by Urban Waite
“Only a couple out from California, tourists wanting to see the desert. Came along after Deacon stopped his truck. The woman in the car was a nurse out of Los Angeles. She helped Deacon with the kid. He had to use his own shirt to stop the bleeding.”
“And the bullet?”
“Something high powered, it went all the way through. Once we get this road cleaned up I can get the deputies searching for it with the metal detector.”
Tom looked up to the west where the hills flowed down from the Hermanos Range like a long, smooth blade bent on its side. Hillsides branched with arroyos, showed green where the locust grew up out of the high desert in thickets. “Whoever shot this boy could just be sitting up there watching. You need to send someone now, you understand,” Tom said, trying to check himself. He wasn’t the sheriff anymore.
“You know what I’m working with here, Tom. We’re not trained for this. We can do a traffic stop, chase a rattler off someone’s porch, but this is a whole other kind of situation.”
“What about the state police?”
“The mayor wants this handled inhouse—”
The breath burst from Tom’s nostrils before he had time to stop it. “He doesn’t want any outside attention,” Kelly finished. “You know how things are around here. Oil’s gone. Nothing’s keeping them here, and the mayor knows it.”
Tom couldn’t help it. He was thinking about the Lopez woman he’d shot ten years before, how he and Kelly had come through the door looking for evidence to convict her, to send her back down to Mexico. Nothing there and Angela Lopez running to protect her in fant daughter, Tom making the splitsecond decision he would never be able to take back. No drugs on her at all, nothing to say she was guilty of anything. “If this thing turns out to be drug related it could get complicated.”
Kelly took a moment with her words, thinking it through. “Yes,” she said, wiping at her forehead again. “I know that.”
Tom knew just by being there he was putting Kelly at risk. He wanted to apologize for the things he’d said, for trying to give Kelly orders he no longer had the right to give.
“Look,” Kelly said after a time had passed. “You can’t repeat any of this.”
“I know. I was just passing by on my way up to see my god-daughter.”
“That’s good of you,” Kelly said. “But maybe now you should be going. I don’t want this getting back to Eli.”
“The mayor?” Tom said, disappointment any time he heard the man’s name.
“If this thing does turn out to be a murder—and it looks like it will—I don’t need him questioning how you happened on us.”
Tom said he understood. There had been a hearing after Angela Lopez had died. The mayor, Eli Stone, pushing for the judge to pun ish Tom. He’d been looking for jail time. The judge called it a freak accident. The woman, out of Nogales, had ties to the south. She was known to hold drugs. She was dangerous. Sheriff Herrera had just been doing his job. The only other officer on the scene, Deputy Edna Kelly, had given her statement at the hearing, agreeing with every thing Tom had said.
There was no excuse, and Tom knew it. There never would be. Not for any of it. He glanced up and caught Kelly’s eyes on him.
“All these years and you still go up to visit that kid?” Kelly said. “Sometimes I don’t know why I take the time. Why I think to even do it. Someday I know they’ll tell Elena all about me and I worry about how that will seem, how I will look after all these years. Sometimes I think it’s best to just leave it alone,” Tom said. He was looking up the road now, planning his course.
When he turned back he saw the shift that had come over Kelly’s face, showing the disappointment at what he’d just said. He knew she saw what had happened to the Lopez woman differently—all of it. Everything was different for her. His cousin Ray wasn’t Kelly’s cousin, it wasn’t as personal for Kelly, none of it ever was, and he knew she’d never understand—not fully—all that had come before and led them to that house where Elena sat on the floor as a baby and her mother rushed to protect her.
Kelly shook her head in that slow way she did sometimes, the way she had always done when she thought she knew something better than Tom. The way she did when she saw everything in a brighter light than Tom could see, that he wouldn’t permit himself to see. And Tom knew all this, knew he couldn’t see any of it because he wouldn’t let himself. So he said again, just to nail the facts down, “I don’t know why I go up there anymore.”
The smile cracked on Kelly’s face. “You know why you go.”
“Yes, I guess I do,” he said, knowing it was guilt, knowing there were a million different reasons he needed to go up that road to visit the girl who had once sat, just eighteen months old, on her mother’s floor.
“You tell Heather and Mark hello for me.” “I’ll do that,” Tom said.
“How old is Elena now?”
“She’ll be eleven this coming March.” “Give her a kiss for me, too.”
“I will.” He was about to leave, then stopped and asked, “You going to be okay out here?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just get on before the mayor finds out you were up here.”
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first wolf pack to be documented in Washington State in sixty years occurred in 2008. As of March 2014, there are thirteen established wolf packs in the state. Under Washington’s wolf management plan, a pack of wolves is defined as two individual wolves traveling together. Three of the thirteen packs now roam the eastern slopes of the North Cascades. And one additional pack can be found just outside the U.S. border at the end of the North Cascade range in Canada.
I am in no way an expert on wolves. But like many in the state of Washington I have watched their population grow, wondering what will happen to the wolves as their territory meets that of the ranchers, farmers, and others who now populate lands once inhabited by wolves and other large predators. In 2012 the deaths of seven calves and one sheep in the northeastern part of the state, along with many injuries to livestock in the area, were attributed to wolves. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife ultimately killed seven members of the Wedge Pack in northern Stevens County.
The return of wolves to Washington State remains part of a critical debate.
FOR OPENING THEIR mountain home to me I want to thank Alan and Susan Rogers. You gave me much needed time not only to begin this novel, but also to finish a draft a year later. To James Scott and Taylor Rogers Scott, thank you for making me feel like family. I owe you both more than I can ever say.
To my agent, Nat Sobel, I am extremely grateful you found my work in a small literary journal out of Virginia. It’s been an amazing five years. Thank you also to Judith Weber, who, along with Nat, read multiple drafts of this novel. Without the two of you Sometimes the Wolf wouldn’t have become anything close to what it is today.
To David Highfill at William Morrow, this is a dream. Thank you so much for continuing to support artists like me. And (along with Cormac) thank you for one kick-ass title! I owe a great deal to Jessica Williams, who has been there at every step of the process. To Laura Cherkas, thank you for once again doing a fine job of copyediting. To Adam Johnson, who designed the cover for this novel as well as for The Carrion Birds, I have you to thank for another beautiful cover. Thank you to everyone at William Morrow/HarperCollins for helping this novel along. I hope you are as proud of it as I am.
I owe a huge debt to Simon & Schuster UK. Ian Chapman, you are a champion of the publishing industry and I’m so grateful we’ve now had the chance to work on three novels together. I hope there are many more. To Clare Hey, you published my first story in the UK and now you’re my editor. It couldn’t have worked out any better. Thank you so much for your keen eye.
I want to thank the friends who read drafts of this novel, inspired me, or simply offered sound advice. There are many of you, but the few to whom I owe the greatest thanks are
Zachary Watterson, Debra DiDomenico, Dan Coxon, Chip Cheek, Lizzie Stark, Carter Sickels, and Jennine Capó Crucet. To Marc Divina, thank you for ridin’ dirty and going crabbing in the middle of the day. To Drew Nicklas, thanks for all the crazy Montana stories. Who knew bears liked alcohol so much? And to Adrian Johnson, keep on keeping on, you feel me?!
A huge thank-you goes out to all my foreign publishers and agents. I really couldn’t do any of this without you. To Joel Gotler, thank you for opening the door to a world I never dreamed of. And to the filmmakers who picked up my first couple novels, Mark Tonderai and Andrew Lauren, I want to say thank you. Just knowing you’re out there keeps me working all that much harder.
Finally, I wouldn’t be here without my parents, who once upon a time saw fit to ground me for half the summer, part of the punishment being an eighty-mile hike through the North Cascades coupled with the assignment of reading ten books and then giving reports on them. Still not sure whether the punishment fit the crime, but I’m grateful all the same.
This novel and the novel before are dedicated to my parents, but all of them are always, always, for my wife, Karen. I couldn’t do any of this without you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
URBAN WAITE is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Carrion Birds and The Terror of Living, which was named one of Esquire’s Ten Best Books of 2011. His work has been a finalist for the New Mexico and Arizona Book Awards, has been translated in nine languages, and is sold worldwide. He lives in Seattle with his wife.
www.UrbanWaite.com
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ALSO BY URBAN WAITE
The Carrion Birds
The Terror of Living
CREDITS
Cover design by Adam Johnson
Cover photograph © by Stephen Alvarez/National Geographic/Getty Images
Author photograph © by Sean Hunter
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SOMETIMES THE WOLF. Copyright © 2014 by Arizona State University. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-221691-5
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2014 ISBN:9780062216939
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