Chapter 14
JOHN WESLEY SAT NAKED on the coffee table staring at the fireplace. His skin had dried but the damp of the shower was still in his hair. Maurice was dead. Patrick was gone and they were running out of options. All they had now was Sheri and she wasn’t much better than a mute. Her hands and mouth taped with some duct tape Bean had found, she lay on the bed in Maurice’s room. John Wesley only able to see her spine where she’d turned away from him on the bed.
Gathering a few of the magazines together he approached the fireplace and squatted, crumpling paper in his fists and then rolling each new ball out onto the ash-stained cement. With a lighter he lit the collection of balled paper and watched it burn, feeding new pages from the magazine into the fireplace as it was needed.
Naked, he roamed the house looking for combustibles. When he passed the bathroom door he heard the shower going and the low croon of Bean singing to himself. Ignoring Sheri, John Wesley went on into Maurice’s room and found a wooden shoehorn in the closet. Next he took a cutting board and a pair of wooden salad spoons from the kitchen. For a long time he stood in front of the small fire and fed the wood into the flames, watching how each new item stained and blackened in the heat. The feel of warmth so good on his skin.
When Bean came out of the bathroom in his suit, John Wesley was breaking down the dining room chairs one leg at a time and feeding them to the fire. Bean simply stared at John Wesley until the big man turned and smiled at him, then went back to breaking down the dining room chairs.
Bean left and went into Maurice’s room and pulled Sheri to her feet. He brought her out and put her on the bloodstained couch and then went back into Maurice’s room. He selected some clothes and laid them out for John Wesley. When Bean came back out into the living room he told the big man to go dress and then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water from the faucet, staying close enough that he could keep his eyes on Sheri. It was a beautiful day, he thought. Out the window above the sink there was nothing but high blue sky and the sun just past its midpoint for the day.
When he returned to the living room John Wesley was dressed and standing over Maurice. A look of horror on Sheri’s face as she watched the big man squat and extend a hand toward the body. A skin had formed at the edge of the blood pool and John Wesley put a finger to it like a skater about to shove off across a half-frozen lake.
With four of the burning chair legs Bean went into Maurice’s bedroom and placed them beneath the bed frame. When he was done he called for John Wesley and waited while the big man dragged Maurice in by his ankles. They were hoisting him onto his mattress when they heard the knocking begin on the front door, the smoke already starting to roll up from beneath the bed.
Chapter 15
THE DRIVE FROM MONROE to Seattle was forty minutes if Driscoll kept the speed limit. If he ran the sirens it was thirty minutes, no accounting for traffic and the side streets he’d have to find his way through. He’d already lost enough time dealing with the marshals and Gary, and on top of that he’d taken his own time thinking it through—thinking what would happen to Patrick or Drake—before he made the decision not to tell the marshals what he knew.
He hit traffic merging onto the 405 and rode the bumper of the car in front of him for five minutes before Driscoll popped the sirens and sped past, one tire riding the grass and the other on the road.
He was being too cautious and he knew it. If Patrick’s cell mate was right then Driscoll might already be too late. He ran up on a driver in the HOV lane and flashed his lights, veering around him and hitting ninety as he passed.
The big software buildings went by on his right as he came down the 405 and sped through Bellevue. Twelve years, he thought, it was a lot of time to pursue one case. Gary and Patrick both wrapped up in the same thing and neither of them talking. Now Gary was helping the marshals while Driscoll tried to avoid them. And he knew they wouldn’t believe him, not after all he’d done to try to keep them away from this case.
Driscoll took the exit for I-90 and came around toward Seattle. The speedometer at ninety-five as he hit the bridge across Lake Washington, the city just on the other side.
DRAKE STOOD ON the porch. Down at the cross street a group of boys on bicycles were turning and turning. He didn’t know how long he’d watched them before he blinked. His eyes gone dry and a sense that he’d lost himself somewhere behind on the road over the mountains, or perhaps even before.
He knew standing there on the porch that he wasn’t thinking straight. The sight of the money in the grave had shaken something up in him. Everything he’d learned from Morgan, Drake’s own desperation to get Sheri back, and the anger he felt for his father all competing for space inside his mind. The thoughts crowded up, each yelling for the attention Drake didn’t have time to give.
He wet his lips, searching down the street for some sign he was in the right place. No one came to the door and he bent to the side window and tried to see what he could, but there was nothing for him—the shades drawn across every piece of glass and the interior of the house a complete mystery.
At the end of the block he watched the boys turn once, then twice. Nothing on the street to say Drake was in the right place. All that mattered now was Sheri. The money was nothing to him.
Whatever Patrick had done, wherever he was, it just didn’t matter to Drake anymore. A third of Drake’s life had gone by without knowing who his father really was and he realized at some point it had stopped mattering to him. Patrick made his own mistakes and Drake chasing after him wasn’t going to make them any better.
Drake looked to the windows again. Nothing to see but his own reflection in the glass—a slim figure standing somewhere between fog and light. His face as nondescript as a mannequin in a shop window. He stood staring at himself for half a minute before he turned, looking again toward the street, wondering if Morgan had been wrong about the place, when the door opened behind him.
By the time he got his body around, John Wesley already had him by his shirt and was dragging him through the doorway into the house. The smell of fire somewhere close by. Drake tried to get a grip but he found himself lifted from the ground and slammed into the wall once, then twice. The plaster cracking as his body bounced and he heard his service weapon clatter and slide away.
He lay on the floor trying to get his breath and then he was lifted once again. A brief feeling of falling as he went over. The floor coming up fast, blood all across the floorboards though Drake couldn’t tell if it was his.
PATRICK THOUGHT ABOUT running. He rolled the bottom of the coffee mug around on the counter, listening to the sound. He’d finished off the hash browns and he was working on the bacon. Dredging it through a small pool of syrup he’d poured himself on the plate.
The waitress was away having a smoke and had told him if he needed anything to ask the grill man. Patrick watched the man work for a moment. His back was to Patrick, chopping something up on a cutting board. Patrick looked to the door again, and the interstate farther on. Again he thought about running.
For the first time in a long time he felt scared. He felt like those characters up there on the soap opera. Fragile. Unaccustomed to life outside the walls.
He pushed his plate away. The sound of it on the counter loud in the silence of the diner. The grill man turned and looked at him and Patrick brought out a dollar and asked the man for change.
He rattled the quarters in his hand as he came off the stool and walked back toward the bathrooms. Patrick stopped at the pay phone and dialed the number. It was the only number he knew by heart. A number that hadn’t changed in twelve years and one he’d dialed a thousand times before.