“I know about the money,” Driscoll said.
“Well then it makes sense that a lot of us in here knew about it, too,” John said. “It wasn’t common knowledge, but when you sleep in the bunk above Pat for as many years as I have, it gets out. Pat would have never said anything, but something like that gets out. He wasn’t exactly running the show in here, but he wasn’t wanting for anything, either. Pat wants something done, it gets done. Respect will do that, but mostly it’s power, and in Pat’s case that power came from the money he was supposed to have on the outside.”
“He kept himself safe.”
“That’s all he did. Counting the days till he could get out.”
“He never told you anything about the money?”
“I saw a bit of it from time to time. Someone was bringing it in for him. Just enough to keep people satisfied.”
“So, you don’t know where it is?”
“Would you tell someone where you’d hidden that kind of money?”
“Two hundred thousand isn’t as much as you think it is these days.”
“Who said anything about two hundred thousand?” John said. He leaned back in his chair and grinned at the DEA agent.
“How much?”
“I’ve got another nine years on my sentence,” John said.
“You’ll be out in four,” Driscoll said. He was leaning into the table now, waiting on John. Behind him, the door opened and the warden appeared. He whispered something to the guard and then asked to see Driscoll in the hall for a moment.
“We’re in the middle of something,” Driscoll said.
The warden shot him a sharp look. “There are people waiting to talk with you, Driscoll.”
John said something under his breath.
“What did you say?” Driscoll asked.
“Marshals,” John said.
The warden was still waiting on him but he couldn’t move. “How do you know about them?”
“They were here yesterday,” John said. “I thought with how close you always seemed to Patrick, visiting him once a year, you’d have shown before them.” John was smiling now, looking across the table at Driscoll, a wild look in his eyes.
The warden tried to get Driscoll’s attention again but Driscoll waved him off. “Just give me a few more seconds.” Driscoll waited for the warden to leave before turning to John. “You knew I’d come?”
“Patrick was like family to you.”
Driscoll didn’t look away. “He was something to me but it wasn’t that.”
“What happens when you catch up to him?”
“I don’t know, but I can tell you it will be a lot better than what will happen if the marshals or those two killers get him first.”
“Patrick is a good guy,” John said. “He helped me when I first got here. Everyone needs someone like that, you know?”
“You paying for protection like he was?” Driscoll asked.
“No,” John said. “I wasn’t a sheriff either, though. I don’t have the same kind of bills Pat probably does.”
“He must have built up a pretty big debt by now.”
“Twelve years,” John said. “What do you think?”
“So what would you do?” Driscoll asked. “What would you do to find Patrick?”
“Are you serious about getting me out of here?”
“Like you said, I’m kind of dirty, but if it’s within my power I’ll do what I can for you.”
John looked around to the guard, the low, muted hum of the halogen lights overhead. When John looked back to Driscoll he took his time, rolling his nails on the table as he thought it over. “I hope you can help Pat out. I really do,” John said. “I wouldn’t have told the marshals this, but when Patrick got here twelve years ago he needed someone just like I did.”
Driscoll thought that over. “For a criminal you’re not that bad.”
“I’m not a criminal,” he said. “I’m an innocent man.”
“So you keep saying,” Driscoll said.
PATRICK ROLLED OVER and put his feet to the floor. The sun was coming in through the front windows and the clutter of Maurice’s house looked even worse in the day than it had in the night. He rested his elbows on his knees and cupped his hands together, running his fingers over his face. The smell of the girl still on his skin and a memory of the night before like a cruel act from his childhood he hadn’t quite forgiven himself for.
He was hungover and when he got up to use the bathroom and splash water over his face, he could see Maurice still asleep in his bed, the covers pushed down to the footboard, and the man laid out full on his stomach still wearing his gray sweatpants. The windows covered up and the sun-warmed air in the room dead still and smelling of dust. His cell phone, keys, and wallet on the nightstand next to him.
He watched Maurice for a time and then walked away to the kitchen and filled a coffee cup with water and drank it full. He had one hand held down on the counter and the other around the empty cup as he looked out the window above the sink. He was thinking it all through again. The girl on top of him, the way she had felt, Patrick trying to resist what his body had wanted most. Something about it all not quite right, a nagging thought trying to break through the clouds. The cell phone on Maurice’s nightstand not where it had been a few hours before.
He went back to the room and looked in on his friend. Careful not to wake Maurice, Patrick took the cell off the nightstand and brought it out to the living room. After toggling through the menu for a second he found the number Maurice had called at two A.M.
Fuck, Patrick thought. There wasn’t one good reason he could think of for Maurice to call someone at that hour.
He stared at the number on the phone’s display for the better part of a minute before he pushed the send button and listened as the call went through. On the third ring someone picked up. In the background the dull fuzz of a car in motion. No one spoke to him and Patrick listened without saying a word. He was thinking it all through again. He was thinking about Maurice last night and how he’d seemed so disinterested in anything related to the money. Money Maurice had been waiting on twelve years.
An ambulance went by on the main street a block up from Maurice’s house, the sirens blaring and then fading away again as the emergency vehicle moved on. Ten seconds later Patrick heard the same siren begin to wail from the earpiece of the phone he held in his hand.
Patrick turned the phone off and moved for Maurice’s room. No time. He put the phone down on the nightstand and grabbed up the truck keys. Maurice turned slightly on the bed but didn’t wake.
With the keys in his hand Patrick came out the front door of the house and took the steps two at a time, jumping the last three and moving for the truck. He had the door open and the engine running almost before he knew what he was doing. With one arm pushed back over the passenger seat he reversed the truck out of the drive and locked the brakes, bringing the truck to a rough stop in the middle of the street. He put the truck in gear and floored the pedal. His eyes focused up on the rearview mirror and the main street behind. Nothing to be seen but the traffic going by as Patrick took the corner at almost forty miles per hour.
MORGAN RAISED HIS eyes and studied the sky. He held the last snare in his hand and the shotgun in the other. A dome of high blue from one horizon to the next and the sun distant and cold. For a while he just stood there watching the slight breeze work across the land, rolling over the far hills before it came washing over him.
Morgan looked over the path he’d taken. The grass shoots bent where he’d come through. But the trail gradually receding back into the landscape like footprints left in the sand of a beach. Nothing to say he’d been there fifteen minutes before.
After it was all done, after he’d shown Drake the money and explained everything to him and Drake had made whatever peace with it he’d needed to make, he asked Morgan if he felt like some sort of castaway out here. “All these rolling hills,” Drake said. “You might as well be lost at sea.”