“Who is ‘we’ in this case? Am I some sort of accomplice?”
“Not legally, since you didn’t know. But — ”
“So was I ever in danger? Where does this come from, this ‘we’re safe’ thing?” Zula did not often get angry, but when she did, it was a slow inexorable building.
“Wallace is just a little weird,” he said. “Some things he said — I don’t know. Look. I realized I was making a mistake even while I was doing this. Hated every minute of it. But then it was done and I had the money and we were on the road, headed for the border, and I started to think about the implications.”
“So you wanted to find a border crossing that was busy,” she said.
“Yeah. So they’d be more pressed for time, less likely to search the car.”
“When you checked the crossing times at Abbotsford — ”
“I was looking for the crossings that were busiest.”
“Unbelievable.”
She drove for a while, thinking through the day. “Why did you do it at the Schloss?”
“It was Wallace’s idea. We were trying to match up our travel schedules. I mentioned I’d be there. He jumped at it. Didn’t seem to mind driving all the way out from Vancouver in the winter. Now I realize that he didn’t want to cross the border with the cash. He wanted to saddle me with that little problem.”
“What kind of an accountant pays for security consulting services in cash?”
Peter said nothing.
Zula was working through it. Hundred-dollar bills. One hundred of them would make ten thousand bucks. That would be a bundle roughly how thick? Not that thick. Not that difficult to hide in a car.
He was carrying more than that. A lot more. She’d seen odd behavior connected with his luggage. Rearranging something at Abbotsford.
“Hold on a sec,” Zula said. “You charge two hundred bucks an hour. It would take fifty hours of work to add up to ten thousand dollars. My sense, though, is that you are carrying a lot more than ten thousand. Which means a lot more than fifty hours of work. But you just haven’t been that busy lately. You’ve been fixing up your building. You just spent a whole week hanging drywall. When could you have logged that many hours?”
And so then the story did come out.
ZULA’S PREDICTION WAS right. It did give them something to talk about all the way back to Seattle.
Peter was right too; it was a relationship termination event. Not so much what he’d done in the past — though that was pretty stupid — but what he’d done today: the ridiculous drama about crossing the border.
The real kiss of death, though, was that he invoked Uncle Richard.
It happened when they were somewhere around Everett, about to enter into the northern suburbs of Seattle. He sensed that he had ten, maybe fifteen miles in which to plead his case. Which he attempted to do by bringing up all the weird stuff that Richard Forthrast had done, or was rumored to have done, in his past. Zula seemed to get along just fine with Uncle Richard, so — the argument went — what was her problem with Peter now?
It was then that she cut him off in midsentence and said that it was over. She said it with a certainty and a conviction in her voice and her face that left him fascinated and awed. Because guys, at least of his age, didn’t have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn’t have to decide. She just had to pass on the news.
Day 1
On Friday Zula had skipped out of work early and driven straight to Peter’s space (he always called it his “space”). She had parked her car inside the more warehousey part of the building, which was accessible through a huge, grade-level, roll-up door off the back alley, and left a few of her work things there. So despite the relationship termination event, she had to go back to his place to get her car and collect her things. From I-5 she exited onto Michigan Avenue, which ran diagonally along the northern boundary of Boeing Field, and after following it toward the water for a couple of blocks, doubled back north into Georgetown.
A hundred years earlier Georgetown had been an independent city specializing in the manufacture and consumption of alcoholic beverages. It was bounded by major rail lines and industrial waterways. Early in the twentieth century it had been annexed by Seattle, which couldn’t stand to see, so close to its city limits, an independent town so ripe for taxation.
When airplanes became common, the regional airport had been built immediately to the south. This was nationalized around the time of Pearl Harbor and then used by Boeing to punch out B-17s and B-29s all through the war. Georgetown’s quieter and narrower streets had become crowded with riveters’ bungalows. Still the neighborhood had preserved its identity until late in the century, when it had come under attack from the north, as dot-coms looking for cheap office space had invaded the industrial flatlands south of downtown, preying on machine shops and foundries that had lost most of their business to China. The mills and lathes had been torn out and junked or auctioned off, the high ceilings cleaned up and rigged with cable ladders creaking under the weight of miles of blue Ethernet wire. Truck drivers had had to get used to sharing the district’s potholed streets with bicycle commuters in dorky helmets and spandex. It was during that era that Peter, sensing an opportunity, had acquired his building. He had talked himself into it largely on the strength of a belief that he and some friends would launch a high-tech company there. This had failed to materialize because of changes in the financial climate, so he had ended up using part of it as live/work space and renting the rest of it to artists and artisans, who, as it turned out, didn’t pay the same kind of rent as high-tech companies. But what was bad for Peter had been good for Georgetown — at least, the aspect of Georgetown that was about actually making things as opposed to playing tricks with bits.
It was an old brick building. The ground floor had high ceilings supported by timbers of old-growth fir, which would have made it a fine setting for a restaurant or brewpub if the building had been on a more accessible street and if Georgetown hadn’t already had several of those. As it was, he’d subdivided that level into two bays, one leased by an exotic-metals welder who made parts for the aerospace industry, the other serving as Peter’s workshop. It was there that Zula’s car had spent the weekend. Above was a single story of finished space with nice old windows looking out toward Boeing Field. This too was subdivided into an open-plan live/work loft, where Peter lived, and another unit that he had been fixing up in the hopes of renting it to some young hip person who wanted to live, as Peter put it “in the presence of arches.”
The remark had made little sense to Zula until she had spent a bit of time in the neighborhood and started noticing that, yes, the old buildings sported windows and doorways that were supported by true functioning arches of brick or stone, the likes of which were never used in newer construction. For Peter to have noticed this was a bit clever, and for him to have understood that it would be attractive to a certain kind of person reflected somewhat more human insight than one normally looked for in a nerd.
So, that night, when they got back to his space at about 2 A.M. and she went upstairs to collect the stuff she’d left scattered around during the months that she’d been quasi living with him, and she saw the brick window arches that he had left exposed during the remodel, a lot went through her head in a few moments and she found herself unable to move or think very clearly. She stood there in the dark. The lights of Boeing Field shone up against a low ceiling of spent rain clouds and made them glow a greenish silver that filled the apertures of the windows smoothly, as if troweled onto the glass.