by Earl Emerson
“That’s not necessary,” Zak said.
“See you later.” Muldaur squeezed past Nadine, letting in more light as he swung the door wide. After they were alone, Nadine pushed the door closed with her fingertips.
“I want to thank you for what you did for Kasey.”
“Did he tell you?”
“Actually, I pieced it together. He hasn’t said anything about that part of it. You were safe, and then you went back down and got him, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever else takes place, I want to thank you for that. From the bottom of my heart. Zak, you’ve got more guts than anybody I’ve ever met.”
“Not really.”
“I’m just so glad he made it. And you, too.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Close to tears, she clasped her hands in front of herself and watched his eyes. It was a long time before either of them broke the silence.
Finally, Zak said, “What?”
“I just…I just want to know where I can kiss you where it won’t hurt.”
Zak contorted his face in what he hoped was a humorous way and pointed to a spot on his cheek until, grinning, she came close and planted a kiss. As soon as she pulled away, he pointed to another spot, which she kissed, then another. The game went on until she got Silvadene on her lips and had to wipe it off with a corner of the bedsheet. At that point she took his hand, sat in a chair beside his bed, and glanced at the doorway with a fleeting look of guilt. “I can’t stay.”
“You just got here.”
“Kasey’s going to find out where I am and throw a fit. My father’s out there trying to make sense of it, but Kasey’s story keeps changing in subtle ways. The sheriff says it doesn’t match what you guys said. They’re…they’re calling you guys liars and all kinds of other names.”
“I bet they are.”
“Zak…”
“Would you like my side in a nutshell?”
“That’s what I was going to ask.”
He gave it to her, thinking it through slowly as he tried to get his brain engaged with the process. The longer he spoke, the more rigid and tense her body became. When he was finished, she didn’t ask any questions. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one, though he’d done his best to include all of the pertinent details and head off any questions she might be entertaining.
“They’re talking lawyers and jail time for you guys and, if criminal charges don’t pan out, civil suits. Kasey said you’re the reason Scooter is missing.”
“Scooter’s not missing. He’s dead.”
“Oh, my God. Are you sure?”
“I saw him. He’s dead.”
“Oh, Lord. We knew he was missing, and we knew there was a good chance he was gone, but…Oh, my God.”
“Nobody wanted anybody dead.”
“No matter what Kasey says, I know you didn’t do anything wrong. And you went back for him. Anyway, I came to tell you nothing between us has changed in my mind. At least I don’t think it has. But I have to think all this through. I have to hear the rest of Kasey’s story.”
“Nadine, I love you.”
“I know you do. And I love you.”
“Your family’s probably going to—”
“Shush,” she said, touching a finger to his lips.
“Nadine?” The voice from the hallway was her mother’s. “Nadine?”
She stood up beside the bed but didn’t turn away. “Nadine,” he whispered. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Oh, Zak.” She held his look for a long time. “I’m not sure that’s going to be possible.”
After Nadine left, a sheriff ’s deputy spoke to Zak. “I know it was confusing up there, and from what I gather your two groups were pitted against each other,” said the deputy, Tom Mathers, a tall, reedy young man who’d walked into the room bouncing on the balls of his feet. “The way I’m seeing it, their stories are going all over the place—especially this guy, Stephens—but you three have remained constant. To me that either means you got together and rehearsed a script, or you’re telling the truth.”
“It’s the truth,” said Zak. “I’m a little too dopey to be remembering lines. The truth is all I’ve got right now.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. And you can bank on this. You boys ever get involved in anything like this again, anytime, anywhere, I swear I’m going to come and dog you. You won’t get away with it a second time.”
“We didn’t get away with anything the first time.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’re still looking into it.”
When Stephens caught them at the nurses’ station the next morning, Muldaur’s wife, Rachel, was alongside them. The plan was for Rachel to drive Zak and Muldaur to North Bend, where they would recover their parked vehicles at Stephens’s house and caravan back into Seattle. Stephens was still in a hospital gown; Muldaur and Zak were in clothing brought by Muldaur’s wife.
Stephens had dark circles under his eyes and Silvadene cream on his ears and along one side of his neck. Other than that, he appeared in perfect health, probably the result of a night in the hyperbaric chamber. “What’d you tell the deputies?” Stephens asked.
“Nothing but the truth, the whole truth,” Muldaur said, giving a salute and lapsing into his Hugh voice. “Why? What did you tell them?”
“Well, uh, of course…I told them…the story of what happened, obviously. I’m just wondering. I mean, exactly what did you tell them?”
“Exactly?” said Muldaur, still posing as Hugh. Rachel, who was almost as tall as her husband, gave him an indulgent look. “Exactly? That would be good…to know exactly. Wouldn’t it?”
“I think so,” said Stephens.
“Okay. We’ll tell you what we said. Exactly.” Muldaur stepped back and crossed his arms.
After a few moments, Stephens said, “Well?”
“You first.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You tell us what you said—exactly—and we’ll tell you what we said. Exactly.”
“Well, I, uh…you know. I told them what happened. You know…pretty much…yeah, I told them the whole story from beginning to end.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Muldaur, turning his back on Stephens and walking away. Zak and Rachel followed.
Stephens called after the trio. “We’ll have to get together in a week or so. You know. Talk things over. Compare notes. Go out to dinner with our wives.” He looked at Zak. “Bring your girlfriend.”
“You’ve got to be kidding, right?”
“Well, fine. Yeah. How about you?” Stephens looked at Muldaur.
“I don’t fucking think so.”
The next day fire crews on the mountain recovered six corpses. Within twenty-four hours the medical examiner’s office determined that Chuck Finnigan’s blood-alcohol level at the time of his death would have qualified him as a drunk driver if he’d been in a car. Scooter and Fred Finnigan had been drinking all day, too, because they were both legally drunk when they died almost eight hours after Chuck.
The case against Zak and the others crumbled after the autopsy results. The prosecutor’s office said it came down to one very coherent story matched up against another set of stories that had already diverged in several instances and was obviously heavily influenced by alcohol. He didn’t believe a jury was going to buy their claims. The prosecutors said if they’d been inclined to prosecute at all—which they weren’t—they would have built a case against Jennifer Moore and Kasey Newcastle, the only survivors from that camp, for accessory to murder. But they didn’t.
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 t
he 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
EARL EMERSON 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.
BALLANTINE 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
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50457-9
v3.0
