Free Primal Threat by Earl Emerson

place where. Behind the garage Zak encountered a swimming pool: a woman doing laps, cutting through the water like an eel, her tan arms moving rhythmically.
    Zak stepped into the pool house, where he found his sister Stacy covered in sawdust and wrestling a plastic garbage can filled with slabs of wallboard.
    “We’re not ready after all,” said Al, when he came out of the other room in coveralls, a tool belt hanging low under his beer gut. Zak’s father had a full head of bushy salt-and-pepper hair and, at five nine, stood several inches shorter than Zak. “Sorry. After I called you, we went back to work and I guess I got carried away. It’s going to be another twenty or thirty minutes before I get it all picked up. They like it cleaned up every night. Can you wait?”
    “I got a choice?”
    “I suppose not. Was the drive over bad?”
    “The normal stop-and-go routine at this time in the afternoon. Hey, listen. I know this job pays well and you like it, so take your time. We’ll grab a pizza and soda on the way home.” He might have suggested beer, but one didn’t mention alcohol around his father, who was a reformed alcoholic.
    “Hey, Ace?” The young man Zak had spoken to earlier poked his head through the doorway Stacy had used and addressed Al. “Ace? You want to pick up that crap you left in the yard? It looks like shit.”
    “Sure,” said Al, scurrying through the doorway. Al was a hard worker who skipped lunch, rarely took breaks, had an accommodating nature, and gave employers more sweat for less money than just about anybody around, yet what it got him more often than not was to be treated like a peasant.
    Zak was still trying to remember where he knew the snotty kid from as he helped his father carry eight or ten long pieces of siding into the pool house. They’d finished aligning them neatly against a wall when the kid came striding through the room and, without getting off the cell phone, said, “Not there.”
    Zak looked at his father, who said, “That’s the son. He means well.”
    “I don’t think he does.”
    “He’s like that to everybody. You should have seen him with the cable man. The guy got so PO’d, he walked out and they had to call another one. He’s a good kid. He just needs a little polish.”
    Zak helped his father move the siding again. When they were finished, Zak stepped into the afternoon sunshine by the pool and let the sun warm his face and soak into his navy-blue T-shirt. As he watched, the young woman hoisted herself up and out of the water, picked up a towel, fluffed her long hair, and strode toward the back door of the house with the same quiet, cocky confidence the young man had. He sensed she’d been watching him since she climbed out of the water.
    “You don’t remember me, do you?”
    He turned from the pool. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
    The young woman held the towel up to her chin and let it drape under her arms in front. “I said you don’t remember me, do you?”
    She was probably somebody he’d dated and forgotten, or the roommate of someone he’d dated and forgotten, but he couldn’t figure it out. He put his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. “I was just—”
    “Nadine Newcastle.”
    “Uh, well, not…wait a minute.” Sure. This was the young woman from the rollover on Martin Luther King Way back in February. Her wet hair looked darker than he remembered and was pulled straight back on her skull. “We got you out of that Lexus?”
    “You remember the car better than you remember me.”
    “The sun was in my eyes.”
    “Sure.”
    “No, it was. You’re all healed up, I see. Great.”
    “I’ve got pins that still need to be removed, and I still don’t have the same strength in my left leg as I do in my right. The doctor wants me to swim. I usually swim at school, but I ran out of time today.”
    “That’s right. You go to the University of Washington, don’t you?”
    “Nice try,” she said, striding across the