She could tell it was late afternoon by the orange light filtered in through the haze coming up off the road and she could also tell which direction was west. She had grown up in Chelan County, dry as tinder in the summers and white with snow in the winter months. The land she looked on now reminding her of that area, grasslands all the way to the Rockies. Wheat and alfalfa fields, hops and industrial apple orchards, all of it to the east of Silver Lake.
With her neck muscles cramping and her eyes straining to catch anything that offered a clue to where she was, she lay there, bouncing to the rhythm of the springs. One pothole after another and the gravel pinging in the wheel wells. Her vision so limited that she could barely make out a thing but the road and the grass all around.
The car came to a stop and she heard the brakes grinding on their discs. The engine stayed on and a door opened. She felt the weight release and the car rise an inch or so. She didn’t know what to do and she pressed herself back into the recesses of the trunk, readying herself for whatever might come.
The gunshot she heard tensed every muscle in her body and she rocked back into the darkness, hitting her head against the metal. Nothing had changed inside the trunk. Her world still only the single prick of light at the rear of the trunk lid. Outside only the sound of the wind as it worked through the wheat.
Straining, she heard a chain grate over metal and then fall away into the dirt. Next a gate was pulled open and then the car depressed again and the door closed. They were moving again and Sheri inched her way back toward the small hole of light and watched a cattle gate of some kind as it disappeared around the edge of the road. The wheels beneath continuing down along the gravel.
It wasn’t till the car came to a stop again that Sheri felt completely trapped. Tree shadows had worked their way over the road and somewhere in the near distance the sound of water flowing could be heard. She didn’t know where she was and her eye strained against the hole, trying to make out anything it could before the trunk opened and the big man who had come into her bedroom stood there looking down at her in a wash of light.
DRISCOLL SAT IN his office looking out over the city. He was seven stories up and through an opening between two of the downtown buildings he watched the bay and West Seattle farther on across the water.
The late afternoon sun was setting over the Olympics and no one but him was in the office. For the better part of an hour he’d sat bouncing a tennis ball against the wall beneath the window. He watched the ferries come and go. Their white bulk moving slowly past and then docking somewhere out of sight beyond the buildings. Occasionally a seagull would swing by, moving past the window seven stories up with its wings still and its head pivoting slightly as it went.
He threw the ball down again and watched it bounce first on the floor and then rocket up off the wall and back into his open hands. He did it three more times before he swiveled on his chair and sat looking at the closed door to his office. He leaned forward and placed his forehead flat on the desk, closing his eyes and breathing in the stale smell of the air. He hadn’t been in the place for four days and for two days he’d worn the same suit and shirt.
There wasn’t anything he could do anymore. He sat up and pushed himself away from the desk. His jacket lay folded over one of the chairs opposite and he took this up as he went out the door.
For about thirty minutes after leaving the casino and heading south on the interstate Driscoll had been in a kind of euphoria. He’d been right. All those trips to see Patrick—to question what part he played, what role he’d had. All those times Driscoll had asked Patrick just to come clean. To give Driscoll something—just get the killings of those two men off his conscience—and Patrick hadn’t budged an inch. Now Patrick was running and it proved something to Driscoll that he’d known he wanted but had never quite been able to imagine.
And for thirty minutes Driscoll had felt satisfied. Driving on the highway, thinking it through, cars passing, cars being passed, suburb after suburb going by as he made his way south to Seattle, and then it occurred to him that Patrick might actually get away with it all.
Driscoll didn’t have a license number for the stolen car. He didn’t really have anything. And that’s what he found himself with now—with less than he’d had four days before. He had almost nothing.
The elevator dinged and when the doors opened he was standing in the lobby level of the federal building. He walked through, the heels of his shoes the only thing to be heard as he made his way across the granite tile. Coming to the door he passed through a series of transparent safety-glass walls and metal detectors, and went out onto the Seattle street. A couple blocks later he sat at the bar of the downtown Sheraton. The bartender nodded to Driscoll and brought over an old-fashioned without even needing to be told.
“You in town this weekend?”
Driscoll rolled the glass around on the counter, watching the liquor coat one side and then the other. He looked up at the bartender. “Yeah, a new case.”
“Anything good?”
“No, just a dead end. Thought I’d step out for a little. Get some fresh air.”
The bartender nodded again. Silent acknowledgment was really all Driscoll wanted from the man. He existed. He was here. And by the time Driscoll had raised the glass to his lips the bartender was on to a group of executives who had come in out of the lobby.
Driscoll liked the place simply because there weren’t any regulars. It was a big chain hotel where the closest thing, besides Driscoll, they got to repeat customers were the flight crews that stayed one night and then were gone again the next. The bartenders were all pretty good at shooting the shit and none of them ever asked anything too personal. Perhaps they just knew how to act when most of their clients might come in once or twice a year, or might never come in again. It was friendly without being prying and Driscoll liked it that way.
A year ago he’d stayed in the hotel for two weeks. The story he’d told them was that he was working a big case, but the truth was he was getting divorced from the woman he’d loved for twenty years. From the woman he still loved. But who didn’t love him anymore.
Perhaps if Driscoll had spent more time with his wife or with his daughter instead of in places like this he’d still be married. Though, even thinking it, he knew he probably wouldn’t have been. And the time he spent at the office, moving up the ladder, chasing things down, had really been the undoing of his marriage.
He tilted the glass back and finished the old-fashioned in one long swallow. His Adam’s apple moving beneath his collar and a thin layering of perspiration collected at his temples. He set the empty down and signaled for another. Driscoll raised a cocktail napkin to his forehead and wiped it clean. He had no fucking clue. Over twelve years he’d worked on this case, picking it up and putting it down.
When the drink came he thanked the bartender and then watched him walk back down the bar. He sipped at his drink and thought it all through again.
Driscoll pulled up his phone and checked for missed calls. There were two text messages from the marshals, but nothing Driscoll could use. He toggled down through the contacts and found the number for his wife. He found his daughter’s cell phone number.
Driscoll looked at the highlighted contact in his cell. He read his daughter’s name three, then four times, and then he put the phone facedown on the bar and picked up the old-fashioned again. Beads of water had grown on the sides of the glass. The cocktail napkin on which it sat stuck to the bottom as he tipped it back and took another long swallow of the sugary bourbon.