right. Maybe it was all in fun. Maybe they simply didn’t have anything better to do with their weekend.
Finding himself the only member of the group who hadn’t paired off or joined a conversation, Zak dropped into an empty camp chair and stared into the fire. When Jennifer and Giancarlo drifted over, he said, “That’s illegal, you know. The fire.”
“I tried to talk them out of it,” said Jennifer. “They wouldn’t listen.”
“My friends beat your friends!” Hugh said as he and Chuck joined them. “No. Really! My friends beat your friends. Giancarlo can go faster on his bike than you can go in your truck. Giancarlo’s fast.”
Zak wasn’t sure what Hugh/Muldaur was trying to promote, but he was definitely working on some sort of scheme.
9
May
O n what was the nicest day of the year so far, Zak found himself crawling across the Evergreen Point floating bridge in bumper-to-bumper traffic, inching his way toward Clyde Hill to pick up his father and sister, who’d called thirty minutes earlier to tell him they were stranded. Two bridges spanned the narrow twenty-one-mile lake that divided the Greater Seattle area, and traffic on both could be counted on to move like molasses during rush hour. Zak was tired from a long training ride earlier in the day and didn’t much mind an extra thirty or forty minutes of listening to public radio and watching early-season water-skiers on the lake. Mount Rainier was glowing off to the southeast in the afternoon sunlight, and a women’s crew team rowed in the glassy water on the lee side of the bridge.
Several times a year Zak’s father, Al, called with the not-so-surprising news that his car had broken down and he needed a ride. Even when Zak was a kid, Al’s cars were always breaking down. Part of the problem was that Al was lousy at picking used cars and refused to buy a new one. “You drive it a thousand miles, you’re in a used car anyway. Let somebody else pay for that new-car smell.” It wouldn’t have been so bad if every used-car salesman in the state didn’t have Al’s name at the top of his sucker list. The Volvo he’d purchased a month ago had already broken down twice.
Zak finally made his way to Clyde Hill, directly across the lake from Seattle—a neighborhood widely regarded as one of the wealthiest in the state. For the past few weeks his father had been renovating a pool house for a man who owned a chain of restaurants, and Al had recently cajoled Zak’s sister into working with him on the days she wasn’t at the post office.
The sunny street was lined with houses of the sort you saw in ads on the back of the Sunday magazine supplement: the shabbiest of the lot went for a million five, the others for substantially more. There was a gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, and a sleepy, heavyset guard with a meticulously trimmed mustache checked his ID and matched his name against a list on a clipboard. Zak wondered how much these five home owners were paying for a full-time guard.
It was a slate-gray house that resembled seven or eight rectangular boxes artfully stacked in no particular order. Some of it was two stories and some of it three, and all of it took up four times the footprint of Zak’s house. The garage had five doors, but Zak’s father had told him they had a hoist inside with underground storage, that the old man had more than twenty antique autos and a Maserati collecting dust in the basement. Zak saw his father’s dull green Volvo wagon sitting in the driveway, out of the way, hood raised.
Zak walked only ten feet from his battered van before a young man talking on a cell phone intercepted him. Without looking him in the eye or abandoning the phone conversation, the man said, “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for my father, Al Polanski.”
“Yeah. Sure. Around there.”
Zak proceeded through some shrubbery and around the side of the garage. He kept thinking he’d seen the young man before, but he couldn’t
Finding himself the only member of the group who hadn’t paired off or joined a conversation, Zak dropped into an empty camp chair and stared into the fire. When Jennifer and Giancarlo drifted over, he said, “That’s illegal, you know. The fire.”
“I tried to talk them out of it,” said Jennifer. “They wouldn’t listen.”
“My friends beat your friends!” Hugh said as he and Chuck joined them. “No. Really! My friends beat your friends. Giancarlo can go faster on his bike than you can go in your truck. Giancarlo’s fast.”
Zak wasn’t sure what Hugh/Muldaur was trying to promote, but he was definitely working on some sort of scheme.
9
May
O n what was the nicest day of the year so far, Zak found himself crawling across the Evergreen Point floating bridge in bumper-to-bumper traffic, inching his way toward Clyde Hill to pick up his father and sister, who’d called thirty minutes earlier to tell him they were stranded. Two bridges spanned the narrow twenty-one-mile lake that divided the Greater Seattle area, and traffic on both could be counted on to move like molasses during rush hour. Zak was tired from a long training ride earlier in the day and didn’t much mind an extra thirty or forty minutes of listening to public radio and watching early-season water-skiers on the lake. Mount Rainier was glowing off to the southeast in the afternoon sunlight, and a women’s crew team rowed in the glassy water on the lee side of the bridge.
Several times a year Zak’s father, Al, called with the not-so-surprising news that his car had broken down and he needed a ride. Even when Zak was a kid, Al’s cars were always breaking down. Part of the problem was that Al was lousy at picking used cars and refused to buy a new one. “You drive it a thousand miles, you’re in a used car anyway. Let somebody else pay for that new-car smell.” It wouldn’t have been so bad if every used-car salesman in the state didn’t have Al’s name at the top of his sucker list. The Volvo he’d purchased a month ago had already broken down twice.
Zak finally made his way to Clyde Hill, directly across the lake from Seattle—a neighborhood widely regarded as one of the wealthiest in the state. For the past few weeks his father had been renovating a pool house for a man who owned a chain of restaurants, and Al had recently cajoled Zak’s sister into working with him on the days she wasn’t at the post office.
The sunny street was lined with houses of the sort you saw in ads on the back of the Sunday magazine supplement: the shabbiest of the lot went for a million five, the others for substantially more. There was a gate at the end of the cul-de-sac, and a sleepy, heavyset guard with a meticulously trimmed mustache checked his ID and matched his name against a list on a clipboard. Zak wondered how much these five home owners were paying for a full-time guard.
It was a slate-gray house that resembled seven or eight rectangular boxes artfully stacked in no particular order. Some of it was two stories and some of it three, and all of it took up four times the footprint of Zak’s house. The garage had five doors, but Zak’s father had told him they had a hoist inside with underground storage, that the old man had more than twenty antique autos and a Maserati collecting dust in the basement. Zak saw his father’s dull green Volvo wagon sitting in the driveway, out of the way, hood raised.
Zak walked only ten feet from his battered van before a young man talking on a cell phone intercepted him. Without looking him in the eye or abandoning the phone conversation, the man said, “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for my father, Al Polanski.”
“Yeah. Sure. Around there.”
Zak proceeded through some shrubbery and around the side of the garage. He kept thinking he’d seen the young man before, but he couldn’t
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