He listened to the call go through. It was answered after the third ring and the voice there was familiar to him, but not the voice he was expecting. “Luke?” Patrick said.
A brief pause while the deputy cleared his throat. “Gary told me to wait around and see if anyone called. I didn’t think it would be you, Pat.”
“What do you mean you didn’t think it would be me? Where’s Bobby, Luke? Where’s Sheri?” Patrick leaned into the phone; he had the receiver held tight to the side of his face and his eyes scanned back over the diner. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. Why are you at my house?”
“They’re missing. It looks like they were taken, both Gary and Driscoll are out searching for them.”
“Together?”
“Two marshals were here. Gary went with them and Driscoll is on his own.”
With his free hand Patrick pinched two fingers over his eyes until the blackness swam behind his lids. He didn’t understand what was happening. “Marshals?”
“I thought you knew. I thought that was why you were calling. They killed a girl in town. Stuffed her in the back of a car with another man they’d killed the day before,” Luke said. “It was in the news last night.”
“What are you doing at my house, Luke?”
“I’m sorry about this, Pat.”
“Again,” Patrick said, “why are you at my house, Luke?”
“Gary told me to wait—I thought you’d have seen it on the news—in case Sheri or Bobby showed or the two men came back.”
“Who?” Patrick managed to say. He was holding the phone tight, the plastic growing slippery with his own sweat.
“They’d been following you since you got out. The marshals said it was two prisoners you knew in Monroe. They got transferred a week ago and killed one of the guards in transit. I’m sorry,” Luke said. “I thought you would have known all this.”
“I guess I haven’t been paying that much attention.”
“None of us knew anything about it till the marshals showed up. I guess they thought the men had gone over into Idaho or up to Spokane.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“What do you mean, Pat?”
“The car they found the bodies in.”
“It was a black Town Car.”
He told Luke to hold on. He took the phone away from his ear and let it dangle by his thigh. He heard Luke call his name several times but Patrick wouldn’t answer. From where he stood he could see Maurice’s truck out there in the lot. The interstate just fifty yards farther on.
THE HOUSE WAS burning. Driscoll stopped the Impala in the middle of the street and was out of the car and up the stairs before the heat turned him away. The temperature too much and his hand raised across his face as he backed away to the sidewalk. Flames already beginning to show at several windows toward the back. The drapes in the front on fire and the glass panes crashing to the porch.
All down the street there were people beginning to come out of their homes. Several of them on their cell phones. Driscoll looked around at it all. The rush of the flames heard now like a constant wind. Neighbors gesturing with one arm raised toward the flames as they tried to make their voices heard over the crackle of wood and heat.
Driscoll came back to the car and put his elbows down across the roof, cradling his face in his hands. So close, he thought, always so close.
In the distance he heard the sound of fire trucks. He turned and looked back toward the house. Flames were beginning to come through the roof. This is the house, he thought. This has to be the house.
Up on the main street the first fire engine made a wide turn to get the corner. He knew he should stay. Already the neighbors were looking to him like he was the first part of some rescue. Only Driscoll knew he wasn’t and that if he stayed he’d have to answer the question of what he was doing there in the first place.
Up at the corner the fire truck had come up short on its turn and was reversing out into traffic to bring the big square body straight so it could fit down the side street. He dropped down into the seat and brought the transmission into drive. Several boys on bicycles staring at him as he went past, moving fast with the grille lights of his Impala pulsing a silent flash. The big red body of the fire truck pulling to a stop in front of the house all he saw before he went around the corner.
He parked a block down and sat there. For a full minute he sat there staring out at the street through the front windshield. “Fuck—fuck—fuck!” he yelled, beating his fists against the wheel in quick succession.
When he looked up at his own reflection in the rearview mirror he saw the blood in his face, the skin pulled red with tension. He felt the beat of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, wetting his throat, and the slow rise and fall of his chest. His hands now resting, useless, palms up on his thighs, with his head played back against the headrest.
He looked back in the direction he’d come from. How did he even know Patrick had come here?
“Because the house is burning,” he said, speaking aloud like it wasn’t he who had asked the question.
“It could be a coincidence. It could mean anything.”
“But it doesn’t mean anything, it means something,” Driscoll said.
Driscoll pulled himself up in the seat. He had his hands gripped on either side of the steering wheel. He hadn’t seen the Toyota Patrick took from the casino lot anywhere on the street. Maybe Patrick never came this way. Maybe John was wrong about Maurice. Maybe he was wrong about Patrick.
Driscoll looked up again at his eyes in the mirror. He was tired. He could see that. He was failing. Failing Bobby and failing Sheri, but mostly he was failing himself.
The house was burning and the Toyota Patrick had stolen from the casino lot was nowhere on the block.
Ten minutes later he found the Camry parked five blocks away. The window was broken out on the driver’s side and Driscoll opened the door and sat in the old Toyota examining the wire harness pulled free below the steering column.
Driscoll shook his head, almost like he didn’t believe it himself. Where the fuck was Patrick?
Two more fire trucks went by while he sat there and he was staring up at the empty space where they had been when his cell phone rang. He checked the display. It was a number he didn’t know and after a second he picked up the call.
“Agent Driscoll?” a voice asked.
He answered, listening, waiting for the voice to go on.
“It’s Luke, the deputy from Silver Lake. Patrick just called and he wants you to call him back.”
Chapter 16
BEAN SAT SHOTGUN WHILE John Wesley drove. Drake’s cruiser radio was turned on and Bean listened as the codes came in but as far as he could tell none of them had anything to do with them.
He’d taken the jacket off Drake and gone through the pockets. One cell phone, a set of keys, a wallet, and a note in a plastic envelope that looked to be from Patrick to Drake. He read the note twice. When he was done he looked up and watched the road for several beats and then read the note again.
He looked to the back, where Drake lay unconscious in the rear cage, bleeding from a split of skin over his right eye. His face badly bruised where it rested against his wife’s lap. And Sheri sitting there with a look of hate on her face and her hands still duct-taped.
He pursed his lips and kissed the air, watching as Sheri turned away.
John Wesley came to the on-ramp for the interstate and looked to Bean for direction.
Bean studied the note in its plastic envelope. “It’s time we got a few things straight,” Bean said, looking to the back, where Sheri sat.