Primal Threat (35 page)
Authors: Earl Emerson
61
A
lot of things happened in the next few years.
Zak continued to work alongside Lieutenant Muldaur on Engine 6 until five years later, when Muldaur retired and he and Rachel moved to Montana to bike, ski, and take up fly-fishing.
Giancarlo Barrett was introduced to trail running, and while he never announced that he was quitting the bike, he parked it in the back of his garage—and several years later, when he realized both tires were flat and the shocks were leaking, gave it to the Goodwill. It didn’t surprise Zak that Giancarlo never wanted to ride a bike again. Zak never saw Stephens after that morning in the hospital. Zak continued to ride and sometimes to race. He got married. They had two children, both girls. Ten years after that weekend in the mountains, when the girls were in first and second grade, they received word his wife’s brother had died.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in autumn when Zak found himself sitting in a large Episcopal church in Clyde Hill. The trees all across the city were turning colors. Hard feelings in the Newcastle family had decreased to the point where Zak almost felt comfortable sitting in the same pew with Mr. and Mrs. Newcastle, Nadine on his left, their two children on the either side of them.
Zak listened to the priest and then to the speakers, who, one by one, extolled the virtues of the deceased Kasey Newcastle. After college Kasey worked for his father for a couple of years, then got an offer to run a consortium of real estate companies back east. He’d worked and lived in New York City, marrying and divorcing once while amassing more wealth in just a few years than his father had in forty. Then one rainy night in Connecticut a semi crossed the centerline and plowed into Kasey’s luxury SUV, and despite all the best safety systems he’d died on the spot.
Zak wondered sometimes whether Kasey ever got over losing five of his best friends in one day under circumstances that were cloudy at best—and at their worst must have burdened him with at least some measure of guilt, as they did Zak. Several years earlier at a large, family Christmas party where he’d had too much to drink, Kasey cornered Zak and went off about how the biggest injustice of the last century was that Zak and the others hadn’t done prison time over what had taken place that weekend. When Nadine asked why, if Zak had been intent on killing him and the others, Zak had returned to save his life, Kasey reacted as if the thought had never occurred to him. Or as if Zak hadn’t returned.
Other than that single drunken holiday rant, Kasey was always polite to Zak in the way that only a man who thinks you’re capable of murder can be. Once Kasey made the move to the East Coast, Zak and Nadine received most of their information about him through Nadine’s parents. His return visits to the West Coast were brief and infrequent. He died at thirty-one, ironically in an accident similar to the one that had killed Zak’s sister.
In recent years at weddings and funerals and birthdays, Kasey, who’d once relentlessly avoided Zak, sought him out, looking him in the eye as if the two of them knew something wicked nobody else in the room could ever realize. Zak couldn’t tell if Kasey’s stare was meant to be a challenge or if he was attempting to forge some sort of blood bond. Either way, Zak didn’t take the bait and now would never know what Kasey had meant by it. Because Kasey had been cremated, there was no procession. Outside the church, people commiserated with the family. Zak and Nadine had two girls they both adored, six and seven, and except for sporting Zak’s jug-handle ears, they were otherwise near clones of their mother. After most of the mourners had gone, the girls played on the grass in the sunshine with the children of Nadine’s cousins. Zak found himself alone with Nadine, who turned to him and said, “I loved him so much.”
“I know you did.”
“After we became adults, we were just never as close as when we were growing up. When we were little he used to protect me at school.”
“Big brothers are good for that,” Zak said, surveying the snow-covered Cascades in the distance and thinking that at this time of year biking up there would be impossible.
Zak put his arm around his wife and pulled her close. He’d been lucky in life. He’d fought hard for that luck and knew the fighting was the single biggest factor in it. He knew whatever luck Kasey had been born with had run out at Panther Creek; the material fortune Kasey enjoyed for the rest of his life had been tainted with what he’d done or not done back there on the mountain.
Forty feet away Zak and Nadine’s daughters shrieked and turned cartwheels on the grass, the long funeral pushed out of their minds by the reunion with second cousins. The afternoon sunlight shone through Nadine’s dress, silhouetting her legs, still strong from tennis and from jogging in the park while the girls rode bikes.
Zak couldn’t help thinking about how Nadine’s tearful mother had wrapped her arm around his waist an hour ago and said, “Well, at least we still have one son left.” He knew she didn’t really mean it, but was grateful for the gesture. Nadine, sensing he was lost in his own thoughts, gave his hand a gentle squeeze.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E
ARL
E
MERSON
is a lieutenant in the Seattle Fire Department. He is the Shamus Award–winning author of
Vertical Burn, Into the Inferno, Pyro, The Smoke Room,
and
Firetrap;
as well as the Thomas Black Detective series, which includes
The Rainy City, Poverty Bay, Nervous Laughter, Fat Tuesday, Deviant Behavior, Yellow Dog Party, The Portland Laugher, The Vanishing Smile, The Million-Dollar Tattoo, Deception Pass,
and
Catfish Café
. He lives in North Bend, Washington.
ALSO BY EARL EMERSON
Vertical Burn
Into the Inferno
Pyro
The Smoke Room
Firetrap
THE THOMAS BLACK NOVELS
The Rainy City
Poverty Bay
Nervous Laughter
Fat Tuesday
Deviant Behavior
Yellow Dog Party
The Portland Laugher
The Vanishing Smile
The Million-Dollar Tattoo
Deception Pass
Catfish Café
Primal Threat
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Earl Emerson, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
B
ALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emerson, Earl W.
Primal threat: a novel/Earl Emerson.
p. cm.
1. Cyclists—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Cascade Range—Fiction. 3. Northwest, Pacific—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.M39P75 2008
813'.54—dc22 2007028740
eISBN: 978-0-345-50457-9
v3.0