“How long have you been in Canada?”
“Three days.”
“Bringing anything back?”
“No,” Zula said.
“Just a bag of coffee. Some junk food,” said Peter.
“Welcome home,” said the guard, and turned on the green light.
Zula accelerated south. Peter motored his seat back upright and rubbed his face.
“Want your passport back?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“It’s like two hours to Seattle,” Zula said. “Maybe that’s long enough for you to explain why you have been fucking with me all day.”
Peter actually seemed startled that she had figured out that he was fucking with her, but he made no attempt to protest his innocence.
A few minutes later, after she had merged into traffic on I-5, he said, “I did something hyperstupid. Maybe even relationship-endingly stupid, for all that I know.”
“Who was that guy in the tavern? He had something to do with it, right?”
“Wallace. Lives in Vancouver. As far as I can tell from his trail on the Internet, he’s an accountant. Trained in Scotland. Immigrated to Canada in the 1980s.”
“Did you do some kind of job for him? Some kind of security gig?”
Peter was silent for a little while.
“Look,” Zula said, “I just want to know what is in this car that you were so nervous about taking across the border.”
“Money,” he said. “Cash in excess of ten thousand dollars. I was supposed to declare it. I didn’t.” He leaned back, heaved a sigh. “But now we’re safe. We’re across the border. We—”
“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.