Sometimes the Wolf

Chapter 24

DRISCOLL WALKED OVER FROM the Impala and told them a body had been found in Maurice’s house. Drake and Patrick were sitting on the stairs and Patrick looked up when Driscoll mentioned the house but didn’t say anything. Driscoll went on and told them the coroner was waiting on a set of dental records to make a positive ID, but the body looked to be Maurice’s.

After a while Patrick turned to Drake. “Did you see anything when you were there?”

Drake looked over at his father and then looked away again. There were flashlights moving out over the grass. Driscoll had called two marshals in and they worked as a team with four deputies from the local sheriff’s department, their flashlights swelling up over the landscape and then moving off again. “I don’t know,” Drake said. He shook his head. He didn’t want to tell his father about it.

They were sitting on the front stairs of Morgan’s cabin. Patrick’s wrists were cuffed behind him and Gary, Driscoll, and Sheri stood in a half circle around them. All with their arms crossed to ward off the cold.

There had been three shots. The first two—Drake guessed—were from Morgan’s bird gun and the last from a pistol. Thirty minutes later Bean had come up the hill and stood next to the cruiser. Drake was thinking about it now. He was thinking about it all and trying to put it back together but nothing seemed to fit.

The first thing they’d seen when they’d come down the hill was John Wesley where he lay just inside the door. He’d taken a load of shot to the shoulder and then another load in his chest and stomach. He was dead and Drake looked around the small cabin for any other sign. The bird gun was gone and so was Morgan. There was a piece of firewood on the floor and the broken glass of the window fallen all around it. The iron stove still had some warmth to it but the room was cold with the window busted in and the door open on its hinges. A single chair had been knocked on its side, another one close by the stove sat alone.

Patrick was still waiting on some sort of answer from him, but Drake didn’t have anything to say. He was angry with his father. Just yesterday he’d sat on this same porch with Morgan like nothing would happen. Drake somehow believing this, knowing now how wrong he had been.

The difference between what he wanted and what would actually happen complete as two passing worlds up there somewhere in the stars. Mostly, though, Drake was angry with himself for letting Patrick convince him they could have some kind of normal life; drinking beer on the back porch and watching the apple orchard with the smell of barbecue and smoke in the air.

The saddest part about it all was that Drake still wanted those things. Only now he knew they would never be. For a long time Drake watched the flashlights out there in the grass. The deputies were taking their time, working their way down the hill with the night wind moving the grass. Soon they’d be into the cottonwoods and up the other side. He wondered how far they would take it.

“Was it Maurice?” Patrick asked.

Sheri stirred. “I’m sorry, Patrick. I know he was a friend of yours.”

Drake wouldn’t look at his father. Anything his father touched seemed to turn to blood on the floor—pools and pools of it.

He shook his head and looked up to Sheri. He didn’t know what there was left to say. Nothing was how it was supposed to be and Drake pushed himself up and walked the few steps toward her. He hugged her, holding her close, her chin resting on his chest and her forehead to the bottom of his jawline. Drake kissed the top of her head, feeling one of the welts that had risen close to the bone, and then taking her hand, he asked her to step away.

In that moment he didn’t care anymore. He didn’t care that his father was sitting there on the stairs watching them. He didn’t care about Driscoll or Gary or what they might want. Drake only wanted his life with Sheri to go back to some form of normality, though he could honestly say he didn’t know what that might be anymore.

They were careful not to go too far—only to the edge of the cabin light. They sat and watched the deputies out there as they moved over the grass. Drake kept his hand on hers. The warmth of her body felt close to him.

“What happens now?” Sheri asked.

“I don’t know,” Drake said. He looked back to the cabin. Driscoll, Gary, and Patrick there. He felt her hand tighten on his.

After a while she asked, “Why doesn’t Gary or Driscoll go help the marshals?”

“I don’t think either one wants to leave the other one alone with my father.”

Sheri’s eyes shifted over the small gathering at the foot of the stairs. Drake saw her waver there for a second and then look to Drake. “Twelve years ago Patrick did it, didn’t he?”

It took Drake a while but eventually he nodded. He watched her take that in. He waited for her to say something and when nothing came he asked her about Bean.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Drake didn’t know what to say. He knew he had to ask but the asking was painful and he was having a hard time forming the words. He looked away from her now toward the search party out there in the grass. The flashlights were farther away from them, almost at the cottonwoods. With his eyes still out on the rolling hills, he said, “I just need to know if you’re okay.”

“He didn’t do anything to me.”

“And the house? The place that they took us—could you find your way back there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I could, either.” He turned to take her in. She wouldn’t look at him now.

“Are you asking if he hurt me?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Not in that way,” she said. “He took something from me that I don’t think I’ll be able to get back for a long time.”

Drake waited. He didn’t want her to go on but he couldn’t stop her.

“I’m telling you he didn’t rape me. He didn’t get off on that. He wanted to make sure I knew I was helpless. He wanted my security. He took that all away from me. And now he’s out there somewhere.” She paused. “It’s almost worse that way,” she finally said.

He turned, looking away for a time before coming back to her, watching as the search party lights reflected on her pupils. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are we okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

PATRICK RAISED HIS head when the shouting started down by the creek. He stood and Driscoll put a hand to his shoulder but then removed it after he saw Patrick wasn’t trying to run.

They covered the ground together, Patrick in the lead with Driscoll and Gary following close behind. Drake and Sheri cutting across the grass toward them. All of them in the near black of night until Gary brought out a small flashlight and flicked it on.

Already Patrick could see the men standing around the base of the tree. Their own flashlights illuminating the scene with a strange glow, the tall thin shadows of tree trunks shifting across the landscape as one deputy or another moved his light to take in the cottonwoods behind.

The incline was difficult with his hands cuffed behind him and Patrick slipped, falling to his side so that the meat of his shoulder would take the fall. He lay there with one of his legs beneath him for only a second before Gary had him up, asking if he was okay. Patrick didn’t spare the time to answer. He’d seen the legs there on the other side of the tree trunk now. The tips of the boots he knew were his father’s and the old bird gun there on the man’s lap.

Patrick came down and stood looking at his father. There was one fresh shell loaded into the shotgun and the other was still in his palm. He seemed to be staring at something just past them all, and for a long while Patrick looked out on the darkness beyond the cottonwood stand and tried to make out what it was.

DRISCOLL WALKED OUT onto the porch and then came back inside again. The paramedics had come and taken John Wesley and Morgan away. The blood was still on the floor where the big man had lain for the last couple hours. Drake brought his eyes up and took in Driscoll where he stood in the doorway of the cabin looking them all over. “You ready, Patrick?”

Patrick didn’t show any notice of Driscoll. He was watching the far hill where the ambulance had gone.

“You taking him in?” Gary asked. “I’d like to come along if that’s what this is.”

“That’s not what this is,” Driscoll said. “Patrick owes me something.”

Patrick came out of whatever trance he was in. He looked to Drake and Sheri first and then he looked at Driscoll. “I said what I did to get us here.”

“I don’t think so, Patrick.”

“Think whatever you want,” Patrick said. “Bobby is alive because I did what I did. All the rest, it’s all the same as it’s always been. There’s no money. There never was.”

Driscoll reached inside his coat and brought out the note written in Patrick’s hand. It was still in the plastic envelope. He walked it over to the table and set it before Patrick. “This was in the front of Bobby’s cruiser. Are you going to tell me you don’t know anything now?”

Patrick was studying the note on the table, his hands cuffed behind him and his back at a slight arch as he bent to take in the old note. He started to laugh, softly at first and then louder, and when he looked up at Driscoll he said, “You really don’t have anything, do you?”

“Where’s the money?” The words were fast and spit came up out of Driscoll’s mouth as he spoke. He was leaning into Patrick now, staring him down.

“We can take him in together,” Gary said again, his voice weaker now, but still trying. He was sitting opposite Drake, and Drake could see the sheriff’s eyes dart from one man to the other.

Driscoll straightened and returned to the open door, looking on the land out there that was now probably Patrick’s. The remaining deputies and lawmen were still searching the area for Bean. Driscoll’s back was to them and Drake couldn’t tell what was going through Driscoll’s head. Patrick was going back in regardless. There was no getting around that.

Drake was alive. He knew what his father had done for him. Sitting here with his wife and his father when he might not have been. But still, the note was on the table. The money didn’t belong to any of them. And maybe that was the problem.

“I can show you,” Drake said.

THEY CROSSED THE prairie with the moon full above them. Drake in the lead, followed by Sheri and then Driscoll, Patrick lagging behind with his hands cuffed and Gary bringing up the rear. The two men far enough back that their voices could not be heard over the sound of the grass swishing at their feet.

“How much is it?” Gary asked.

Patrick looked over his shoulder and then went on walking. He was having trouble seeing where to put his feet. Drake carried a flashlight and so did Gary. But the light would probably be better if both turned their flashlights off and they just used the moon. “You know how much,” Patrick said.

“All of it?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

Gary quickened his step. He was just behind Patrick now and every few steps he felt Gary’s shoe catch the back of Patrick’s heel. “It can look like an accident,” Gary said.

“I don’t want that,” Patrick said.

“It’s been twelve fucking years,” Gary said. His voice elevated.

Driscoll turned and looked back at Patrick but there didn’t seem to be any recognition in the man’s face.

They were still walking when they came up over a small rise and Patrick saw where the fence sat in a line along the hill. “It’s going to be okay,” Patrick said, speaking over his shoulder to Gary. The thought that they’d soon stop and then there wouldn’t be another chance to talk for a very long while. “No accidents,” Patrick said again. “I didn’t do all this to watch it all fall apart in front of me. You’re going to have to take care of Sheri and Bobby now. They’re going to need you.”

SHERI RODE SHOTGUN and Gary drove. It was past midnight and they’d left Morgan’s cabin an hour before. Neither of them had said much to the other since they’d left, Sheri only telling Gary what roads to take and where to turn. She was reading the directions off an app on Gary’s phone and the display gave the front seat of Drake’s cruiser an intimate closed-off feeling that Sheri could only avoid by opening her window. The night air blew by at sixty miles per hour. The far lights of farms the only thing to be picked off the Eastern Washington prairie.

The turn for Silver Lake was a few miles ahead and she put the window up. The heaters had been turned on full and she switched them down and then flicked on the phone. The small blue icon that was them and nothing else around for thirty miles.

“How far?” Gary asked.

“Two miles.” She put a hand to the dash and messed with the heater for a while, trying the various settings. Though she knew them almost as well as her own car. Just doing what she could to pass the time, all the while studying Gary from the corner of her eye.

Gary wet his lips and then glanced her way. “I’m proud of Bobby.”

“I’m proud of him, too,” Sheri said. She didn’t know where this was going but she’d been the one to suggest it. She’d been the one to tell Drake she didn’t mind going back to Silver Lake with Gary.

“Not a lot of people would have given up the money like that.”

They rode in silence for a long time after that. Gary took the turn and the road began to wind into the mountains. Silver Lake another hour away. The smell of the evergreens growing as they went and the air turned crisp and cold. High up on the peaks she saw the snow in the mountains. This place was her home, though it had not always been. And she tried to imagine where she would go or what she would do if she ever left.

After a time, she said, “Patrick wasn’t alone when he took the money, was he, Gary?”

“No,” Gary said. He glanced her way and then returned his eyes to the road.

“All this time,” she said.

“I know.”

She waited, listening to the wind pass by outside the window. “You’ve been the sheriff as long as I’ve lived in Silver Lake.”

“I know that, too,” he said.

She watched the high, blue mountains and when she turned back she asked, “Should I be scared of you?” She was watching him but he wouldn’t turn to look at her.

“No,” he said. And then after a while he asked, “Should I be scared of you?”

She didn’t know how to answer that. All the years they’d known each other, all the help Gary had given them over the years. None of it fit.

She looked his way. “Tonight could have gone a lot different,” she said. “I don’t know if this is the right way to say it but I guess I think you did the right thing back there.”

“How’s that?”

“Bobby gave up the money but I think in some way you did, too.”

THE FIRST LIGHT chased them up the mountains and they drove now in the western shadows just beyond. Drake sat with the green tackle box between his feet on the floor. Patrick, with his hands cuffed, was asleep in the back and Driscoll drove. For a long time Drake sat and watched the undergrowth pass by his window and then when he tired of it he turned and looked to the back, where Patrick slumped against one of the doors, his head bent to the window and his eyes closed.

“You know what they say about a guilty man,” Driscoll said.

Drake nodded. “I know.”

Driscoll raised his eyes on the rearview mirror and then brought them back to the road ahead. “When we come into Bellingham I’ll drop you at the hotel and then take Patrick in for holding.”

“I’ll go in with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Drake said. He didn’t know how to feel about it. He never thought he’d be the one to take his own father in, but he was.

“I’m going to take the money in as well. I’ll be handing it over in Bellingham. It’s their case still.”

“I understand.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go by the hotel first? The guys in Bellingham are going to want to talk with Patrick. It might be a while.”

“I’ll go with you,” Drake said. “They’ll want to talk with me as well.”

“We don’t have to rush anything.”

Drake thought that over. He didn’t say anything more and Driscoll didn’t try to talk him out of it.

They drove in silence and by the time they came out of the mountains Drake was asleep, only waking when Driscoll pulled the Impala to the front of the Bellingham Police Department and turned the engine off.

Patrick was up, and Drake wondered how long his father had been sitting there, his eyes on both of them while Driscoll drove and Drake slept.

Driscoll asked for the money, and then, when Drake handed it over, he ran his eyes between father and son and then went on inside the department.

“He’s wondering if I’m going to let you loose,” Drake said, speaking over his shoulder to Patrick.

Patrick didn’t respond. Out on the street a school bus had stopped and the doors slid open. A group of elementary students waiting with their parents and then when the doors slid closed again Drake and Patrick watched the parents walk away, some talking to each other for a time before splitting and going on again toward their individual houses.

Patrick cleared his throat. “We’d both be in Monroe if you let me loose.”

“I’m sorry about the way this turned out,” Drake said.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. I just wish I could have seen your grandfather, you know?”

“I feel responsible.” Drake had his head down, his eyes on the place the money used to be. Morgan was dead and in some way Drake was a part of that.

Patrick shook his head. “You know you’re not responsible for any of this. Drug smuggling, the money, the deaths of those two men, or your grandfather. I know you want to believe you are. I know that’s why you became a deputy but it’s just not your fault. I’ve wanted you to know that for a long time and I’ve wanted to say that to you for just as long and I guess now I have. You understand? You’re not responsible for my mistakes.”

Drake sat looking out on the front of the department. Driscoll would be back soon and Drake didn’t know when he’d see his father again.

Patrick leaned forward and Drake could feel him close behind. “Say something.”

There wasn’t anything Drake could say. The emotions were spinning around inside of him like a tornado. Nothing ever settling. He knew his father wanted him to let it go but he just couldn’t.

SHERI GOT THE PHONE on the second ring and listened to what Drake had to say. By then it was afternoon and Drake had already given his statement to the Bellingham police. He’d slept a few hours at the hotel and one of the detectives had told him he’d give Drake a ride home in an hour or so.

Sheri hung up without saying more than ten words and when she walked to the front window she saw Luke out there in his cruiser, watching over her. It was Gary who’d insisted on it. With Drake not home yet it was just a precaution, Gary had said. Bean out there somewhere still.

She turned and walked away from the window. Everything was the same as it had been when Bean and John Wesley had taken her from the house. Even the cereal bowl was still there in the kitchen sink. She looked this over and then after a minute she cleaned the bowl and spoon and set them on the rack to dry.

She straightened the kitchen first and then the living room. Ten minutes later she walked down the hall and stopped in front of Patrick’s room. The door was open and she stood there for a long time looking over the crib and changing table, the walls painted to look like a sunset.

Drake’s voice on the phone had sounded tired. It was how she felt, worn out, scrubbed down. For forty-eight hours she hadn’t known if she would live or die.

She had not known how it would turn out for so long, and now she did. Her life with Drake. Her life here in Silver Lake.

She stood in the doorway for a long time before she turned and went back to the kitchen. When she came to the second bedroom again she carried an empty cardboard box with a wrench and a screwdriver inside. She removed the tools and set the box on the bed next to Patrick’s things.

The first thing she packed was Patrick’s clothes, taking them from the changing table drawers and folding them before putting them in the cardboard box. When she was done, she set the box in the hallway and came back into the room. It took her thirty minutes to break down the crib, loosening the bolts and then removing the sides so that each lay flat against the wall.

Sheri did it all with a quiet determination. There was no pausing or break in her labor. It was just her and the room. Two separate bodies that had once been and now were not.

THE DETECTIVE WHO’D agreed to take Drake back to Silver Lake was waiting for him in the front drive of the hotel. A plastic container of 7-Eleven nachos in his lap that he ate chips from one at a time. He nodded to Drake and when Drake was seated in the car he wiped one hand clean with a napkin and drove out of the lot still eating chips with the other hand.

The man was twenty years older than Drake and from talking to him earlier, Drake knew the detective had been one of the first to respond to the two bodies found at the gravel lot outside town. The case Driscoll said Patrick was involved with.

The detective had been a young guy then, the incident one of his first investigations. Now he was aged past his middle and moving into the last years of his service. He talked and drove at the same time. Pointing out various places he’d made busts and pulled drivers over to find sandwich bags of meth in their glove compartments.

Halfway to the highway Drake stopped the man and asked him to turn the car back.

They made it to the gravel lot just as the sun began to set. The detective sitting in the car and telling Drake what had changed and what hadn’t. He gestured to an open spot just twenty feet away. “That’s where they were shot,” he said. The detective made a gun out of his fist. Bucking it with each shot. “Pop. One goes down. A clean shot to the temple, cracked his skull right down the middle. The second man turns to run. Pop, pop, pop. He gets cut up as he moves. Makes it maybe four steps and then falls right there.” The detective was still holding his trigger finger out on the scene, letting it quiver there in the air before him. A spot of nacho cheese on his fingernail. He brought the finger back and put it to his mouth and just sat there looking the lot over. “We found the bodies behind one of the big rock piles over there.”

“Where was the shooter?” Drake asked.

The detective pointed out the spot. It was about a hundred yards off. “Twelve years ago there was one of those big yellow excavators right there. The shooter was probably back behind it in the shadows.”

“Were they shot at night?”

“That’s what we figured.”

Drake opened the car door and got out. The evening cold around him and the lot out a ways from the city, built up against a few acres of wetland. Farther out, the white trunks of a stand of birch trees, the leaves just starting to sprout. He walked over and stood in the spot where the men had been shot.

He turned and looked to where the shooter would have been. Nothing there now but an empty space between two piles of gravel. He knelt and looked at the ground, running his hand over it and feeling the grit against his skin, expecting somehow that his fingertips would come back stained with blood. Still kneeling, he put a hand to his bad knee and pushed into the muscle, feeling the dull, familiar ache of his old injury. He imagined the shot. He felt the force of the bullet and the tear it made through human skin.

By the time he stood, the detective had come out of the car and was waiting a little ways off watching Drake. “The thinking on this has always been that there were two men. One waiting where you are now to distract the two victims, then the other back there in the shadows covering them all.”

“What did my father say when you interviewed him today?”

“Denies it ever happened. Says he’s not the one. Says we had it wrong all those years before and we still have it wrong.”

“Even with all that money?”

“Funny thing about it is I always thought it was going to be more. Two hundred thousand is a lot of money but it doesn’t seem like enough to kill for.”

“What happens now?” Drake asked. He was trying to put it all back together in his head. He was trying to picture his father here twelve years before.

“We’ve got statements from you and your father but it’s really not enough without the gun, or any direct proof your father was here. We can’t hold him. Driscoll will move him to the federal building in Seattle tonight and I’d guess it will be the last we see of your father. He’ll be back in Monroe in a week.”

“Even the money isn’t enough?”

“It’s drug money. It’s not like the bills were marked.”

Drake looked to the spot where the shooter had been. He paced it out, walking over and then looking back at the detective.

When he was finished he came back to the car. “It seems like a pretty good shot.”

The detective nodded. “It was.” He watched Drake where he stood. “They’re saying your father will be out again in a few years. That worry you?”

“Honestly,” Drake said, “I really don’t know.”

“And this other guy, your father’s buddy from Monroe. He’s still out there, too. He’s out there now.”

“The money’s gone,” Drake said.

The detective grinned and opened the driver’s-side door. “Like I said, it always seemed like too little.”

Chapter 25

BEAN SAT AT THE edge of the wood and surveyed the clearing before the small house. His face dirty and his hands crosshatched with slivers of dried blood from the rock and grasslands he’d traveled through much of the night. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the jacket and his white shirt was stained gray with a mixture of dirt and sweat. The collar a jaundiced yellow where it rested against the exposed skin of his neck.

Most of the night had been spent making his way through the fields, grasslands and prairie giving way to wheat fields and then back to prairie. When the day came he followed small creek beds that had gone dry or still trickled with water and worked his way across the country in a zigzagging fashion, using what tree cover he could find to hide him from view.

Now, almost twenty hours later, he had come to the house at the base of the mountains. He sat watching it for a long time as he tried to make up his mind. The light fading and no sense that Drake or his wife had been able to lead the marshals back this way. Though Bean knew he and John Wesley had been careful enough coming here the night before.

He waited, watching the light fade till it sat over the fields in a blue haze of floating pollen and spring seedpods. The light catching it all like the filament of weeds in a stream.

After a long while he rose and crossed the clearing. His muscles cramped from his rest and his body aching. He came to the house and went along its side, peering through the windows at the darkness within.

The smell had grown worse in the day since they’d left and Bean put a shirtsleeve to his nose as he came through the door. He left the door open and walked into the house. When he came to the basement door he eased it open on the hinges and stared down into the depths at the cement floor below. He couldn’t risk the use of a light switch and after a time he went down the stairs. The sound of his shuffling through the darkness the only thing to be heard from the top of the stairs.

After a minute he was back again, standing in what little light fell from above, one hand held to his nose and the limp body of a woman supported on his opposite shoulder. He came up the stairs and walked, carrying the woman through her house and out into the yard. He dumped her there and then went back for her husband. The two lying faceup in the grass. Both in their early seventies, the blood drawn from their faces and the bruises John Wesley had left on their necks now only a slight yellow.

For a long time Bean simply sat there with them. He’d needed their house after he and John Wesley had made their escape and now he needed it again.

In an hour he’d have the couple in the ground, and in another hour he’d sit resting in their tub, windows open to let in the night air, cleaning the last couple days of trouble from his skin.

Chapter 26

FOR MOST OF THE day Patrick sat in the holding cell watching the clock on the wall. He was alone in the cell and it had been two hours since anyone had come by to tell him anything. The empty dinner tray the only thing to say anyone had ever been there at all. Far down the hall he knew an officer sat at a desk but he could not see him, and besides the occasional murmurings of a drunk in a cell two or three doors down, Patrick felt very alone. More alone than he’d ever felt in prison.

He checked the time again. The clock in a metal cage, painted white like the walls. Gray cement floors all the way down the hall and into his cell. A single bench for him to sit on and not even a sink or toilet for Patrick to use if needed.

He stood and walked to the bars and tried to look down the hallway but there was nothing to see, not even a window. He looked to the clock and wondered if the sun had set, or if it was still twilight outside with the pale pink of sunset still in the air and the saltwater smell of Puget Sound drifting like far-off music.

He walked back to the bench and sat again. He’d been told he was going south that night, down to Seattle, where he’d be processed and then eventually sent back to Monroe. He set his face in his hands and rubbed the coarse hair on his cheeks, working his fingers up across his skin until his hands sat behind him, yoked across the back of his neck.

Fucking Bobby, he thought. He shook his head in disbelief. Smiling to himself as he brought his head up and stared for a beat too long at the overhead light. He was proud in a way. It had been a lot of money. But Patrick could see now that Bobby didn’t need it, probably never had, and in that way Patrick was proud of him.

He sat there and watched the hands of the clock go around and around. An hour later he heard a far door open and then something being said to the officer down there. There was the sound of rubber soles on cement and farther on the clack of hard-soled dress shoes. When Driscoll showed he was wearing the same rumpled suit from earlier in the day, the top button on his shirt undone and no tie. The service weapon visible beneath his coat. Two officers came before him, one with the keys and the other holding a shotgun in one hand while reaching for the cuffs on his belt with the other.

“You ready, Patrick?”

Patrick stepped back from the bars, the movement inherent now to who he was. Barred gates opening from one cell to another. He looked out on Driscoll and said he was. The door came open and the officer handed the shotgun to Driscoll and came forward with the cuffs. Patrick letting the man get the bracelets on him.

With the officer leading him, Patrick went down the hall, glancing over into the cells as he passed. The drunk now lay out on his own bench, snoring with his pants wet at the crotch and a pool of liquid beneath him on the floor. Patrick heard the other officer swear and then the keys came out and the door to the drunk’s cell was yanked opened. It was the last thing Patrick heard before they came out of the holding area and made their way to a side door. Driscoll followed while Patrick walked. The officer still leading and Patrick glancing up to check the time before they went out the door and the cool of night came over them like a soft cotton sheet.

Driscoll’s Impala sat there in the loading dock and Patrick heard Driscoll fumble for a moment with his keys. There was nothing around but a line of cars parked fifteen feet away, the headlights facing them, and the blue light of the overhead halogens giving the area a washed-out feel. Moths and small winged insects playing in the light as a single spider dangled from a web catching what it could.

He heard Driscoll grumble about something and then two high beams were on them in a flood. Bright and encompassing as a nuclear explosion. Patrick tried to raise a hand to ward off the light but found his hands pulled down by the officer.

The best Patrick could manage was to close his eyes, the light pink beneath his eyelids and then the rapid pop of gunfire very close and the thump of bullets finding contact. Two bodies dropped to the ground on either side of him, and he no longer felt the officer’s hand holding him back.

Chapter 27

DRAKE CAME IN FROM the garage and found Sheri in the kitchen. The box of Patrick’s clothes had been put away atop a stack of other boxes. Now he crossed the living room and went in after the sides of the crib. It took him two trips to bring the four pieces outside to the garage, leaning them carefully against the wall with bits of cloth nestled between each layer to keep the paint from scraping.

He closed the garage doors and padlocked them. Luke still out there in the patrol car and Drake’s own cruiser now back in the drive. For a while he stood looking in at the inside of his house, golden with light. Sheri putting dinner together in the kitchen and the overhead lights in the hallway leading back into the house.

Drake nodded to Luke and then mounted the stairs. He paused at the top and looked out on the forest. He wondered how long Gary would have Luke or Andy sit outside the house. The two patrol cars in the drive reminding Drake of the crimes committed and how Sheri and he were living in the aftermath.

He opened the door and went inside.

When he’d come through Silver Lake earlier that day he saw the small memorial set up for the girl who had been killed. Flowers and ribbons placed beside the door to the doughnut shop. Candles that were no longer lit but that Drake could see had burned through the night and sat melted in an uneven mass on the pavement. A single picture of the girl, framed, showing her the year before when she was a senior at the local high school. He was thinking about this now, and thinking about Morgan and the way they’d found him sitting against the tree with his eyes on the darkness.

Drake took a seat at the kitchen counter and watched Sheri pour a steaming pot of water into the sink, straining pasta while a red sauce simmered on the burner. He tried to put the days together in his mind but they fell apart in front of him. He wanted to feel something about it all but he kept returning to a selfish thought, that Sheri was still alive, that he was. He looked out on the patrol cars there in the drive. He wondered how the foot of their stairs would look with candles burning, with ribbons and flowers. He wondered if anyone would have cared. He didn’t know if he had the answer.

They hadn’t talked yet about the crib or the way Sheri seemed to be packing the house away little by little. She had only asked him to clear the room, to put the things away in the garage. Drake thought about this as he set the table. He thought about Patrick’s bed in there and how he’d break it down after dinner and put it away with all the rest. Leaning it against the crib. And for a long time he looked away into the darkness out back of their house, trying to locate the small dirt patch where their child was buried, but he didn’t see it and Sheri called his name and told him to pour two glasses of water and grate a small block of cheese before she brought the pasta over.

They sat in silence and ate the food. Neither had had much to say the entire day. Several times now Sheri tried to speak but the words failed her and she looked away again or twirled her fork through her pasta.

“Is this the life we wanted?” she finally asked, the pasta gone from Drake’s plate and the red sauce all that remained against the white porcelain.

He looked up at her and there was nothing to take away from her face. The eyes steady as they appraised him, her chin held tight and the lips solid and unmoving.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking around at the house they’d made their own.

“Is this the life you wanted?” she asked.

Drake didn’t know what to say, but he knew if he asked the same question of her she would have an answer for him. Somewhere along the way it had all gone crooked for them and he stared back at her and knew what his answer would be, and he hoped it wouldn’t take them long to find their way back to where it all went wrong.

ANDY WAS AT the front door in the morning, and Drake rose from bed and pulled his boxers on and then some sweats. He got to the door just as Andy started down the steps to go around and try the back door.

“Gary says he wants to see you,” Andy said after Drake had the door open.

“What about?”

“Don’t know, he just got me on the radio and told me to tell you to go into the department.”

Drake looked behind him into his house, the living room still in shadow and the door to their bedroom left open slightly. “Sheri’s still sleeping.”

Andy looked past Drake like he might see her back there but then when he didn’t he raised his eyes and told Drake not to worry, he’d be just outside.

Drake wore his deputy browns and his star. He drove into town in his own patrol car and put on his belt just before coming into the department. He wore his hat and he didn’t even have time to take it off before Gary called to him from the back office.

The first thing Drake noticed was Agent Driscoll sitting in one of the seats before Gary’s desk. Gary motioned to the other one and Drake sat, taking his hat from his head and placing it in his lap.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Seattle?” Drake asked.

Driscoll sat up a bit in the chair and put a hand to his side, wincing for a moment and then recovering. “That was before someone broke my rib with a rubber bullet. I was just telling Gary here all about it.”

Gary looked over at Drake. “Someone jumped Driscoll and an officer just as they were taking your father out of holding.”

Drake looked from Gary to Driscoll. “He’s gone?”

Driscoll smiled. “Let me get down to it.” He was still holding his hand to the injured rib.

“Please do,” Gary said.

“One of the officers who brought Patrick back to holding after he made his statement let Patrick make a phone call.”

Gary watched Drake’s face and said, “Driscoll says Patrick called over to the Buck Blind.”

“Well, your father made a call into the bar specifically, not the restaurant,” Driscoll said. “You two know all the regulars down there, don’t you?”

“You’re talking about half the town of Silver Lake,” Gary cut in.

“Weird thing about it is the rubber bullet. They’re used by city police for riot control.”

Gary shifted and fixed Driscoll with his eyes. “I don’t like what you’re saying. I don’t know why you’re talking to us about this. Just go by the bar and see who answered the phone.”

“You’re right, Sheriff. After I got out of the hospital last night I called over there and got no answer.”

“It can get busy down there,” Gary said.

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I was wondering. I worked in a restaurant when I was a kid. Some little Italian place, and I remember how it was. You start juggling too many things at once and eventually you’re going to drop something. I guess the bartender just dropped that phone call.”

“Do you even know if Patrick talked to anyone?”

“The officer said he did but he wasn’t close enough to hear who he might be talking with.”

“So you think it was some regular down there? One of Patrick’s old smuggling buddies?”

“That’s the guess.”

Gary laughed, leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands over his belly. “You just love this place, don’t you,” he said. “You’re almost a regular as it is. I expect you’ll be buying your lake cabin soon enough.”

Driscoll smiled back at Gary. “We could have one of those old-time cabin-raising parties. Isn’t that how it’s done around here? We help each other. You’d help me, wouldn’t you, Bobby?”

“Sure I would, Driscoll.”

“Agent Driscoll living in Silver Lake,” Gary said. “Sounds like fun.”

Driscoll tried to laugh, but just ended up wincing and putting a hand to his ribs again. “Feels like someone is kicking me every time I try and take a breath,” Driscoll said.

“I bet,” Gary said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“Don’t I know it, at close range the bullet lifted me right off my feet.”

Drake nodded. He was trying to catch a break between the two men but he hadn’t been able to find it yet.

“I’d never been hit like that,” Driscoll was saying. “I imagine it looked like one of those big boxing swings we used to see on television when me and you were younger. You know, the big heavyweights going at it. One punch and the guy’s bottom jaw is up in his brain and his feet are sailing into the air. Lifting him right off into outer space. Man, I miss a good fight like that sometimes. Now we have all these featherweights dancing around the ring.”

“It’s true,” Gary said. “Things used to be different. No one can take a hit like that anymore and any time I watch a fight these days they always end up hugging on each other.”

“The young fighters have some finesse. But they’ve got nothing behind their punches. No offense, Bobby.”

“No offense taken,” Drake said. “I’d rather watch finesse any day than see two big guys slamming away at each other.”

“Yeah, well, to each his own,” Driscoll said. “What I wanted to get down to here is who Patrick called and how they got their hands on rubber bullets made specifically for the police.”

Drake could see Driscoll looking around at all the hunting pictures that lined the office. Gary holding up the head of a big buck. Gary kneeling next to a moose somewhere up in Canada.

“You shoot, don’t you, Sheriff?” Driscoll asked. “You probably work in a variety of different situations. You might even know where someone would be able to buy that type of bullet.”

“Agent Driscoll, you’re getting real serious all of a sudden.”

“Try getting shot, it will switch your whole perspective around.”

“I’d prefer not to,” Gary said. “I like my perspective just the way it is.”

Driscoll didn’t say anything for a while. He was staring at the wood backing of Gary’s desk. “Where were you last night, Gary?”

“I was actually at the Buck Blind for most of the night.”

“One more thing for me to talk to the bartender about,” Driscoll said.

“For fuck’s sake, Driscoll, just come out and say it.”

“Last night you shot me with a rubber bullet and helped Patrick escape custody.”

“Can you prove any of this?” Gary asked.

“I hope you have some sort of alibi for last night,” Driscoll said.

“You’re flying too close to the sun,” Gary said.

Driscoll winced and stood, his hand to his side. He looked around at Drake. “You should know who you’re working for. He’s just as bad as your father only he hasn’t been caught.”

Drake held Driscoll’s gaze for a long time before looking away. He heard Driscoll turn and go, the department door closing a few seconds later.

Drake ran his eyes over the office. No one but them. “How much of what Driscoll said is true?” Drake asked.

“About your father and me?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a word of it,” Gary said.

“You were at the Buck Blind last night?”

“Most of the time.”

“What does that mean?” Drake asked.

“I mean I got up to piss and I went home at some point and ate a Lean Cuisine,” Gary said. “What else do you want me to say? We’re like family, aren’t we, Bobby? You know you can trust me.”

Drake gave him a hard stare and then stood. He took off his belt and then his badge. He put them on the desk. “No offense, Gary, but I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

THREE DAYS AFTER Drake turned in his badge, he and Sheri went back east of the mountains for Morgan’s funeral. The town came out and the reception was held in the only restaurant, a barbecue and burger joint on the county highway with a single room and outside a front patio underneath a tent. Drake and Sheri shook hands with everyone and thanked them for coming. An older woman tried to give Sheri a novel she’d borrowed from Morgan but Sheri didn’t think Morgan would mind if she simply kept it.

“It was a heart attack?”

“Yes,” Sheri said. She thought of the old man she’d only met once. There and then not there at her wedding. She tried to think if she knew much more than that but nothing came.

The woman held the book for a time, sitting across from Sheri on one of the benches. And then when Drake came over to tell Sheri they were going on to the property, the woman said, “He just seemed so alive.”

“He was,” Drake said.

ALL OF MORGAN’S things were still there in the cabin when they stopped off, and Sheri watched as Drake went through the possessions. From what Sheri knew of Morgan he’d lived alone, simply, with nothing more than the woodstove and a few pots and pans to keep him company.

She watched Drake and while he read through one or two of the letters sitting out on the dinner table, she walked back into the bedroom and leafed through the books. A whole wall had been dedicated to them and the color of the bindings gave the uniform wood tones of the cabin a special quality that nothing else on that prairie seemed to have.

When she came back out of the bedroom, Drake was boxing the letters away. “You okay?” she asked.

He looked up. “I thought this place would feel different. But it feels the same.”

“Isolated?”

“Yes, I feel like Morgan is just going to come up out of the cottonwoods any moment.”

She looked away at the fields outside. The door and the window had been patched with pieces of plywood. “You worry what’s going to happen to this place once we leave?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

“And Patrick? There’s been no word?”

“He’s not coming back here. Morgan’s will left this place to him. It’s Patrick’s and I don’t know where he’d go but it wouldn’t be here.” He picked up the box and brought it out to the car.

While he was gone Sheri started to collect what dry goods she could find. A box of baking soda, a jar of flour, a can of Crisco in one of the cupboards next to a hidden bar of Hershey’s chocolate.

Outside she heard the car door clap shut and then a second later the split of a log. She came out onto the porch and for the next hour she watched Drake break down a collection of cottonwood sections, stacking them up in an even pile at the rear of the cabin like Morgan might come up out of the cut to use them.

It was night by the time they left. The letters the only thing they took with them.

FOR A WEEK Drake cleared brush from their orchard, pruning back the dead branches and forming the apple trees. In the mornings or in the afternoons he gave Sheri rides to work with their only car and then waited through the day for the call telling him she was ready to be picked up. Occasionally, Luke and Andy came by the house, though they didn’t have to anymore.

The two deputies helped Drake to take down the remaining bits of the old alder fence Patrick hadn’t gotten to. When they finished they helped Drake stake metal posts and run barbed cattle wire. At the front where the drive met the lake road they installed a wide metal gate that sat on a hinge and had to be unlocked with a key.

Besides the trips Drake took to the Buck Blind he didn’t speak much with anyone. Only occasionally seeing Gary when Drake came and went. It was Gary who told him about the dead calf one night while Drake sat eating a burger at the bar. The wolf didn’t kill the calf outright; it had nipped and bitten at the calf’s flanks, leaving the calf bloodied and weak by morning. The rancher noticed it all too late and the calf was dead by noon that same day. “It’s a shame about that wolf,” Gary said. “They’re saying they’ll have to shoot her now.”

“Who’s saying that?”

“Fish and Wildlife. They’re telling Ellie to use the collar and track the wolf down. But she won’t do it.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Drake said. He ate a couple more fries and then pushed the plate away. Gary sat watching him and after a while asked, “What are you doing out there at your place? Building a compound?”

“Just getting the place in order. Trying to do something with the land.”

“You’re going to sell the apples?”

“Yes.”

“And the fence Luke and Andy helped you with?”

“After everything I thought it would be nice to feel safe again. For Sheri to feel safe.”

“I can put a car out there again. If that’s it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Drake said.

Gary looked at him and shook his head. “Talk to Ellie,” he said.

RAIN KEPT THEM out of the mountains for two days and then when the sun came out on the third day they tracked the signal up an avalanche chute, white in places with snow. The sound of the spring melt running underneath the rock. They came up onto the open ridge with sweat stains on their shirts and their thighs aching from the ascent. The GPS telling them the wolf was somewhere in the valley beyond.

The trees began again after about a hundred feet and they made their way through the trunks as they descended. Coming out into a clearing they found the wolf lying just a couple hundred feet farther on. Crows lifting from the body as they came closer and the GPS collar still attached.

Ellie came to the animal first, crouching with the backs of her thighs resting on her calves. The spring grass had grown tall through the clearing and it surrounded the wolf on all sides, stretching away toward the forest where the mountain went on dark beneath the trees.

Drake slipped the day pack from his shoulders and laid it in the grass at his feet. He took a step closer, watching the way the clearing rolled away before them. Grasshoppers flitted off, the brief clap of their wings heard as they tried to stay afloat through the air. He hadn’t realized Ellie was crying till he came closer and saw the tight pulse of her shoulder blades working beneath her shirt. He put a hand to her back and she jumped, pulling away and standing.

On the ground Drake saw the wolf had been shot through the head, the right foreleg badly mangled by a metal trap.

“They killed her,” Ellie said. She had recovered a bit and she stood a few feet off. The redness still in her eyes.

There was nothing for Drake to say. He was kneeling in the same place Ellie had, looking down on the wolf. Someone had tried to cut the GPS collar away but the knife used hadn’t been sharp enough for the job. He put a hand out and ran his fingers up through the fur, gripping it in his hands for a moment before letting go. The meat had begun to go bad and he could smell it.

The wolf had pawed up the ground around where the trap had been, tearing the grass and leaving a small patch of exposed earth that had grown muddy with the rain. There were paw prints everywhere, bits of fur, and in one section near the wolf’s left hip, the partial indent of a boot. Ellie had already seen it and Drake examined it for a long time before he stood. Ellie already scanning the tree line like she might find the killer out there in the shadows.

The light was fading in the sky and Drake checked his watch. It would take them an hour to hike back down and by then the sun would be completely down. “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Drake said. “I can help you with the tracking.”

Ellie turned and looked back at him. She was kneeling near the edge of the forest where the grass ran out and the shadows began. When Drake came over to her he could see another boot print, much clearer than the last.

“Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Ellie said. “Looks a lot like one of the prints from those poachers a few weeks back.”

Drake knelt and examined the indentation in the mud. “Probably a day old. The edges are clean.” If it wasn’t for the GPS collar Drake knew they never would have found the wolf at all.

“Tomorrow,” Ellie said.

“Yes.”

“First thing.”

“Okay.”

Chapter 28

BEAN STOOD WATCHING THE empty road. Fields of soybean ran along one side. The line of wire fence running down it and out of sight on both sides. He turned and looked up the road, just the same as it had been for ten minutes. Nothing but the deep shadows of the mountains farther on, avalanche chutes turning from rock to snow as the elevation grew and the trees thinned to clusters and then nothing at all. The light beginning to fade in the west and the road Bean stood on taking on a slanted otherworldly look that seemed to tilt away from him as he waited there.

The couple’s property was back a few hundred yards on a gravel access road. The trees opposite the soy field hiding the house from sight. Weeks before they’d taken the couple’s car and then ditched it as soon as they came into Seattle.

Where Bean stood he was visible to both lanes of traffic, an empty red gas tank he’d found in the garage at his feet.

By then he had lived a week in the old house at the base of the mountains. Waiting for things to die down and for whatever decision he was going to make, but that he hadn’t been able to make until that point. A few days before, eating canned soups and stale bags of cereal in front of the couple’s computer, he’d come across an article in the Seattle paper.

The article was brief, only a recap of a much larger article he assumed had run earlier in the week. The money listed at two hundred thousand and all of their names mentioned one way or another, Bean still at large. And the amount of money Patrick had always told them much too small. He scanned down through the article, making sure he had the facts right. Somewhere out there Patrick was still running around, and the money Drake had led them to somehow not enough.

He read the article five times before making up his mind and now he stood alongside the road, clean shaven and looking respectable in a set of clothes he’d taken from the house. No car or truck for ten minutes.

While he waited, he picked gravel from the side of the road and targeted the fence posts, playing a game with himself to pass the time. He was juggling a collection of these rocks when an RV showed on the horizon, the body just visible in the twilight and the headlights turned dimly on.

As the RV came closer he stepped a foot into the road and began to wave his arms over his head. He wore a blue sport coat he’d taken from the man’s closet, cotton khakis, and a white undershirt. With his hair combed neat and pulled back over his scalp, he looked like a man who’d lost his way in the country, or abandoned his car in search of gas.

He continued to wave and the RV came to a stop a few feet past where he stood. Bean arrived at the window as it came down and looked up on an older man wearing a white shirt and clear wire-rimmed glasses.

“Where’s your car?” the man asked, speaking through the open window, his hands still on the wheel.

Bean smiled. He’d forgotten the gas can and he looked back at it now. “A mile or so down the road.”

The old man at the wheel nodded like he understood. “I can give you a ride into town if you like. I was just out tooling this baby around. It wouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”

Bean smiled again. “That’s real good of you,” he said. He jogged back to the gas can and scooped it up in his hand and then returned to the RV. He heard the door unlock as he approached and with one hand holding the gas can he slipped Drake’s gun from inside his waistband and shot the driver at point-blank range through the open window.

The man slumped into the wheel and the horn sounded, but Bean reached a hand in and pushed the driver’s body back, resting the bloody scalp against the headrest. With the engine still idling and the RV in park he opened the side door and came up the stairs into the RV. The thing was big as a bus and built with a dining area on one side and a kitchenette on the other; in the back a small bedroom with cupboards lining the ceiling and a small flat-screen mounted in one corner.

He went down through the RV looking the place over, Drake’s gun in his hand and the Walther resting in his waistband at the small of his back. The bathroom was empty and the rear bedroom held only a mattress and single mirror. There was no one else on the RV.

When he came back to the front he saw that the man’s blood had sprayed a good amount of the dash and part of the passenger seat, but the windshield was relatively clean. He put Drake’s gun on the passenger seat and then bent to look through the glass at the road ahead. Nothing to see, not even a farmhouse or an approaching car.

Taking the driver under his arms Bean dragged him off the RV and into the forest, where he covered the body with dead branches and bits of moss. The white shirt stained red in places seemed now almost a piece of the forest itself.

He came back out from beneath the trees wondering how fast a vehicle like that could get up over a mountain pass and down into Silver Lake. The door stood open before him and he put a hand out on the railing and pulled himself up the stairs.

Chapter 29

IT WAS NIGHT BY the time they got the wolf down off the mountain. Ellie gave Drake a ride to the Buck Blind. He came in through the front entrance and watched Sheri carry two plates out of the kitchen and set them on a table. She came over and they kissed and then she sent him into the bar for a beer.

Drake nodded to Jack, the bartender, as he took a seat. Ten minutes passed before Gary came in and Drake looked to the bartender, wondering if Jack had called him or if it was just coincidence.

They sat and drank their beers and made small talk. After a while Drake brought up the wolf.

“Where was it?”

Drake told him. He described the avalanche chute and the ridge above. He described the small descent into the valley through the trees and the clearing farther on. “We’re going to go back tomorrow. There was a boot print up there.”

Gary sipped from his beer. “So someone did your job for you?”

“Someone who didn’t have the authority to shoot her.” Drake leaned back from the bar and looked over at Gary. “What size shoe do you wear?”

Gary shook his head. “You’re serious?” He was smiling and he lifted his beer and then, reconsidering, put it back down again. “You know I work for the people—no matter what the law says. That includes you, too, Bobby.”

“That’s what you’re saying.”

“That’s all there is. Besides, it doesn’t matter, does it? You went up to kill the wolf and the wolf is dead. What else matters?”

Drake thought it over. He didn’t know if it mattered or not. He was starting to have a hard time telling the difference.

“Sheri’s usually off around this time, isn’t she?”

Drake nodded. He glanced over his shoulder toward the dining room. “Usually,” he said. “Seems like maybe there’s just a couple more tables.”

“You come and pick her up every day?”

“I try. There’s just one car now so I usually drop her off and then come get her at the end of the day.”

“But today you were up in the mountains?”

“Yes, so Sheri dropped me at Fish and Wildlife and then came to work. We’ll probably do the same tomorrow.”

“You know, it’s nice you’re helping out,” Gary said. “You’re always welcome to come back, you know?”

He didn’t have anything to say to Gary. He’d made his decision. He knew he couldn’t go back on it and in a couple minutes Sheri came over from the restaurant and approached Drake and Gary where they sat at the bar.

“You ready?” she asked.

Drake said he was and got up from the bar. He was collecting his wallet and cell phone from the bar when Gary said, “You know they caught Bean earlier today.”

Sheri—who was half turned toward the exit—stopped and looked back at Gary. “You sure?”

“I wanted to wait till both of you were here. He wasn’t caught, really. He was shot as he tried to steal an RV from a man over in Chelan County.”

Drake stood watching Gary where he sat. “Dead?”

“Doesn’t get much deader.”

“How?” Sheri asked. “I mean, who shot him?”

“A ten-year-old boy—the grandson of the poor son of a bitch who was driving the thing. The sheriff called me forty minutes ago and gave me the info. The driver pulled over to help Bean out. Bean was carrying a gas can or something and the driver stopped to offer him a ride. Bean shot him right there and dragged the body off the RV and hid it off the side of the road.”

“And the boy?” Drake asked.

“Hidden in the bench seat of the dining area,” Gary said. “The sheriff said the grandfather was just taking the boy out for a little drive. They didn’t live more than twenty miles away.”

“That’s horrible,” Sheri said.

“Bean left a gun behind sitting on the seat when he dragged the driver from his RV. I guess he figured he was alone.”

“I can’t believe it,” Drake said.

“Looks like you can stop building a compound out of your place.”

Drake shook his head in disbelief. “Ten years old…”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Gary said. “I just thought it would be better if you two were together.”

“It’s fine,” Drake said. He looked to his wife and saw her eyes had gone watery. “It’s okay,” he said, trying to comfort her. He thanked Gary and after a little while he led Sheri out through the bar.

At the door, just before they left, Gary called after him. “I’m a size ten if you’re still wondering.”

Drake nodded. He put a hand to the door and propped it open for Sheri, the night air out there like a cool balm on the skin.

AT HOME THEY made dinner together and for a long time neither said a thing. At ten they watched the evening news and the story came on first thing. The cameras showed an empty road and the RV, a big thing that looked like a tour bus, wrapped with yellow police tape. Several of the Chelan County deputies working in the background to guide what little traffic there was.

An interview with the sheriff followed and then one of the two marshals made a statement for the camera. The news moved on to an Easter egg hunt somewhere in North Seattle that weekend, followed soon after by the weather and the local sports. Drake watched it all in silence as he sat on the couch.

For some reason little of it surprised him and he got up and went back into Patrick’s room. Without bothering to turn on a light, he sat at the desk in front of the computer. Sheri hadn’t come into the room much since breaking down the crib and removing the changing table. Now there was only the bed that Drake still hadn’t gotten around to.

He swiveled on the chair and looked over the mattress and frame. His father had made the bed and it looked untouched. On the desk where Drake sat there was a paper from a week and a half ago. Someone had brought it by—either Luke or Andy—and Drake had taken the time to scan the article, looking to see what was said and what wasn’t.

The story was a full page of text, cut up throughout the front section of the paper. It detailed the three days Patrick had gone missing and ended with Patrick’s escape from the Bellingham Police Department. They’d contacted Drake but he’d offered no comment, hanging up before the reporter was able to ask a second question.

Now Drake stood and walked to the bed and knelt, feeling around underneath for the box of Patrick’s things. He slid it out and brought up the folder and then crossed the room to the desk again.

For about five minutes he stood leafing through the articles, the light from the hallway the only thing to assist him in his study.

It was when he started to rip the article from the newspaper that Sheri came to the door. He looked over at her but didn’t say anything, simply continuing on with the article. When he was done he collected the pieces and folded them to fit in the manila folder with the rest of the newspaper articles, and then he placed the latest and, he hoped, the last within.

Only when he put the folder away and the box back under the bed did Sheri ask if he was saving it for Patrick.

“I’m not sure anymore,” Drake said. He stood half in the light and half in the dark and for a long time he stayed that way.

THE BOOT PRINTS were still there in the morning. Ellie waited for him as he looked them over for the second time in two days. The edges around the imprints had crumbled away a little more but the shape and size of the boot was still easy to recognize.

“There’s nothing off this way except for forestry land and a few hundred acres of clear cut,” Ellie said. She was looking at a topographical map and lining up a compass. The boot tracks were visible every few feet, sometimes in the mud but mostly as a scrape in the forest floor—a patch of dead pine needles displaced or the scuff of a boot toe against a rotten log. It was hard going and at times they backtracked, looking for a sign before going on again. The trail leading them on, farther and farther into the woods, where even Drake felt he had never been.

They traveled light, each with a day pack loaded with supplies. In Drake’s bag he carried a flashlight, a thermal blanket, some matches, a compass, binoculars, a radio Ellie had given him, and the spare ammunition to the .270 strapped over his shoulder. Ellie had the same except for the service weapon she wore in a holster over her right hip.

In an hour, they’d lost the track five times and spent just about as much time going back over their own footprints as they’d done following the original. After a mile and a half they came to a small creek where Drake saw the track pause, the boot prints in several places as if the person they followed had stopped to drink from the stream. While Ellie surveyed the map, Drake circled the area, coming across a second track. The boots about the same size but the tread slightly different, and this close to the stream the indentations clear in the wet earth.

He came back up the stream and found Ellie. “I don’t think this person stopped here just for the water.”

Ellie rested with one thigh supported on an egg-shaped rock. She looked up as soon as Drake came back and didn’t break eye contact till he was finished. She was holding the map in her hands still and Drake wondered if she knew where they were, because he certainly didn’t.

“Whoever was out here came to meet someone else.”

“Do the two tracks go on together?”

Drake looked behind him. The second track came on about fifty yards farther down, followed the first for a time, and then broke off again. He couldn’t be sure without following one or the other but he didn’t think they had traveled more than a few hundred feet together.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I’m not sure what to,” Drake said. He was looking up the stream, listening to the wind high up as the trees swayed above. A yellow finch flitted out of the brush, catching the light and then disappearing back within the forest shadows. “What size boot have we been following?”

“I don’t know.” Ellie placed her own foot next to one of the prints and then looked up at Drake. “I can’t be sure. What do you make of it? It looks like a woman’s eleven or twelve.”

“What’s that in men’s?”

“A nine,” Ellie said. “Maybe a ten. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about what the size difference is between men and women.” She was waiting for Drake to say something and when he didn’t, she said, “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking about something Gary said to me last night.”

“Gary?”

“Yeah,” Drake said. “It’s nothing, really. I wear a size ten. I can’t make any more of this than you can.”

Ellie brought the map over so that they could both see. She laid it out on a rock and marked their position with her finger. “This stream runs back down to the lake eventually. It looks far away but that’s just because it follows the back side of the ridge. It really isn’t too far—less than a day’s walk really.”

Drake looked it over. “But like you said, there’s nothing out here.”

“How does that second track look to you?”

“It looks the same as the first,” Drake said. He was getting frustrated with it all. They were out in the middle of nowhere and he was having a hard time putting two and two together.

“Does it double around on itself?”

Drake looked up from the map. He thought back. The trail had come up the stream and met the first and then after a while peeled off. It could have but he wasn’t sure.

“But they do split apart?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got the map,” Ellie said. “I’m going to keep on with the first. I want you to follow the second and see where it goes. You can use the stream as a guide. It runs into the southern part of the lake in about four miles.”

Drake looked back at her in complete disbelief. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ellie said. “This is the job. Mostly we work alone, you know that.”

Drake shook his head. “If you find someone I don’t want you doing anything.”

She smiled back at him. “I’ll use caution,” she said. “I’ll radio you every thirty minutes. How does that sound?”

“Better.”

She took out her water and drank a quarter of it and then put it back in her bag. “Four miles,” she said. And then she put the map away and lifted the backpack onto her shoulders and went on across the creek. Drake watched her for a time as she picked the tracks out of the soft forest detritus.

When she was gone from sight he lifted his own bag and cinched the straps down over his chest and waist. Twenty minutes later he was still following the creek, the boot prints heading southeast toward the lake.

At thirty minutes he stopped beneath a ledge of rock cut away from the mountains by the creek. A deadfall straddled a pool of water where he could see trout skimming the surface for mosquitoes, bits of twig and pine bark collected on the down-creek side of the pool.

He rested and got out some of his water. When thirty-five minutes had passed he tried the radio and got only static. He waited and tried it again. Ellie came through sounding breathless.

“You okay?”

“It doubled back across the creek,” she said. There was static for a moment and then her voice came through clear. “The trail is headed back up the ridge, right back to the clearing where we found the wolf.”

He thought that over. “Back toward town?”

“Exactly,” she said. Her voice sounded a little stronger and Drake imagined her a couple miles up the stream, and probably a thousand feet higher than he was. “You keep going,” she said. “I might lose you when I come over the ridge. I’ll follow my trail and if it just leads me back to the truck I’ll swing around and get you when you come out at the southern part of the lake.”

“Okay,” he said. “It’s just leading me that way as it is.”

“Radio again in thirty minutes.”

He replaced the radio in his bag and then stood with the backpack in one hand. He put one strap over his shoulder, removed the rifle from his other shoulder, and then put the other backpack strap on. For a long moment he stood looking out on the forest as it climbed gradually away from him and the mountain farther on. Besides the wind and the gurgle of the stream there was absolute silence and he felt a shiver travel up his spine and wring itself out on the fine hairs at the back of his neck.

He strapped the rifle up over his shoulder again and began to walk. Two hundred feet on he came to a wet boot print still dripping down one of the rocks.

The rifle was off his shoulder and in his hands before he knew it and for what felt like ten minutes he crouched next to a large boulder with his breath shallow in his lungs and his ears tuned to every swaying tree branch above.

He tried the radio again and got only static. He didn’t know what that meant but he guessed maybe Ellie had made her way up over the ridge and was headed to the truck. With his heart thumping he looked down at the boot print again, the water evaporating where the speckled light of the sun came in from the canopy above. He leaned out from around the boulder and looked up the slight grade at the shadowed forest beyond. Nothing at all to see.

When he turned back the print was just a wet dot on the rock. It could have been anything and this is what he tried to tell himself. The rifle in his hands and the knowledge that whoever had stepped across the creek had done so only a few minutes before.

He came out from behind the boulder in a sweep of the forest. The rifle held to his shoulder and the sight magnifying the far shadows. There was nothing to see but the dense growth of the forest.

Careful with his feet, he made his way up out of the creek bed and followed the fresh trail over the floor of pine needles. He moved with the gun in his hand, resting as he came to each new trunk and then waiting, listening to the blank silence of the surrounding wood. Somewhere far off a chipmunk beat a series of strained calls, chattering in a harsh cacophony before going silent again.

Drake moved out from behind the tree and went on. The trail he followed faint but still there.

He came up a small rise and crouched to survey the forest beyond. Evergreen trees and sword fern; a full minute passed before he saw the brown tarp, colored the same as the forest floor.

Circling to his right he came on the tarp from uphill. The plastic stretched over several support branches that ran down from a larger bough that had been nailed crudely into two trees about eight feet apart. The tarp making a kind of lean-to, with one side open to the forest and the back side shielding the small residence from the creek.

Drake tried the radio again and got nothing but static. He waited and tried it again. Still nothing. He was about two hundred feet off with a clear view to the open side of the lean-to. A blue bucket that looked to contain stream water was there. Inside he thought he could make out the roll of a sleeping bag and a few more items.

He raised the rifle again and searched the area. There was nothing to be seen and he ran the sight back over the lean-to, appraising those items that he hadn’t been able to make out with his naked eye. A rechargeable lantern with a crank sat toward the back, several tins of food, a couple magazines, and one book that Drake couldn’t see from his angle, and then around the edge of the sleeping bag Drake saw something that made him drop the sight from his eye, refocus, and then put the sight back.

There was a kind of metal box, bright red with only the battered corners showing beyond the rolled sleeping bag. He rose from where he’d crouched with his rifle and came on toward the lean-to, checking his blind spots every few steps. Once even stopping to sweep the forest when, far off, he heard a stick break, and then the forest go silent again.

He came to the lean-to with the rifle raised. Nothing more than what he’d seen through the scope. With the barrel of the gun he nudged the sleeping bag and then dragged it away, revealing the red toolbox beneath, the paint scored away in places to reveal the gray metal. Rust showing in other places where the box had sat in the elements.

He’d seen this box before. Or at least he’d seen one like it. He crouched and ran a hand across the metal. The same dings and dents he remembered. A few new ones that he didn’t.

Feeling something behind him he turned and watched the forest. No movement but that caused by the wind. When he was sure he was alone he let the rifle down onto the floor of the lean-to and with both hands he raised the edge of the toolbox and looked inside.

Empty. Nothing in the thing at all.

He rose and scanned the forest floor looking for a sign. The water in the bucket was fresh and clear and the pine needles were wet in places where the water had slopped over the edges and stained the earth.

Far out somewhere he heard another branch break and he was running, following the sound as he weaved through the trees, letting his feet navigate the uneven dips of the mountain. He moved farther from the creek, stopping once as he fought to catch his breath; he couldn’t hear the water anymore. Nothing but forest behind and ahead of him, nothing except brief glimpses of the sun through the trees above to tell him his direction.

At some point he dropped the bag, the backpack falling behind him as the slope began to run downhill, the rifle now solely in his hands. He was another five hundred feet on when he thought of the radio inside but he didn’t stop or go back. Up ahead something crashed through a thicket of devil’s club and he saw the green, maple-like leaves swaying.

He raised the rifle and sighted but only the leaves were there to dance in front of him. He went on, coming to the thicket, and then he was through and out into bright sunshine. The light blinding him as he took a fall over a young pine lying lengthwise across his path.

He came up holding his knee and gritting his teeth. The pain intense and the fallen pine only one of thousands that lined the clear-cut mountainside he’d emerged onto. He bounced up onto his good leg, still holding the rifle in one hand, and balanced himself with the other.

Somewhere below he heard a rock fall, tumbling through space, and then clapping into another, where it shattered into several smaller pieces. He raised the rifle. The running figure of a man visible through the scope as he jumped one tree stump and then vaulted the fallen trunk of another. Drake called out, telling the man to stop, his voice carrying in the open space. But the figure kept running, a backpack bouncing as he went. The bald crown of skin and the sun reflected in a glare.

“Stop,” Drake yelled, letting the voice carry. He held the rifle, the butt to the meat of his chest, just below his shoulder, and his eye searching down the scope.

The man didn’t stop. It was more like he slowed. One foot in front of the other, his pace slackening like an old coal train shifting away its power. The man standing there, backpack over his shoulders, sweat showing now on the back of his neck. The beginnings of a mane of hair grown in around the edges of his scalp. And Drake knew it before the man turned around. It was his father. And he knew, too, what had been in the red toolbox and what his father had meant when he’d written Morgan to take care of his half.

Drake knew it all now.

He held the rifle, sweat beading on his forehead and creating paths down his skin, waiting for his father to turn around. And then when he did, Drake felt his finger tighten on the trigger. He felt the tension there. The way the trigger yearned for release.

Patrick stood looking back at him. A hundred yards away. And then he raised a hand and waved. He didn’t say anything, he just stood there looking back at Drake, white hair grown in around his face and at the sides of his head. And Drake watched—he watched the hand go up high over his father’s head. He watched the palm open, the fingers extend, and it was like his father was saying hello, or saying good-bye, only Drake didn’t know.

The hand stayed that way for a long time, outstretched above Patrick’s head until it, too, fell away and Patrick turned downslope.

For a few seconds more Drake watched as his father moved away over the open landscape. The rifle still clutched into the meat of Drake’s chest. The crosshairs following his father, Drake knowing for the first time in a long time that whatever this was—sighting his father through the scope of a rifle—it simply wasn’t his job anymore.