Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [19]
“It was nice talking to you,” Nadine said, looking at Zak and then squeezing past Lieutenant Muldaur, who was still smirking. “And thanks for the tour.”
“Sorry about what I said earlier.”
“No problem.”
After she left and the door swung closed, Muldaur said, “Were you hitting on her?”
“She wanted me to drop my pants.”
“So I gather.”
“She wanted to see my scabs from that crash.”
Muldaur laughed. “Apparently, her family’s got a lot of money.”
“There is that.”
“Your tone of voice makes the money sound like a disqualifier.”
“The boyfriend’s a disqualifier. I didn’t know she still had one until you said it. Besides, I’m not interested in someone that much younger than me.”
“Don’t try to palm it off on her age. Zak, you’re pretty well grounded when it comes to most things, but she’s rich and you hate rich folks. Admit it.”
“Okay, maybe I do. But only the ones with too much money.”
“And which are those?”
“All of them.”
Muldaur laughed.
Afterward, Zak wanted to go back and retrieve those moments with her so he could be civil this time. What a perfect ass he’d been.
7
August
As he turned the .30-30 over in his hands, jacked the shells out of the magazine, and then sighted down the inside of the oiled barrel, Kasey marveled at how much he loved the precision of a fine rifle. He admired the heft of it and savored the heavy cartridges sagging in his pocket. His father had given him the carbine on his fourteenth birthday, and it was still his favorite. It wasn’t hunting season, of course, and he didn’t hunt anyway. He liked to drive up into the hills to shoot wine bottles scavenged from one of the several restaurants Chuck and Fred’s parents owned.
All of them owned guns, even Jennifer, although only three had thought to bring them along on this trip. Perhaps tomorrow morning they would cork some empties and toss them into the river, then plink them as they floated past. Kasey hadn’t done any shooting since last summer out on his father’s boat in the Pacific, when he’d gone through a thousand rounds of ammo in one day. He still remembered the blister on his thumb and the ache in his shoulder, but it had been a blast.
They’d made camp where the local had told them to, uncertain if they had the right place until Jennifer spotted one of the cyclists up the hill. Over the next few minutes they saw the others in turn, although neither Kasey nor Scooter recognized Zak among the distant figures. They’d dusted them bad. Scooter had been laughing since it happened and, energized by the incident, was uncharacteristically doing all the work of making camp: sipping from a bottle of beer and setting up the tent, lighting the campfire, heating up the LPG portable barbecue they’d brought along.
“I wish we’d videotaped it,” Scooter said. “We could put it on the Internet.” He drained the beer bottle and was cocking his arm to throw it at some nearby rocks when Kasey stopped him.
“What are you doing, man? We need to be good conservationists. Put the cap back on, and we’ll shoot it in the river.”
“Right. Conservation. That’s my game.” Scooter placed the bottle carefully on the tailgate of the Finnigans’ truck. “We’ll be recycling these items,” he announced to Jennifer.
Jennifer Moore was a nice enough girl and had done her job back at the guard shack, but Kasey wished she hadn’t come along. Women on a trip like this cramped his style. Besides, Chuck went apeshit if anybody so much as looked her. A guy that big, you’d think he would have all the self-assurance in the world, but he had about as much confidence as a squirrel burying a nut.
“I like that,” Jennifer said, tossing her long blond hair to one side. She had a habit of flipping her hair and standing so that her breasts jutted out, and every time she did it Chuck was looking around to see who was watching. “We’re out here in the woods, but at least we can leave nature the way we found it.” Ironically, she picked up a piece of wood and threw it onto the fire. “How about if we go up and invite those guys down? Wouldn’t that be fun? We