Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [7]
Scooter squandered his time in high school partying and getting drunk, and after the family pulled strings to get him into Columbia, he ceased studying and even quit cheating on tests somewhere in his sophomore year—and eventually flunked out. His folks were furious, but what did he need school for? So he could translate his quarterly stock portfolio statements into English? He’d been explaining the paperwork to his parents since he was fourteen. To fill out his tax forms? He’d had a private accountant since he was twelve. Scooter understood finances, and when you understood finances everything else in life fell into place without a whole lot of exertion.
They’d trekked up I-90 to North Bend, four vehicles carrying five of Scooter’s best friends along with one of their girlfriends, Jennifer. Scooter was riding in the Porsche Cayenne with Kasey Newcastle, his best buddy since second grade, when they were both enrolled in the Bush private school. This year alone they’d taken two trips to Mexico and one off the Washington coast in the Newcastle family boat. Scooter couldn’t imagine not being best friends with Kasey. Hell, they were going to be family once Scooter settled down and married Kasey’s sister, Nadine.
In North Bend they spotted a few cyclists, but no large groups and none riding mountain bikes. After driving around for an hour looking for their quarry, they regrouped at Scott’s Dairy Freeze and had a flustered lunch trying to figure out where Zak and his buddies might be mountain biking for three days. Scooter had hatched the scheme to drive up into the hills and camp out, and if they happened to intercept them—well then, that would just be their good luck, wouldn’t it?
Even though Nadine and Zak weren’t supposed to be seeing each other anymore, during one of their semiregular phone chats Zak had told her that Thursday evening he and some friends would be riding out of North Bend and into the Cascade Mountains for three days. It burned Scooter up that she was still talking to the fireman on a daily basis, because when she broke up with him she’d done her best to cut off all communication and had at one point even threatened to get a restraining order against him. When he went over to visit Kasey, she wasn’t even civil, and it galled Scooter no end that she didn’t treat the fire dude the same way. For weeks after she told Scooter she didn’t want to see him anymore, he’d assumed she was joking. Even when he heard she was seeing the fireman, he thought it was a charade to make him jealous. By the time he realized Nadine was actually dating the guy, it was too late to reverse things. To Scooter’s way of thinking, Nadine had a simple mind, and that made her easy to manipulate, which was exactly what Zak had been doing from the moment he met her.
North Bend was a small town with traffic backed up on the main drag for blocks in either direction. Too much of their time had already been spent in that god-awful queue, which made Scooter abhor the town even more than he did to begin with. There were a lot of junky little houses off the main drag, and a few blocks farther on somebody had made a pathetic attempt at a swank neighborhood, but Scooter had lived in Clyde Hill his whole life, and contemplating a day out here in the sticks gave him the willies.
“Maybe they’re not all hicks,” Kasey said, once they’d grown accustomed to the dim light in the Sure Shot Tavern, where they’d gravitated after lunch. “I mean, look around. That guy in the corner nursing the beer, who looks like he’s been sleeping with pigs, sure. But check out the traffic outside. There’s a Benz. A couple of ’Vettes.”
“’Vettes are all bought on credit, Kase. You know that.”
The Sure Shot Tavern was a block east of the only stoplight in town, the interior filled with the aroma of suntan lotion, perfume, onion rings, and beer. Pickup trucks and SUVs shuffling along in the heat outside the door lent a whiff of exhaust to the mix. All seven of them were crowded around two tables