Primal Threat (18 page)

Leaving Perry and Bloomquist alone had been a mistake, because as soon as they arrived back in camp, Bloomquist said, “We’re not going to…uh, we’ve decided if you guys want to run around trying to shoot somebody, that’s your business. But we’re not going to participate.”

To Kasey’s surprise, Jennifer laid into them. “You raggedy-ass backstabbers. Chuck is at the bottom of that cliff…” She began weeping, then regained control. “Don’t you dare chicken out on us. We’re going up that hill, and we’re going to shoot them before they shoot us. We are going to do that, and you are coming with us.”

“You don’t,” said Scooter, pointing his rifle at Perry’s head, “we might as well shoot you ourselves.” After a few moments of silence, Scooter pointed his weapon at the ground and laughed.

“Jesus,” said Fred. “For a minute I thought you meant it.”

“For a minute,
I
thought I meant it.” Whether he’d meant it or not, it was settled. Perry and Bloomquist were coming.

Kasey had a feeling they’d find the cyclists halfway up the mountain, exhausted from pedaling, and that they would quickly surrender. They would take them back to town and turn them over to the police. Simple.

He was in the Porsche waiting for Scooter to take a leak when he saw the dog dash out to the road and race up the mountain. Fred passed Kasey’s open car window, halfheartedly chasing the malamute. “He was Chuck’s. I don’t see how he could know Chuck’s dead, but he knows something, because he’s been going crazy all morning.”

“Where’s he going?” asked Scooter, stepping into the Porsche Cayenne.

“I don’t have a clue. But I know he hates bikes.”

29

June

Z
ak was relishing the stillness of the warm summer night when Stacy got out of a Carrera and slammed the door. Her exit was almost like an ejection, the car radio so loud it caused a German shepherd up the street to start baying. She’d been on a date, one of her rare social interactions since she’d moved back from Florida, and not a very successful date by the look of things.

Zak, his father, and his sister all lived in the home Zak had bought five years ago deep in the heart of the Central District, a location that missed a grandiose view of Lake Washington by a few blocks. At the time he’d purchased the house it was in ruins, so he bought it for a song compared with the other properties on the block. He’d rebuilt most of the main floor: the living room, dining room, kitchen, one bathroom, and a back bedroom, which he’d turned into a den. Upstairs he was gutting the bedrooms one by one. For the next two months he would sleep in the downstairs den while he tore his bedroom apart and restored it. Zak had done massive amounts of work on the foundation, scoured and cleaned the basement, and put on a new roof. He’d put in new walls, wiring, plumbing, hardwood floors, and fixtures. He would be doing more work this summer. The fire station was about a mile away, so most mornings he walked to and from work. What with the fire department, this house, and his bike racing, his summer plans didn’t leave much time for romance, which was one reason the unexpected affection he felt for Nadine had buffaloed him.

Tonight his sister had been out with Nadine’s brother.

Stacy was almost as tall as Zak and had been a star on the swim team at Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle. As he watched her make her way up the concrete walk and onto the wooden porch, he thought she moved more like a woman on her way to the gas chamber than an ex-athlete. He switched on a lamp just before she opened the front door.

“Hey, Stacy,” Zak said, without moving from the chair. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and her mascara was smeared on her cheeks as if wet kittens had been pawing her. Stacy closed the door but remained in the shadows. He could see she had on her best shoes, a skirt, and a blouse, a sweater clutched in one arm. The blouse had a button missing at the level of her navel. “You look nice,” he said.

“I did earlier.”

“What happened?”

“Zak, honey, I don’t want you grilling me right now, okay? I know you don’t like him, and I guess I don’t, either. Can we leave it at that?”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing up?”

“We had a car wreck last night at work. A rollover. An Explorer.”

“And you had another dream about Charlene?”

“Yes.”

“Zak, it’s so strange that you managed to find a job that puts you right in the middle of your worst nightmare. I mean, if you die and go to hell, this would be it.”

“What happened to your lip?”

She touched her face. “I didn’t think it showed.”

“He hit you, didn’t he?”

“It was what you might call a mutual love fest.”

“How do you get into a fistfight on your first date?”

She walked into the room and sat heavily on the sofa across from Zak. As more light blanched her pale face and it became even more obvious that Stacy had been crying, Zak thought of several things to say, but discarded each as it came to mind.

“Life is full of disappointments,” she said. “Some just a little uglier than others, but it’s not the end of the world. In the morning I’ll get up, have my coffee, and go to work.”

He felt like driving to Kasey’s house and beating the crap out of him, but all that would get him was a night in jail, maybe more.

“Zak? I know you think you have to take care of me, and I love having you for my brother because of that. What I’m trying to say is I’m grateful for your concern, but I only need so much help.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, Zak. You found yourself a good job and you’ve stuck with it and you’ve got a house that’s going to be gorgeous when you’re finished. You haven’t made any major mistakes with your life and I don’t guess you will. I’m just saying I love you and I know you love me, but don’t wait up for me again.”

“I told you I had a nightmare.”

Stacy gave Zak a tiny beauty-pageant wave and proceeded upstairs, where he heard the bathroom door close. The nightmare was bad enough, but seeing his sister step out of Kasey Newcastle’s car had put him into a black mood. That they’d gone someplace and had sex, or something like sex, before slapping the hell out of each other was almost too much to think about. He had no doubt she’d given as good as she’d gotten, though. His sister had a temper and was incredibly strong.

He was eleven when Charlene died at sixteen; Stacy was fourteen. Once again, sitting in the dark, he knew he would give anything to be able to go back and replay that night, that he would give anything if he could erase those thirty seconds of cowardice. It didn’t matter how many times he told himself he’d been a child, because the assurances never dissolved the cold, hard kernel of fear he’d cached away in the pit of his stomach, the fear that reminded him almost daily that his family’s implosion was all his doing. They all knew Charlene would be alive today if not for him.

They’d lived in Tacoma. It was raining that night. Zak was in the front seat next to Charlene, who’d only been awarded her driver’s license a month before. Stacy was in the back, a fact that probably saved her life. She’d been battling her older sister for some time and refused to sit up front. They were about to drop Zak off at a chess club meeting, driving up Sixth Avenue toward the library, when a truck in the oncoming lane blinded Charlene with its headlights, crossed the centerline, and hit them head-on. Zak didn’t remember the initial details, only that there was a loud noise, that Charlene said, “Oh, shit,” and then they were spinning in the road. There were more loud noises, and then Zak was crying. He’d broken his wrist. Stacy escaped relatively unscathed and got out of the wreck on her own. The car was upside down, and Zak managed to get his seat belt undone, which dropped him onto the crumpled roof of the car. Charlene, still hanging upside down, said, “Zak, help me. I’m stuck.”

It had been a simple request, delivered in a tranquil voice, and Zak would remember her calm resolve for the rest of his life, making it a model for everything he did. The smoke began to grow worse, but Zak crept toward her and then reached up and tried to manipulate the belt mechanism with his good hand. As he fumbled with it, he felt a searing heat and without thinking, slithered out of the car backward. The smoke flared up until he almost couldn’t see Charlene. Just as he cleared the car, a young man he’d never seen before knelt and began to squirm into the smoke until one of his friends pulled him back.

“Zak?”

Hearing her voice and realizing he still had time to get the seat belt loose, Zak crawled back in. Nobody pulled
him
out; nobody tried to stop
him
. He never did figure out why. Crawling on his belly, he reached his sister and began to fumble again with her seat belt. And then, without the heat becoming appreciably worse, without his sister coming free, without anything changing, he was once again overwhelmed with panic. The earlier terror had been a mustard seed compared with this. He didn’t know it was possible to have so much adrenaline in his body or to be so single-minded about saving himself.

Again he scooted out backward. There was still time, he thought, as he lay whimpering on the ground beside the car looking on as his sister tried to unloosen the seat belt herself. There was still time to venture in and try again. The worst thing about cowardice, he later realized, was that in even the most egregious cases, there were often multiple opportunities to redeem oneself, opportunities one could look back on in future years with something a lot worse than mere regret. “Zak? Zak are you still there?”

Zak didn’t answer. He could have, but he didn’t. While he waited for Charlene to save herself, the car’s interior burst into flames with a whooshing sound. Having already been escorted to the far side of the street by a middle-aged woman, Stacy screamed when the fire broke out. Zak didn’t budge. He didn’t scream and he didn’t move, not until somebody took him by the shoulders and moved him.

The fire department showed up a minute later and doused the flames, but it was too late. On the day of the funeral, Zak got dressed, went downstairs, and, after a long, tearful struggle, made the family leave him alone in the house while they went to the service. When they came back four hours later, he was still in his Sunday suit, sitting in front of the television, which he’d turned on only moments before, fearing they would find out he’d been staring at a photo of Charlene and crying the whole four hours.

“Are you having a good time?” said his mother, with sarcasm she was never to repeat quite so openly, though for the rest of her life he would know she blamed him for her eldest daughter’s death. If Zak’s father blamed anything on him, he never let on. Nor did Stacy. Still, during the next few years his mother reminded him of it by the way she tiptoed around the topic of Charlene, always with a brief look directed his way when she mentioned her dead daughter, always subtle enough that nobody noticed but Zak.

Since that night on Sixth Avenue, Zak felt in his heart that he was responsible for Charlene’s death, his parents’ divorce, Stacy running away from home, his mother’s pill-popping and religious binges, all of their financial woes. If he’d been a man instead of a baby, he would have worked that seat-belt buckle loose, Charlene would have crawled out of the family car, and they would have gone about their lives with an interesting yarn to spin about the time the three kids were involved in a car wreck. The tragedy so dominated his thinking that there were times when Zak believed the only reason he’d joined the fire department was to prove he wasn’t a coward.

Zak was never far from the panic of that night, and it had a way of coming back, tormenting him in the form of a recurring nightmare. He daydreamed about it on the freeway when he least expected it. House fires, shootings, heart attacks, suicides he could handle as casually as posting a letter, but car wrecks turned him into a frightened boy. Outwardly, though, he never let it show, and his determination to handle every car wreck in a manly way was what gave him a rep in the department as being some sort of car-wreck guru. And now he was falling in love with a woman he’d met in almost identical circumstances to those in which he lost his sister.

Nadine. What did the two of them have in common except their competitive instincts? She was religious, and he was not. She was from a family of wealth and privilege, and he was not. She was headed for a college degree, which he had no interest in achieving. She was from a loving, tightly knit family, and he was from a home that had shattered into a thousand pieces. The best part was that she thought he was a hero. When you put it into perspective and thought about how Charlene had died, he couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something Freudian and ultimately twisted and scarred and maybe a little bit scary about his attachment to Nadine.

The afternoon after Stacy’s date, Zak found himself on the front porch of the Newcastle estate in Clyde Hill, having been asked by the Hispanic woman who answered the door to wait outside for Nadine. During the few moments the front door was open, Zak heard shouting inside, one voice that was distinctly Nadine’s, another just as distinctly her father’s.

Moments after the maid closed the door, Kasey Newcastle exploded out of the house and stomped over to his Porsche, picked up a garden hose, and began spraying the windshield. If he noticed Zak, he didn’t let on. Zak couldn’t help noting he had a black eye.

Finally, Kasey spoke without looking at him. “Nadine used to collect lost pets. We had a stray parrot in the house for almost a year. She grew out of it. She’ll grow out of you, too.”

“Where’d you get the shiner?”

Newcastle reached for his eye. “Caught an elbow playing basketball, if it’s any business of yours.”

He left the water running, fired up the Porsche, and roared out of the driveway, narrowly missing Zak’s van. Moments later Nadine appeared and chirped, “Have you been waiting long?”

“Not long at all. I was having a nice little chat with your brother.”

Nadine walked over and turned off the water faucet. “He’s been in a foul mood all day.”

“I thought I heard arguing inside.”

“Yes, you probably did. Everybody’s in a bad mood. I won’t dance around it. My dad and I were fighting. Daddy doesn’t want me going out with you anymore.”

“Why not?”

“He thinks we’re not right for each other. How would he know? He hardly knows you. Plus, he thinks you’re after my money. I don’t even have any money.”

“You will have.”

“But that’s not why you’re going out with me.”

“No? Why am I going out with you?”

“Because you like getting slaughtered at tennis.” She laughed at the look on his face, and after a few moments he laughed, too.

“You still want to go out with me?”