Morgan looked around the office. There was room to stand but little more. If he took more than a couple steps in any direction he’d come to a wall. “I was in town,” Morgan said.
“I see that.” She was smiling at him a bit. She wore the blue fleece vest with the eagle on the breast but little else to say she worked there. Her hair was slightly curly and the blond dye had started to go out of it, but it was still there in certain patches. Her figure was plump in the way Morgan liked; he thought about the rabbit stew again. He liked the way they had sat together and she had broken the bread with her hands and used it to clean out her bowl.
She looked him over. The counter flipped up behind her. “I have some mail for you, I guess.” She turned and went back into the mailroom, bringing the pass down behind her. For a moment she was gone. The sound of her somewhere in the back as she rummaged for the right box. “I needed something to read and I almost opened one of your packages. Looks like you got a few good books here.” She came back to the counter and set the box down on the floor. She brought up the mail and placed it on the counter between them.
He looked it over. “How can you tell they’re any good?” he asked.
She was smiling at him again. “I peeked.”
“That’s a federal crime.”
She didn’t say anything back to him. He was stone-faced and she was looking up at him and trying to decide what he meant. “I just thought—”
He broke into a laugh and he saw the relief go across her face. “Go ahead,” he said, opening the package up right there. “I’m happy to let you read any of them first.”
She took one of the books off the stack and looked it over, turning it front to back and then reading the rear flap for a time. She held it close to her chest like a schoolgirl and it made Morgan smile to look at her.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded and then began to collect his things.
He was at the door when she said, “That was nice, wasn’t it? You and me a few weeks ago.”
“Yes,” he said. “It was.”
DRISCOLL CAME INTO the diner parking lot at full speed, grille lights going, and the dust kicked up from his tires rolling past him as he came to a stop. Patrick sat there on the tailgate of a red pickup with his feet dangling over the lot. He wore the same canvas jacket and jeans Driscoll remembered him wearing at the Buck Blind. While the two days of white growth on his head and face made him look ten years older.
The Impala was parked at an angle, blocking the truck. Patrick still sitting there watching him as Driscoll got up from his car. “Raise your hands,” Driscoll said. He watched Patrick do it and then he told him to slide off the tailgate and turn around. Driscoll came around the Impala and pressed him then, bending one of Patrick’s arms back and then the other. The handcuffs out in one of Driscoll’s hands as he held Patrick’s wrists with the other.
With Patrick turned on the tailgate, Driscoll went through his pockets, throwing anything he found onto the tailgate. Inside the diner there was a waitress and a cook staring out at them. The waitress had a hand to her mouth as if something had jumped out at her.
Driscoll set Patrick down again on the tailgate, letting him lean on the metal. His legs straight out and his hands behind him in the cuffs. “Hello, Driscoll,” Patrick said.
Driscoll ignored him and ran his hands down one leg and then stood and patted down the other. When he was finished he rose and stepped back. He was looking at all that he’d taken out of Patrick’s pockets. Keys and a wallet, and a receipt from the diner inside.
Driscoll pulled Patrick up and started to walk him to the Impala.
“Easy,” Patrick said.
“You don’t fucking get it, do you, Patrick? Bobby’s gone and so is Sheri. You deserted them.”
“Slow down,” Patrick said. He made his best effort to turn and look at Driscoll but Driscoll had a good grip on his arm and levered him against the metal body of the Impala before Patrick could say more.
“Something happens to them it’s on you,” Driscoll said. He opened the door of the Impala and put one hand over Patrick’s head and put him in the backseat. He slammed the door as soon as Patrick was inside and then he went back to the truck and went through the cab.
In the glove box he found the registration and read the name. He stood and walked to the back of the tailgate and cleared Patrick’s things from the bed and then closed the tailgate. Inside the waitress and cook were still standing at the window looking out at him.
He looked the registration over again and then he walked back to the Impala and sat in the driver’s seat with his eyes up on the rearview.
“I called you,” Patrick said.
Driscoll held up the registration in his hand. “You’re a selfish son of a bitch.”
Patrick fixed on Driscoll’s eyes for a moment in the mirror and then he looked away. “What the fuck, Driscoll?”
“Bobby and his wife are missing because of you,” Driscoll said. “You don’t give a shit about anyone, do you? No one matters to you. No one should ever trust you. I just came from your buddy’s place. The house is still burning.”
Driscoll waited. He watched Patrick mull that over, he watched the muscles beneath the man’s cheeks tighten. When Patrick turned back he said, “You come all the way up here on your own, Driscoll? No one to watch your back? No one to say this ever really happened?”
“I came because you said you wanted to turn yourself in.”
“Where are the marshals?” Patrick asked. “You trying to keep me for yourself?”
“I’m trying to save your son and your daughter-in-law,” Driscoll said.
Patrick looked up at the mirror. “I know you,” he said. “I know why you came out to see me every year—deep down somewhere you think we’re the same in some way.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your marriage,” Patrick went on. “Your daughter. You think I didn’t hear about your family?”
“That has nothing to do with you.” But he knew it did. He knew in some way he needed something to show for all the time he’d taken away from his family—all the work he’d put in on this one solitary goal.
“I think you should ask yourself who deserted who,” Patrick said. “I think you should ask yourself if you’re trying to save Bobby or if you’re trying to save yourself.”
DRAKE LOOKED DOWN the long hallway, light fading away into the darkness beyond. He sat in a solitary dining room chair with his wrists still taped behind him and John Wesley’s hand resting like ten pounds of meat over one of Drake’s shoulders. Three minutes had passed since Bean took Sheri away down that hall. A door far down opening and only a sliver of light visible now as Drake strained to hear what he could from the darkness.
“What is this place?” Drake asked.
“Just the first place we found,” John Wesley said.
For a long time they’d driven east into the fading light. The night moving up through the sky and the sun disappearing behind. When it was over Drake hadn’t been able to tell where they were, or even how far they’d come, and he looked around the house now searching for some beacon of information to help him get a bearing.
Two silver candleholders sat on the table, their wicks burned almost to the metal and the wax pooled at their bases. Everything in the house seemed like something from a forgotten time. The hutch sitting there across from them with the old china plates displayed along its surface. A pile of mail by the door, built up and then toppled across the floor in a collection that seemed to take in weeks. The night out there beyond the windows like a fine silk cocooning them all within the house.