by Urban Waite
Sheri looked up at him. “What do you think Bean will do when he finds Patrick?”
“That’s up to Patrick,” John Wesley said. He looked away, running his eyes over the room, listening to the splash of water from the bathroom sink.
On the floor Maurice was still alive—just barely so. And when he started to pull himself little by little across the floor, John Wesley paused, his eyes oscillating between Bean in the bathroom and Sheri in the corner, then he looked to where Maurice had managed to cover a few inches of ground on his way to the door.
John Wesley wanted to say something to Bean but then thought better of it. Instead he got up from the coffee table and walked to where Maurice lay, struggling for escape, his chin upturned with the side of his face flat on the floor and his eyes looking toward the door. Each breath flaring his nostrils as he put one hand out and then the other, trying for a solid grip on the floor.
Bean came out of the bathroom with a towel in one hand and with his other caught Sheri by the throat as she tried to make a run for the back door. He should have been angry but he wasn’t, the pulse of Sheri’s neck felt in the skin of his palm as he made a slow turn of his head, taking in the room. John Wesley there beside Maurice, the blood spreading on the floor, and John Wesley crouched on his haunches like a little boy studying a snail making its way across a distance too far to travel.
Chapter 13
GARY WAS THERE IN the prison parking lot when Driscoll came out. The two U.S. marshals were there with him, too.
Gary stood next to the fence, smiling now and watching Driscoll as the guard showed him out onto the lot. The marshals a couple hundred feet away by their vehicle.
“These marshals have been looking for you.”
“Looks like they found me,” Driscoll said. “They ask you to come along? Help them track me down?”
“Thought you would have at least picked up your calls the last couple days,” Gary said.
“I’ve got nothing for them,” Driscoll said. His eyes moved over the two men at the other end of the lot and then came back to Gary. “It’s not my case, it’s theirs.”
Gary grinned. “You worried they’re going to take the glory away from you? All these years and nothing to show for it?”
“No,” Driscoll said. “You’re right. I don’t have anything. I wish I did but I don’t.” The guard latched the gate behind him and Driscoll felt alone and exposed in the lot, the marshals both on their phones but looking to where Driscoll stood now. “Plus, there’s always the worry that if I did have something the information might end up in the wrong hands.”
Gary fell into step next to Driscoll as they crossed the lot, walking away from the prison gates. “These men are trying to find two escaped convicts,” Gary said. “I’m just doing my part. If they’re looking for Patrick, and Bobby gets in the way, that’s something I have to live with.”
“The way you lived with Patrick being in prison,” Driscoll said.
“Be nice, Driscoll. Patrick went to prison for smuggling drugs. He was the sheriff and he got caught. That’s all.”
“You got a job out of it, though.”
“And so did Bobby,” Gary said, his voice drawn tight and his jaw rigid as they crossed the lot.
“I know you’ve been waiting on Patrick to get out,” Driscoll said. “Everyone except maybe Bobby has. And now he’s the one in trouble.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gary said.
“Yes, you do.” Driscoll looked ahead to where the marshals had taken notice of him. He didn’t know what to tell them. Whatever Patrick’s cell mate John had told them yesterday, it hadn’t been enough. Now he had something for them. Something that could help them all, but Driscoll didn’t know if he could share anything with them while Gary was still helping them out.
He watched one of the marshals drop his phone to his pocket and start to walk toward him. Driscoll pulled his own phone up and looked at the blank display. He pulled up short with Gary still next to him. Driscoll pretended to answer. “They don’t really care about Bobby, do they?”
Gary looked back at Driscoll, the marshal still fifty feet away. “They’ve got a job to do and they’re trying to do it.”
“Just like you,” Driscoll said.
“Yes, just like me.”
PATRICK PULLED THE truck off at the exit in Everett. He was hungry and he was having second thoughts. The diner he pulled up to had a counter running the length of the restaurant and at the end near the bathroom there was a pay phone. When he came into the place he could smell the potatoes going on the grill in the back. He sat at the counter and ordered coffee.
No idea what he would do next and a fear growing inside him that all he’d done to get to this point would amount to nothing. The money he’d saved just another shackle around his life, holding him back from the hopes he’d had for the future. Now he wanted to get home to Silver Lake. He was worried about that dead space on the other end of the phone that morning. He was worried about what it might mean for his son and Sheri.
He waited for the coffee to come, looking the menu over and watching the grill man behind the counter. The potatoes were making his mouth water and he ordered a big skillet of hash browns with a side of bacon as soon as the waitress came back with the coffee.
The turnoff for Silver Lake forty miles to the north and he thought about this for a long time. Drinking his coffee cup dry and then calling for another. He didn’t know what to do anymore. The phone at the end of the diner sitting there and a real need to just call Bobby and Sheri and tell them both what he’d been doing these last few days.
The only thing stopping him was the certainty that he’d be going back to prison the moment he made the call. He knew Driscoll was probably still out there looking for him. He’d switched cars three times since he’d left Silver Lake and he couldn’t be sure of anything really, but he was almost positive whoever had been on the other end of Maurice’s phone hadn’t been the law.
He didn’t know what to do and he looked behind him, out on the interstate going by just beyond the diner’s big windows. He didn’t know one damn thing, and he was a fool to have thought he did.
Up above, over the counter, there was a television going and he watched some soap opera play out in silence on the screen. Lots of people crying and a bunch of actors who looked like they’d never lived a day of their lives in the real world.
He looked away at the interstate again and then turned and watched the grill man. Patrick was jumpy and he looked it. Nothing he could do but try to sit still. The waitress came over with more coffee.
“You going far today?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Just up the road.”
“Well, you look like you’re worried the freeway is going to get away from you.” She filled his coffee to the top and then stood there at the counter. “It’s not going anywhere, honey.”
Patrick gave a polite laugh. Even his laugh had nerves in it and he looked again at the interstate. He had to stop doing that. He thought of the money again and all the trouble it had brought him. “Just a reunion I have to be at this afternoon,” he said.
“I hate those,” the waitress said. “How long has it been?”
“Twelve years.”
The waitress whistled and behind her the bell rang in the kitchen. When she came back with his food she said, “I hope you didn’t leave anyone waiting at the altar.”
“No, nothing like that. Nothing that special.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine then.” She asked him if he needed anything else and when he said no, she walked away down the counter and started pouring coffee for one of the other customers.
Patrick ate and watched the soap opera. Well aware that at any moment their perfect little world would start to fall apart around them, if it hadn’t already begun.
Chapter 14
JOHN WESLEY SAT NAKED on the coffee table staring at the fireplace. His skin had dried but
the damp of the shower was still in his hair. Maurice was dead. Patrick was gone and they were running out of options. All they had now was Sheri and she wasn’t much better than a mute. Her hands and mouth taped with some duct tape Bean had found, she lay on the bed in Maurice’s room. John Wesley only able to see her spine where she’d turned away from him on the bed.
Gathering a few of the magazines together he approached the fireplace and squatted, crumpling paper in his fists and then rolling each new ball out onto the ash-stained cement. With a lighter he lit the collection of balled paper and watched it burn, feeding new pages from the magazine into the fireplace as it was needed.
Naked, he roamed the house looking for combustibles. When he passed the bathroom door he heard the shower going and the low croon of Bean singing to himself. Ignoring Sheri, John Wesley went on into Maurice’s room and found a wooden shoehorn in the closet. Next he took a cutting board and a pair of wooden salad spoons from the kitchen. For a long time he stood in front of the small fire and fed the wood into the flames, watching how each new item stained and blackened in the heat. The feel of warmth so good on his skin.
When Bean came out of the bathroom in his suit, John Wesley was breaking down the dining room chairs one leg at a time and feeding them to the fire. Bean simply stared at John Wesley until the big man turned and smiled at him, then went back to breaking down the dining room chairs.
Bean left and went into Maurice’s room and pulled Sheri to her feet. He brought her out and put her on the bloodstained couch and then went back into Maurice’s room. He selected some clothes and laid them out for John Wesley. When Bean came back out into the living room he told the big man to go dress and then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water from the faucet, staying close enough that he could keep his eyes on Sheri. It was a beautiful day, he thought. Out the window above the sink there was nothing but high blue sky and the sun just past its midpoint for the day.
When he returned to the living room John Wesley was dressed and standing over Maurice. A look of horror on Sheri’s face as she watched the big man squat and extend a hand toward the body. A skin had formed at the edge of the blood pool and John Wesley put a finger to it like a skater about to shove off across a half-frozen lake.
With four of the burning chair legs Bean went into Maurice’s bedroom and placed them beneath the bed frame. When he was done he called for John Wesley and waited while the big man dragged Maurice in by his ankles. They were hoisting him onto his mattress when they heard the knocking begin on the front door, the smoke already starting to roll up from beneath the bed.
Chapter 15
THE DRIVE FROM MONROE to Seattle was forty minutes if Driscoll kept the speed limit. If he ran the sirens it was thirty minutes, no accounting for traffic and the side streets he’d have to find his way through. He’d already lost enough time dealing with the marshals and Gary, and on top of that he’d taken his own time thinking it through—thinking what would happen to Patrick or Drake—before he made the decision not to tell the marshals what he knew.
He hit traffic merging onto the 405 and rode the bumper of the car in front of him for five minutes before Driscoll popped the sirens and sped past, one tire riding the grass and the other on the road.
He was being too cautious and he knew it. If Patrick’s cell mate was right then Driscoll might already be too late. He ran up on a driver in the HOV lane and flashed his lights, veering around him and hitting ninety as he passed.
The big software buildings went by on his right as he came down the 405 and sped through Bellevue. Twelve years, he thought, it was a lot of time to pursue one case. Gary and Patrick both wrapped up in the same thing and neither of them talking. Now Gary was helping the marshals while Driscoll tried to avoid them. And he knew they wouldn’t believe him, not after all he’d done to try to keep them away from this case.
Driscoll took the exit for I-90 and came around toward Seattle. The speedometer at ninety-five as he hit the bridge across Lake Washington, the city just on the other side.
DRAKE STOOD ON the porch. Down at the cross street a group of boys on bicycles were turning and turning. He didn’t know how long he’d watched them before he blinked. His eyes gone dry and a sense that he’d lost himself somewhere behind on the road over the mountains, or perhaps even before.
He knew standing there on the porch that he wasn’t thinking straight. The sight of the money in the grave had shaken something up in him. Everything he’d learned from Morgan, Drake’s own desperation to get Sheri back, and the anger he felt for his father all competing for space inside his mind. The thoughts crowded up, each yelling for the attention Drake didn’t have time to give.
He wet his lips, searching down the street for some sign he was in the right place. No one came to the door and he bent to the side window and tried to see what he could, but there was nothing for him—the shades drawn across every piece of glass and the interior of the house a complete mystery.
At the end of the block he watched the boys turn once, then twice. Nothing on the street to say Drake was in the right place. All that mattered now was Sheri. The money was nothing to him.
Whatever Patrick had done, wherever he was, it just didn’t matter to Drake anymore. A third of Drake’s life had gone by without knowing who his father really was and he realized at some point it had stopped mattering to him. Patrick made his own mistakes and Drake chasing after him wasn’t going to make them any better.
Drake looked to the windows again. Nothing to see but his own reflection in the glass—a slim figure standing somewhere between fog and light. His face as nondescript as a mannequin in a shop window. He stood staring at himself for half a minute before he turned, looking again toward the street, wondering if Morgan had been wrong about the place, when the door opened behind him.
By the time he got his body around, John Wesley already had him by his shirt and was dragging him through the doorway into the house. The smell of fire somewhere close by. Drake tried to get a grip but he found himself lifted from the ground and slammed into the wall once, then twice. The plaster cracking as his body bounced and he heard his service weapon clatter and slide away.
He lay on the floor trying to get his breath and then he was lifted once again. A brief feeling of falling as he went over. The floor coming up fast, blood all across the floorboards though Drake couldn’t tell if it was his.
PATRICK THOUGHT ABOUT running. He rolled the bottom of the coffee mug around on the counter, listening to the sound. He’d finished off the hash browns and he was working on the bacon. Dredging it through a small pool of syrup he’d poured himself on the plate.
The waitress was away having a smoke and had told him if he needed anything to ask the grill man. Patrick watched the man work for a moment. His back was to Patrick, chopping something up on a cutting board. Patrick looked to the door again, and the interstate farther on. Again he thought about running.
For the first time in a long time he felt scared. He felt like those characters up there on the soap opera. Fragile. Unaccustomed to life outside the walls.
He pushed his plate away. The sound of it on the counter loud in the silence of the diner. The grill man turned and looked at him and Patrick brought out a dollar and asked the man for change.
He rattled the quarters in his hand as he came off the stool and walked back toward the bathrooms. Patrick stopped at the pay phone and dialed the number. It was the only number he knew by heart. A number that hadn’t changed in twelve years and one he’d dialed a thousand times before.
He listened to the call go through. It was answered after the third ring and the voice there was familiar to him, but not the voice he was expecting. “Luke?” Patrick said.
A brief pause while the deputy cleared his throat. “Gary told me to wait around and see if anyone called. I didn’t think it would be you, Pat.”
“What do you mean you didn’t think it would be me? Where’s Bobby, Luke? Where’s Sheri?” Patrick leaned
into the phone; he had the receiver held tight to the side of his face and his eyes scanned back over the diner. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. Why are you at my house?”
“They’re missing. It looks like they were taken, both Gary and Driscoll are out searching for them.”
“Together?”
“Two marshals were here. Gary went with them and Driscoll is on his own.”
With his free hand Patrick pinched two fingers over his eyes until the blackness swam behind his lids. He didn’t understand what was happening. “Marshals?”
“I thought you knew. I thought that was why you were calling. They killed a girl in town. Stuffed her in the back of a car with another man they’d killed the day before,” Luke said. “It was in the news last night.”
“What are you doing at my house, Luke?”
“I’m sorry about this, Pat.”
“Again,” Patrick said, “why are you at my house, Luke?”
“Gary told me to wait—I thought you’d have seen it on the news—in case Sheri or Bobby showed or the two men came back.”
“Who?” Patrick managed to say. He was holding the phone tight, the plastic growing slippery with his own sweat.
“They’d been following you since you got out. The marshals said it was two prisoners you knew in Monroe. They got transferred a week ago and killed one of the guards in transit. I’m sorry,” Luke said. “I thought you would have known all this.”
“I guess I haven’t been paying that much attention.”
“None of us knew anything about it till the marshals showed up. I guess they thought the men had gone over into Idaho or up to Spokane.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“What do you mean, Pat?”
“The car they found the bodies in.”
