She straightened the kitchen first and then the living room. Ten minutes later she walked down the hall and stopped in front of Patrick’s room. The door was open and she stood there for a long time looking over the crib and changing table, the walls painted to look like a sunset.
Drake’s voice on the phone had sounded tired. It was how she felt, worn out, scrubbed down. For forty-eight hours she hadn’t known if she would live or die.
She had not known how it would turn out for so long, and now she did. Her life with Drake. Her life here in Silver Lake.
She stood in the doorway for a long time before she turned and went back to the kitchen. When she came to the second bedroom again she carried an empty cardboard box with a wrench and a screwdriver inside. She removed the tools and set the box on the bed next to Patrick’s things.
The first thing she packed was Patrick’s clothes, taking them from the changing table drawers and folding them before putting them in the cardboard box. When she was done, she set the box in the hallway and came back into the room. It took her thirty minutes to break down the crib, loosening the bolts and then removing the sides so that each lay flat against the wall.
Sheri did it all with a quiet determination. There was no pausing or break in her labor. It was just her and the room. Two separate bodies that had once been and now were not.
THE DETECTIVE WHO’D agreed to take Drake back to Silver Lake was waiting for him in the front drive of the hotel. A plastic container of 7-Eleven nachos in his lap that he ate chips from one at a time. He nodded to Drake and when Drake was seated in the car he wiped one hand clean with a napkin and drove out of the lot still eating chips with the other hand.
The man was twenty years older than Drake and from talking to him earlier, Drake knew the detective had been one of the first to respond to the two bodies found at the gravel lot outside town. The case Driscoll said Patrick was involved with.
The detective had been a young guy then, the incident one of his first investigations. Now he was aged past his middle and moving into the last years of his service. He talked and drove at the same time. Pointing out various places he’d made busts and pulled drivers over to find sandwich bags of meth in their glove compartments.
Halfway to the highway Drake stopped the man and asked him to turn the car back.
They made it to the gravel lot just as the sun began to set. The detective sitting in the car and telling Drake what had changed and what hadn’t. He gestured to an open spot just twenty feet away. “That’s where they were shot,” he said. The detective made a gun out of his fist. Bucking it with each shot. “Pop. One goes down. A clean shot to the temple, cracked his skull right down the middle. The second man turns to run. Pop, pop, pop. He gets cut up as he moves. Makes it maybe four steps and then falls right there.” The detective was still holding his trigger finger out on the scene, letting it quiver there in the air before him. A spot of nacho cheese on his fingernail. He brought the finger back and put it to his mouth and just sat there looking the lot over. “We found the bodies behind one of the big rock piles over there.”
“Where was the shooter?” Drake asked.
The detective pointed out the spot. It was about a hundred yards off. “Twelve years ago there was one of those big yellow excavators right there. The shooter was probably back behind it in the shadows.”
“Were they shot at night?”
“That’s what we figured.”
Drake opened the car door and got out. The evening cold around him and the lot out a ways from the city, built up against a few acres of wetland. Farther out, the white trunks of a stand of birch trees, the leaves just starting to sprout. He walked over and stood in the spot where the men had been shot.
He turned and looked to where the shooter would have been. Nothing there now but an empty space between two piles of gravel. He knelt and looked at the ground, running his hand over it and feeling the grit against his skin, expecting somehow that his fingertips would come back stained with blood. Still kneeling, he put a hand to his bad knee and pushed into the muscle, feeling the dull, familiar ache of his old injury. He imagined the shot. He felt the force of the bullet and the tear it made through human skin.
By the time he stood, the detective had come out of the car and was waiting a little ways off watching Drake. “The thinking on this has always been that there were two men. One waiting where you are now to distract the two victims, then the other back there in the shadows covering them all.”
“What did my father say when you interviewed him today?”
“Denies it ever happened. Says he’s not the one. Says we had it wrong all those years before and we still have it wrong.”
“Even with all that money?”
“Funny thing about it is I always thought it was going to be more. Two hundred thousand is a lot of money but it doesn’t seem like enough to kill for.”
“What happens now?” Drake asked. He was trying to put it all back together in his head. He was trying to picture his father here twelve years before.
“We’ve got statements from you and your father but it’s really not enough without the gun, or any direct proof your father was here. We can’t hold him. Driscoll will move him to the federal building in Seattle tonight and I’d guess it will be the last we see of your father. He’ll be back in Monroe in a week.”
“Even the money isn’t enough?”
“It’s drug money. It’s not like the bills were marked.”
Drake looked to the spot where the shooter had been. He paced it out, walking over and then looking back at the detective.
When he was finished he came back to the car. “It seems like a pretty good shot.”
The detective nodded. “It was.” He watched Drake where he stood. “They’re saying your father will be out again in a few years. That worry you?”
“Honestly,” Drake said, “I really don’t know.”
“And this other guy, your father’s buddy from Monroe. He’s still out there, too. He’s out there now.”
“The money’s gone,” Drake said.
The detective grinned and opened the driver’s-side door. “Like I said, it always seemed like too little.”
Chapter 25
BEAN SAT AT THE edge of the wood and surveyed the clearing before the small house. His face dirty and his hands crosshatched with slivers of dried blood from the rock and grasslands he’d traveled through much of the night. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the jacket and his white shirt was stained gray with a mixture of dirt and sweat. The collar a jaundiced yellow where it rested against the exposed skin of his neck.
Most of the night had been spent making his way through the fields, grasslands and prairie giving way to wheat fields and then back to prairie. When the day came he followed small creek beds that had gone dry or still trickled with water and worked his way across the country in a zigzagging fashion, using what tree cover he could find to hide him from view.
Now, almost twenty hours later, he had come to the house at the base of the mountains. He sat watching it for a long time as he tried to make up his mind. The light fading and no sense that Drake or his wife had been able to lead the marshals back this way. Though Bean knew he and John Wesley had been careful enough coming here the night before.
He waited, watching the light fade till it sat over the fields in a blue haze of floating pollen and spring seedpods. The light catching it all like the filament of weeds in a stream.