She moved closer to the light, lifting her neck to get one eye over the hole. With one lid closed she could make out a long country road, cattle wire running both sides, and fields of wheat stalks shining gold on either side. No cars behind and only the yellow dividing line feeding away from her as the road went on underneath the tires.
She let her head drop. The muscles in her neck tight from the effort and the constant thump of the car wheels moving over the concrete. Again she thought of Drake. She was alone and she was scared. She raised her head and placed her eye to the small hole. The road went on behind just as it had before. No one was there, and though she hoped for it, she knew no one was coming.
THE OLD MAN came away from the window and sat in one of the chairs across from his grandson. “That’s all of them there.” He reached a hand out to touch the worn top of an old shoe box sitting on the table. The feel of the cardboard soft beneath his fingers. “If it’s not in there I don’t know where it is.”
“It?” Drake said.
“Whatever you’re looking for.”
Drake opened the box and removed the stack of letters. He flipped through the envelopes one after the other, examining the dates before laying them on the table. “What will I find in these?” Drake asked.
“I don’t know. Something, but I can’t tell you what that something is.”
“You can’t?”
“I have a friend in town I exchange books with. I read a book and then I give it to her. Some of the things we see in these books are the same, but a lot of it, scene to scene, page to page, is always different. You understand?”
“But you could describe the book for me, couldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then what would you say?”
“I would say Patrick was sorry about the way things turned out. He worried over the past. He worried over the present. Mostly, though, he worried over the future. What would happen to you. To him.”
“That’s what’s in here?”
“That’s what fathers always worry about.”
Drake let that sink in before he opened one of the letters and scanned the words. Morgan watched him for a time before he got up and walked to the stove, where he’d left the remaining rabbit to braise over low heat. He lifted the top of the pan and touched the meat with one of his fingers, feeling the bones move beneath.
He was at the sink skinning the two prairie dogs when Drake’s phone rang. The old man turned and watched his grandson look at the number on the display, then slip the phone back into his pocket.
“You don’t want to get that?”
“It’s nothing,” Drake said. “I’m waiting on a call but that wasn’t it.” He was bent over the table, reading one of the letters. It was the third letter Morgan had seen him open.
“What call are you waiting on?”
“The call that tells me Sheri is okay,” Drake said. “The call that tells me what I can do.”
“I’m sorry about this,” Morgan said.
“I’m sorry, too.” He held one of the letters up to the light. Something there he was trying to make out. “What are the dates and times at the bottom of each letter?” Drake asked.
“Times when I could see him,” Morgan said.
Drake turned and looked at his grandfather. “You went to Monroe?” Drake’s phone rang again and he looked at the number and then put the phone away. “How often did you see him?” Drake asked.
Morgan cut a piece of sinew away and brought the skin down another inch. “When I could. Almost any date you see there in the letters. Sometimes I had to wait a bit for the guards to find him but he usually showed within a half hour or so. I brought him things. Books, cigarettes, things he needed.”
“I didn’t know he smoked.”
“I don’t think he does, not like me at least. But he could use them. They helped him avoid trouble.”
Drake was staring at his grandfather in total disbelief when the phone rang again.
DRISCOLL STOOD IN the orchard. He had his phone out and he listened to the message click on a third time and Drake’s voice asking him to leave a number, and then he hung up. Driscoll didn’t have a clue and he kept wondering why Drake wouldn’t pick up, or if it was Drake at all who had the phone.
The night was starting to come together. Thirty minutes earlier Driscoll had returned from the truck lot, where the foreman had played the closed-circuit cameras back for him. From one angle they saw Patrick climb the fence, then go over, slipping into the lot. From another angle they picked out Driscoll’s Impala as it passed by and then came back. They saw Drake’s cruiser several times as well. The ghost in the shadows—Patrick sitting there in the truck cab—watching each vehicle pass. By the time Driscoll returned to the house a set of prints had come back and two U.S. marshals were on their way out to see them.
The prints belonged to two guys from Monroe. Convicts, Gary said, who had spent time with Patrick when he was inside. Two violent men who had escaped a week before while being transferred from Monroe to Walla Walla, killing a guard and taking his handgun with them.
Driscoll looked at the phone in his palm once more. He figured he had an hour before the marshals showed. An hour before they came in and took the scene over and Driscoll went back to sitting in an office in Seattle.
He began to walk to the house. The sun above shone pale beneath a thin layer of clouds. The heat in the grass causing the dew to rise and the apple trunks—obscured in places—seeming to float a foot above the ground.
One night and everything had changed. Two people murdered and stuffed in the trunk of a car. Drake, Patrick, and Sheri all missing. And now two escaped prisoners.
He didn’t know where any of them were and even seeing Patrick take the truck, Driscoll didn’t know whether Patrick was working with these men or against them. He had an hour to figure it out.
PATRICK CAME OUT of the Indian casino onto the lot, looking back over his shoulder as he went. He knew they had cameras in there but he’d kept his head down, trying only to get through the casino floor and then out the opposite door.
It had taken only two hours for the police to track down the big semi. The biggest thing in the lot except for the few RVs that had set up on the perimeter where the cars were fewer and something as big as an RV or a semi could be parked sideways across several spaces.
If he’d really wanted to hide the thing he would have dropped it by the cranes and container ships down by the Port of Seattle, but he hadn’t had the time to get south, the semi too big and too visible among all the cars on the highway.
Now he walked across the lot, weaving between cars as he went, looking behind him every thirty seconds or so. His nerves going like little electric shocks inside his chest, and an awareness to his movements that he had to force on himself, counting the seconds before he could turn again to look behind toward the semi and the growing flicker of police lights.
Certain that he could not turn around, and that all he’d left behind was waiting for him in the lot by that semi. Prison and possibly worse. There was no going back, and he felt himself committed to whatever would come next, and what that would hold for his future.
Ahead, he saw the cars were beginning to thin. The lot surrounded the casino on all sides. A building that hadn’t even existed when he’d been put away, at least not in the form it was now. Ten stories tall, like something off the Vegas Strip, all glass and neon lights.
All down the access road off the highway, he’d passed fast food joints, cell phone stores, and even a Safeway. He looked to these now. The Safeway the closest building. If he was going to make the big grocery store, he’d need to get out of the casino parking area and move across two lanes of traffic and a wide open lot that looked ready for development. It was too much ground to cover.