The Intruders Read Free Page B

years. Names from the past are like streets you haven’t driven in a while. You have to remember where they go.
    “You still there?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Just surprised. Gary Fisher? Really?”

    “It’s my name,” the guy said, and laughed. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
    “I guess not,” I said. I had question marks right across the dial. “How did you get my number?”
    “A contact in L.A. I tried calling last night.”
    “Right,” I said, remembering a couple of hang-ups on the machine. “You didn’t leave a message.”
    “Thought it might come across kind of weird, getting in touch after nearly twenty years.”
    “A little,” I admitted. I found it hard to imagine that Fisher and I had anything to discuss unless he was running the class reunion, which seemed unlikely in the extreme. “So what can I do for you, Gary?”
    “It’s more what I might be able to do for you,” he said. “Or maybe both of us. Look—where is it you live, exactly? I’m in Seattle for a few days. Thought it might be cool to meet up, talk about old times.”
    “Place called Birch Crossing. Hour and a half inland. Plus, my wife’s got the car,” I added. Amy has claimed that if you could get enough unsociable people together in a room to vote, they’d make me their king. She’s probably right. Since my book came out, I’d been contacted by a few other people from the past, though none as far back as Fisher. I hadn’t bothered to reply to their e-mails, forwarded via the publisher. Okay, so we used to know each other. What’s your point?
    “I’ve got a day to kill,” Fished persisted. “Had a string of meetings canceled.”
    “You don’t want to just tell me on the phone?”
    “Would be a long call. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favor, Jack. I’m going nuts in this hotel, and if I walk round Pike Place Market one more time, I’m going to wind up with a big dead fish I don’t need.”
    I thought about it. Curiosity struck a deal with the desire not to work, the terms brokered by a small part of my soul for which—absurdly—Gary Fisher’s name evidently still held something of a charge.
    “Well, okay,” I said. “Why not?”

     
    He arrived a little after two. I’d achieved nothing in the meantime. Even a call to Amy’s cell phone for a hey-how-are-you had dead-ended in her answering ser vice. I was becalmed in the kitchen thinking vaguely about lunch when I heard someone pulling into the drive.
    I walked up the polished wood steps and opened the front door to see a black Lexus where our SUV usually sat—a vehicle that was currently in Seattle, with my wife. The car door opened and some mid-thirties guy got out. He came crunching over the gravel.
    “Jack Whalen,” he said, breath clouding around his face. “So you grew up. How did that happen?”
    “Beats me,” I said. “Did everything I could to avoid it.”
    I made coffee, and we took it down into the living room. He looked around for a few moments, checking out the view of the wooded valley through the big plate-glass windows, then turned to me.
    “So,” he said, “still got that good throwing arm?”
    “Don’t know,” I said. “Don’t get much occasion to throw stuff these days.”
    “You should. It’s very liberating. I try to throw something at least once a week.”
    He grinned, and for a moment he looked pretty much how I remembered him, albeit better dressed. He reached a hand across the coffee table. I shook it.
    “Looking good, Jack.”
    “You, too.”
    He was. You can tell men in good condition just from how they sit in a chair. There’s a confidence in their poise, a sense that sitting is not a relief but merely one of the many positions in which their body is at ease. Gary looked trim and fit. His hair was well cut and not gray, and he had the skin that healthy eating and nonsmoking deliver to those with the patience to endure that type of lifestyle. His face had matured into that of a youthful