by Urban Waite
He came out onto the road dragging the chain link beneath him, the sparks visible in the mirrors as he made the turn toward the lake and ground the gears up through second and into third. He knew he could make good time before anyone showed up at the lot, and he hoped he could make the interstate before the first call came in about the broken-down fence and missing truck.
MORGAN QUARTERED THE rabbit, separating the skin first and then running the knife along the joints to break down the carcass. He boned out the legs and pounded the meat flat on the cutting board, leaving it lean and opaque as chicken thighs. When he was done he warmed a pan, letting the grease grow smoky with heat before laying the rabbit sections down against the metal. The oil spitting in the ancient cast-iron pan.
His grandson, Bobby Drake, sat behind him at the table, watching the window that looked toward the road and the slight rise a quarter mile away.
“You hungry?”
Drake turned and looked at the old man and then looked back to the window.
Morgan stood there at the stove listening to the snap of the grease in the pan. He salted the rabbit and turned it, listening again for the familiar sizzle. When he was satisfied he covered the pan, turning the propane down to let the meat cook.
They ate on the porch and watched the road. Morgan smoking a cigarette and letting the meal cool. Drake, with the plate in his lap, picking the meat apart with his fingers. The morning still cold around them and a slight haze beginning to rise off the dew-covered grass with the sun.
“There’s more if you want it,” Morgan said. “A few pieces of fry bread I made yesterday by the stove as well. I could heat them up.” He finished his cigarette and ground it out on the railing.
Drake shook his head. He rubbed his hands over his thighs several times, cleaning the grease from his fingers.
“There’s still two pieces of rabbit left,” Morgan said.
Drake looked over at his grandfather and then away again. They had said little more than a greeting to each other since he showed up, and Morgan hadn’t expected much more. Drake’s wedding was the last time they had seen each other. Morgan sitting off to himself for much of the time, smoking cigarettes at a steady pace, at times acknowledging what others said to him, but never offering comment. He was on the road again, headed back east over the mountains and down into the plain, before the wedding had even come to a close. Thankful for the return to the life he’d accustomed himself to.
Besides the widow from the post office, he hadn’t had another human being on his property in more than ten years. The chair Drake sat in having to be pulled from inside so they could both sit on the porch.
“You going to tell me what this is about?” the old man asked. He had begun to pick at his own rabbit, careful to keep the plate level on his lap and the juices from staining his pants.
Drake opened his jacket and brought out a series of worn envelopes. Bound with a single rubber band and collected in a stack just the same way Morgan received his mail once a month. Morgan sucked the grease from his fingers and set the plate on the porch again. He leaned forward and took the collection of envelopes from his grandson and turned them over in his hand. He recognized his own scrawl there on the outside of the envelope and looked back over the postmark dates. More than ten years of letters written in his own hand.
“How long has he been out?” Morgan asked.
“A few days. He’s been staying with me.”
“But he’s gone now?”
Drake turned to take in the old man. “A couple men have been looking for him.”
Again, Morgan looked down at the collection of letters. “Who has been looking for him?” Morgan asked.
“They said they knew my father from Monroe. They’d like to talk with him.”
“In what kind of way?” Morgan asked.
“In the bad kind of way.”
Morgan slipped one of the envelopes from the rubber band and opened the letter within. Blue ink and paper yellowed with time.
“I’m hoping you have the other end of those letters,” Drake said.
“That’s why you came?”
“Those two men almost drowned me last night. They came into our house,” Drake said, his voice straining. After a while he went on. “They say he promised them some money.”
“Patrick?”
Drake shrugged. “If my father did have some money he didn’t trust me with it. I was wondering if he said anything to you. I’d like to see those letters he sent.”
Morgan rose from his chair. He tried to think about the letters, bound up with twine. Aged. Sitting away in a hidden place. How many times had he gone through them? Late at night with just the light of the fire burning deep in the stove. Feeling the paper beneath his fingertips, the way the creases had begun to wear and the ink to fade. Months since he’d received the last. He was at the door when he turned. “They’re going to hurt Patrick if they find him,” the old man said.
“Probably.”
“You don’t care?”
“They took Sheri.”
“Your wife?” Morgan stood looking back at Drake, his body half turned in the doorway. “Did they hurt her?”
“I don’t know,” Drake said. “I don’t know anything.”
“You could call someone.”
Drake shook his head.
“You don’t want to?”
Drake didn’t say anything, he’d fixed his eyes on a place at the old man’s feet and he looked to be trying to find the bottom.
“They have to know hurting her isn’t going to help them,” Morgan said. “They have to know that.”
“I need to get her back. And in order to do that I need to find my father,” Drake said.
DRISCOLL STOOD IN the doorway and looked inward at the bedroom. The comforter lay on the floor with two of the pillows. A single red sheet was still attached at the bottom of the bed, though it, too, had been yanked down and stretched along the floor like blood dripping from a wound.
He turned and went out into the living room and found one of the deputies fingering a half-full milk carton on the counter. “Don’t fucking touch that,” Driscoll said. He stood watching the deputy till the man put the carton down. “Where’s Gary?”
The deputy pointed outside.
They’d found the front door unlocked after they came out of the woods, Driscoll in the lead with Gary close behind. The logging road, where the deputies had found the Town Car early that morning, only a hundred yards through the forest. Driscoll’s leather shoes wet from the night’s rain as he came out of the trees and stepped into the orchard.
Driscoll found Gary looking at the driveway a few feet past the bottom of the stairs, a pair of long scrapes in the gravel like parallel rows in a garden. The gravel raised on either side and the dirt showing brown beneath. “Did you try Bobby again?”
Gary looked up and nodded. “No answer.”
“Try Sheri.”
Gary pulled his phone out and put the call through. Driscoll watching. From somewhere inside they heard a phone begin to ring. The deputy came to the door and Gary told him to look into it.
Twenty seconds later the deputy was back with the news the phone was on a charger in the bedroom.
“These are drag marks,” Gary said. “I didn’t even think to look for them this morning, but now . . .”
Driscoll raised a hand. “I know,” he said. “They’re both missing now and I don’t think they left by choice. The television was on when we came in, there’s a half-full carton of milk just sitting on the counter, and the sheets in Bobby and Sheri’s bedroom look like someone fought pretty hard to stay in bed.”
“And a hundred yards away there’s a Town Car with two dead bodies in the trunk,” Gary said.
“There’s that, too.”
Gary’s phone began to ring and Driscoll watched him answer. When Gary finished he put the phone away in his pocket and told Driscoll a foreman had just called in about a broken-down chain-link fence and a missing truck.
“WHAT WILL YOU do when you find Patrick?” Morgan asked. He stood by the window, looking out on his property.
Behind, at the table, Drake stirred, pushing one foot across the wood floor. The sound of grit beneath the sole of his shoe. “Arrest him, I guess.”
“You don’t seem sure of that.”
“I’m not.”
SHERI WOKE IN darkness with a thin prick of light the only thing visible before her. Her hands were bound and the arm resting on the floor had gone numb. Still she could feel the movement of the car and for a while she lay there trying to think back on how it had all happened. Waking to the sound of someone in her bedroom. The figure of a man moving toward her in the darkness.
She closed her eyes and felt the swelling over her left cheekbone. The flesh raised and tight. The slim prick of light like the only star in a dead sky shining back at her. There was the dusty smell of the trunk and the creak of the springs any time the car moved from one cement panel to another. She didn’t know how long she’d been out but she guessed it had been a while.
With her tongue she wet her lips and tasted blood like flaked, rusted iron. A dry crust of it lay along her upper lip, softening as she brought her tongue across the skin again. She was in trouble and for the first time she thought about Drake. She didn’t know where she was or who had come into their house.
She moved closer to the light, lifting her neck to get one eye over the hole. With one lid closed she could make out a long country road, cattle wire running both sides, and fields of wheat stalks shining gold on either side. No cars behind and only the yellow dividing line feeding away from her as the road went on underneath the tires.
She let her head drop. The muscles in her neck tight from the effort and the constant thump of the car wheels moving over the concrete. Again she thought of Drake. She was alone and she was scared. She raised her head and placed her eye to the small hole. The road went on behind just as it had before. No one was there, and though she hoped for it, she knew no one was coming.
THE OLD MAN came away from the window and sat in one of the chairs across from his grandson. “That’s all of them there.” He reached a hand out to touch the worn top of an old shoe box sitting on the table. The feel of the cardboard soft beneath his fingers. “If it’s not in there I don’t know where it is.”
“It?” Drake said.
“Whatever you’re looking for.”
Drake opened the box and removed the stack of letters. He flipped through the envelopes one after the other, examining the dates before laying them on the table. “What will I find in these?” Drake asked.
“I don’t know. Something, but I can’t tell you what that something is.”
“You can’t?”
“I have a friend in town I exchange books with. I read a book and then I give it to her. Some of the things we see in these books are the same, but a lot of it, scene to scene, page to page, is always different. You understand?”
“But you could describe the book for me, couldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then what would you say?”
“I would say Patrick was sorry about the way things turned out. He worried over the past. He worried over the present. Mostly, though, he worried over the future. What would happen to you. To him.”
“That’s what’s in here?”
“That’s what fathers always worry about.”
Drake let that sink in before he opened one of the letters and scanned the words. Morgan watched him for a time before he got up and walked to the stove, where he’d left the remaining rabbit to braise over low heat. He lifted the top of the pan and touched the meat with one of his fingers, feeling the bones move beneath.
He was at the sink skinning the two prairie dogs when Drake’s phone rang. The old man turned and watched his grandson look at the number on the display, then slip the phone back into his pocket.
“You don’t want to get that?”
“It’s nothing,” Drake said. “I’m waiting on a call but that wasn’t it.” He was bent over the table, reading one of the letters. It was the third letter Morgan had seen him open.
“What call are you waiting on?”
“The call that tells me Sheri is okay,” Drake said. “The call that tells me what I can do.”
“I’m sorry about this,” Morgan said.
“I’m sorry, too.” He held one of the letters up to the light. Something there he was trying to make out. “What are the dates and times at the bottom of each letter?” Drake asked.
“Times when I could see him,” Morgan said.
Drake turned and looked at his grandfather. “You went to Monroe?” Drake’s phone rang again and he looked at the number and then put the phone away. “How often did you see him?” Drake asked.
Morgan cut a piece of sinew away and brought the skin down another inch. “When I could. Almost any date you see there in the letters. Sometimes I had to wait a bit for the guards to find him but he usually showed within a half hour or so. I brought him things. Books, cigarettes, things he needed.”
“I didn’t know he smoked.”
“I don’t think he does, not like me at least. But he could use them. They helped him avoid trouble.”
Drake was staring at his grandfather in total disbelief when the phone rang again.
DRISCOLL STOOD IN the orchard. He had his phone out and he listened to the message click on a third time and Drake’s voice asking him to leave a number, and then he hung up. Driscoll didn’t have a clue and he kept wondering why Drake wouldn’t pick up, or if it was Drake at all who had the phone.
The night was starting to come together. Thirty minutes earlier Driscoll had returned from the truck lot, where the foreman had played the closed-circuit cameras back for him. From one angle they saw Patrick climb the fence, then go over, slipping into the lot. From another angle they picked out Driscoll’s Impala as it passed by and then came back. They saw Drake’s cruiser several times as well. The ghost in the shadows—Patrick sitting there in the truck cab—watching each vehicle pass. By the time Driscoll returned to the house a set of prints had come back and two U.S. marshals were on their way out to see them.
The prints belonged to two guys from Monroe. Convicts, Gary said, who had spent time with Patrick when he was inside. Two violent men who had escaped a week before while being transferred from Monroe to Walla Walla, killing a guard and taking his handgun with them.
Driscoll looked at the phone in his palm once more. He figured he had an hour before the marshals showed. An hour before they came in and took the scene over and Driscoll went back to sitting in an office in Seattle.
He began to walk to the house. The sun above shone pale beneath a thin layer of clouds. The heat in the grass causing the dew to rise and the apple trunks—obscured in places—seeming to float a foot above the ground.
One night and everything had changed. Two people murdered and stuffed in the trunk of a car. Drake, Patrick, and Sheri all missing. And now two escaped prisoners.
He didn’t know where any of them were and even seeing Patrick take the truck, Driscoll didn’t know whether Patrick was working with these men or against them. He had an hour to figure it out.
PATRICK CAME OUT of the Indian casino onto the lot, looking back over his shoulder as he went. He knew they had cameras in there but he’d kept his head down, trying only to get through the casino floor and then out the opposite door.
It had taken only two hours for the police to track down the big semi. The biggest thing in the lot except for the few RVs that had set up on the perimeter where the cars were fewer and something as big as an RV or a semi could be parked sideways across several spaces.
If he’d really wanted to hide the thing he would have dropped it by the cranes and container ships down by the Port of Seattle, but he hadn’t had the time to get south, the semi too big and too visible among all the cars on the highway.
Now he walked across the lot, weaving between cars as he went,
looking behind him every thirty seconds or so. His nerves going like little electric shocks inside his chest, and an awareness to his movements that he had to force on himself, counting the seconds before he could turn again to look behind toward the semi and the growing flicker of police lights.
Certain that he could not turn around, and that all he’d left behind was waiting for him in the lot by that semi. Prison and possibly worse. There was no going back, and he felt himself committed to whatever would come next, and what that would hold for his future.
Ahead, he saw the cars were beginning to thin. The lot surrounded the casino on all sides. A building that hadn’t even existed when he’d been put away, at least not in the form it was now. Ten stories tall, like something off the Vegas Strip, all glass and neon lights.
All down the access road off the highway, he’d passed fast food joints, cell phone stores, and even a Safeway. He looked to these now. The Safeway the closest building. If he was going to make the big grocery store, he’d need to get out of the casino parking area and move across two lanes of traffic and a wide open lot that looked ready for development. It was too much ground to cover.
Looking behind him, he saw two of the officers had already broken away from the rest and were headed toward the casino doors. For a long while he just stood and stared at them, both officers a good hundred yards away across the lot, their attention not on him at all, but on the casino doors.
Patrick was standing between a big Ford pickup and a smaller Toyota. No idea what to do. If he went any farther he’d be on open ground, obvious as a flashing beacon to anyone looking.
He knelt between the two vehicles and felt his chest beating. Moving low on his haunches he made his way through the small alleyways between the cars. At first trying every door he came to, and then, after finding them all locked, he stood for a second and canvassed the nearby lot with his eyes. Most everything a new-model car with a computer doubtless inside and an alarm ready to spring.