He came up spitting water. There was water in his sinuses and he felt it trickling down the back of his throat. “Until a few days ago I hadn’t talked to him in years.” He coughed. “I can’t tell you more than that.”
He was under again, trailing bubbles, the dark all around. “You better get familiar,” the man said from the shore as Drake came up. Water glassing over Drake’s skin and dripping from his earlobes. “You get familiar and you find your way after him or things will not be good. You think you can handle that, Deputy?”
Drake nodded.
“There you go,” the skinnier man said. “We just want to ask him a few questions now that he’s out. See if he remembers us, or the money he owes. We don’t need to make it complicated.”
Drake nodded again, his heels resting on the lake bottom below. “Complicated?”
The big man dunked him and Drake came up sputtering. “How many times you going to put me under?” Drake yelled. Water running cold on his face.
“As long as it takes,” the big man said, pushing him under again.
Drake came up gasping for air, his shirt clenched tight in the big man’s fist.
The skinny man bent on his knees and squatted next to the shoreline, picking over the small rocks there. When he satisfied himself he flicked one out over the water, watching as it skipped along the surface and then disappeared within the rain. “Don’t call on the law and expect it to turn out for you, Deputy,” he said, cleaning his palms by rubbing one on the other. “Don’t complicate things for you and yours.”
Drake looked at the man till he saw him turn away and climb up the bank toward the road. The big man still holding him there and Drake cold all the way through, his body shivering in the water and wavelets shaking out around his shoulders and head. “What do you mean ‘you and yours’?”
The skinnier man didn’t look back. Drake called after him again and then he looked to the big man. “What does he mean?”
“Find your father,” was all the big man offered, his fist gripped tight to Drake’s shirt.
“If I find him, what then?” The cold was all the way through him now, his clothes like lead, dragging him down.
The skinny man was at the edge of the road looking down on them. No cars or light anywhere Drake could see. “We have your cell number,” the skinny man said. “We won’t be far off.”
He felt the big man’s hand tighten and then send him down through the water again, the grip coming loose on his shirt and Drake out of his depth. He came up treading water, adrift in the lake, watching as the big man waded to shore and stepped onto land like a creature out of the swamp, bent on some unknown destruction.
DRAKE HEARD THE doors clap shut and then somewhere in front of him a car engine start. He was halfway up the incline when he saw headlights flare out over the water and then turn south on the lake road. The red taillights of the car already distant by the time he stood on the road, cleaning the grit from his hands. His clothes soaked through and a tired, frozen feel to his muscles.
They could have killed him but they hadn’t.
For a time he stood there trying to steady his heart in his chest. The night air filled with the sound of falling rain as he tracked the taillights around the lake. He spit a mixture of saliva and water onto the pavement and turned, searching down the road to either side. He was a hundred yards south of his driveway and as soon as he found his bearings he was running.
The wet clothes grated on his skin but he didn’t stop. He took the turn to the driveway and ran, increasing his speed as he came to the house. Drake’s Chevy was missing and Drake turned and looked back down the drive. He spun and took in the clearing, his lungs heaving in his chest and a vein in his neck beating a constant rhythm under the skin. His cruiser was still there and as he passed he saw that the shotgun had been taken from the stand between the passenger’s and driver’s seats. He cursed under his breath and went up the stairs, still rushing to get inside.
He called his wife’s name as soon as he was through the door. Only the television there to greet him. A rerun of some show from the seventies playing dully on the screen. Drake called his wife’s name again as he crossed the living room and entered the hallway. There was no response. When he came to the bedroom door and pushed it open he found out why.
“Sheri?” he said. Slower now, letting the name linger there like he expected a response. None came.
PART III
MISSING. GONE. VANISHED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH
Chapter 7
IN THE EARLY LIGHT of morning the old man, Morgan Drake, crossed the grass field and went down into the hollow before the house, then up through the cottonwoods. His breath hard to come by and the beat of his pulse thumping in the thin flesh of his forehead. On a string he carried two prairie dogs and a small rabbit over his shoulder, all swaying to the cadence of his walk, slow and labored as he climbed toward the house. His balance measured with caution as he moved his weight to the next foot, making his way up out of the hollow. The creek there barely an inch deep and the water flowing fast and cool from the rain the night before. His pant legs wet to his knees from the grass and sage he had passed through just before morning, the sun inches below the horizon and the eastern sky glowing red like a cold thin fire along the prairie.
He came up out of the cottonwoods and stood catching his breath. The little house there before him. Two front windows and a door. A porch of wood slats and the tin roof he’d put on himself five summers before. The rolling plains all around spotted with bunch grass and deepening growths of cheatgrass. Grown almost to his hips and darkened with the rain.
Morgan crossed the last hundred or so feet and came out of the grass. He’d lived in the place for fifteen years. Through snowstorms that left drifts up to his windows, and through summers where the air thickened to the color of charcoal and huge plumes of smoke could be seen coming off the distant mountains, climbing dark into white clouds. Every morning his porch dusted with gray ash as if from some volcanic explosion.
Except for the septic he’d done most of the work on the small house himself. The dirt road almost a mile in length patched and repatched with gravel he brought in on the bed of his pickup every spring. The grasslands all around slowly trying to take it back by growth or destruction. Mud holes and wallows forming in the depressions and corners when the land softened away from winter and the snow melted and bogged every low point on the plain. Often he stood on the porch and watched how the sun moved across the land, catching the light on the pools of water. The creek loud in the hollow and the leaves of the cottonwoods green with the snowmelt.
Morgan left only once a month to run errands at the store. Buying those things that he could not grow or hunt for himself. His shopping list always much the same: propane, cigarettes, flour, butter, powdered milk, bacon, and whatever fresh greens were on hand. At times he bought things like chocolate and jam, and once a year he made a trip into the big Walmart outside Spokane for birdshot, trapping wire for snares, soap, shaving razors, and kerosene. Often taking his time to wander through the aisles, getting a sense of the way the world had changed around him in the year since.
He was always alone and had grown used to it. At eighty-six he was older than most of the people he met at the little store in town and certainly older than even the retirees who greeted him at Walmart. Three summers before he’d met an old veteran from the Second World War who was eight years older than him and the two had sat on one of the benches outside the Walmart pharmacy for an hour comparing their lives. The next year he looked for the veteran but did not see him, and asking around, he heard that the man had passed sometime that spring.