Drake didn’t know how he felt about it, either. He ran his hand down all the way to her fingers and squeezed them in his palm. He wanted to let her know he was there but he couldn’t find the words to say it aloud.
“So you’ll leave tomorrow?” she asked, her voice muffled by his arm.
“The next day,” he said. “I need to go in to the department tomorrow. I need to talk to Gary about all this.”
HE WOKE EARLY and made a pot of coffee in the kitchen. The sound of his father’s snoring coming from beneath Drake’s old bedroom door. All Patrick must have been thinking as he lay down in that bed last night, in that old room, painted now for a small child who had never arrived, while Sheri and Drake slept just down the hall in Patrick’s old bedroom.
Drake poured a cup of coffee and tried to imagine what his father had thought before he closed his eyes. The unfamiliar becoming the familiar again. Like watching an old movie that hadn’t been seen in years. The same lines replaying, the same scenes, and plot twists. A half-remembered life slowly coming back into focus.
Drake sipped at the coffee. He was barely awake. The thoughts in his head seeming random and disoriented, bumping around inside him with a sleep-starved stumble. After Sheri had drifted off, he’d slept poorly and in the morning he’d woken and dressed in his uniform. The light just up over the mountains and the back acre of their property—where the apple trees grew in unkempt lines all the way to the forest—bright with the morning sun.
He drank the coffee and watched the orchard. The year after his mother died, the apples had sat in the field unpicked. Drake, age nine, watching as a yearling bear wandered around, picking the apples from the ground. Going from tree to tree and eating what apples it could find. The bear drunk on rotting apples by the time it had reached the fourth tree.
His father had come to stand with him at the window as the yearling lay back against one of the apple trunks and rubbed its spine one way, then the other. Eventually falling back into the grass and rolling around with its arms half suspended in front of its face. The bear dozing for over an hour before lumbering off again.
Even now they didn’t care for the trees as they should and half had gone wild, their tops lopsided and unkempt. The apples sagging on the branches in the fall, deer and elk showing up out of the forest to pick over the rotting apples on the ground, or as he had seen once or twice, put their hooves to the trunks and reach for the apples like giraffes extending their slender necks toward the most tender leaves.
Drake set his empty cup in the sink. He left the coffee machine on and collected his hat from near the door. When he’d gone a hundred feet down the wooded drive in his cruiser, he saw a Chevy Impala waiting out on Silver Lake Road. A man in a suit getting out of the car and closing the door behind him.
Drake pulled forward and when he came closer, he put down his window and said, “I was wondering if you’d show up.”
The agent smiled and offered his hand. “How are you, Deputy?”
Drake took his hand and said, “Fine, Driscoll. It’s been a long time.”
Driscoll looked down the drive toward Drake’s house. “How’s the family? How’s Sheri?”
“Still doesn’t like you very much.”
“She’s got gentle sensibilities.”
Drake watched Driscoll for a time, trying to figure the man out. There were only a couple reasons the agent would be waiting for him at the entrance to his drive. And none of those reasons meant anything good for Drake. “I’m guessing you didn’t travel three hours from Seattle for a simple hello.”
“Your father was released from prison yesterday, wasn’t he?”
Drake thought of the two men who had been waiting in the McDonald’s parking lot the day before. He hadn’t thought much of them then but he was starting to reconsider. They hadn’t looked like DEA men. “Driscoll, I hope you’re here because you just wanted to make sure we got home all right?”
“Something like that,” Driscoll said. A car went by on the road, the tires moving over the asphalt. Driscoll watched it go by and then when it was gone, leaned in again. “You think I could talk with you for a moment before you head in?”
“You got somewhere in mind?”
“Sure,” Driscoll said, straightening up. “Follow me into town.”
“YOU’RE SO FUCKING predictable,” Drake said, looking around the doughnut shop.
“Just blending in. I thought all you small-town cops hung out in places like this.” Driscoll took a seat in a far booth, away from the main windows. He gestured to the bench across from him.
Drake sat, throwing his hat on the table, and when the girl looked up from the counter, Driscoll ordered a black coffee and Drake asked for a maple bar. Their table far enough down the side of the doughnut shop that they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone driving by.
When the girl brought the doughnut and coffee over, she nodded to Drake, and Drake said, “Thanks, Cheryl.”
“I didn’t know you were on a first-name basis here,” Driscoll said, his head turning to watch the girl walk away.
“You’ve seen this town,” Drake said. “We’re all on a first-name basis. She probably even knows who you are—probably made you the moment you drove that unmarked Impala into town.”
Driscoll waited for the girl to go into the back before he spoke again. He fingered his coffee cup with two meaty hands and looked down into it for a long time, like someone wishing into a well. “I need to talk to you about something,” Driscoll said. “You remember how we first met?”
“Sure,” Drake said. “You accused me of being a dope runner like my father.”
Driscoll chuckled and looked up from his coffee. “I gave you a hard time, yes, but I wanted to make sure I could talk to you frankly. No beating around the bush. No leading you on, no feints.”
“You’re about to tell me why the DEA has been following me around.”
Driscoll gave him a dead stare. “What do you mean?”
A strained laugh escaped Drake’s lips as he looked around the doughnut shop like Driscoll was playing a joke on him. “The two men? The ones who followed us up the interstate yesterday morning in the black Lincoln. They were your guys, right?”
Driscoll took a sip from the coffee and then put it back on the table. He’d grown bigger in the two years since they’d last seen each other, his shoulders rounded and the jowls of his face thick on his jawline. White all the way through his hair in a way it hadn’t been before. “Deputy, I didn’t put any guys on you.”
“Are you sure?”
“They were following you?” Driscoll asked. He had taken a small notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and he wrote down “Black Lincoln.”
“My father thought they were. I told him he was being paranoid.”
“That’s probably true,” Driscoll said. “I’ll check it out for you, though, just in case. You remember anything else about them?”
Drake went down the list, two white males, one larger than the other. He gave Driscoll the exit number and a more thorough description of the vehicle they were driving. He couldn’t remember the license number. “Is this something I should be worried about?” Drake asked.
“Have you seen them since?”
“No.”
“Then I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re probably right, your father is being paranoid.” He tucked the notebook away in his jacket again and then sat forward with his forearms on the table and his fingers interlaced. “I think you know me and your father have a little history together. I think I made that pretty clear from the beginning. The thing I didn’t tell you before is that I was part of the team that eventually brought him in.”