“What makes you not trust him at all?”
“A lot has been said about him.”
“You’ve heard it all before,” Sheri said. “It’s not like you haven’t gotten used to the things people say.”
“Not all of it.”
“Well, you know him better than me,” Sheri said, sarcasm in her voice.
Drake had his eyes open still, the dark room was coming back into focus and he saw the nightstand and the wall farther on. “What makes you so certain about him?”
“I just feel for him,” Sheri said. “For where he’s been and what he’s had to do to get here with us. It took a lot for him to come back here after everything. To the house he used to share with your mother and you. For him to come to Silver Lake. I have sympathy for him, but I also think it takes a lot of courage.”
Drake turned so that he could face her, hoping that she could see the smile on his face when he said, “You’ve got a soft heart, Sheri.”
“Well, you’ve got a heart made of stone,” she said, pushing at him a little beneath the sheets, her own smile now visible.
“He’s here because he has to be. We said we’d take care of him, didn’t we? It was one of the conditions of his release.”
“I know he seems like a loner but he’s not really to blame for what he is. Not totally.”
In the dim light of their bedroom Drake lay watching his wife. He didn’t know what else to say to her. The trip into the woods with Ellie was less than eight hours away. All the things people had said about Patrick Drake over the years and now he was here. Sleeping in the room down the hall, resting up for his chance at the mountains.
Drake lay there for a long time thinking it over. Sheri falling asleep and the thoughts in his head whistling around like leaves over an empty lot, nothing to catch them or anchor them to the earth as they moved. All the while, Drake simply trying to see the world through Sheri’s eyes, but he just couldn’t.
He didn’t want his father to be any of the things people were saying about him. Mostly, though, he didn’t want his father to be a murderer on top of everything else he’d already been convicted of.
PART II
THE HUNT
Chapter 6
THE SUN WAS JUST up over the mountains when Drake pulled his cruiser past the cattle fence. The barbed wire stained black where the deer had been, but little else to say what happened two days before. Patrick sat in the passenger seat watching the houses go by as they rounded the lake. The smell of coffee thick inside the car from one of the old chipped cups Patrick held in his hands, amplified by the closed-in air packed tight between the windows.
Drake had half expected to see Driscoll at the end of his drive that morning, sitting there on the hood of his Impala, just waiting for them. Only he hadn’t been there and Drake turned south along the lake and followed the road, feeling loose and untethered from his day and the expectations he usually had for himself. The home he’d made the last twelve years in Silver Lake shattered by what Driscoll had said. No way of knowing how any of this would turn out. His father next to him in the passenger seat and all they’d need for the wolf hunt loaded up in the back.
As he pulled past the field he saw the Fish and Wildlife truck waiting beneath the trees. The brown vehicle tucked into the shadows up a small access road that wound back into the forest and ran the perimeter of the property, ending at the farmhouse. Ellie standing there with the tailgate down and a rifle pitched skyward. The red tufts of tranquilizers sitting there beside her on the metal with the rest of her gear.
Drake parked the car off the side of the road and got out. He came and stood next to the truck with his arms resting over the top of the bed. A good amount of gear laid out below. “You really think you’re going to take her down with one of those?” he said.
Ellie finished packing the tranquilizers into the case and then zipped it closed. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’re supposed to use silver bullets, aren’t you?”
Ellie smiled. “You think this wolf is going to turn into a person after we catch up to her?”
“It might explain why she’s all alone. The last of her kind.”
“A wolf in these mountains is just about as rare as Bigfoot.”
“Some might tell you a wolf is rarer than Bigfoot,” Drake said.
Ellie laughed, hitching the strap of the rifle over her shoulder and leaning into the bed to grab up her pack. “Well, we’d probably have to put Bigfoot on the endangered species list as well, wouldn’t we?” Over the uniform she wore a green fleece vest. Her hair, kept back from her eyes with a rubber band, bobbed from shoulder to shoulder as she moved one item after another out of the truck bed, setting them on the ground in a wide circle at her feet. “What about him?” Ellie nodded toward Patrick where he sat in Drake’s backseat with the door pushed open, pulling on his boots. His coffee cup and pack on the ground near his feet. “Is he going to come over here and tell me to wear garlic around my neck and make sure to stab the beast in the heart with a wooden cross?”
“Don’t be silly, Ellie. We may be talking werewolves here, but not vampires.”
Ellie gave him a wry look, raising her hands in mock surrender. “Of course. But you know after all the rumors that have been going around the last dozen years, your father’s probably going to be the scariest thing in these woods the next couple days.”
Drake looked back to where his father sat, lacing his boots. In the last twelve years, he knew, Patrick had been called a number of things, which in their own way had reflected on Drake. He didn’t know what to say about that. He knew Ellie was joking with him, and he wanted to laugh and play it off like it didn’t matter, but the comment had hit too close to home and he was struggling to find anything to say.
He was still trying to find a way to keep the darkness out of their conversation when he heard gravel popping beneath tires as a car came down the ranch access road. The headlights cutting through the shadowed tree trunks for only a moment before they came around the corner and Drake saw the bubble lights on top of the car.
Ellie straightened at the sound and then moved some of her gear to the side of the road, close in to the wheels of her truck, leaving enough room for the cruiser to go past.
“You tell Gary where we would be this morning?” Drake asked.
Ellie turned and looked to Drake for a moment. “I asked Gary to go talk to the rancher for us. I thought asking for a spot to leave our vehicles would be better if it came from him. Fish and Wildlife aren’t exactly the ranchers’ favorites right now. They’d all rather see this wolf shot than have us out here trying to save her.”
Drake glanced to his right and found his father up now, standing about three feet off, watching as the cruiser drew to a stop close by.
“It’s been a long time,” Gary said to Patrick through the open window. His arm up over the passenger seat as he spoke to Patrick. “I hope your boy told you Andy and Luke say hello. We’d like to have you down to the Buck Blind when you’re finished here. We can catch up over a few drinks.”
Patrick nodded. “Just like old times out here, isn’t it?” he said, bending at the waist so that he could look in through the passenger window at Gary.
Gary glanced back over his shoulder to where Drake stood. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Pat. Going on a wolf hunt a few days after being let out of Monroe. I already told Bobby and Ellie how I feel about all this. Making you the third wheel. If you want, I can give you a ride back into town and we can grab breakfast. You shouldn’t be going up into the mountains your first week out.”