Driscoll smiled. “If there was evidence to prove it, I would have.”
“You’re out on a limb here, aren’t you?”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re right, either.”
“I’m here to help you out, Deputy. I tell you about the fact that maybe you brought a murderer into your home and on top of that, your boss over at the Sheriff’s Department might have been involved, and you think I’m the one doing you a disservice?”
“You’re a fucking cheery guy, you know that, Driscoll? I ought to have you over for more barbecues.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to your wife and see how it goes.”
DRAKE GOT INTO the department thirty minutes late and went straight into Gary’s office.
“I bet you’re wondering why I set you up with Fish and Wildlife,” Gary said. He was sitting at his desk, looking through the morning paperwork.
Drake nodded, his eyes casting out around the office like he might find a bloodstained sack of money in the corner. He had to check himself and keep his focus on Gary.
“I know you’ve been helping Ellie out with that poaching thing, and this didn’t seem too much of a stretch,” Gary said. A few years younger than Patrick, Gary had been like an uncle to Drake growing up. He’d given Drake his job, even loaned him money till Drake could sell off some of his father’s land to buy groceries and pay for the mortgage on their house. Since then Gary had begun to show his age. The uniform rounded on his stomach and the hair that had once been red now gone thin on his pink scalp. Worry lines across his forehead deep and defined on the skin.
“The truth is,” Gary was saying, “your fellow deputies, Andy and Luke, could have done it, but you know the valley better than anybody and you’re the one who keeps getting the calls as it is.” Gary shook his head like something was funny. “Hell, you’re about the only one besides Ellie that gives a shit about that wolf. I think a lot of people would rather you just shot it, and to be honest, I’m one of them.”
Drake had his hat sitting in his lap and as Gary talked he turned it slowly with his fingers. “You know my father is out?” Drake said.
“I know,” Gary said. “I was the one who approved your day off.”
“You ever visit him in Monroe?”
Gary cracked a smile, the flesh beneath his chin drawing tight. “You know I did. I haven’t in a long while, but I did.”
“Except for one time, I didn’t visit him at all,” Drake said.
“He’s staying with you and Sheri?”
“He has my old bedroom.”
Gary nodded; he leaned back in the chair and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. The office had been Patrick’s at one time. Now all the pictures that had lined the walls were gone and Gary had replaced them with his own. Pictures from the fishing trips he took to Alaska, one with Drake holding a king salmon and looking proudly at the camera. The trips a yearly vacation for Gary, sometimes on his own but often with one of the deputies from the department. And Drake knew, too, that if Patrick had never gone away to prison it would have been his father there in the picture instead of him.
“You guys were close when I was a kid.”
“Yes, we were,” Gary said. “It’s a shame how it all turned out.” Other photographs showed Gary in the Cascade foothills, kneeling next to big bucks he’d shot, their antlers turned up in his hand and the buck’s eyes staring out at the camera, dull and black as those of the deer Drake had seen the other day. “You should tell Patrick we say hello. Me, Andy, and Luke, all of us, tell him that and say we’ll get a few beers one of these nights.”
“What I mean to say is that my father just got out yesterday. I don’t know if I should be headed off into the hills on a wolf hunt.”
“I can stop by and check up on him, if that helps you out at all,” Gary said. “I don’t think that wolf can wait more than a day.”
Drake thought about what Driscoll had told him only thirty minutes before. The image in his mind of two old lawmen sitting on Drake’s porch counting the cash they’d stolen twelve years ago. Drake was having a hard time keeping his focus. All the things Driscoll had said to him earlier at the doughnut shop were crawling up his spine like spiders through a tin pipe. “Maybe I’ll just take Dad with us,” Drake said.
“Is that you or Ellie talking? I already told her that was a bad idea.”
“I told her the same,” Drake said. “But I’m not going to leave him around the house doing who knows what.”
Gary smiled. “Don’t trust the old man yet?”
“Something like that,” Drake said. He was having a hard time trusting anyone at this point. “Did Ellie mention when she wanted to head out?”
“She was thinking you’d go out tomorrow, early, as soon as the sun is up.”
Drake collected his hat and stood. He was holding it in his hand and about to turn when Gary said, “Son, don’t put too much faith in your buddy Driscoll. He was around here a good amount when your father went away. There was a lot of media and law enforcement throwing crazy theories around and he was one of the main guys throwing the mud.”
Drake ran his fingers under the band of his hat. His eyes on the floor, feeling exposed.
“Andy’s oldest daughter went to school with that girl over at the doughnut shop, Cheryl. Maybe it comes with the job, but the girl likes to get in people’s business—she likes to talk, too, and it just worked its way up through the grapevine. It’s the nature of a small town. I wouldn’t think too much on it. I’ve been expecting we might see Agent Driscoll around here again at some time.”
Drake let himself out and closed the door. Andy and Luke at their desks. Drake went and sat in his chair. He felt defeated. He had no clue what to think about any of it, but mostly he just felt pissed off. Until an hour ago he’d thought Driscoll was his friend, now he was saying one thing and Gary was saying another. Two people Drake had always trusted.
Drake sat at his desk and looked around the office. Whatever seed Driscoll had planted was growing. Roots coiling around his chest like a vine on a tree and Drake there in the office scared to see how it bloomed.
DRAKE MADE IT into the early afternoon before he went back into Gary’s office and asked to take the rest of the day off.
When Drake pulled up to the house he saw his father one hundred feet away at the edge of the clearing where the apple orchard ran out and the alder fence had once sat. Patrick stood there for a moment and then bent a knee into the grass, where with one hand he seemed to be looking something over. He wore a set of jeans and one of his old flannels. His scalp and beard shaved clean. And the newly exposed skin white and puckered in places where the razor had nicked his neck and jawline.
Drake slipped the car into park. For a while he watched his father where he knelt at the edge of the clearing. He didn’t know what to think about the man. And it was only when Drake got up out of the cruiser and closed the door that his father raised his eyes to Drake.
By the time he made it across the orchard to his father, Patrick was standing again. “I’ve never seen you in the uniform,” Patrick said. His eyes on Drake, taking in the cop browns he wore.
Drake tried to smile. He looked Patrick over and then he looked back at the house, where he could see Sheri’s profile through one of the kitchen windows.
“You get off early?” Patrick asked.
“Yes,” Drake said, turning back to his father. “Gary let me go. I thought I’d just come home for a little while. What’s been going on?”
“Sheri showed me around. We picked up some groceries, had lunch, really just took it easy.”