Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [15]
Beyond the Olympic Mountains the sky was beginning to glow a rosy pink, yellowish at the edges, with deep purple and maroon patches in the middle. It was easy to see from the haze over Seattle that the colors were going to get only more vibrant as the sun continued to die. A small bank of cumulus clouds hunkered over the Olympics, and the waning sun was painting them a brilliant white.
“There are communities near Wenatchee that have been evacuated because everyone is choking from the forest fires,” said Muldaur.
“Yes, but this is going to be a splendid sunset,” said Zak, nodding at the horizon. “Thank God for pollution.”
Muldaur laughed his loud, braying laugh. Few people laughed as hard as Muldaur, and even fewer found as much to laugh about. It wasn’t until they hiked back to camp and saw the visitors that he stopped.
6
February
It had been almost four weeks since the wreck, and Nadine Newcastle was still in a neck brace, her left ankle in a cast from toes to knee. Walking with the aid of crutches and accompanied by a horde of family, friends, and department officials, she smiled sweetly at the firefighters who greeted her at the front door of Station 6.
The first thing Zak noticed was the unmarked cast on her leg. Not a single signature, greeting, or smiley face had been scrawled on it, even though each of the three giggling girlfriends accompanying her looked fully capable of wielding a grease pen.
With Nadine were her parents, her brother, and one of her brother’s buddies, a soft-looking young man introduced as William Potter III but called Scooter by the Newcastles. Zak immediately tagged him as a soul who wouldn’t last ten minutes in the fire service. A lot of people came through the station because they wanted to be firefighters, and it was impossible for Zak not to regard each one the way a horse trainer eyed a colt he was thinking about taking on. Not that Potter wanted to be a firefighter. The watch he wore was easily worth a month of Zak’s salary.
Twenty minutes earlier, they’d received a call on the main phone from the assistant chief telling them that the chief of the department and several other city officials would be visiting, along with a civilian who wanted to donate a good chunk of money to the Medic One Foundation. The civilian turned out to be Donovan Newcastle—Nadine’s father.
Before Zak could finish polishing his boots, the visitors showed up in staggered formation: chiefs, a couple of newspaper reporters, the boisterous family and friends pouring through the front door like partygoers and, except for the girl on crutches, all chattier than magpies.
Nadine Newcastle was prettier than he remembered, with an open face, guileless gray-blue eyes, and lustrous brown hair that hung below her shoulders. And she was sweet—in fact, that seemed to be her main trait. He found himself immediately attracted to her. Her brother was a year or two older, about her height, the same stocky build as their father but with the pug nose and freckles of his sister. His name was Kasey.
The Newcastles told everybody how grateful they were for the rescue of their daughter, who, according to the doctors, might have ended up a quadriplegic had the firefighters been even the tiniest bit sloppy in their spine management.
Mr. Newcastle was dressed in a formal suit and at various intervals stood off to one side as if he wasn’t interested in talking to any firefighters. Mom flirted with the chiefs, who tried not to ogle her plush figure. The Newcastles had money coming out their ears, and Zak couldn’t help noting that the son, who wasn’t more than twenty or twenty-one, wore an expensive-looking European-styled suit. Muldaur tried to politely engage him in conversation, but he and his friend Scooter turned their backs on Muldaur to zero in on the lone female firefighter in the station.
All in all, there