Sometimes the Wolf (2 page)

Drake got out of the car and stood, waiting. The one time he had visited his father in prison, the man had just stared coldly back at him, his head shaved to the skin, and a slight tilt to his lips as he sat answering Drake’s questions. The man locked away for a third of Drake’s life. Sheriff Patrick Drake, a legend in his time with no other family left in Silver Lake except his son and daughter-in-law.

The deputy for years had not cared what happened to his father, shamed any time his father’s name was mentioned. The family history in the hills and mountains around the lake nothing to be proud of, Drake’s own grandfather, Morgan Drake, infamous for bringing booze and entertainment to the logging camps up and down the North Cascades, eventually settling the family in Silver Lake.

Looking at his father now, with his hair grown out and a beard matted across his face, his skin pulled flat in places and creased in others, Drake felt like he didn’t know his father the way he should. So much time had passed with nothing being said between them. Patrick wearing the same clothes he’d gone in with twelve years before, outdated and now large on his thin, muscular frame.

Behind, the guard closed the door and Drake heard the latch fall as Patrick crossed the lot to where he waited by the car. The old canvas coat open at Patrick’s chest, revealing the flannel shirt and jeans he’d gone in with all those years before.

“I see you’ve gone wild,” Drake said, gesturing to his father’s white mane.

Patrick smiled. He’d been in there a long time. And the creases on his skin looked all the deeper. “I’ve always been wild,” he said.

In the lot behind them, Drake heard an engine start up, followed by the soft putter of exhaust, but Drake didn’t think anything of it as he took the box from his father and loaded it into the backseat, watching how Patrick put a hand to the door and lowered his body down into the car.

IT WAS AN
hour before they spoke again. The sound of the interstate moving beneath them, the thrum of the tires on the asphalt and the radio turned on low against the quiet. The absence of their voices like some living, breathing thing, tucked far back in the darkness waiting to appear.

“Pull off at the next exit,” Patrick said, pointing ahead of them to an overhead sign.

There was still a good forty-five minutes before they would turn off the interstate and head east into the Cascades, threading their way up the mountain pass toward Silver Lake and the home that had been left for Drake and his wife when his father had gone in.

“You planning on knocking off a convenience store?”

“You know that’s not what I was convicted of,” Patrick said. His eyes flashed on Drake for a moment and then looked away again.

Drake had no idea why he said the things he did to his father. No way around what his father had done but to joke about it and hope it could be avoided for just another day. “You had a lot of people fooled,” Drake said.

The old sheriff nodded but didn’t look over at Drake again.

Drake took a hand off the wheel and ran it back over his scalp, feeling the close-cropped hair he’d gradually been losing since his midtwenties. Like his father he was built thick through the shoulders, with long legs and the thin, angular bones that had been passed down through their family for generations. “People still talk about it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“What people?”

“Silver Lake, the whole town.”

“I never thought I’d be going back there.”

“Well, I don’t know where you thought you’d be. We had to sell a lot of the land just to hold on to the house.”

“I never asked you to go back there.”

“I never asked you to get thrown in prison.”

His father shifted, then looked behind him, reaching for something out of the cardboard box in the backseat. “I’m not proud of what I did but at the time it seemed like the only option.” He was sitting in the seat again, holding open a thin folder. “Look,” he said. “I saved them, every one I could find. Even the ones that had my name in them.”

Drake looked over at the clippings and then looked away. Some from before his father had gotten into trouble, some from years afterward. All of them he’d seen before and he knew they told something about Drake’s past that he really didn’t care for, that he wasn’t proud of, but that he’d done because he’d thought at the time it would mean something.

Drake felt nauseous just thinking about those years. All he’d given up to come home and deal with his father’s debts. A basketball scholarship to Arizona he’d had to leave behind. All the time he’d spent trying to make up for his father’s crimes. To earn the name back. It wasn’t Drake’s fault. None of it was, and that point—most important to Drake now—had only recently occurred to him. Still, he had to remind himself that he was living for himself. For his wife, Sheri. He was living his own life in a way he hadn’t for many years. And now with Patrick sitting beside him, trying to reawaken all the old memories, all the things that had occurred in the past, Drake knew he needed to look to the future.

“They’re all here,” Patrick said, holding a clipping up for Drake to see. “Even the newspaper articles from Arizona, from when you played basketball.”

“Why would you keep those?”

“So I don’t forget.”

“Sometimes things are better forgotten.”

Patrick paused, looking down at the clipping in his hand. Even with his eyes on the road, Drake couldn’t help but notice. “I don’t plan on making any problems for you,” Patrick said. “Not anymore.”

Drake looked over to where his father sat in the car, the green shift of the landscape going by, the backs of houses, run-down and scabbed with paint.

His father closed the folder and put it back with the rest of his possessions. “You don’t need to worry about me,” his father said, his eyes looking to the side mirror as the road went by in a flicker of light. “I just want you to know that I’ll be fine. I want you to know that I have a plan. Whatever I did in the past, it’s covered. You and me are going to be fine.”

Drake nodded and watched his father. Now it’s me and him, Drake thought. When did that happen? When has that ever been the way things were? Drake certainly hadn’t played a part in the second mortgage Patrick took out on their house, on the money he owed. All that had added up after Drake’s mother passed and there just wasn’t anything in the bank for the bills.

“I was away for a long time,” Patrick said. “I thought about a lot of things. I know going back to Silver Lake is what I have to do now. But someday I plan to build a cabin in the woods—live like your grandfather. Just disappear.”

Drake shifted, rolling his shoulders back. “Don’t disappear just yet. You’re still out on parole. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if the forestry service had some sort of restraining order out against you after all the time you spent in the woods last time you were free.”

“Very funny,” Patrick said. He had his eyes on the side mirror and it made Drake look to the rearview, scanning the highway behind. Nothing to see but a tall line of semis and the daytime running lights of cars shining back on him.

Drake took the exit. He slowed into a stop sign and then turned to the east, where there were several gas stations and a McDonald’s. Up the road he saw where a big warehouse store was going in, the skeleton of the place big as an airplane hangar.

“You need money?” Drake asked.

“No, just a bathroom.”

Drake pulled in beside one of the pumps and watched his father go in. With his credit card Drake paid the machine and let the tank fill, sitting in the car with the door open and the sound of the engine ticking beneath the hood. With his hand he pushed into the muscle of his thigh and felt the tendons pull. Two years before he’d been shot in the knee while trying to help out a DEA agent by the name of Frank Driscoll, and there were pieces of Drake’s patella still floating around through his insides. All of it the result of a bust Drake had tried to make on a man smuggling drugs over the mountains outside Silver Lake, a former acquaintance of his father’s.

With the door open he brought his legs around, resting them on the pavement and working the muscle in his hands, the smell of gas strong in the air. There had been physical therapy for a year afterward, lessons on how to shift his weight, how to swing his knee, and try to minimize the limp he would have for the rest of his life.

All the people we try to be, Drake thought. All the people we will be in a single life.

On the weekends Drake still pushed the ball up the court at the local high school. Wearing a knee brace. His bad leg constantly losing the battle with his good leg. He’d had to adjust for how he shot, making sure he came off his good leg when he ran in for a layup. He had to think about it now, the way he couldn’t jump as high anymore. He’d always been an outside shooter, playing point in college, he’d spent most of his time moving the ball around at the top of the key, or stepping back beyond the three-point line to line up his shot. But he’d put on weight since then. He’d slowed. And even keeping himself in shape he knew he’d never be the same player he once had been. Though he was teaching himself to be something different now, not worse or better, but something different. Smarter perhaps. Drake didn’t know. The person he was then so far from the person he was now.

He sat in the car with the door open. The smell of gasoline dissolving in the air as he ran his fingertips over the muscles of his thigh, pushing the strain away. His fingertips digging for the familiar scars and wounds of his past.

A minute later his father came out of the gas station wiping his hands down the sides of his pants to dry them. “I worried about you when I read in the paper what happened,” his father said.

“It’s nothing now,” Drake said. “It stiffens up on long drives.”

“You were shot twice, weren’t you?”

“Once in the knee and once in the arm,” Drake said. His hand on his kneecap and the slight indentation left in the bone from where the bullet had passed through. He’d thought in that moment, two years before, he was a dead man, and that all he had tried to do in his life had been for nothing. A scar in the shape of a star on his forearm where the second bullet had gone in, and the dark purple sliver of tissue at the back of his left hand where he’d caught a knife through his palm. Thinking on it now he couldn’t even begin to put it back together, or reason out why he was still alive. But he was. All that in the past and now he sat trying to wring the stiffness from his leg.

When he raised his eyes from his knee, his father was no longer looking at him, his head up, with his focus across the street. “You know those men over there?”

Drake turned and found where Patrick’s gaze fell. A new-model Lincoln Town Car with two men inside, sitting in the McDonald’s parking lot. “I don’t think they care much about us,” Drake said.

“They’re a little too far for me to make out.”

“I don’t recognize them,” Drake said.

“They pulled off the highway as we came up the exit,” his father said. “They’ve been sitting like that ever since I got out of the car and went inside.”

Drake stood and put his hands to the small of his back, working his shoulders until he heard the ligaments pop. “Is that why you were looking in the side mirror?”

Patrick stood watching the men. “Why are they just sitting there? Why don’t they go in?”

“They could have gone in while you were in the bathroom.”

“I wasn’t in there that long.”

Drake stared at his father and then looked back at the men. “Is there a reason they’d be following us?” The pump clicked off and Drake walked back to take the hose from the tank. “Are you feeling all right, Dad? You’re scaring me a bit here.”

Drake watched as his father’s eyes quivered, something watery and loose in their stare before they broke away and met Drake again. “Just paranoid, I suppose. Too much time locked away in small places seeing things that aren’t there.”

Drake nodded, taking the receipt from the machine. Patrick stood on the other side of the car, the beard and stark white hair giving him a mythical quality, like some piece of history come to life from a book. “You sure you’re okay, Dad?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just feels different out here, I guess.”

“That’s fine,” Drake said. He started the car and pulled it around to the road, feeling the engine work as he pressed his foot down and angled for the interstate.

In his rearview Drake watched the road, waiting to see if the Lincoln would round the corner and take the entrance with them. Nothing there to see, and only the semis out on the interstate as he pushed the accelerator again and headed north.

Chapter 2

T
HERE WAS THE SOUND
again of something hitting against the metal—the thump of an elbow, the beat of a foot, the hard strike of a palm against the inside of the trunk lid. The skinny man looked to the side where the big man sat and then he looked behind him, over the backs of their seats to where the leather—with every knock—seemed to palpitate like something alive.

He turned and ran his eyes to the gas station across the street. The car they’d been following since that morning now pulling out into traffic, headed toward the highway again. He watched it go, tracking it with his eyes as it went. And then when it was gone he got up from the Lincoln and walked around to the back where the sounds could be heard.

There were several children playing inside on the McDonald’s play structure—twenty feet of slides and rope ladders, a bridge of netting from one plastic tower to the next. One overweight boy of eight or nine there at the edge, surveying the land, watching the skinny man where he stood in the parking lot. The two stared at each other for the beat of a second. The boy there and then gone, called away by his mother or by some other child.

The man turned and opened the trunk. The driver there in the belly, his face showed as only a mash of dried blood and broken bones. One side of his skull sagging like melted rubber, cheekbone to eye socket crushed inward. And the skin purpled and swollen from when he’d been beaten unconscious.

The skinny man took it all in quickly, looking to the McDonald’s and then looking back on the driver. He dropped a fist fast into the windpipe of the man and crushed the driver’s larynx. Then as the eyes opened wide, the driver’s lungs struggling to breathe, the skinny man bent downward and with two hands took hold of the driver, breaking his neck as deftly as a farmer snapping the neck of one of his chickens.