Primal Threat (6 page)

“That’s exactly what happens. But you were great. I don’t mind telling you, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I haven’t told that to anybody else. I mean, when my grandfather died it was awful, but this was so sudden. I really thought I was going to pass away. And then you came and you were right there with me. I mean, you were right there, whispering in my ear. It made me feel…just made me feel like it was going to be all right.”

“I’m glad everything turned out okay. You’re a nice girl. Bad things shouldn’t happen to you.”

“They shouldn’t happen to anyone.”

He regretted his harsh words. He fancied the way her long brown hair flowed when she moved her head, and he fancied the way she looked at him brazenly now that they were alone, even though upstairs she’d seemed about the shiest human he’d ever met. He even fancied the way she’d faced up to his insane verbal onslaught about money. He liked the strength in her arms and shoulders when she scooted around on her crutches. He wondered if her life was as simple as he thought: playing tennis, going to school, pleasing Daddy.

“What’s that on your arm?” she asked, pointing to a scab that wrapped around either side of his elbow and ran under his shirt-sleeve.

“We were mountain biking in a local park, and I took a couple of spills.”

“It looks terrible.”

“You should have seen it before.”

“Let me see.”

“It’s too ugly.”

“No, I want to look at it.” When he pulled his sleeve up, she stepped close and examined the wounds with interest. “Where else were you injured?”

“My hip. All down one side of my knee. That was the worst.”

“Can I see?”

He leaned over and pulled one pant leg up carefully, exposing the thick scabbing above his knee while she stared like a kid in a spook house. “You in premed, or something?” he said.

“Social work. What are these here?”

“Old scars. I got this one at a criterium in Port Townsend a couple of years ago. These others are mostly from mountain bike crashes. This is where I got torn up by blackberry vines last summer.”

“And you have one on your hip, too?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to drop my trousers,” Zak said, at the same time that the door to the court opened.

“You’re not going to drop your trousers?” Lieutenant Muldaur repeated.

“We were just talking,” Nadine said, embarrassed.

“We’ve been looking all over for you. Your boyfriend’s getting worried.”

“It was nice talking to you,” Nadine said, looking at Zak and then squeezing past Lieutenant Muldaur, who was still smirking. “And thanks for the tour.”

“Sorry about what I said earlier.”

“No problem.”

After she left and the door swung closed, Muldaur said, “Were you hitting on her?”

“She wanted me to drop my pants.”

“So I gather.”

“She wanted to see my scabs from that crash.”

Muldaur laughed. “Apparently, her family’s got a lot of money.”

“There is that.”

“Your tone of voice makes the money sound like a disqualifier.”

“The boyfriend’s a disqualifier. I didn’t know she still had one until you said it. Besides, I’m not interested in someone that much younger than me.”

“Don’t try to palm it off on her age. Zak, you’re pretty well grounded when it comes to most things, but she’s rich and you hate rich folks. Admit it.”

“Okay, maybe I do. But only the ones with too much money.”

“And which are those?”

“All of them.”

Muldaur laughed.

Afterward, Zak wanted to go back and retrieve those moments with her so he could be civil this time. What a perfect ass he’d been.

7

August

A
s he turned the .30-30 over in his hands, jacked the shells out of the magazine, and then sighted down the inside of the oiled barrel, Kasey marveled at how much he loved the precision of a fine rifle. He admired the heft of it and savored the heavy cartridges sagging in his pocket. His father had given him the carbine on his fourteenth birthday, and it was still his favorite. It wasn’t hunting season, of course, and he didn’t hunt anyway. He liked to drive up into the hills to shoot wine bottles scavenged from one of the several restaurants Chuck and Fred’s parents owned.

All of them owned guns, even Jennifer, although only three had thought to bring them along on this trip. Perhaps tomorrow morning they would cork some empties and toss them into the river, then plink them as they floated past. Kasey hadn’t done any shooting since last summer out on his father’s boat in the Pacific, when he’d gone through a thousand rounds of ammo in one day. He still remembered the blister on his thumb and the ache in his shoulder, but it had been a blast.

They’d made camp where the local had told them to, uncertain if they had the right place until Jennifer spotted one of the cyclists up the hill. Over the next few minutes they saw the others in turn, although neither Kasey nor Scooter recognized Zak among the distant figures. They’d dusted them bad. Scooter had been laughing since it happened and, energized by the incident, was uncharacteristically doing all the work of making camp: sipping from a bottle of beer and setting up the tent, lighting the campfire, heating up the LPG portable barbecue they’d brought along.

“I wish we’d videotaped it,” Scooter said. “We could put it on the Internet.” He drained the beer bottle and was cocking his arm to throw it at some nearby rocks when Kasey stopped him.

“What are you doing, man? We need to be good conservationists. Put the cap back on, and we’ll shoot it in the river.”

“Right. Conservation. That’s my game.” Scooter placed the bottle carefully on the tailgate of the Finnigans’ truck. “We’ll be recycling these items,” he announced to Jennifer.

Jennifer Moore was a nice enough girl and had done her job back at the guard shack, but Kasey wished she hadn’t come along. Women on a trip like this cramped his style. Besides, Chuck went apeshit if anybody so much as looked her. A guy that big, you’d think he would have all the self-assurance in the world, but he had about as much confidence as a squirrel burying a nut.

“I like that,” Jennifer said, tossing her long blond hair to one side. She had a habit of flipping her hair and standing so that her breasts jutted out, and every time she did it Chuck was looking around to see who was watching. “We’re out here in the woods, but at least we can leave nature the way we found it.” Ironically, she picked up a piece of wood and threw it onto the fire. “How about if we go up and invite those guys down? Wouldn’t that be fun? We’ve got enough steaks for an army.”

“Uh, I think they might not want to be grilling steaks with us,” Kasey said.

“Why not? We have way too much food.” Turning to Chuck, Jennifer bounced up and down and said, “Come on, honey. I think we should introduce ourselves. It’ll be fun.”

Chuck said, “Why not?”

Kasey watched Jennifer walk away in her tight pink shorts and white deck shoes, her astonishing legs long and sleek and tanned. She was about the only one in the group who didn’t know Zak Polanski was the reason they were here. When he looked back toward the camp, Fred was watching him watching her, so he winked, hoping Fred wasn’t going to tell Chuck later. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought the steroid brothers. On the other hand, as long as the Finnigans were along, nobody was going to mess with them, which would be a good thing once Zak and his group realized who had showered them with dust.

Zak was the first to spot them walking up the hill. They were having such a hard time, Zak wondered how he and his four friends had pedaled up the steep slope. Moments later the two were standing in front of the cyclists’ somewhat disorganized encampment trying to catch their breath. They looked like brother and sister. He was tall and thick through the neck and chest, blond and blue-eyed, with legs like tree trunks. A sheen of sweat glistened on his upper lip, and his muscle shirt was damp with it. She was a long-haired blonde, also with blue eyes, also somewhat thick, though attractive. Zak recognized her as one of Nadine’s friends. As Zak recalled, she’d played years of soccer, thus the legs and the lungs—she wasn’t breathing nearly as hard as her companion. Zak noticed that Muldaur had slipped into his thick Coke-bottle glasses and put his bicycle helmet back on, pulling it low on his forehead.

“Hi. I’m Jennifer Moore, and this is Chuck Finnigan. We’re camping just down the hill here.” Finnigan nodded but didn’t say anything. She gave a start when she noticed Zak. “Oh, hi, Zak. Funny running into you here.”

“Hello, Jennifer. What are you guys doing?”

“We’re just out for a lark.”

“Odd that you should end up right next to us, huh?”

“That
is
weird.”

Stephens, Morse, and Giancarlo stepped forward and shook hands with both of them while Zak busied himself with some bike gear.

Jennifer bit the inside of her cheek and said, “I guess we passed you kind of too fast earlier. Was that you guys?”

“I think it was,” said Muldaur, altering his voice and staring down at his lap. “I think maybe it was.”

Zak recognized Muldaur’s voice and demeanor as those of Hugh, an alter ego the lieutenant sometimes adopted around the fire station as a practical joke. Why he was playing Hugh now was a mystery, though.

Stephens and Morse, not realizing what he was up to, turned in unison and stared at Muldaur. Stephens turned back to the young woman and helped her with excuse making. “You were already going so fast when you came up on us, it was probably just best to keep going.”

“I got a ton of dust in my boogers,” said Muldaur. Again Morse and Stephens stared at Muldaur, who was now hiding his face in a towel.

“We’d like to make it up to you,” Jennifer said. “We’re putting some steaks on. We’ve got plenty. Why don’t you all come on down and meet the others?”

“Fine with me,” said Giancarlo, who was easily as large as Chuck Finnigan. Morse nodded, and so did Stephens. Zak said, “Sure.” Muldaur shrugged, his face still hidden in the towel.

“Are you planning to stay all night?” Morse asked.

“We thought we would,” said Jennifer. “We’ve got a campfire. It’ll be fun.”

“You’re not supposed to have a fire in these mountains,” said Zak. “You know about the fire alert, don’t you?”

Neither Jennifer nor Chuck replied.

“So you guys are just out here for the one night, or what?” Morse asked. “You have plans after that?”

“I really have no idea,” said Jennifer. “Do you know, honey?” She turned to Chuck.

“We follow Kasey, I guess.”

“Kasey’s here?” Zak said.

“Down the hill with the others.”

“How about we’ll be down in five minutes?” Stephens said.

“Sounds great. We’ll go back and tell the others to throw some more meat on.”

“They don’t seem so bad,” Morse said after they were out of earshot.

“No,” said Stephens. “I think that speeding thing must have been a…well, a miscalculation. I mean, how would they have known there would be bicyclists on the road? You have to agree, we weren’t supposed to be here.”

“Neither were they,” Zak said.

As the five of them walked down the hill a few minutes later, Muldaur had his false teeth in, his Coke-bottle glasses on, and his helmet adjusted tight and low over his ears. Zak turned to him and said, “You sure you want to do this?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.” Muldaur strode ahead in an awkward gait neither Stephens nor Morse had seen before. The walk alone made Zak laugh.

Giancarlo smiled at Zak and said, “
He’s
Hugh? The guy who’s always visiting your station?”

“Yep.”

“Does anybody else know?”

“Just me.”

“What’s so funny?” asked Morse. “What the hell is he up to?”

“Just play along, okay?”

“Yeah,” Giancarlo said to the others. “You’re going to have to see this to believe it.”

8

A
s they walked down the hill Zak and Muldaur threw each other looks to show their unease over the venture, while Morse and Stephens, seemingly content, led the way into the camp at a leisurely pace. Muldaur was in full disguise and was moving in that ungainly, jerky motion he was so good at. Even his friends at the station hadn’t been able to see through his modest getup, the slightly altered modulation in his voice, or the distorted body language. As far as Zak could tell, he was the only one who knew that Hugh, who had been regularly visiting the fire station for months, was actually Muldaur playing his most elaborate practical joke yet.

Every fire station has at least one learning-disabled civilian with an obsession for firefighting apparatus who hangs around the station as much as he can. With few exceptions, most crews treat him with tolerance and generosity and enjoy having someone they can think of as their station mascot. So it wasn’t all that surprising that no one at the station saw through the Hugh disguise or that, undetected, Muldaur chose to keep his alter ego alive. It was unclear, however, why Muldaur had chosen to play Hugh just now, or why he’d bothered to bring the glasses and fake teeth along on the trip. But Muldaur was full of surprises.

The encampment below was far more elaborate than theirs. In addition to the vehicles, they’d set up four tents, camp chairs, a battery-operated television, and a barbecue grill complete with sizzling steaks. The campfire in the middle of the encampment was growing larger by the minute. So was the beer-fueled bonhomie.

Nadine’s brother sat in front of the grill in one of the camp chairs next to William Potter III—Scooter. Zak recognized most of the others, even if he didn’t know them all real well. Roger Bloomquist. Ryan Perry. While the others made introductions and ignored the fact that an hour and a half earlier these people had come as close to killing them as was humanly possible without actually doing so, Zak stood outside the circle in a disbelieving stupor. This had to be about him. There was no other reason for them to be here.

Scooter had tailed Zak before, back when Zak and Nadine were spending time together, but they weren’t an item anymore and Scooter knew that. So what was going on now?

“Don’t get too paranoid.” Roger Bloomquist was standing alongside him, speaking in a normal tone that Zak knew nobody else would be able to hear over the truck radio Fred Finnigan had just turned on full blast, both doors of his Ford winged open to send Oasis off into the hills. Zak had met him twice before at Newcastle family functions. Bloomquist, who was living on a trust fund, had started a number of half-assed rock bands and wanted to be a famous guitarist more than he wanted to breathe. Zak had heard him play the guitar and figured his chances were about one in ten thousand. His family was known around the region for their philanthropy involving the arts, and his grandmother had endowed the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company with enough money to keep them flush for years, but Bloomquist’s greatest ambition was to play in a garage band.

Bloomquist was also a longtime, second-tier suck-up of Kasey, as was Ryan Perry. The number one sidekick had always been Scooter. After Zak had gotten to know the group earlier that summer, he realized the social tier was structured, coincidentally or not, on a hierarchy that ran from wealthiest on down. Of course, that placed Zak squarely on the bottom rung in any group function. “I mean it,” said Bloomquist. “Don’t get too worked up about us being here.”

“How did you guys know where we were?”

“Dumb luck. Some guy in North Bend told Kasey.”

“You just happened to be in North Bend talking about me to the one person there who knows where I was going?”

“Somehow Scooter got wind of it. I’m not sure how.”

“Scooter or Kasey?”

“Scooter.”

Nearby, Muldaur, aka Hugh, had convinced Chuck Finnigan to show him the interior of the Porsche Cayenne. Chuck patiently answered each of Hugh’s inane questions, not realizing that Hugh considered it his duty to exhaust the patience of anyone who tried to treat him civilly.

“Okay. Okay. Okay,” said Hugh. “Three men are in a rowboat and it’s in the middle of the ocean. One is a kindergarten teacher. One is a professor. And one is a pimp with a razor knife. What do they say to each other as the boat sinks?”

“I don’t know,” said Chuck. “What do they say?”

“I got it right here,” Hugh said, pulling a scrap of paper out of his pocket and holding it close to his glasses. “They say…they say…no…wait…this is for the turtle and the stripper. Wait. I got it here somewhere.” He fumbled through his pockets. Zak knew there was no joke and no punch line and that he would perform this stunt as many times as they let him get away with it.

“So you guys found out what I was doing and came out to hassle us?” Zak said.

“Kasey and Scooter thought it would be funny,” said Bloomquist. “They don’t mean anything by it. We were just going to grill some steaks, listen to music, and party. I mean…well, you know these guys. Just go with the flow.”

“In the morning are they going to chase us around in those trucks again?”

“No. Of course not. I mean…I don’t know what their plans are. I’m just along for the ride.”

“You know this is all about me and Nadine and Scooter, don’t you?”

“We’re just going to have a good time and go home. Nobody means anything by it.”

“Sure.”

On the other side of the campfire, Stephens and Morse were chatting with Perry, Scooter, and Kasey. Stephens was playing that game of “who do you know” and finding they had more than one acquaintance in common, mostly businessmen in the Greater Seattle area. Then Stephens asked about investments, and soon they were discussing the stock market and Japanese real estate and REITs.

It was interesting to watch the dynamics of the two groups mesh. Fred Finnigan, who was almost as taciturn as his brother Chuck, remained on the sidelines of the stock market conversations. Jennifer watched silently as Chuck showed Hugh various gadgets on the trucks and answered his questions. Kasey, Scooter, and Perry chatted amiably and passed bottles of beer to Stephens and Morse; Bloomquist drifted over to join them. Zak thought Stephens and Morse were finding more in common with these Jeep boys than they had with the firefighters, money apparently forging tighter bonds than bicycling. Giancarlo got along with just about anybody and had soon embarked upon an earnest conversation with Jennifer about religion, which was at the core of Giancarlo’s life.

Zak was still mulling over the fact that he’d been followed into the foothills by his ex-girlfriend’s former boyfriend. Maybe Bloomquist was right. Maybe it was all in fun. Maybe they simply didn’t have anything better to do with their weekend.

Finding himself the only member of the group who hadn’t paired off or joined a conversation, Zak dropped into an empty camp chair and stared into the fire. When Jennifer and Giancarlo drifted over, he said, “That’s illegal, you know. The fire.”

“I tried to talk them out of it,” said Jennifer. “They wouldn’t listen.”

“My friends beat your friends!” Hugh said as he and Chuck joined them. “No. Really! My friends beat your friends. Giancarlo can go faster on his bike than you can go in your truck. Giancarlo’s fast.”

Zak wasn’t sure what Hugh/Muldaur was trying to promote, but he was definitely working on some sort of scheme.