Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  “It was a black Town Car.”

  He told Luke to hold on. He took the phone away from his ear and let it dangle by his thigh. He heard Luke call his name several times but Patrick wouldn’t answer. From where he stood he could see Maurice’s truck out there in the lot. The interstate just fifty yards farther on.

  THE HOUSE WAS burning. Driscoll stopped the Impala in the middle of the street and was out of the car and up the stairs before the heat turned him away. The temperature too much and his hand raised across his face as he backed away to the sidewalk. Flames already beginning to show at several windows toward the back. The drapes in the front on fire and the glass panes crashing to the porch.

  All down the street there were people beginning to come out of their homes. Several of them on their cell phones. Driscoll looked around at it all. The rush of the flames heard now like a constant wind. Neighbors gesturing with one arm raised toward the flames as they tried to make their voices heard over the crackle of wood and heat.

  Driscoll came back to the car and put his elbows down across the roof, cradling his face in his hands. So close, he thought, always so close.

  In the distance he heard the sound of fire trucks. He turned and looked back toward the house. Flames were beginning to come through the roof. This is the house, he thought. This has to be the house.

  Up on the main street the first fire engine made a wide turn to get the corner. He knew he should stay. Already the neighbors were looking to him like he was the first part of some rescue. Only Driscoll knew he wasn’t and that if he stayed he’d have to answer the question of what he was doing there in the first place.

  Up at the corner the fire truck had come up short on its turn and was reversing out into traffic to bring the big square body straight so it could fit down the side street. He dropped down into the seat and brought the transmission into drive. Several boys on bicycles staring at him as he went past, moving fast with the grille lights of his Impala pulsing a silent flash. The big red body of the fire truck pulling to a stop in front of the house all he saw before he went around the corner.

  He parked a block down and sat there. For a full minute he sat there staring out at the street through the front windshield. “Fuck—fuck—fuck!” he yelled, beating his fists against the wheel in quick succession.

  When he looked up at his own reflection in the rearview mirror he saw the blood in his face, the skin pulled red with tension. He felt the beat of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, wetting his throat, and the slow rise and fall of his chest. His hands now resting, useless, palms up on his thighs, with his head played back against the headrest.

  He looked back in the direction he’d come from. How did he even know Patrick had come here?

  “Because the house is burning,” he said, speaking aloud like it wasn’t he who had asked the question.

  “It could be a coincidence. It could mean anything.”

  “But it doesn’t mean anything, it means something,” Driscoll said.

  Driscoll pulled himself up in the seat. He had his hands gripped on either side of the steering wheel. He hadn’t seen the Toyota Patrick took from the casino lot anywhere on the street. Maybe Patrick never came this way. Maybe John was wrong about Maurice. Maybe he was wrong about Patrick.

  Driscoll looked up again at his eyes in the mirror. He was tired. He could see that. He was failing. Failing Bobby and failing Sheri, but mostly he was failing himself.

  The house was burning and the Toyota Patrick had stolen from the casino lot was nowhere on the block.

  Ten minutes later he found the Camry parked five blocks away. The window was broken out on the driver’s side and Driscoll opened the door and sat in the old Toyota examining the wire harness pulled free below the steering column.

  Driscoll shook his head, almost like he didn’t believe it himself. Where the fuck was Patrick?

  Two more fire trucks went by while he sat there and he was staring up at the empty space where they had been when his cell phone rang. He checked the display. It was a number he didn’t know and after a second he picked up the call.

  “Agent Driscoll?” a voice asked.

  He answered, listening, waiting for the voice to go on.

  “It’s Luke, the deputy from Silver Lake. Patrick just called and he wants you to call him back.”

  Chapter 16

  BEAN SAT SHOTGUN WHILE John Wesley drove. Drake’s cruiser radio was turned on and Bean listened as the codes came in but as far as he could tell none of them had anything to do with them.

  He’d taken the jacket off Drake and gone through the pockets. One cell phone, a set of keys, a wallet, and a note in a plastic envelope that looked to be from Patrick to Drake. He read the note twice. When he was done he looked up and watched the road for several beats and then read the note again.

  He looked to the back, where Drake lay unconscious in the rear cage, bleeding from a split of skin over his right eye. His face badly bruised where it rested against his wife’s lap. And Sheri sitting there with a look of hate on her face and her hands still duct-taped.

  He pursed his lips and kissed the air, watching as Sheri turned away.

  John Wesley came to the on-ramp for the interstate and looked to Bean for direction.

  Bean studied the note in its plastic envelope. “It’s time we got a few things straight,” Bean said, looking to the back, where Sheri sat.

  Chapter 17

  MORGAN SAT OUT ON the porch for a long time before he went in. He made fry bread in the pan and then got out some of his preserves and ate the sweet jelly slathered on the warm bread. Except for the warmth from the propane burner the house was cold and he walked back outside to sit in the sun and take in the land.

  A muddy patch of earth sat halfway up the hill from the rains two days before. Stained into the gravel. He leaned back in his chair and brought one leg over the other. Up above a hawk was circling over something in the fields and he thought of his snares and wondered if it was something he’d caught.

  He was tired and his lids dropped once, then again. The hunting jacket buttoned over his chest and the collar turned up. When he came awake he didn’t know what time it was and he had to take the hour from the sun. The hawk gone from the sky.

  He lit a cigarette with a match and then sat there till the paper felt hot between his fingers. He mulled it over for a while before he went back inside and found the box of bird shot Drake had left out on the table. He looked this over and then crossed to where he’d put the shotgun away. He broke open the breech and looked in on the two shells. He closed the breech and found his truck keys.

  PATRICK SIGNALED THE grill man and asked for the bill. A minute later the grill man came back with the waitress behind him.

  “Sorry,” Patrick said. “That reunion just got moved up and I’ll be taking off soon.”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey.” She was at the register now and she put in the figures and brought up the total. When she came back over he could smell the cigarette smoke on her. “I hope it all turns out for you.”

  “I hope so, too.” He brought out a few bills from his wallet and laid them over the counter. It was enough to cover the total and then some. He didn’t have anything left in his wallet but a few old receipts and expired credit cards. The leather still smelled like the lockup. “Can I have a refill on the coffee?” he said.

  She poured the coffee and he watched her as she did it. She’d probably be the last good memory he had in this life. After she was done he toasted her with his mug and saw the little smile come across her lips before she went to check on the other customers.

  He was waiting on the phone at the other end of the diner to ring and he wasn’t surprised when it did a minute later.

  He answered and Driscoll said, “I bet you weren’t planning on talking to me.”

  “I wasn’t planning on ever hearing from you again.”

  “Then you should have stayed where you were.”

  “I think you know I didn
’t have that option.”

  “You’re talking about the two men who came by your house?”

  “And others,” Patrick said. He held the receiver close, his back turned away from the diner.

  “Maurice?”

  Patrick didn’t say anything. He was still thinking about what Maurice had tried to do to him. All that time inside and Maurice had tried to cut him out of the deal.

  “You still there, Patrick?”

  Patrick listened to the empty sound of the phone in his hand. He could tell Driscoll was driving. “I’m here,” he said.

  DRAKE WOKE IN the back of his cruiser. He lay there with his knees pushed up against the seat. His head hurt, the pain centralized over his left eyebrow. The skin hot and swollen, he held his eyes closed and he listened to the breath enter through his nose, feeling it swell in his chest and then release. When he opened his eyes he realized what had happened.

  Above, through the back windows of the car, he saw telephone poles passing one after the other, the wires falling and then rising again in a never-ending series of waves. He felt the late sun on his face, and the pants he wore were hot against his thighs. But it was fading now, like it had been hotter at one point in the day. There was blood on him, too, on his pants and crusted to the front of his shirt. He could feel it under the material and on his skin.

  It was only when he tried to move that he found his hands had been duct-taped behind him, and it was this movement that brought the realization of where he truly was. His wife’s thigh under his head, and the two killers in the front, Sheri looking down on him, her eyes unwavering, and Drake thinking maybe he’d been too late, maybe she was dead. And then she blinked and Drake watched a single tear roll down her cheek.

  “Reunited at last,” Bean said.

  MORGAN PUSHED OPEN the door and listened to the bell chime. He turned and closed the door, wooden with glass at its center. He looked out on the county road and his truck there in the gravel drive. The last time he’d been to the store there had been snow on the ground and he remembered how his truck had left muddy tracks all the way off the road and onto the drive. No more than a couple cars in the lot. Just as there were now.

  The clerk was waiting for him at the counter when he turned. The clerk wiped a paper napkin across his lips and brought it away with the slight stain of mustard. Morgan knew the man’s name but simply nodded to him as he went down the first aisle, passing the Popsicle case and magazine rack on one side and the chips and soda pop on the other. He came to the back of the store and looked in on the dairy coolers there.

  “You’re early,” the clerk said. He had taken another bite of the sandwich he was eating for a late lunch and he wiped at his mouth again, standing there at the counter watching Morgan.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just early,” the clerk said. He took another couple bites. Finished the sandwich and then said, “You usually don’t come in till the end of the month.”

  Morgan nodded at that and then looked away. The store was a mash-up of kerosene, fishing hats, T-shirts, beer, chips, hot dog buns, work pants, shoes, even horse feed and birdseed. Anything and everything was sold there and if they didn’t have it they could get it in a week. Morgan liked that about the place and he went down to the next aisle and looked over the fishing supplies. He’d never taken it up but he thought maybe he would someday. The green tackle box with the money inside the only piece of gear Patrick or Morgan had ever owned.

  He came up the aisle and looked over the wares behind the counter. Cigarettes and lottery tickets, an old Budweiser shirt and matching hat that had hung in the store for as long as Morgan could remember. “What do you have for deer shot?” Morgan asked. He was looking over the ammunition now, about ten rows of boxes were dedicated to it and he was examining the various measurements and sizes on the boxes.

  The clerk turned and looked to the place Morgan was studying. He selected two boxes and then brought them back to the counter. He laid them out for Morgan to see. “I never took you for much of a deer man, Morgan.”

  “I’m not,” Morgan said.

  He paid and left through the front door. The bell chiming again. When he started up his truck he could see the clerk staring at him through the glass door. Morgan reversed out and then brought the wheel straight. He ran the engine a bit hard and he heard the gravel pinging in the wheel wells.

  A quarter mile on he pulled over and just sat there with the engine running. “Damn it,” he said.

  When he came back into the little town he could see the shades were down at the post office and he checked his watch and then looked at the shades again. The woman’s car was still in the lot and he pulled in next to her and then went up the stairs. It took her a minute to pull back the shade and then undo the lock. “Oh, hi,” she said as he came into the small office. A little counter where she sat with the sorting room behind and about twenty wooden slots on the opposite wall for mail.

  Morgan looked around the office. There was room to stand but little more. If he took more than a couple steps in any direction he’d come to a wall. “I was in town,” Morgan said.

  “I see that.” She was smiling at him a bit. She wore the blue fleece vest with the eagle on the breast but little else to say she worked there. Her hair was slightly curly and the blond dye had started to go out of it, but it was still there in certain patches. Her figure was plump in the way Morgan liked; he thought about the rabbit stew again. He liked the way they had sat together and she had broken the bread with her hands and used it to clean out her bowl.

  She looked him over. The counter flipped up behind her. “I have some mail for you, I guess.” She turned and went back into the mailroom, bringing the pass down behind her. For a moment she was gone. The sound of her somewhere in the back as she rummaged for the right box. “I needed something to read and I almost opened one of your packages. Looks like you got a few good books here.” She came back to the counter and set the box down on the floor. She brought up the mail and placed it on the counter between them.

  He looked it over. “How can you tell they’re any good?” he asked.

  She was smiling at him again. “I peeked.”

  “That’s a federal crime.”

  She didn’t say anything back to him. He was stone-faced and she was looking up at him and trying to decide what he meant. “I just thought—”

  He broke into a laugh and he saw the relief go across her face. “Go ahead,” he said, opening the package up right there. “I’m happy to let you read any of them first.”

  She took one of the books off the stack and looked it over, turning it front to back and then reading the rear flap for a time. She held it close to her chest like a schoolgirl and it made Morgan smile to look at her.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded and then began to collect his things.

  He was at the door when she said, “That was nice, wasn’t it? You and me a few weeks ago.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was.”

  DRISCOLL CAME INTO the diner parking lot at full speed, grille lights going, and the dust kicked up from his tires rolling past him as he came to a stop. Patrick sat there on the tailgate of a red pickup with his feet dangling over the lot. He wore the same canvas jacket and jeans Driscoll remembered him wearing at the Buck Blind. While the two days of white growth on his head and face made him look ten years older.

  The Impala was parked at an angle, blocking the truck. Patrick still sitting there watching him as Driscoll got up from his car. “Raise your hands,” Driscoll said. He watched Patrick do it and then he told him to slide off the tailgate and turn around. Driscoll came around the Impala and pressed him then, bending one of Patrick’s arms back and then the other. The handcuffs out in one of Driscoll’s hands as he held Patrick’s wrists with the other.

  With Patrick turned on the tailgate, Driscoll went through his pockets, throwing anything he found onto the tailgate. Inside the diner there was a waitress and a cook staring out at them
. The waitress had a hand to her mouth as if something had jumped out at her.

  Driscoll set Patrick down again on the tailgate, letting him lean on the metal. His legs straight out and his hands behind him in the cuffs. “Hello, Driscoll,” Patrick said.

  Driscoll ignored him and ran his hands down one leg and then stood and patted down the other. When he was finished he rose and stepped back. He was looking at all that he’d taken out of Patrick’s pockets. Keys and a wallet, and a receipt from the diner inside.

  Driscoll pulled Patrick up and started to walk him to the Impala.

  “Easy,” Patrick said.

  “You don’t fucking get it, do you, Patrick? Bobby’s gone and so is Sheri. You deserted them.”

  “Slow down,” Patrick said. He made his best effort to turn and look at Driscoll but Driscoll had a good grip on his arm and levered him against the metal body of the Impala before Patrick could say more.

  “Something happens to them it’s on you,” Driscoll said. He opened the door of the Impala and put one hand over Patrick’s head and put him in the backseat. He slammed the door as soon as Patrick was inside and then he went back to the truck and went through the cab.

  In the glove box he found the registration and read the name. He stood and walked to the back of the tailgate and cleared Patrick’s things from the bed and then closed the tailgate. Inside the waitress and cook were still standing at the window looking out at him.

  He looked the registration over again and then he walked back to the Impala and sat in the driver’s seat with his eyes up on the rearview.

  “I called you,” Patrick said.

  Driscoll held up the registration in his hand. “You’re a selfish son of a bitch.”

  Patrick fixed on Driscoll’s eyes for a moment in the mirror and then he looked away. “What the fuck, Driscoll?”

  “Bobby and his wife are missing because of you,” Driscoll said. “You don’t give a shit about anyone, do you? No one matters to you. No one should ever trust you. I just came from your buddy’s place. The house is still burning.”