He had only soloed this particular climb once before and it hadn’t been pretty.
He’d gotten into a jam about twenty-five feet up, in a position where he couldn’t go up or down, wedged in an off-width crack. He stayed there for as long as he could—ten minutes or more—and finally resigned himself to the fact that it was time to jump.
Unfortunately there were no good landing spots, only rocks.
He picked the place least likely to kill him, let go and kicked off at the same time, twisting on the way down and then shielding his head with his arms and hands just before impact.
The plan worked.
He broke a leg but lived.
That was four years ago when he was twenty-nine.
THIS TIME HE WOULDN’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE. Plus he was in better shape now—down to 208 ripped pounds. Before, he had pretty good abs, a six-pack.
Now he had an eight-pack.
And whereas before he could only do forty-five pull-ups, now he could do fifty.
Still, the mountain worried him.
He stayed to the right, avoiding the troublesome area, even though the face was steeper there. He wished he had gotten here an hour earlier. The twilight was actually starting to slip into darkness. The rock was getting colder and starting to suck his warmth. In another thirty minutes or so it would be downright dangerous. The climb would take at least that long, even with no glitches.
He got to the place he made it to before, but this time was ten feet to the right.
He kept climbing.
Five feet higher.
Now thirty feet above the ground with lots of exposure.
Then something bad happened.
The wall actually extended outward, past vertical, plus there was no way to go either to the right or the left. He remembered seeing a chimney somewhere in the area, but couldn’t remember exactly where. He would either have to downclimb, which was always dangerous, or do a dynamic move—jump up and catch an overhang with his hands, dangle, and just hope there was somewhere to go up once he got there.
He jumped.
His hands caught the edge.
The abrasion of the rock immediately assaulted his fingers.
He hung there for a second until he got a solid bomber-hold. Then he pulled up with his arms to where he could see above.
Damn it!
There was nowhere to go.
The rock above him was totally vertical for a good ten feet with no crevices or cracks to grab.
He hung there for five minutes.
Then looked below and picked the least insane spot to land.
5
Day Two—June 12
Tuesday Morning
LONDON WOKE EARLY Tuesday morning and decided her apartment was too small. In fact, her whole life was too small. She got the coffee going, fired up her laptop and logged on to the Colorado Bar Association website to see if any new job openings had been posted in the last twelve hours.
None had.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true.
One had.
Vesper & Bennett was looking for an associate to add to its intellectual property department. She may as well apply to be the president of the whole freaking universe.
She ate a nonfat yogurt, snapped the plastic spoon in half before throwing it away, put on a baseball cap and pulled her hair through the back. Then she carried her 20-speed Trek bicycle down the apartment stairway to ground level. Fifteen minutes later she arrived at the 24-Hour Fitness on Alameda where she worked the weights for a half hour and then hit the elliptical trainer until her T-shirt was soaked.
She wasn’t big; five-three, a hundred and five pounds.
Some people might say she was too small but she liked her size. It fit her personality. Plus she was in good shape and her body moved easily. She could get up and sit back down a hundred times a day and never even notice. If she needed a paper clip, and it was on the other side of the room, she’d just go over and get it; no problem.
She liked her proportions too.
Her chest would never turn heads. Her thighs, ass and stomach, on the other hand, were just about perfect. When guys felt her up that’s where they spent their time. In the bedroom, men liked to have her on top because she was so light and such a good wiggler, not that she’d wiggled in over four months.
She was the cute librarian when she pulled back her hair.
When her hair came down she was a lot more than cute, and when she let her stomach muscles show, heads turned.
She showered at the club and then peddled the Trek over to the Starbucks on Alameda. When she arrived, the woman—Venta Devenelle—was already waiting for her.
YESTERDAY, WHILE PICKING PLATES OFF THE FLOOR, London got a good enough look at Venta to tell that she was incredibly attractive. Now she realized that the woman was even more beautiful than she initially realized.
She was five-eight or nine with a strong body and long blond hair—a California lifeguard meets movie star look.
Most of the men in the place had half an eye on her.
They drank two cups of coffee, chatting about everything and nothing, before Venta got to the point of the meeting.
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” Venta said. “I’m a private investigator with a small office on Market Street, in San Francisco. About two months ago, in early April, I got a strange phone call. The caller said he was with a law firm, but didn’t want to disclose the name of it because the firm wanted to hire me for a highly confidential matter, so confidential that they didn’t even want the name of the firm in my files. It turned out that the firm wanted to get some dirt on a man named Bob Copeland.”
“Why?”
“Good question,” Venta said. “The same one I asked, as a matter of fact. But the man wouldn’t say. Anyway, the firm had information that Copeland was going to be traveling to Bangkok. They suspected that he was going there to have sex with lady-boys. You know what a lady-boy is, right?”
No.
London didn’t.
“Well, they’re basically young Asian men who look and act exactly like girls, except that they have a cock,” Venta said.
“Oh.”
“Most of them are actually quite beautiful,” she added. “Anyway, the firm wanted me to follow Copeland to Bangkok and confirm that he was screwing lady-boys. I was also supposed to get as much documentation as I could.”
“Meaning photographs?”
“Exactly,” Venta said. “Preferably of Copeland and a lady-boy mingling or drinking together, but if not that, at least pictures of him walking in and out of bars that had reputations for lady-boys. I was supposed to take a digital camera. Then, if I got pictures, I was supposed to download them to my laptop and email them to myself. That way I could download them once I got back in the States and would still have them even if my camera and laptop got lost or stolen.”
“Clever,” London said.
“Routine, actually,” Venta said. “Anyway, I struck a deal with the law firm. They agreed to pay me a total of $20,000—win, loose or draw—plus all my expenses. Half was to be paid up front and the other half was to be paid on completion. Ten thousand dollars in cash arrived at my office by courier the next day. With that money I bought a roundtrip plane ticket to Bangkok and took off.”
She paused.
Her lower lip trembled for a second.
“What happened next is a long story,” she said. “A long ugly story.”
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Pretty Little Lawyer (Nick Teffinger Thriller) Page 28
