Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [45]
“Fuck off. I wouldn’t give you a wet fart in a windstorm.” Scooter strode angrily across the camp toward the barbecue. The dog began barking after one of the Finnigan brothers teased it with a slab of steak. Zak looked around for some indication of outrage, but he only saw shrugs from the other cyclists and averted eyes from the Jeep crowd.
19
“I hope this doesn’t get worse,” said Nadine, searching Zak’s face for signs of irritation. “Because it’s all my fault. Everything that’s happening is because I told people where you were going.”
“Don’t worry about it. Seeing you makes anything worthwhile.”
“You mean that?”
“I’ve been thinking about you for weeks, Nadine.”
“I’ve been thinking about you, too.”
Nadine hoped she didn’t sound too eager. It was wonderful to see Zak again, but she knew they were walking a delicate balance. They’d been together, and now they weren’t, but even so she felt closer to him than ever. The dynamic that existed between them now that they’d split up was something she didn’t quite have a handle on, but she certainly wanted to explore it.
Nadine counted sixteen people as she looked around the group: five bicyclists, seven in the Jeep group, her three friends, and herself. Following Jennifer’s detailed instructions, they’d spent an hour driving through holiday traffic swollen with motor homes and trucks towing boat trailers. Nadine didn’t like duping the guard, and she felt even lousier when they found her brother’s camp and realized Scooter and Kasey had somehow located Zak and his friends.
Even though everyone in the Jeep camp was disappointed over the results of the races, they sat around the barbecue with the cyclists like old friends while Kasey passed out steaks and burgers. They ate and waited for the sun to finish dying and talked about coyotes after somebody heard a distant howl. Dozer began barking, and the Finnigan brothers howled with him, which only made him bark louder. The brothers laughed so long and hard Nadine thought one of them was going to have a stroke. It wasn’t until then that she realized how drunk they must be.
Nadine knew that in sitting next to Zak she was aligning herself with the bicyclists, but if she sat next to her brother, Scooter would view it as an invitation, and she didn’t want to send that message. If she sat with her girlfriends, Scooter would try to cull her out like a cowboy roping a calf, and she didn’t want to get into a struggle with him—not here, not with everyone watching. Even though she knew it was going to infuriate Scooter, the only safe place was next to Zak. And what if she made Scooter angry? He had no legitimate hold on her.
The group jabbered about everything except the races, Zak whispering details to Nadine to complement something one of his people had said, she adding information on a topic one of her people had brought up. After a while, Nadine said, “Come on. Show me your waterfall.”
“It’s up the hill.”
“Then let’s go.”
Together they walked up the steep road. As they left, Nadine caught a glimpse of Scooter staring at them with those large gray eyes she’d once thought were so beautiful—all pale with tiny black pupils in the middle, so that when he stared at you, if he didn’t move or blink, you thought you were watching a wax sculpture in a museum. Over the past month his eyes had become attributes she’d come to despise.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about them coming up here,” she said.
“The only thing that’s happened so far is we’ve pocketed a thousand bucks and are owed another thousand.”
“Yes. Well, you’ll never see that second thousand.”
Nadine accompanied Zak to an outcropping of rocks just below and to the west of the bicyclists’ encampment. From time to time they could hear the dog barking back in the Jeep camp. From the viewpoint, other than the dog and the smudges of smoke on the southwestern horizon, there were no indications anybody else lived on the planet. The distant buildings of Seattle and Bellevue had long been submerged in the haze.
She braved the first bluff and then steeled herself to follow Zak onto