Sometimes the Wolf

by Urban Waite

  Drake ran his eyes over the office. No one but them. “How much of what Driscoll said is true?” Drake asked.

  “About your father and me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not a word of it,” Gary said.

  “You were at the Buck Blind last night?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “What does that mean?” Drake asked.

  “I mean I got up to piss and I went home at some point and ate a Lean Cuisine,” Gary said. “What else do you want me to say? We’re like family, aren’t we, Bobby? You know you can trust me.”

  Drake gave him a hard stare and then stood. He took off his belt and then his badge. He put them on the desk. “No offense, Gary, but I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  THREE DAYS AFTER Drake turned in his badge, he and Sheri went back east of the mountains for Morgan’s funeral. The town came out and the reception was held in the only restaurant, a barbecue and burger joint on the county highway with a single room and outside a front patio underneath a tent. Drake and Sheri shook hands with everyone and thanked them for coming. An older woman tried to give Sheri a novel she’d borrowed from Morgan but Sheri didn’t think Morgan would mind if she simply kept it.

  “It was a heart attack?”

  “Yes,” Sheri said. She thought of the old man she’d only met once. There and then not there at her wedding. She tried to think if she knew much more than that but nothing came.

  The woman held the book for a time, sitting across from Sheri on one of the benches. And then when Drake came over to tell Sheri they were going on to the property, the woman said, “He just seemed so alive.”

  “He was,” Drake said.

  ALL OF MORGAN’S things were still there in the cabin when they stopped off, and Sheri watched as Drake went through the possessions. From what Sheri knew of Morgan he’d lived alone, simply, with nothing more than the woodstove and a few pots and pans to keep him company.

  She watched Drake and while he read through one or two of the letters sitting out on the dinner table, she walked back into the bedroom and leafed through the books. A whole wall had been dedicated to them and the color of the bindings gave the uniform wood tones of the cabin a special quality that nothing else on that prairie seemed to have.

  When she came back out of the bedroom, Drake was boxing the letters away. “You okay?” she asked.

  He looked up. “I thought this place would feel different. But it feels the same.”

  “Isolated?”

  “Yes, I feel like Morgan is just going to come up out of the cottonwoods any moment.”

  She looked away at the fields outside. The door and the window had been patched with pieces of plywood. “You worry what’s going to happen to this place once we leave?”

  “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  “And Patrick? There’s been no word?”

  “He’s not coming back here. Morgan’s will left this place to him. It’s Patrick’s and I don’t know where he’d go but it wouldn’t be here.” He picked up the box and brought it out to the car.

  While he was gone Sheri started to collect what dry goods she could find. A box of baking soda, a jar of flour, a can of Crisco in one of the cupboards next to a hidden bar of Hershey’s chocolate.

  Outside she heard the car door clap shut and then a second later the split of a log. She came out onto the porch and for the next hour she watched Drake break down a collection of cottonwood sections, stacking them up in an even pile at the rear of the cabin like Morgan might come up out of the cut to use them.

  It was night by the time they left. The letters the only thing they took with them.

  FOR A WEEK Drake cleared brush from their orchard, pruning back the dead branches and forming the apple trees. In the mornings or in the afternoons he gave Sheri rides to work with their only car and then waited through the day for the call telling him she was ready to be picked up. Occasionally, Luke and Andy came by the house, though they didn’t have to anymore.

  The two deputies helped Drake to take down the remaining bits of the old alder fence Patrick hadn’t gotten to. When they finished they helped Drake stake metal posts and run barbed cattle wire. At the front where the drive met the lake road they installed a wide metal gate that sat on a hinge and had to be unlocked with a key.

  Besides the trips Drake took to the Buck Blind he didn’t speak much with anyone. Only occasionally seeing Gary when Drake came and went. It was Gary who told him about the dead calf one night while Drake sat eating a burger at the bar. The wolf didn’t kill the calf outright; it had nipped and bitten at the calf’s flanks, leaving the calf bloodied and weak by morning. The rancher noticed it all too late and the calf was dead by noon that same day. “It’s a shame about that wolf,” Gary said. “They’re saying they’ll have to shoot her now.”

  “Who’s saying that?”

  “Fish and Wildlife. They’re telling Ellie to use the collar and track the wolf down. But she won’t do it.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Drake said. He ate a couple more fries and then pushed the plate away. Gary sat watching him and after a while asked, “What are you doing out there at your place? Building a compound?”

  “Just getting the place in order. Trying to do something with the land.”

  “You’re going to sell the apples?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the fence Luke and Andy helped you with?”

  “After everything I thought it would be nice to feel safe again. For Sheri to feel safe.”

  “I can put a car out there again. If that’s it.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Drake said.

  Gary looked at him and shook his head. “Talk to Ellie,” he said.

  RAIN KEPT THEM out of the mountains for two days and then when the sun came out on the third day they tracked the signal up an avalanche chute, white in places with snow. The sound of the spring melt running underneath the rock. They came up onto the open ridge with sweat stains on their shirts and their thighs aching from the ascent. The GPS telling them the wolf was somewhere in the valley beyond.

  The trees began again after about a hundred feet and they made their way through the trunks as they descended. Coming out into a clearing they found the wolf lying just a couple hundred feet farther on. Crows lifting from the body as they came closer and the GPS collar still attached.

  Ellie came to the animal first, crouching with the backs of her thighs resting on her calves. The spring grass had grown tall through the clearing and it surrounded the wolf on all sides, stretching away toward the forest where the mountain went on dark beneath the trees.

  Drake slipped the day pack from his shoulders and laid it in the grass at his feet. He took a step closer, watching the way the clearing rolled away before them. Grasshoppers flitted off, the brief clap of their wings heard as they tried to stay afloat through the air. He hadn’t realized Ellie was crying till he came closer and saw the tight pulse of her shoulder blades working beneath her shirt. He put a hand to her back and she jumped, pulling away and standing.

  On the ground Drake saw the wolf had been shot through the head, the right foreleg badly mangled by a metal trap.

  “They killed her,” Ellie said. She had recovered a bit and she stood a few feet off. The redness still in her eyes.

  There was nothing for Drake to say. He was kneeling in the same place Ellie had, looking down on the wolf. Someone had tried to cut the GPS collar away but the knife used hadn’t been sharp enough for the job. He put a hand out and ran his fingers up through the fur, gripping it in his hands for a moment before letting go. The meat had begun to go bad and he could smell it.

  The wolf had pawed up the ground around where the trap had been, tearing the grass and leaving a small patch of exposed earth that had grown muddy with the rain. There were paw prints everywhere, bits of fur, and in one section near the wolf’s left hip, the partial indent of a boot. Ellie had already seen it and Drake examined it for a long time before
he stood. Ellie already scanning the tree line like she might find the killer out there in the shadows.

  The light was fading in the sky and Drake checked his watch. It would take them an hour to hike back down and by then the sun would be completely down. “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Drake said. “I can help you with the tracking.”

  Ellie turned and looked back at him. She was kneeling near the edge of the forest where the grass ran out and the shadows began. When Drake came over to her he could see another boot print, much clearer than the last.

  “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Ellie said. “Looks a lot like one of the prints from those poachers a few weeks back.”

  Drake knelt and examined the indentation in the mud. “Probably a day old. The edges are clean.” If it wasn’t for the GPS collar Drake knew they never would have found the wolf at all.

  “Tomorrow,” Ellie said.

  “Yes.”

  “First thing.”

  “Okay.”

  Chapter 28

  BEAN STOOD WATCHING THE empty road. Fields of soybean ran along one side. The line of wire fence running down it and out of sight on both sides. He turned and looked up the road, just the same as it had been for ten minutes. Nothing but the deep shadows of the mountains farther on, avalanche chutes turning from rock to snow as the elevation grew and the trees thinned to clusters and then nothing at all. The light beginning to fade in the west and the road Bean stood on taking on a slanted otherworldly look that seemed to tilt away from him as he waited there.

  The couple’s property was back a few hundred yards on a gravel access road. The trees opposite the soy field hiding the house from sight. Weeks before they’d taken the couple’s car and then ditched it as soon as they came into Seattle.

  Where Bean stood he was visible to both lanes of traffic, an empty red gas tank he’d found in the garage at his feet.

  By then he had lived a week in the old house at the base of the mountains. Waiting for things to die down and for whatever decision he was going to make, but that he hadn’t been able to make until that point. A few days before, eating canned soups and stale bags of cereal in front of the couple’s computer, he’d come across an article in the Seattle paper.

  The article was brief, only a recap of a much larger article he assumed had run earlier in the week. The money listed at two hundred thousand and all of their names mentioned one way or another, Bean still at large. And the amount of money Patrick had always told them much too small. He scanned down through the article, making sure he had the facts right. Somewhere out there Patrick was still running around, and the money Drake had led them to somehow not enough.

  He read the article five times before making up his mind and now he stood alongside the road, clean shaven and looking respectable in a set of clothes he’d taken from the house. No car or truck for ten minutes.

  While he waited, he picked gravel from the side of the road and targeted the fence posts, playing a game with himself to pass the time. He was juggling a collection of these rocks when an RV showed on the horizon, the body just visible in the twilight and the headlights turned dimly on.

  As the RV came closer he stepped a foot into the road and began to wave his arms over his head. He wore a blue sport coat he’d taken from the man’s closet, cotton khakis, and a white undershirt. With his hair combed neat and pulled back over his scalp, he looked like a man who’d lost his way in the country, or abandoned his car in search of gas.

  He continued to wave and the RV came to a stop a few feet past where he stood. Bean arrived at the window as it came down and looked up on an older man wearing a white shirt and clear wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Where’s your car?” the man asked, speaking through the open window, his hands still on the wheel.

  Bean smiled. He’d forgotten the gas can and he looked back at it now. “A mile or so down the road.”

  The old man at the wheel nodded like he understood. “I can give you a ride into town if you like. I was just out tooling this baby around. It wouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”

  Bean smiled again. “That’s real good of you,” he said. He jogged back to the gas can and scooped it up in his hand and then returned to the RV. He heard the door unlock as he approached and with one hand holding the gas can he slipped Drake’s gun from inside his waistband and shot the driver at point-blank range through the open window.

  The man slumped into the wheel and the horn sounded, but Bean reached a hand in and pushed the driver’s body back, resting the bloody scalp against the headrest. With the engine still idling and the RV in park he opened the side door and came up the stairs into the RV. The thing was big as a bus and built with a dining area on one side and a kitchenette on the other; in the back a small bedroom with cupboards lining the ceiling and a small flat-screen mounted in one corner.

  He went down through the RV looking the place over, Drake’s gun in his hand and the Walther resting in his waistband at the small of his back. The bathroom was empty and the rear bedroom held only a mattress and single mirror. There was no one else on the RV.

  When he came back to the front he saw that the man’s blood had sprayed a good amount of the dash and part of the passenger seat, but the windshield was relatively clean. He put Drake’s gun on the passenger seat and then bent to look through the glass at the road ahead. Nothing to see, not even a farmhouse or an approaching car.

  Taking the driver under his arms Bean dragged him off the RV and into the forest, where he covered the body with dead branches and bits of moss. The white shirt stained red in places seemed now almost a piece of the forest itself.

  He came back out from beneath the trees wondering how fast a vehicle like that could get up over a mountain pass and down into Silver Lake. The door stood open before him and he put a hand out on the railing and pulled himself up the stairs.

  Chapter 29

  IT WAS NIGHT BY the time they got the wolf down off the mountain. Ellie gave Drake a ride to the Buck Blind. He came in through the front entrance and watched Sheri carry two plates out of the kitchen and set them on a table. She came over and they kissed and then she sent him into the bar for a beer.

  Drake nodded to Jack, the bartender, as he took a seat. Ten minutes passed before Gary came in and Drake looked to the bartender, wondering if Jack had called him or if it was just coincidence.

  They sat and drank their beers and made small talk. After a while Drake brought up the wolf.

  “Where was it?”

  Drake told him. He described the avalanche chute and the ridge above. He described the small descent into the valley through the trees and the clearing farther on. “We’re going to go back tomorrow. There was a boot print up there.”

  Gary sipped from his beer. “So someone did your job for you?”

  “Someone who didn’t have the authority to shoot her.” Drake leaned back from the bar and looked over at Gary. “What size shoe do you wear?”

  Gary shook his head. “You’re serious?” He was smiling and he lifted his beer and then, reconsidering, put it back down again. “You know I work for the people—no matter what the law says. That includes you, too, Bobby.”

  “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “That’s all there is. Besides, it doesn’t matter, does it? You went up to kill the wolf and the wolf is dead. What else matters?”

  Drake thought it over. He didn’t know if it mattered or not. He was starting to have a hard time telling the difference.

  “Sheri’s usually off around this time, isn’t she?”

  Drake nodded. He glanced over his shoulder toward the dining room. “Usually,” he said. “Seems like maybe there’s just a couple more tables.”

  “You come and pick her up every day?”

  “I try. There’s just one car now so I usually drop her off and then come get her at the end of the day.”

  “But today you were up in the mountains?”

  “Yes, so Sheri dropped me at Fish and Wildlife and then
came to work. We’ll probably do the same tomorrow.”

  “You know, it’s nice you’re helping out,” Gary said. “You’re always welcome to come back, you know?”

  He didn’t have anything to say to Gary. He’d made his decision. He knew he couldn’t go back on it and in a couple minutes Sheri came over from the restaurant and approached Drake and Gary where they sat at the bar.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  Drake said he was and got up from the bar. He was collecting his wallet and cell phone from the bar when Gary said, “You know they caught Bean earlier today.”

  Sheri—who was half turned toward the exit—stopped and looked back at Gary. “You sure?”

  “I wanted to wait till both of you were here. He wasn’t caught, really. He was shot as he tried to steal an RV from a man over in Chelan County.”

  Drake stood watching Gary where he sat. “Dead?”

  “Doesn’t get much deader.”

  “How?” Sheri asked. “I mean, who shot him?”

  “A ten-year-old boy—the grandson of the poor son of a bitch who was driving the thing. The sheriff called me forty minutes ago and gave me the info. The driver pulled over to help Bean out. Bean was carrying a gas can or something and the driver stopped to offer him a ride. Bean shot him right there and dragged the body off the RV and hid it off the side of the road.”

  “And the boy?” Drake asked.

  “Hidden in the bench seat of the dining area,” Gary said. “The sheriff said the grandfather was just taking the boy out for a little drive. They didn’t live more than twenty miles away.”

  “That’s horrible,” Sheri said.

  “Bean left a gun behind sitting on the seat when he dragged the driver from his RV. I guess he figured he was alone.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Drake said.

  “Looks like you can stop building a compound out of your place.”

  Drake shook his head in disbelief. “Ten years old . . .”