Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  “I think so.”

  John Wesley knelt and dug the log into the coals. When he stood again, Bean was holding the phone, the green light of the display flashing in his hand and the low pulsing sound of its vibration.

  Bean depressed a button and held the phone to his ear. He listened for a time and then when he was finished, he looked over at John Wesley, the grin growing across Bean’s face. “Yeah, man, I feel you,” Bean said, and then closed the phone, already turning toward the car, Seattle a few hours’ drive away.

  PART IV

  THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

  Chapter 11

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

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

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

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

  “Almost six.”

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

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He came out here?”

  “When he could.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He wasn’t the man you think of now.”

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

  “Occupation defines him, then?”

  “You know what I mean.”

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

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

  “So you would arrest him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You know what’s in there.”

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

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

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

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

  “This is for me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s all you know about it?”

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “Just waiting to give it to me?”

  “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “You think my father would bring them here?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

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

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

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

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

  Drake bent his hand to the small piece of paper and brought it up. He tucked it within a pocket of his coat. When he was finished he dropped the tackle box back into its hole.
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br />   “Telling the truth can be a horrible thing,” Morgan said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “It wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

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

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

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

  “How long have you been in here?”

  “Too long.”

  “How long do you have to go?”

  “Too long.”

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