“I’m fine,” he said. “Just feels different out here, I guess.”
“That’s fine,” Drake said. He started the car and pulled it around to the road, feeling the engine work as he pressed his foot down and angled for the interstate.
In his rearview Drake watched the road, waiting to see if the Lincoln would round the corner and take the entrance with them. Nothing there to see, and only the semis out on the interstate as he pushed the accelerator again and headed north.
Chapter 2
THERE WAS THE SOUND again of something hitting against the metal—the thump of an elbow, the beat of a foot, the hard strike of a palm against the inside of the trunk lid. The skinny man looked to the side where the big man sat and then he looked behind him, over the backs of their seats to where the leather—with every knock—seemed to palpitate like something alive.
He turned and ran his eyes to the gas station across the street. The car they’d been following since that morning now pulling out into traffic, headed toward the highway again. He watched it go, tracking it with his eyes as it went. And then when it was gone he got up from the Lincoln and walked around to the back where the sounds could be heard.
There were several children playing inside on the McDonald’s play structure—twenty feet of slides and rope ladders, a bridge of netting from one plastic tower to the next. One overweight boy of eight or nine there at the edge, surveying the land, watching the skinny man where he stood in the parking lot. The two stared at each other for the beat of a second. The boy there and then gone, called away by his mother or by some other child.
The man turned and opened the trunk. The driver there in the belly, his face showed as only a mash of dried blood and broken bones. One side of his skull sagging like melted rubber, cheekbone to eye socket crushed inward. And the skin purpled and swollen from when he’d been beaten unconscious.
The skinny man took it all in quickly, looking to the McDonald’s and then looking back on the driver. He dropped a fist fast into the windpipe of the man and crushed the driver’s larynx. Then as the eyes opened wide, the driver’s lungs struggling to breathe, the skinny man bent downward and with two hands took hold of the driver, breaking his neck as deftly as a farmer snapping the neck of one of his chickens.
Chapter 3
“YOU GOT SOME TIME?” Drake asked as they came into Silver Lake, the houses all strung together along the road. Prefabs with vinyl siding and patchy lawns farther out, and as they came into town, two-story clapboards with wood-frame windows and lopsided porches. A single yellow caution light dangling where the two main roads came together and then split apart again.
“Plenty of time,” his father said, leaning into the windshield to take in the town. “Hasn’t changed much, has it?”
“A few more logging outfits,” Drake said. They came to the blinking yellow and Drake turned the steering wheel to the left, heading away from the lake.
When they came to the metal Quonset hut five miles up the road, Drake pulled into the gravel and set the brake. “This is new,” Patrick said.
“Fish and Wildlife put it in a few years back. I’ve been helping them out. This morning on the way to pick you up I spotted a wolf just off the lake road.”
“A wolf?”
Drake nodded. “Positive.”
“No shit?” Patrick said, leaning forward to take in the hut like he might see the wolf standing there before them. “Your grandfather used to tell me stories about the old packs that ran in the North Cascades. Nothing like that when I was around. This must be the first wolf in fifty years.”
“At least.” Drake pushed the door open and moved to get out, pausing and looking back at his father. “You hear from him at all? Grandpa? Is he still crazy?”
“He wrote me a few times. Says he’s getting old. Told us to come visit when we had a chance. Says he’s been shooting gophers and prairie dogs. Sent me a recipe for chili a few years ago. Same crazy old man.”
“What kind of chili?”
“It wasn’t beef.”
“Sounds about right,” Drake said. “I’m surprised he wrote you.”
“Living out where he does I think he gets lonely,” Patrick said.
Drake told his father he’d be only a moment and then got up out of the car and closed the door. He could smell the tree pollen in the air. The first buds of spring showing on the stink currant branches off the road.
Nothing up the road but forest, and then eventually, thirty miles on, the border crossing into Canada. A single booth set in the middle of the road with red-and-white pole gates hanging off either side, like a trawler on the ocean. Drake took a breath and felt the sweet air at the back of his throat, cold and mineral as snowmelt. He nodded to his father and then went on to the hut.
He smelled the deer by the time he had the door open and he put a hand to his nose to quell the stench. “How long did she sit in the sun before you brought her in?” he asked.
Ellie Cobb leaned out from behind a metal cabinet. Eight years younger than him, she wore a pair of safety glasses over her dark eyes, her brown hair tied back and the green Fish and Wildlife uniform visible beneath a yellow rubber apron. With a gloved hand, she removed the glasses and stood. “When you left the message this morning you didn’t say anything about the deer being half-eaten.”
“She wasn’t half-eaten when I left her,” Drake said. He was standing close by Ellie now and he could see how the wolf had cleaned one of the flanks to the bone. A strong light focused down on the remaining muscle. The musk of the deer floated in the air, and an underlying smell of the wilderness.
The room they stood in a mix of salvaged wood furniture—culled from some government office in Olympia—and the more modern stainless examination tables toward the back, where a series of freezers lined the wall and filled the room with an electric hum. Each freezer containing the various remains of one thing or another, finds either Drake or Ellie had brought in over the last few months: a frozen coyote, a flattened porcupine, and the remains of a diseased elk.
Drake picked up a pair of surgical tongs and folded open the stomach cavity. The innards torn and the ribs snapped in a jagged fashion Drake knew had not been done with human hands. When he looked over at Ellie to tell her about the wolf, the Fish and Wildlife officer’s eyes were looking past him.
Drake turned and found his father there, the big canvas coat on his shoulders and a hand held to his nose.
“Ellie Cobb,” Drake said, “this is my father, Patrick.”
“The convict,” Ellie said, a playful smile on her face as she said it. “I’d heard your time was coming up.”
“Ex-con,” Patrick said, extending a hand to Ellie.
She looked down at it a moment and then gave him a weak wave with her gloved hand. “Sorry,” she said. “Blood.”
His father nodded and forced a smile. He was standing about two feet away from where Drake leaned over the carcass. “My son tell you I was getting out?”
“Actually, no. The sheriff, Gary, said you might be around soon. Bobby only told me about it when I pressed him a little.”
“Gary is the sheriff now?”
Ellie looked to Drake.
“Gary was my deputy,” Patrick explained.
Ellie’s eyes locked on Drake. “I thought Bobby would have told you.”
“Bobby doesn’t tell me much of anything. I half expected I’d be catching the bus this morning.”
“Bobby seems pretty good at keeping secrets. You have any advice for me if I decide to go rogue?”