Sometimes the Wolf: A Novel

by Urban Waite

  And for thirty minutes Driscoll had felt satisfied. Driving on the highway, thinking it through, cars passing, cars being passed, suburb after suburb going by as he made his way south to Seattle, and then it occurred to him that Patrick might actually get away with it all.

  Driscoll didn’t have a license number for the stolen car. He didn’t really have anything. And that’s what he found himself with now—with less than he’d had four days before. He had almost nothing.

  The elevator dinged and when the doors opened he was standing in the lobby level of the federal building. He walked through, the heels of his shoes the only thing to be heard as he made his way across the granite tile. Coming to the door he passed through a series of transparent safety-glass walls and metal detectors, and went out onto the Seattle street. A couple blocks later he sat at the bar of the downtown Sheraton. The bartender nodded to Driscoll and brought over an old-fashioned without even needing to be told.

  “You in town this weekend?”

  Driscoll rolled the glass around on the counter, watching the liquor coat one side and then the other. He looked up at the bartender. “Yeah, a new case.”

  “Anything good?”

  “No, just a dead end. Thought I’d step out for a little. Get some fresh air.”

  The bartender nodded again. Silent acknowledgment was really all Driscoll wanted from the man. He existed. He was here. And by the time Driscoll had raised the glass to his lips the bartender was on to a group of executives who had come in out of the lobby.

  Driscoll liked the place simply because there weren’t any regulars. It was a big chain hotel where the closest thing, besides Driscoll, they got to repeat customers were the flight crews that stayed one night and then were gone again the next. The bartenders were all pretty good at shooting the shit and none of them ever asked anything too personal. Perhaps they just knew how to act when most of their clients might come in once or twice a year, or might never come in again. It was friendly without being prying and Driscoll liked it that way.

  A year ago he’d stayed in the hotel for two weeks. The story he’d told them was that he was working a big case, but the truth was he was getting divorced from the woman he’d loved for twenty years. From the woman he still loved. But who didn’t love him anymore.

  Perhaps if Driscoll had spent more time with his wife or with his daughter instead of in places like this he’d still be married. Though, even thinking it, he knew he probably wouldn’t have been. And the time he spent at the office, moving up the ladder, chasing things down, had really been the undoing of his marriage.

  He tilted the glass back and finished the old-fashioned in one long swallow. His Adam’s apple moving beneath his collar and a thin layering of perspiration collected at his temples. He set the empty down and signaled for another. Driscoll raised a cocktail napkin to his forehead and wiped it clean. He had no fucking clue. Over twelve years he’d worked on this case, picking it up and putting it down.

  When the drink came he thanked the bartender and then watched him walk back down the bar. He sipped at his drink and thought it all through again.

  Driscoll pulled up his phone and checked for missed calls. There were two text messages from the marshals, but nothing Driscoll could use. He toggled down through the contacts and found the number for his wife. He found his daughter’s cell phone number.

  Driscoll looked at the highlighted contact in his cell. He read his daughter’s name three, then four times, and then he put the phone facedown on the bar and picked up the old-fashioned again. Beads of water had grown on the sides of the glass. The cocktail napkin on which it sat stuck to the bottom as he tipped it back and took another long swallow of the sugary bourbon.

  For a long time after his marriage came apart Driscoll had wondered if they’d ever been happy, his wife, his daughter, him. Or maybe they’d never been happy and he just thought of them that way because it was easier for him to deal with. His wife and daughter like something out of a dream, half remembered the next morning, slipping slowly away with the coming light of day.

  But the thought was too painful and when the bartender came by Driscoll ordered another drink. Driscoll had no fucking clue and he knew it.

  MORGAN SET THE log and then hefted the ax, bringing the blade down into the wood and sinking the metal deep as the handle. He raised the log in this way and brought it down again, listening to the tear as the two sides came apart and fell aside. The work had been waiting for a week now and he went after it, breathing hard, while sweat beaded on his forehead and the back of his shirt grew wet with perspiration between his shoulder blades. He bent and hefted the two sides of the split to the pile nearby and set another. Pausing to wipe a sleeve across his forehead and look to the cabin.

  He knew he was being a coward. He’d never set out to hide anything from his grandson, and now that’s what he was doing. Patrick had abandoned them both and now Morgan was left trying to set it all straight. He thought of Patrick again. Where was he? What was he doing? Did he have any idea what was going on?

  For a time Morgan just stood there with the ax in his hand, wondering about a great many things, and thinking about Bobby inside his house, back at the table with the letters, reading every page as if it was going to reveal some great secret, though Morgan knew there was nothing like that to be found, and the things that his grandson searched for were not so easily located.

  After splitting the next log Morgan paused to sit. He ran his hand down into his jacket for his cigarettes. He brought out his pack and shook a smoke out. Placing it to his lips and then feeling the weight of the pack in his hand, he thought better of it, took the cigarette from his mouth, and then slipped the pack back inside his pocket. He smoked too much but it hadn’t hurt him much till a year or so before. Whether it was old age or some cancer growing inside him, he couldn’t tell, but he thought it was probably both, and he went on through his days with the weight of it over his shoulders like a lead harness, pulling god-knows-what behind.

  He wiped a sleeve across his forehead again and looked at his grandson in there at the table. Sheri was missing and he didn’t know what he could do about that, but he knew he had to try. “Well,” he said, leaning one hand to the seat and angling himself up. “I guess I’m old enough.”

  He came up the stairs and stood on the porch looking in through the front window. He didn’t know what he was protecting anymore. “Old,” Morgan said, in a whisper only audible to him, “and now I’ve begun to talk to myself.” He put a hand out and turned the doorknob. “What’s new about that?” he said, answering his own voice.

  Drake looked up at him as he came into the cabin. “I don’t know if it will help but I want to tell you something about those men who took your wife,” Morgan said. “I know them and they know me. The skinnier one is named Bean and the bigger one is John Wesley. They looked out for Patrick while he was inside. And for a long time I helped them by bringing whatever they needed from the outside.”

  Chapter 8

  BEAN CHECKED THE SIGNAL on the prepaid phone, the green light of the display open in his palm. A primordial glow showing on the lines of his face before he closed the thing in his palm and took a step away into the night. The day gone behind the mountains and the light from the fire barely visible through the small thicket of trees. He paused to take it all in, the country road a mile off but no car seen or heard for over an hour now. The place he’d picked for them close to a drainage stream, no bigger than a creek, the trees grown tall and thick around the water’s edge.

  He stood there looking it all over, the creek heard from time to time, and the wind shifting and moving the branches overhead. Smoke pulled one way from the fire and then another, gray as it rose, and then turned black, all of it lit from beneath and then fading away into the night sky above. At the fire Bean could see where John Wesley stood with a slender branch of willow in his hand, tending to the coals with his eyes fixed downward into the flames, and Drake’s wife sitting there with her hands
still taped together in front of her.

  They hadn’t talked more than to offer her some food. Cans of chili they ate cold with their fingertips. A few apples they’d stolen from Drake’s kitchen. They ate and threw the empty tins into the shadows of the thicket. Only letting Sheri eat when they had finished.

  Now Bean stood beyond the fire wearing the black suit, his legs knee-deep in the wheat field. The lapels of his jacket turned up to ward off the cold and the black material scuffed with dirt in places from the few days of work he’d used it for. He pulled the lapels closer around his neck and walked a few more feet through the grass, holding the lapels of his jacket to his skin and watching the empty space in the wheat fields a mile off where the road came through.

  In his other hand he depressed the power button on the phone and listened to the music play and then when he was satisfied he turned the phone back on and watched the display light again. The same signal as before.

  Chapter 9

  THE BAR MAURICE TOOK him to was a small neighborhood spot a few blocks up. Dimly lit with blue and purple neon lights all down the wall, and the windows tinted almost black. It was unlike any place Patrick had ever been, low ceilinged with a pearly light of neon on every surface. The beer was mostly in bottles and the liquor in plastic jugs. The customers a mix of the young taking shots at the bar—their heads tipped back and their nostrils flared with each progressive slug of alcohol—and the older crowd closer to Patrick’s and Maurice’s age. Mostly single men who looked to have come in after work for a cheap beer and a view of the younger crowd.

  It wasn’t the type of place Patrick had been expecting. Nothing like the Buck Blind back in Silver Lake, where he could grab a beer and have a discussion. Maurice’s bar was loud and dirty. Patrick wanting nothing to do with it as he looked around the crowded room for the nearest exits while music pumped like an artery in his ears.

  Still, Patrick tried to talk to Maurice about why he was there, but the music was too loud and the man simply nodded at everything Patrick said, watching the crowd behind them in the mirror. Every once in a while taking sips from a glass of whiskey. The place so crowded that Patrick hadn’t noticed the girls behind them until Maurice turned to talk to them. Maurice introduced them each in turn, telling Patrick how he knew them. Patrick struggling to hear above the music, but the girls not seeming to care as they danced in place to the rhythm.

  SHERI WORE ONLY a set of sleeping shorts and a tank top and she squatted next to the fire feeling the heat on her skin. She extended her bound hands toward the flames, feeling the fire on her palms. The night cold behind her and the frozen feel of her clothes any time they touched the skin. She was shivering with her teeth chattering and the tremors rolling up her spine almost as constant as the wind that came over the wheat fields.

  Opposite, John Wesley sat on a log and watched the fire. He was at least a foot taller than her and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He looked slow and cumbersome in the padded flannel he wore. His jeans too tight and the bulge of his stomach showing where it came over the waistline and protruded pink and hairy from beneath his shirt.

  The other man had gone to lie down in the car and she could hear the soft pull and give of his breath from time to time. She looked up at the big man and then looked away again. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the fire in more than ten minutes.

  Already the fire was dying, sputtering on the meager collection of fuel they’d managed to cull from the grasslands. The flames licking past the dried edges of wood while Sheri listened to the crackle of grass and sage. John Wesley watching the small twigs blacken, then falter, curling in on themselves like the last spasm of life in a dying spider.

  She stood and turned to catch some heat on the backs of her legs, watching the night beyond the thicket of trees and listening to the drainage stream flowing past. Out in the fields the wash of a single car went past on the nearby road. It was the only sound besides the crack of the fire and the rolling waters of the stream she had heard in over four hours.

  “This time of year it can get into the teens at night,” John Wesley said. He’d risen from the log he sat on and he stood now looking across the fire at her. Her legs white from the cold and beyond the flicker of firelight echoing out through the trunks of the trees into the night. John Wesley took off his flannel and brought it around to her. “This will help.”

  He laid the jacket over her shoulders, and she felt herself jump and then tense, waiting for some punishment that didn’t come. He was gone back to his side when she turned. The white undershirt he wore stained in the armpits and around the collar from days of wear. “Thank you,” she said, crouching again so that the tails of the flannel fell over her thighs.

  She turned and looked to where the car sat. The doors closed and the windows fogged with the heat from Bean’s lungs. When she turned back she asked John Wesley if Bean was waiting on a call. “I’ve seen him look at his phone a few times,” she said. “Is it my husband he’s waiting on?”

  “Something like that,” John Wesley said. He picked up the willow switch and played with the fire.

  “And you’re looking for Patrick?”

  “Yes.”

  He played with the stick for a long time, letting air into the belly of the fire and watching as the oxygen bloomed red with flame. When he looked up at her he asked, “Does it hurt?” gesturing to the welt at her cheekbone.

  “No,” she said, bringing her wrists up and laying the back of her hand to the swollen side of her face. “It’s better now.”

  “I’m sorry about it.”

  She tried to give him a good-natured smile but it came out ghoulish across the fire. “I need to use the bathroom,” she said.

  “I can’t untie you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  He rose and came around the fire and pulled her up with one hand and she felt the power as he lifted her onto her toes and then placed her down again. They walked out past the fire to the edge of the trees and she felt his arm loosen and then release. “This good?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She looked around at him where he stood, only a couple feet off. “Can you at least turn around?” she asked.

  He looked her over for a second and then half turned, his eyes faced away from her as she squatted. Working with her hands bound she had to shimmy the shorts down. Her bladder at the point of exploding and steam rising from between her legs as she peed, the blue light of the moon everywhere in the night and the wheat shifting like waves across a distant ocean.

  She felt abandoned and set adrift. What mountains she’d been able to see in the last long beams of sun lost from view and the night beyond black as it had ever seemed to her. She squatted, looking over the wheat field like a sailor looking for land.

  She thought of Drake out there somewhere. She thought of Patrick. She hoped for all of this to go away but she didn’t know how it could.

  Behind, the crack of a twig in the fire. She turned her head to look at John Wesley, the corner of his eye on her. “You done?” he asked.

  She nodded and looked once more toward the open wheat fields. John Wesley waited for her to pull her shorts back up before reaching a hand to her arm. She dodged his grip and before she thought any more about it she was into the wheat, high-stepping as fast as possible and trying to keep low. John Wesley somewhere behind, crashing after her. The wheat cut at her bare thighs as she ran and the flannel John Wesley had given to her fell behind somewhere in the field.

  “YOU’RE SAYING YOU know those men.”

  Morgan stood with his weight to the sink and his hands behind on the counter. He was looking back at his grandson where he paced the small room. “I’ve known them for a long time,” Morgan said. “They looked out for Patrick while he was away—made sure no one messed with him.”

  Drake stopped and put his hands to the back of a chair, the window black with the night beyond. “And how did they do that?” Drake asked. He was not looking at Morgan, but at the old man’s
reflection in the window.

  “It wasn’t easy for Patrick. You should know that. I’m sure you’ve heard what it’s like for a lawman in there.”

  “He promised them something, didn’t he?” Drake hadn’t moved and Morgan could see his hands tighten on the chair back, the knuckles grown white.

  “He did.”

  “More than cigarettes and little things from the outside,” Drake said. He turned and fixed his grandfather.

  “Yes,” Morgan said.

  “And now they’ve followed my father into our lives. Into my life with my wife, and into our home.”

  “I don’t think Patrick meant for it to happen this way,” Morgan said.

  “But it has.”

  “Yes,” Morgan agreed. “Your father just wanted to get home. That’s all there was to it. He wanted to make sure of that. I don’t blame him for what he did. I don’t even blame him for what’s happened now. With all the wrong your father did it was always for the right reason. It was for you.”

  Drake stared back at his grandfather, his jaw held tight and the muscles tense against his temples. “For me?”

  “That’s all he ever talked about when I went to see him.” Morgan gestured to the letters once again collected in their box. “You can read it right there. You can read it for yourself if you don’t want to hear it from me.”

  Drake just shook his head. His body now half turned to take in the box of letters on the table. He was shaking slightly and there looked to be little control left in him.