Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  Even now they didn’t care for the trees as they should and half had gone wild, their tops lopsided and unkempt. The apples sagging on the branches in the fall, deer and elk showing up out of the forest to pick over the rotting apples on the ground, or as he had seen once or twice, put their hooves to the trunks and reach for the apples like giraffes extending their slender necks toward the most tender leaves.

  Drake set his empty cup in the sink. He left the coffee machine on and collected his hat from near the door. When he’d gone a hundred feet down the wooded drive in his cruiser, he saw a Chevy Impala waiting out on Silver Lake Road. A man in a suit getting out of the car and closing the door behind him.

  Drake pulled forward and when he came closer, he put down his window and said, “I was wondering if you’d show up.”

  The agent smiled and offered his hand. “How are you, Deputy?”

  Drake took his hand and said, “Fine, Driscoll. It’s been a long time.”

  Driscoll looked down the drive toward Drake’s house. “How’s the family? How’s Sheri?”

  “Still doesn’t like you very much.”

  “She’s got gentle sensibilities.”

  Drake watched Driscoll for a time, trying to figure the man out. There were only a couple reasons the agent would be waiting for him at the entrance to his drive. And none of those reasons meant anything good for Drake. “I’m guessing you didn’t travel three hours from Seattle for a simple hello.”

  “Your father was released from prison yesterday, wasn’t he?”

  Drake thought of the two men who had been waiting in the McDonald’s parking lot the day before. He hadn’t thought much of them then but he was starting to reconsider. They hadn’t looked like DEA men. “Driscoll, I hope you’re here because you just wanted to make sure we got home all right?”

  “Something like that,” Driscoll said. A car went by on the road, the tires moving over the asphalt. Driscoll watched it go by and then when it was gone, leaned in again. “You think I could talk with you for a moment before you head in?”

  “You got somewhere in mind?”

  “Sure,” Driscoll said, straightening up. “Follow me into town.”

  “YOU’RE SO FUCKING predictable,” Drake said, looking around the doughnut shop.

  “Just blending in. I thought all you small-town cops hung out in places like this.” Driscoll took a seat in a far booth, away from the main windows. He gestured to the bench across from him.

  Drake sat, throwing his hat on the table, and when the girl looked up from the counter, Driscoll ordered a black coffee and Drake asked for a maple bar. Their table far enough down the side of the doughnut shop that they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone driving by.

  When the girl brought the doughnut and coffee over, she nodded to Drake, and Drake said, “Thanks, Cheryl.”

  “I didn’t know you were on a first-name basis here,” Driscoll said, his head turning to watch the girl walk away.

  “You’ve seen this town,” Drake said. “We’re all on a first-name basis. She probably even knows who you are—probably made you the moment you drove that unmarked Impala into town.”

  Driscoll waited for the girl to go into the back before he spoke again. He fingered his coffee cup with two meaty hands and looked down into it for a long time, like someone wishing into a well. “I need to talk to you about something,” Driscoll said. “You remember how we first met?”

  “Sure,” Drake said. “You accused me of being a dope runner like my father.”

  Driscoll chuckled and looked up from his coffee. “I gave you a hard time, yes, but I wanted to make sure I could talk to you frankly. No beating around the bush. No leading you on, no feints.”

  “You’re about to tell me why the DEA has been following me around.”

  Driscoll gave him a dead stare. “What do you mean?”

  A strained laugh escaped Drake’s lips as he looked around the doughnut shop like Driscoll was playing a joke on him. “The two men? The ones who followed us up the interstate yesterday morning in the black Lincoln. They were your guys, right?”

  Driscoll took a sip from the coffee and then put it back on the table. He’d grown bigger in the two years since they’d last seen each other, his shoulders rounded and the jowls of his face thick on his jawline. White all the way through his hair in a way it hadn’t been before. “Deputy, I didn’t put any guys on you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “They were following you?” Driscoll asked. He had taken a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and he wrote down “Black Lincoln.”

  “My father thought they were. I told him he was being paranoid.”

  “That’s probably true,” Driscoll said. “I’ll check it out for you, though, just in case. You remember anything else about them?”

  Drake went down the list, two white males, one larger than the other. He gave Driscoll the exit number and a more thorough description of the vehicle they were driving. He couldn’t remember the license number. “Is this something I should be worried about?” Drake asked.

  “Have you seen them since?”

  “No.”

  “Then I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re probably right, your father is being paranoid.” He tucked the notebook away in his jacket again and then sat forward with his forearms on the table and his fingers interlaced. “I think you know me and your father have a little history together. I think I made that pretty clear from the beginning. The thing I didn’t tell you before is that I was part of the team that eventually brought him in.”

  “Just a little something you forgot to mention. Right, Driscoll?”

  “I didn’t want you blowing it out of proportion.”

  “You’d already accused me of being a criminal. How much worse could it have been?”

  “I’m the guy who put the cuffs on him. Pushed his face into a table just up the street here.”

  “What the fuck, Driscoll?”

  The agent raised his hands from the table. “I needed you to think we were on the same team, you know?”

  “Jesus. We were on the same team . . . we are on the same team.” Drake felt himself growing angrier, remembering how Driscoll had brought him into the interrogation room in the Seattle federal building and treated him like he was part of the problem, like he was the one smuggling drugs in from Canada. He reached down and straightened his leg, feeling his kneecap click. “I was shot twice,” Drake said. “How many times have you been shot?”

  Driscoll smiled, obviously enjoying this. “Let’s not get into a pissing contest, Bobby.”

  “Why are you here, Driscoll?”

  “Well, your father is out.”

  “Yes, and he served his time.”

  “What are his plans now that he’s out?”

  “So far his plans seem to be screwing with my life.”

  “Look, Bobby, I want to be straight with you here. We made an example out of Patrick Drake. We put him away for a lot of years. But if we could have proved everything we had on him from the start, he’d still be in prison. He did a lot of bad shit.”

  Drake took a bite of his maple bar, thinking it through. He didn’t have a clue what Driscoll was talking about or what his father was doing. What his father had planned now that he was out. Coming north on the interstate Patrick had told Drake not to worry about him. It was all covered. “I’m not helping you put him back in prison,” Drake said.

  The smile spread across Driscoll’s face again. “I thought you said we were on the same team.”

  “I remember now why my wife doesn’t like you,” Drake said.

  “You could lose your house, Deputy. That’s as straight as I can give it to you. You’re in trouble, and your father is most certainly the root of your problems.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that before Sheriff Drake went to prison, two guys were found dead in a gravel lot north of Bellingham.”

  “That’s a whole ot
her county,” Drake said.

  “Well the thing about it is that they were two guys who had ripped off a lot of money from someone big. Someone your father worked for.”

  “Sounds like they had it coming.”

  “Who’s saying that?” Driscoll asked. “You or your father?”

  “I’m not my father.”

  “A lot of money went missing,” Driscoll said. “Hundreds of thousands. It was drug money and—from what I hear—a portion of it was your father’s. So, naturally, a big deal like this gets my attention, and I talk to my sources and they say Patrick was the one who tracked the two men down. Said they stashed the money before Patrick found them. Only I go around and start asking questions from the wives of these guys—real trashy sort of girls. Moss all over their houses, rent-to-own sort of lifestyle. You get what I’m saying?”

  Drake nodded. His head turned toward the front windows, just looking at the sunlight outside, wishing he could be somewhere else.

  “They say they don’t know anything about the missing money. They admit to everything else. What their husbands were up to, how they did the job, who put them onto it, everything. Only they don’t know anything about the money. Are you following me, Deputy? Twelve years later one of the wives is still living in the same house. She’s paid off her rent-to-own couch, but there’s still moss on her siding, and she’s taking in welfare checks to pay for the kids. The other one isn’t doing as well. Couldn’t make her house payments, lost her place, and is living with her brother’s family, working three jobs, all that horrible stuff.”

  Driscoll took a drink of his coffee. Drake knew he’d paused just to push the knife in deeper. A grin on Driscoll’s face that heralded the coming twist of the handle.

  “So you might want to ask: where’s the money?” Driscoll said. “Well that’s the interesting part. That’s the part that gets me up in the morning and keeps me watching those two poor widows. Because you know what, that money is gone. It never made it back to the smugglers up in Canada. The widows don’t have it. And little by little I start to wonder where it’s gone and who has it. It’s a lot of money to go missing, a lot of money that most anyone would do most anything to hold on to. And so I go to Monroe to ask your father this question a few years back. I tell him if he knows where it is and he’s willing to point the finger at the people he works for, who sent him to do what he did, he can get out of prison right then and there. Time already served. He’s off the hook. The murders weren’t him, I know that. I just want to know where the money is and who sent it down this way in the first place. Hell, we went hard on him, too hard. And you know what, I don’t think Sheriff Drake was in on it alone.”

  “You’re saying my father didn’t kill those men?”

  “For now I’m giving Patrick the benefit of the doubt.”

  “How much are we talking about?” Drake asked.

  “Two hundred thousand. Not much in this day, but twelve years ago it would have been a good amount. Enough to get out of the business. Maybe start a new life. For your father to settle his debts.”

  “You think that’s what he was doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Driscoll said. “That’s why I’m coming to you. I’m asking for your help on this.”

  “Go talk to someone else. I’m certainly the last person my father would tell anything to,” Drake said.

  “That’s right,” Driscoll said. “But what I’ve heard and what I keep hearing is that your father and his deputies were pretty tight back in the day. Bend a few rules. Get away with a little here and there. Wasn’t your current sheriff, Gary Elliot, one of his deputies?”

  “That’s taking it too far,” Drake said. “Gary gave me my job after my father went away. For Christ’s sake, he lives in a two-bedroom apartment over the Laundromat. He’s not a rich man.”

  “I know where he lives,” Driscoll said. “I even know how much money he has in his bank account. Look, we’ve gone through just about everything. Before you gave up being a basketball star and came back from Arizona we even went through your house.”

  “And you didn’t find a thing, did you?”

  Driscoll laughed. “This is just like old times, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Drake said. “I’m just waiting for you to accuse me of being a criminal mastermind. You got anything more you want to tell me?”

  “That’s it. That’s all there is. I thought I owed you a talk at least. I thought you should hear it from me.”

  “Don’t give it to me like that, Driscoll. What is it you really want?”

  “I just want you to keep your eyes open. Stay sharp. Weeks from now I don’t want to see you across the table from me in a federal interrogation room.”

  “You want me to tell you if my father starts spending ten-thousand-dollar bills.”

  “Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. We’re friends, aren’t we? I’m only asking you to keep your father close for a little while. If nothing comes of it, then I’ll go back to sitting around the office, throwing the tennis ball at the wall. No harm done.” Driscoll slid a card out across the table. “In case you lost the last one I gave you.”

  Drake picked up the card and read the title and name: Regional Director, Agent Frank Driscoll. “If you’ve got all this information on my father why didn’t you just threaten him with life in prison for killing those two men?”

  Driscoll smiled. “If there was evidence to prove it, I would have.”

  “You’re out on a limb here, aren’t you?”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  “Doesn’t mean you’re right, either.”

  “I’m here to help you out, Deputy. I tell you about the fact that maybe you brought a murderer into your home and on top of that, your boss over at the Sheriff’s Department might have been involved, and you think I’m the one doing you a disservice?”

  “You’re a fucking cheery guy, you know that, Driscoll? I ought to have you over for more barbecues.”

  “Yeah, well, tell that to your wife and see how it goes.”

  DRAKE GOT INTO the department thirty minutes late and went straight into Gary’s office.

  “I bet you’re wondering why I set you up with Fish and Wildlife,” Gary said. He was sitting at his desk, looking through the morning paperwork.

  Drake nodded, his eyes casting out around the office like he might find a bloodstained sack of money in the corner. He had to check himself and keep his focus on Gary.

  “I know you’ve been helping Ellie out with that poaching thing, and this didn’t seem too much of a stretch,” Gary said. A few years younger than Patrick, Gary had been like an uncle to Drake growing up. He’d given Drake his job, even loaned him money till Drake could sell off some of his father’s land to buy groceries and pay for the mortgage on their house. Since then Gary had begun to show his age. The uniform rounded on his stomach and the hair that had once been red now gone thin on his pink scalp. Worry lines across his forehead deep and defined on the skin.

  “The truth is,” Gary was saying, “your fellow deputies, Andy and Luke, could have done it, but you know the valley better than anybody and you’re the one who keeps getting the calls as it is.” Gary shook his head like something was funny. “Hell, you’re about the only one besides Ellie that gives a shit about that wolf. I think a lot of people would rather you just shot it, and to be honest, I’m one of them.”

  Drake had his hat sitting in his lap and as Gary talked he turned it slowly with his fingers. “You know my father is out?” Drake said.

  “I know,” Gary said. “I was the one who approved your day off.”

  “You ever visit him in Monroe?”

  Gary cracked a smile, the flesh beneath his chin drawing tight. “You know I did. I haven’t in a long while, but I did.”

  “Except for one time, I didn’t visit him at all,” Drake said.

  “He’s staying with you and Sheri?”

  “He has my old bedroom.”

  Gary nodded; he leaned
back in the chair and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. The office had been Patrick’s at one time. Now all the pictures that had lined the walls were gone and Gary had replaced them with his own. Pictures from the fishing trips he took to Alaska, one with Drake holding a king salmon and looking proudly at the camera. The trips a yearly vacation for Gary, sometimes on his own but often with one of the deputies from the department. And Drake knew, too, that if Patrick had never gone away to prison it would have been his father there in the picture instead of him.

  “You guys were close when I was a kid.”

  “Yes, we were,” Gary said. “It’s a shame how it all turned out.” Other photographs showed Gary in the Cascade foothills, kneeling next to big bucks he’d shot, their antlers turned up in his hand and the buck’s eyes staring out at the camera, dull and black as those of the deer Drake had seen the other day. “You should tell Patrick we say hello. Me, Andy, and Luke, all of us, tell him that and say we’ll get a few beers one of these nights.”

  “What I mean to say is that my father just got out yesterday. I don’t know if I should be headed off into the hills on a wolf hunt.”

  “I can stop by and check up on him, if that helps you out at all,” Gary said. “I don’t think that wolf can wait more than a day.”

  Drake thought about what Driscoll had told him only thirty minutes before. The image in his mind of two old lawmen sitting on Drake’s porch counting the cash they’d stolen twelve years ago. Drake was having a hard time keeping his focus. All the things Driscoll had said to him earlier at the doughnut shop were crawling up his spine like spiders through a tin pipe. “Maybe I’ll just take Dad with us,” Drake said.

  “Is that you or Ellie talking? I already told her that was a bad idea.”

  “I told her the same,” Drake said. “But I’m not going to leave him around the house doing who knows what.”

  Gary smiled. “Don’t trust the old man yet?”

  “Something like that,” Drake said. He was having a hard time trusting anyone at this point. “Did Ellie mention when she wanted to head out?”