Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You know he’s gone, then?”

  “I know.”

  “And you were waiting to tell me . . .”

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

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

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

  “What else is there?”

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

  “Should he be?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A few days now.”

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

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

  “Like who?”

  “Like Gary,” Drake said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Who are you guys?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Does it get better?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What way is that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Drake nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  They could have killed him but they hadn’t.

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