Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The boy has come to see me. It’s the first time . . . He’s grown. I know you haven’t seen much of him but I . . . I need to make sure everything is set. If I can . . . I’ll be out in two. I need to know that you’ll watch over your half.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Please,” Drake said.

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

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

  “You know him?”

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

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

  “You don’t have the license?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How’s it going, Maurice?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Rent-free living?” Patrick asked.

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

  “That why you changed it up?”

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

  “You got any work now?” Patrick said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Have you been reading the letters I sent?”

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

  “Almost six.”

  “Shit, man. Time flies.”

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

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

  “Not that kind of night.”

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

  “I’m not into that sort of thing.”

  “What?” Maurice laughed. “Women?”

  “You know what I mean.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Thinking things through.”

  “How’s it looking?”

  “Not good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s what they said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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