” Patrick said. “And you’re going to take me in for a stolen car?”

“It is what it is.”

“That drug money,” Patrick said. “I stole it. I’m telling you right now. I’m confessing it to you. You want that, don’t you? You want to be right after all these years.”

Driscoll had him in the rearview. “Don’t bullshit me.”

“I’m not. I’ll show you where it is. Everyone will know it was you who figured it out. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Driscoll looked up at the mirror again. Patrick was waiting on him. Driscoll thought about the years he’d wanted only this, about the years he’d spent avoiding his family, sacrificing relationships with his wife and daughter so that he could put himself in this moment. And then he thought about what it would mean when there were no more excuses—when one day he might finally go home and sit at the table with his family and have a dinner. And he wondered if he was too late or if maybe there was still time.

“What’s it going to be?” Patrick said.

THE DOOR TO the woodstove was open partially and Morgan sat with his back to it, his legs up on another chair and an old blanket stretched from his lap to his feet. He was faced toward the door, and out the window, he’d watched the sun descend and then thirty minutes later the light completely go out of the sky. Now only the reflection of the kerosene lamp on the table could be seen in the glass, suspended there in the darkness of the window, and his own shadowed ghost on the periphery.

The books he’d received in the mail were stacked close at hand on the table and he looked at them from time to time but didn’t move from his seat. Again, he thought of the woman and then just as quickly pushed the thought away.

On the floor lay a tin plate with what remained of his meal—taken early in the day, almost as soon as he’d come through the door. Just a bit of fry bread with some cooked meat and some tomatoes he’d grown and then dried over the past summer. He was looking at this, thinking how he needed to get up and wash the plate, when he saw the small pink nose pop from beneath the counter on which he cooked.

He’d seen the mouse before. The sound of it there behind the counter, trying for whatever crumb he’d dropped. And now he sat as still and quiet as he could, watching first the nose appear and then the head. The mouse as big as his thumb and colored brown as the winter fields.

It came out from under the counter and then stood, sniffing the air. The small whiskers twitching and the little claws clutched in front of its chest like a dog watching a ball raised high overhead.

For a time the two of them sat there, the mouse on its haunches and Morgan in his chair. Then as if Morgan was not there at all the mouse moved in a straight line for the plate. The miniature body low as it came across the floor and the black eyes focused solely on the leftover crumbs of Morgan’s meal.

Morgan didn’t stir and he watched the mouse come up short, testing the air again, and then, satisfied, move the remaining foot toward the plate. It sat there on the tin for a minute, holding one of the larger crumbs between its paws, working the bread down like a man eating corn off the cob.

It finished the crumb and moved on to the next. The mouse close enough that Morgan could hear its claws skittering across the tin. He watched and waited. There was no rush and he didn’t want to scare the mouse away.

The animal ate a third crumb and then went sniffing around the edges of the plate. Finding one it came up on its back legs again and stood gnawing at it. Morgan didn’t move, but he saw the ears of the animal turn up. The mouse gone rigid for a moment, standing there, nose poised in the air and ears flaring one way and then another. The tin was the only thing to sound as the mouse flitted back across the floor and disappeared behind the counter. Crumbs left uneaten on the plate and Morgan looking now toward his own reflection in the window glass.

Chapter 20

THE KILLERS HAD PARKED the patrol car just beyond the ridge and they went on foot to the summit, looking down on the small cabin. Bean carried the Walther in one hand and Drake’s service weapon in the other. John Wesley carried the shotgun they’d taken from Drake’s cruiser a couple days before. They stood watching the smoke feed up into the air in a blue moonlit plume. Nothing else to see at the base of the slope except the shift of the cottonwoods in the wind.

They stood without speaking and studied the terrain. When they were done they went together down the slope and separated as they came upon the light spilling from within the cabin onto the grasslands.

Chapter 21

THE DOOR SWUNG OPEN on its hinges with such force that it bounced back almost completely, leaving a sliver of the night visible beyond and the bulk of John Wesley standing there. Without moving from his seat, Morgan raised the shotgun from beneath the blanket and emptied one barrel into the wood frame of the door, catching John Wesley in the left arm. Splinters of wood all across the floor and the big man taking a step back with the deer shot in his flesh. A look on his face that Morgan could only guess was complete surprise.

John Wesley faltered a bit and then came forward. With his good arm he pushed the door open and stood looking in on Morgan. Morgan’s feet now planted on the floor, the woodstove behind him, and the old bird gun still in his hands. The bore smoking slightly and the blanket fallen to the floor.

John Wesley looked to the window over Morgan’s shoulder and in the same moment Morgan saw a piece of his firewood come through the window. Glass all over the floor and the stove wood rolling to a stop, Bean just beyond clearing the remaining glass from the frame with his pistol.

When Morgan turned back to the door John Wesley was raising his shotgun. Morgan pulled the trigger and the second shell of deer shot went full into the big man’s body, laying him out on the floor.

Morgan was running before he knew it.

Chapter 22

BEAN WAS HALFWAY THROUGH the window when Morgan took off. All he’d wanted was a chance to talk with Morgan. He didn’t want to kill the man, at least not until he’d gotten the money.

He had one hand on the sill and a leg through the opening and he was trying to keep his cool. But the only friend he had in the world, John Wesley, was laid out there on the floor and he wasn’t moving. Bean got the other leg over and he went through into the room just as Morgan came off the porch. Off balance and running, Bean raised the Walther and took aim.

Morgan there ten feet from the stairs, the light from the open door spilling onto the prairie. Morgan moving for the shadows. Bean pulled the trigger and felt the gun buck slightly. Morgan fell out of the light and into the darkness. Bean had no idea if he’d hit the man or not.

He came down off the porch with the pistol still pointed out on the prairie, Drake’s own service weapon now tucked into the waistband of his pants.

Grass moved in the wind, and farther on the sound of the high thin branches of the cottonwoods clacking together. Bean’s eyes trying to adjust. He came to the edge of the light and stood with the gun in a sweep of the land.

Nothing but the high grass to see.

For what felt like an hour he stood there looking out on the night. And then he backed away, his finger still held down on the trigger, the gun warmed in his grip. He came back into the cabin and sat for what seemed a long time with John Wesley. Bean’s legs crossed and the tail of his suit jacket spread behind him on the floor. One hand with the Walther in his lap and the other laid palm down on John Wesley’s back. The big man still warm and his face away from Bean, cheek down on the floor.

Nothing Bean could do.

Bean was rocking slightly and watching the open door and the night beyond when he rose and left his friend behind on the floor of the cabin.

Chapter 23

DRAKE AND SHERI PUT their backs to the seat and kicked at the cage. Drake counted down the time and then both of them shot out their soles at the cage a final time. Nothing moved. The car sat there rocking slightly on its springs and the sound of their breath was the only thing to be heard there in the darkness.

He looked over at her but there was little to see. The silver light of the moon luminescent on her features, the bruises the men had left nothing but dark marks on her white skin. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I trusted Patrick, too,” Sheri said. “It wasn’t just you.”

They’d heard three shots come from over the edge of the hill and then nothing for a very long time. He moved and kicked at the glass of the side window, feeling the body of the car shake. The bottom of his foot felt numb from the twenty or more times he’d tried to push through the rear cage.

He stopped to catch his breath. The night cold had seeped into the car. His lungs pumping in his chest and the steam rising, then disappearing in the air before him. Free to move, he went to the window and looked out on the night as if he might find some help there.

All he’d told the two men was that the money was down there. There was no other choice. It was all he could think of to buy time, and he looked out on the crest of the hill, hoping Morgan had taken his advice to clear out for a day or two. Just go on into town and see if his friend could give him a place to sit this all out. But the guns going off down the hill suggested otherwise.

Sometime on the ride over he’d managed to get his hands free and he’d loosened the tape from around Sheri’s wrist as soon as the two killers had disappeared from sight. Now he tried to pry away the clear glass-like polycarbonate separating the front seat from the back. All of it supported on a metal frame that had been bolted to the floor at his feet. He didn’t have anything but his own strength to rely on and his strength wasn’t enough.

WHEN BEAN FOUND Morgan he sat at the bottom of the cut with his back to a cottonwood trunk and his legs splayed out on the ground. He’d broken the bird gun open and it lay on his lap with the chambers exposed and the two empty shells in the dirt to his right. There was a pain in his shoulder like a knife blade any time he moved and he sat there trying to calm it away with one hand raised to the meat at his breast and the other out on the ground like an anchor.

He looked up at Bean as he came out of the trees, moving down the slight incline to where Morgan rested. Bean carried a pistol before him and he stopped five feet away from Morgan, the barrel of the gun aimed off to the side. Morgan could see Bean was looking him over and making his judgments.

“You were just sitting up waiting for us,” Bean said. He moved a little closer, squatting so that they could look each other over at the same level. The gun still in his hand.

“I’ve been sitting up waiting for years now,” Morgan said. A wave of pain passed through him and he closed his eyes tight. When he opened them again Bean was still there. Morgan gave him a smile.

“John Wesley is dead,” Bean said.

“I expected he was.”

“We could have just sat down and talked.”

“I know how those talks go with you,” Morgan said.

Bean looked from the open breech of the shotgun to the empty shells in the dirt by Morgan’s thigh. “You and Patrick, huh?” Bean laughed a bit to himself, looking back the way he’d come from. Light up the hill where the cabin bled a thin gray tone into the night air. “I would have thought you were too old for something like this.”

“Turns out I’m not,” Morgan said. He moved a bit, taking his hand away from his chest, and watching the way Bean looked him over. The man hadn’t moved except to kneel there in front of him.

“You were always good to us, Morg,” Bean said. “I didn’t mean to shoot you.”

“You didn’t.”

“Then what’s wrong with you?”

There was sweat growing on Morgan’s forehead and upper lip and it felt cold in the night. “Just old,” Morgan said. “Just sitting here catching my breath.”

Bean gave a disappointed smile. He rose and slipped the pistol into the waistband at his back. For a second he stood looking down the stream and then he turned and fixed Morgan again with a stare. “Where’s the money, Morgan?”

“There is no money.”

Bean knelt again, pulling the suit jacket away where it bunched between his stomach and thighs. Morgan watched him and thought of how the man reminded him of some gunfighter in a novel, pushing the jacket back over the grip of the gun before taking his paces.

“I read the note from Patrick to his son,” Bean said. “I have the deputy and his wife back there in the car. I can tell you right now it’s you or him.”

Morgan thought that over. The pain was coming over him in waves, and he thought again about the woman in town. He thought about Patrick. He didn’t know what to think. Morgan’s heart doing the stutter-step inside his chest.

With one hand Morgan felt around on his jeans until he found the spare shells in his pocket. He knew Bean was watching but he didn’t care. His hand was slow and it shook too much but he got one shell out and then another. The two shells in the palm of his hand and a dry rasp now felt on his tongue as he tried to push himself up.

“Don’t,” Bean said.

Morgan got one shell in his fingers and fed it down into the bore. He was working on the other one when Bean put his hand out and cupped his palm over Morgan’s fist. The two frozen there like that, Bean kneeling before Morgan and Morgan sitting there with his back to the cottonwood trunk.

“You’re an old fool,” Bean said.

Morgan looked up at him. The words not coming and a dry heat seizing up in his chest just above the heart, his insides gone solid and heavy as cement.

THROUGH THE CRUISER windshield Drake watched the pale indent in the sky. His grandfather’s cabin out there just beyond the ridge and no shot or sound for more than thirty minutes. He sat forward on the edge of the backseat—one hand to the cage—watching the place Bean and John Wesley had stood. There was nothing for him to do. His arms ached and his legs felt swollen from trying to kick out the doors and windows. His bad knee pulsing like a metronome.

The keys had been left in the ignition, but the car was not on. There was no light but that of the stars and what little escaped from the cabin beyond the ridge. Drake’s eyes had long since adjusted and he could see now far away over the grass. Watching the way the moon came down silver and glossy over the fresh shoots of spring. Far away he saw the occasional headlight break over the top of a hill on the county road and then go away again.

“What do you think?” Sheri asked.

“Morgan?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t know what had happened to Morgan and he went on watching the ridge before him and thinking about the morning. Drake leaving Morgan to go west over the mountains and the old man simply turning to walk back out into the grasslands to set his snares. Every day seeming to repeat itself like the one before.

“I can’t say,” Drake finally said, though he knew it was probably too much to hope for. And he thought what little time they had left owed a lot to Morgan.

It took Drake a second to notice the figure come up over the ridge, the head visible first, backlit by the pale light of the cabin. Then the shoulders came into view. A black figure standing there looking at the cruiser. He watched and waited. Drake’s face still at the window and then when the man turned in profile to look out at something far away on the county road, Drake saw it was Bean.

The chill went down Drake like ice on the skin. He fell back against the seat, covering Sheri as much as possible. Listening now to Bean’s footsteps as he came down off the ridge and made his way to the car.

Drake looked around but there was nothing for him to use. There was nothing he could do but wait it out and hope somehow to escape notice. Though he knew it wasn’t a possibility and Bean knew exactly where they were.

Drake heard the shuffle of gravel under Bean’s shoes and then he didn’t hear anything anymore. The warmth of Sheri’s body under his, the strangled breathing as they both tried to make themselves as small as possible. Drake looked up and Bean stood outside the door, just his body visible through the glass, the Walther tucked into the front of his pants next to Drake’s own pistol. The black sides of his jacket outlining the white belly of Bean’s shirt.

Drake’s eyes ran along the walls of the cage but there was no escape. Both he and Sheri moved all the way across the seat, as far away from Bean as they could get. Nothing to prevent Bean from just reaching in and pulling them out one at a time.

But then Drake saw what had taken up Bean’s attention on the county road. Blue and red light now beginning to flicker on the white of Bean’s shirt. Drake rose and looked behind down the gravel road. The first halo of flashing light showed over the horizon and then the grille lights came into view over the far ridge.

The car was a long way off but it was moving fast, running down the road with the gravel popping beneath the tires. Drake turned and saw Bean had backed away into the grass. He stood there now with his body toward Drake, both guns loose in his hands by his thighs, and his face turned to the oncoming blaze of light.

Drake watched Bean until he took one step back and then another. He was looking at both of them now, the guns still in his hands and the light growing on his face. Drake watching Bean there in the grass, his legs dipped into the prairie like a man wading backward into a swimming pool, first one foot, then the other.

And then Bean was gone. A few hesitant steps before he turned and disappeared over the ridge, the black jacket waving behind him as he cut down through the grass and went from sight.