Primal Threat (7 page)

9

May

O
n what was the nicest day of the year so far, Zak found himself crawling across the Evergreen Point floating bridge in bumper-to-bumper traffic, inching his way toward Clyde Hill to pick up his father and sister, who’d called thirty minutes earlier to tell him they were stranded. Two bridges spanned the narrow twenty-one-mile lake that divided the Greater Seattle area, and traffic on both could be counted on to move like molasses during rush hour. Zak was tired from a long training ride earlier in the day and didn’t much mind an extra thirty or forty minutes of listening to public radio and watching early-season water-skiers on the lake. Mount Rainier was glowing off to the southeast in the afternoon sunlight, and a women’s crew team rowed in the glassy water on the lee side of the bridge.

Several times a year Zak’s father, Al, called with the not-so-surprising news that his car had broken down and he needed a ride. Even when Zak was a kid, Al’s cars were always breaking down. Part of the problem was that Al was lousy at picking used cars and refused to buy a new one. “You drive it a thousand miles, you’re in a used car anyway. Let somebody else pay for that new-car smell.” It wouldn’t have been so bad if every used-car salesman in the state didn’t have Al’s name at the top of his sucker list. The Volvo he’d purchased a month ago had already broken down twice.

Zak finally made his way to Clyde Hill, directly across the lake from Seattle—a neighborhood widely regarded as one of the wealthiest in the state. For the past few weeks his father had been renovating a pool house for a man who owned a chain of restaurants, and Al had recently cajoled Zak’s sister into working with him on the days she wasn’t at the post office.

The sunny street was lined with houses of the sort you saw in ads on the back of the Sunday magazine supplement: the shabbiest of the lot went for a million five, the others for substantially more. There was a gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, and a sleepy, heavyset guard with a meticulously trimmed mustache checked his ID and matched his name against a list on a clipboard. Zak wondered how much these five home owners were paying for a full-time guard.

It was a slate-gray house that resembled seven or eight rectangular boxes artfully stacked in no particular order. Some of it was two stories and some of it three, and all of it took up four times the footprint of Zak’s house. The garage had five doors, but Zak’s father had told him they had a hoist inside with underground storage, that the old man had more than twenty antique autos and a Maserati collecting dust in the basement. Zak saw his father’s dull green Volvo wagon sitting in the driveway, out of the way, hood raised.

Zak walked only ten feet from his battered van before a young man talking on a cell phone intercepted him. Without looking him in the eye or abandoning the phone conversation, the man said, “May I help you?”

“I’m looking for my father, Al Polanski.”

“Yeah. Sure. Around there.”

Zak proceeded through some shrubbery and around the side of the garage. He kept thinking he’d seen the young man before, but he couldn’t place where. Behind the garage Zak encountered a swimming pool: a woman doing laps, cutting through the water like an eel, her tan arms moving rhythmically.

Zak stepped into the pool house, where he found his sister Stacy covered in sawdust and wrestling a plastic garbage can filled with slabs of wallboard.

“We’re not ready after all,” said Al, when he came out of the other room in coveralls, a tool belt hanging low under his beer gut. Zak’s father had a full head of bushy salt-and-pepper hair and, at five nine, stood several inches shorter than Zak. “Sorry. After I called you, we went back to work and I guess I got carried away. It’s going to be another twenty or thirty minutes before I get it all picked up. They like it cleaned up every night. Can you wait?”

“I got a choice?”

“I suppose not. Was the drive over bad?”

“The normal stop-and-go routine at this time in the afternoon. Hey, listen. I know this job pays well and you like it, so take your time. We’ll grab a pizza and soda on the way home.” He might have suggested beer, but one didn’t mention alcohol around his father, who was a reformed alcoholic.

“Hey, Ace?” The young man Zak had spoken to earlier poked his head through the doorway Stacy had used and addressed Al. “Ace? You want to pick up that crap you left in the yard? It looks like shit.”

“Sure,” said Al, scurrying through the doorway. Al was a hard worker who skipped lunch, rarely took breaks, had an accommodating nature, and gave employers more sweat for less money than just about anybody around, yet what it got him more often than not was to be treated like a peasant.

Zak was still trying to remember where he knew the snotty kid from as he helped his father carry eight or ten long pieces of siding into the pool house. They’d finished aligning them neatly against a wall when the kid came striding through the room and, without getting off the cell phone, said, “Not there.”

Zak looked at his father, who said, “That’s the son. He means well.”

“I don’t think he does.”

“He’s like that to everybody. You should have seen him with the cable man. The guy got so PO’d, he walked out and they had to call another one. He’s a good kid. He just needs a little polish.”

Zak helped his father move the siding again. When they were finished, Zak stepped into the afternoon sunshine by the pool and let the sun warm his face and soak into his navy-blue T-shirt. As he watched, the young woman hoisted herself up and out of the water, picked up a towel, fluffed her long hair, and strode toward the back door of the house with the same quiet, cocky confidence the young man had. He sensed she’d been watching him since she climbed out of the water.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

He turned from the pool. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

The young woman held the towel up to her chin and let it drape under her arms in front. “I said you don’t remember me, do you?”

She was probably somebody he’d dated and forgotten, or the roommate of someone he’d dated and forgotten, but he couldn’t figure it out. He put his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. “I was just—”

“Nadine Newcastle.”

“Uh, well, not…wait a minute.” Sure. This was the young woman from the rollover on Martin Luther King Way back in February. Her wet hair looked darker than he remembered and was pulled straight back on her skull. “We got you out of that Lexus?”

“You remember the car better than you remember me.”

“The sun was in my eyes.”

“Sure.”

“No, it was. You’re all healed up, I see. Great.”

“I’ve got pins that still need to be removed, and I still don’t have the same strength in my left leg as I do in my right. The doctor wants me to swim. I usually swim at school, but I ran out of time today.”

“That’s right. You go to the University of Washington, don’t you?”

“Nice try,” she said, striding across the grass toward the house. “But it’s Seattle U.”

Back inside the pool house, Zak met his father and asked, “How did you get this job?”

“They called you and wanted some work done. Said they met you at your fire station and learned you did this kind of work off shift. You were mountain biking in Moab for eight days, and they were in a hurry, so I offered my services. I didn’t think you would mind. I told you about it. Why? Is something wrong?”

“Not a thing.”

Zak was in the sun again when the girl walked into the yard combing her hair, which hung past her shoulders. She had changed into a short denim skirt, a chartreuse blouse, and flip-flops. Unbeknownst to her, Kasey and the young man Zak remembered as her boyfriend were in the window behind her, the boyfriend making crude motions in front of his chest. Zak thought he was making fun of Nadine until his own well-endowed sister came into view.

Nadine walked close and said, “What’s that on your arm?”

“It’s a scar from a mountain biking accident in Moab.”

“It doesn’t look too bad.”

“Not now, it doesn’t. It’s five weeks old.”

“Where’s Moab?”

“Utah. It’s a destination spot for mountain bikers from all over the West. It’s got huge rock trails. They’re fun, but they’re like sandpaper when you crash on them.”

Nadine paused before her next question. “You wouldn’t have time to play tennis with me tomorrow morning, would you? All of my friends are bugging out on me.”

“I thought you were on the school team.”

“I’m not healthy enough to play with them yet.”

“Sorry. I’m busy tomorrow. Thanks for asking, though.”

“I guess you don’t remember you promised to play me.”

“I guess I did, didn’t I?”

“You said when I got better. I’m better now.”

“Tell you what. I’m working a twenty-four-hour shift tomorrow, and we don’t get off until Thursday morning at seven thirty. On Thursday morning I could be somewhere at eight.”

“Perfect. My first class isn’t until one. How about the courts at Green Lake? Just north of Evans Pool?”

“You have a deal.” Zak wasn’t sure why he was agreeing to this. He had a sixty-mile bike ride planned that afternoon.

On the drive home, Zak looked over at his father in the passenger’s seat. “How long is that job going to take?”

“Another couple of weeks. They keep giving me other things they want done.”

“You should probably get out of there as soon as you can.”

“The old man’s running things, not his son. And I admit, the son is pretty full of himself.”

“I think he’s cute,” said Stacy, who was sitting in back with her feet propped up on a tub of spackle Zak had bought the night before and left in the van. “He’s taking me to a show at the Paramount in a couple of weeks.”

“Jesus, Stace. He’s ten years younger than you are. Maybe twelve.”

“Look who’s talking. I heard you setting up something with his sister.”

“We’re only going to play tennis. Besides, she’s got a boyfriend, so it’s not a date. She just needs a tennis partner. I don’t want you to go out with him. He’s conceited and self-absorbed and…Haven’t you seen the way he orders Dad around?”

“He’s been very nice to me.”

“I don’t mind,” added Al.

“Trust me on this. Don’t go out with him.”

“Whether you want to admit it or not, I’m a big girl, Zak. Believe me, if he’s a jerk, I’ll know what to do. And I saw the way she was looking at you. It’s not just tennis she wants. She’s like…what…sixteen?”

“She’s in college.”

“Just don’t be such a hypocrite.”

Because she was partially right, Zak found himself fuming over the tennis date. There were at least three good reasons he shouldn’t have agreed to it. One, Nadine Newcastle was rich, and Zak had a habit of antagonizing rich folks. Two, she had a boyfriend. Three, he was attracted to her. He liked her spirit, and he liked her combination of boldness and shyness—he even liked the way she wanted all the gruesome details about his accidents.

His father had told the Newcastles that Zak roomed with him, but it was the other way around—a minor fiction Zak let him maintain to preserve his dignity. Zak was proud of his old man but just a bit embarrassed about the circuitous route his father had taken to reach his current position in life, and a little irritated that he had less than eight hundred dollars in savings and couldn’t seem to build a large enough nest egg to move out, though there were times when Zak suspected his father’s lack of savings had more to do with wanting to remain near Zak than it did with any failure to budget effectively.

Stacy was an entirely different proposition. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, she was coming off a delicate, windblown perch she’d been poised on the last few years, and Zak didn’t want anything to disturb her equilibrium. After almost ten vagabond years of moving from city to city and state to state, she had finally settled down in Seattle and obtained a part-time position delivering mail for the US Postal Service, a job she was overqualified for but loved. In years past she’d been a legal secretary, a doctor’s assistant, and a supermarket manager, and was now trying to finesse her way into a permanent position with the USPS. When you thought about it, her story was even stranger than Al’s. In fact, when you thought about it, everyone in his family had an odd story except Zak. At least that was how Zak viewed it.