Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  “Morning, babes,” Galvin said as they kissed.

  “Good morning,” Danny said.

  He thought about what Galvin had just said. He’d kill to protect his family. From anybody else, that would be a figure of speech.

  From Galvin, though, it sounded awfully like a threat.

  45

  Celina made French toast and bacon for breakfast, which they had along with the pastries from the coffee shop, and then they all suited up and took the Silver Queen Gondola to the summit of Aspen Mountain, six of them in one cabin. The sun glinted off the snow trails, dazzling ice-encrusted trees, the skinny pine trees far below like the bristles of a coarse brush.

  The three Galvins were wearing expensive ski outfits. Jenna had on a gold down jacket and ski pants that looked like blue denim but weren’t. Her mother wore a long silver metallic coat with a fur collar, too high fashion to be practical on the slopes. Tom had a bright yellow Salomon parka that resembled a rain slicker with a high collar. A bright green-and-yellow-striped knit cap with a pompom. With that outfit, Danny thought, he should be easy to spot at a distance.

  The girls sat on the bench facing the adults and didn’t stop talking the whole way. Abby wore the hot-pink Helly Hansen ski parka that Sarah had bought her a couple of years ago, a little worn and a size too small.

  Lucy held Danny’s hand. She leaned in close and said, under her voice, “She really looks happy, doesn’t she?”

  Danny nodded. In the bright light, he could see a few faint freckles across Lucy’s nose. She hated her freckles, usually hid them with makeup. He thought they were adorable. She was wearing a light blue down jacket with a blue scarf and white pants that made her great legs look even greater.

  Abby paused in midsentence and looked at them. She had the hearing of a bat, at least when she was the subject of conversation.

  “We’ve never skied before, have we?” Lucy said.

  “This is a first.”

  “You know I’m pretty good at this sport, right?”

  “I’m not surprised. You’re good at most sports.”

  “You’re not going to be embarrassed, I hope.”

  “At what?”

  “At how much better a skier I am.” She said it with a coy smile, almost flirtatiously.

  “Not at all. I’ll be inspired, more likely. You make me a better man.”

  “That’s for sure,” she said with a laugh.

  But Danny wasn’t thinking about skiing.

  He was thinking about a way out. The DEA had him in a corner, it was true, but that didn’t make him powerless. If he were actually able to snap a picture of whoever Galvin was supposed to be meeting with, then he’d have something the DEA wanted.

  You want the pictures? How about I get a letter of immunity? Signed by the DEA and the Department of Justice and whoever the hell else was necessary to make it ironclad. The president, if need be. A guarantee that he would never be indicted for anything to do with Galvin.

  That would finally banish the threat hanging over his head, which kept them coming back and coming back. He was fed up with being a marionette. The only way to cut the strings was to be ruthless.

  But how safe would it be to trail Galvin? If he were actually meeting someone from the Sinaloa drug cartel, he’d take precautions against being followed. And Danny was a writer, not a spy. Not a trained intelligence operative. He didn’t know the first thing about surveillance. From everything he’d read on the subject—mostly, he had to admit, spy thrillers—following someone without being detected was a skill acquired by a professional after long practice. Not a skill he had. No way.

  Short of chaining himself to Tom Galvin’s ski boots, there was simply no way to make sure Galvin didn’t go off somewhere during the course of the afternoon. Galvin could ski down the mountain and disappear into the streets of Aspen. He could meet someone at a café, a restaurant, a bar, and Danny would never know about it.

  All he could do was keep Galvin in sight as long as possible. And hope he got lucky.

  At the top of the mountain, they got off the gondola, snapped into their skis, and gathered to confer.

  “There aren’t any green trails?” Abby asked, trying to sound casual. She swallowed hard.

  “Just intermediate and expert,” Danny said. “You can snowplow for a while until you get used to it. It’ll all come back to you. Wasn’t it you who said it’s like riding a bike?”

  “The blue trails really aren’t so scary,” Jenna said.

  The girls didn’t want to ski with the oldsters, and who could blame them? Abby pulled her goggles into place, and the two of them started down the slope, a blue trail called Easy Chair, which didn’t in fact look particularly easy.

  Celina said, “Everyone: One thirty at the Sundeck for lunch?” She pointed at the building behind them. “Okay? Girls? Yes?”

  Jenna waved an impatient acknowledgment to her mother, and the two girls were off. If Abby was nervous about her skiing ability, she was no longer showing it.

  A minute or so later, the adults set off down the same slope, giving the girls enough of a head start to be on their own. Galvin was nimble and graceful, clearly an expert. Lucy was even better. Celina was good, about on par with Danny.

  They quickly came to a juncture with a black trail.

  “What do you think, Danny?” Lucy said. “Stay with the blue?”

  Galvin said, “I’ll probably be doing mostly black trails. Don’t worry about trying to keep up with me.”

  There was no way to explain to Lucy why he needed to stay with Galvin at all times. He hesitated a moment, then said to Galvin, “I’ll be fine,” and he followed Galvin toward the expert trail, leaving Lucy and Celina behind.

  • • •

  The black trails weren’t easy. They were scary at times, with some incredibly steep runs, but Danny managed to keep up with Galvin, more or less, for the next two hours or so. They skied on black diamond trails, but not double black diamond ones. The difficult ones, but not the “expert only” ones. He took a few spills, wounding just his dignity. He worried about the camera, hoped the down padding would protect it from damage.

  A few times he spotted Abby and Jenna on the chairlift or cruising down the slopes. Abby seemed to be doing just fine. Twice he and Galvin met up with Lucy and Celina on the Shadow Mountain chairlift line. If Lucy was annoyed about being left behind in favor of Galvin, she didn’t display it.

  At a few minutes past one thirty, the adults all gathered out behind the Sundeck restaurant by the picnic tables to wait for the girls. They stashed their skis in a rack. Galvin lit up a cigar. He waggled it at Danny with a questioning look.

  Danny shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

  A few diners at the picnic tables were giving Galvin poisonous glares, but he didn’t seem to notice, and if did, he didn’t care.

  Something about him seemed different. He was unusually preoccupied, pensive. Maybe he’d made a bad trade at work. Lost a couple hundred million dollars. Maybe he and Celina had had a fight.

  Maybe that was all.

  Anyway, how well did he really know the guy? They’d had a couple of friendly chats. They’d bonded over their similar backgrounds. Men don’t sit around sharing their feelings. They do stuff together. They don’t cry together or gossip; they watch football on TV, maybe play poker. They drink together, rib each other.

  Maybe he was preoccupied. Or maybe he really was about to meet his contacts from the Sinaloa cartel.

  “Hey, you,” Lucy said to Danny. “You took off.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I guess I just wanted to push the edge of the envelope. My bad.”

  “Men and their competitiveness,” she said, shaking her head, amused.

  Danny made a stop in the men’s room, clomping, with his ski boots on, like Frankenstein’s monster.

  Wh
en he returned, Galvin was gone.

  “Tom went back to the slopes,” Celina said. “He said he wasn’t hungry.” Something about the way she spoke, the way her eyes wouldn’t meet his, prickled Danny’s suspicions.

  “Which way did he go?” Danny said. “I think I’ll join him. I don’t mind skipping lunch.”

  “I saw him going that way,” Abby said. She pointed vaguely toward the uncleared back section of the mountain, away from the blue and black trails, down the hill on the other side of the gondola landing.

  “Oh, stay with us,” said Lucy.

  “Knowing Daddy,” said Jenna, “he’ll be doing one of the double black diamond runs.”

  “I wouldn’t mind trying a couple of double black diamond runs,” Danny said.

  “I think maybe Tom is just wanting to ski by himself,” Celina said. Her tone was brittle. She gave Danny a quick but penetrating look.

  Danny, pretending not to hear her, headed toward the uncleared area.

  “You’re not staying for lunch?” Lucy said. “You sure?”

  “I’m good,” he said.

  And he set off in search of Tom Galvin.

  46

  On this side of the mountain, beyond the railing, were yellow signs on tall posts warning SKI BOUNDARY. The area was cordoned off with a pink neon rope. A diamond-shaped yellow caution sign: DANGER—NO SKIING BEYOND THIS POINT. Another one read WARNING! HAZARDS EXIST THAT ARE NOT MARKED—SKI WITH CARE. Just beyond that, a red sign mounted on a pole declared: THIS IS YOUR DECISION POINT. BACKCOUNTRY RISKS INCLUDE DEATH.

  There were no marked trails here. There were no trails at all. This was the off-piste, ungroomed section, reserved for the most adventurous expert skiers, the hard-core powder heads and freeriders, the rippers and the shredders.

  He could see a few lone tracks from skis and snowshoes. Also the parallel corduroy tracks laid down by the teeth and tread of a Sno-Cat, the snow vehicle that could climb up or down the mountainside. People generally didn’t ski terrain this rough on their own. Adventurers usually went in groups led by guides on Sno-Cats.

  Had Galvin really taken off down this side of the mountain? It didn’t seem likely.

  It didn’t seem at all likely that Galvin had gone this way. Abby must have been mistaken.

  Then he noticed something dark and gnarled and malodorous in the snow a few paces ahead: the discarded butt of a cigar, like the turd of a small dog.

  • • •

  He peered down the mountainside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Galvin’s yellow parka among the glades. Nothing. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t skied down this way. He might just be out of sight, down a gulley, on the far side of a swell.

  The sunlight reflecting off the snow dazzled his eyes. He put on his goggles and took a deep breath and stood at the lip of a cornice.

  The snowdrifts looked seriously deep. Based on the diameter and taper of the tree trunks, he estimated that the snow was as deep as six feet in some places. This was not terrain he was used to skiing. Untouched, ungroomed runs like this, with such a deep snowpack, were meant for backcountry skiers.

  Not him.

  He briefly weighed making a desperation move—attempting a controlled descent, carving long turns side to side, zigzagging to slow his speed. But standing on the ledge and looking down, he realized what a preposterous idea it was to try skiing this side of the mountain. He turned his skis to one side—and felt the ledge crumble beneath him.

  Suddenly he was plummeting, rocketing down the steep decline. He found himself whooshing through powder a foot deep, unlike the hardpack on the other side of the mountain, where the snow was flattened by hundreds, maybe thousands of skis every day. Here the snow was fluffy and lighter than air. It was like gliding through a cloud.

  But the wide-open bowl quickly gave way to a more densely forested area, the tall pines scattered on the mountainside. Now he found himself weaving in and among and around the trees, picking up speed. Pines popped up before him like the looming obstacles in a video game. He carved a hard turn to one side, swerved to the other, slaloming between closely set tree trunks. From somewhere deep in his memory he recalled that the best trick for swooping between the trees was to focus on the white spaces in between, aiming carefully.

  He swooped and carved, faster and faster, propelled down the hill by gravity and momentum, and he tried to slow himself down. But the only way to do that was to carve back and forth, shift his weight from one side to the other. And that he couldn’t do. Because he was catapulting downhill so fast, with so little clearance between the trees, he couldn’t afford an unnecessary turn even a few degrees to one side or the other. His skis shuddered. His legs and thighs burned from the unaccustomed muscular exertion. And the terrain between the trees was wildly inconsistent. In some places the snow was deep and fluffy; in other places were sheer patches of ice, and every so often he hit a rocky knuckle. His face felt frozen solid. He caromed faster and faster, always aware that the slightest miscalculation would send him crashing into a tree trunk.

  Suddenly his skis crunched against something, which he realized only too late was a ridge, a cliff.

  Midair, soaring, he felt time slow. He could see the sharply pitched slope, the rocky chasm directly below, and he knew that if he dropped too quickly, he would hit the rocks and be instantly killed.

  He knew his fate was outside his control. He couldn’t alter the force of gravity or the trajectory of his descent. He’d vaulted down an icy chute into a twenty-foot drop, a vertical rock wall, with nothing but slippery boards strapped to his feet and no brakes.

  And yet, for one brief passing moment, it was exhilarating. To feel nothing below him. Airborne, free falling, a human projectile, a missile. It was thrilling. Like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The wind howled in his ears.

  He was just a few seconds, and one wrong turn, away from the finality of death.

  And he realized at the deepest level of his consciousness how thin the margin was between extreme, awesome, energizing terror—and death. For the first time in his life, he understood thrill seekers, extreme skiers and mountain climbers. Hang gliders and skydivers and tightrope walkers. He finally understood the intoxicating sensation of defying death, of facing down our hardwired instinct for self-preservation.

  And then, just as quickly as this realization had come over him, another kind of understanding seized him. That he might actually meet his death on the rocks below.

  And the instinct for self-preservation reasserted itself.

  This might have taken as much as two seconds. Certainly no more. He bent his knees, squatted, braced himself—

  —and landed hard on the ground, absorbing the impact, a blow to his entire body all at once. He catapulted forward. He’d lost control.

  The tip of his right ski caught on something. He flipped over and landed, hard, on his back, and for a moment everything was absolutely quiet. He’d come to an abrupt stop.

  He tasted blood.

  He twisted, felt pain shoot through his limbs, then throughout his entire body, jagged, like the crackle of lightning.

  Icy snow bit his ears, his eyelids, the back of his neck. He tried again to move, wriggled, and found he could move his legs, his arms. He felt bruised all over, but nothing seemed to be broken. Then he remembered how to get up with skis on. He tucked his feet in toward his butt and leaned his knees to the left side. He realized he’d lost both skis. Slowly, carefully, he rolled over. Felt something twang in his lower back, a pizzicato pluck of nerve endings. A tendon? A pulled muscle? He hoped it was nothing more serious than that. For a moment he needed to rest, so he sank down, his face buried in the snow, which felt strangely warm, and then icy cold.

  Then, bracing himself on his elbows he pushed up, the exertion sending more daggers of pain through his arms and shoulders. He pushed through the pain and got to his knees. He tasted m
ore blood, probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, realized he’d bitten his lower lip during the fall.

  Unsteady on his feet now, he saw something maybe two or three hundred feet away. An old shack, it appeared, built from logs. It couldn’t have been more than ten feet by ten feet. Squat and sturdy and old, with a shingled roof. It looked like an old mining hut, left over from the mining boom at the end of the nineteenth century. He knew that Aspen had once been a silver mining camp, the largest in the country, until the day Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, demonetizing silver; in a matter of months, Aspen was a ghost town. But many of the old buildings remained, dotting the mountainside.

  Through a small window on the side facing him, Danny could see a flickering amber light within. And silhouettes moving inside. Instinctively, he sank to the ground, sat in snow. He rooted around in his pockets until he located the nylon pouch that held the camera.

  He yanked it open, the ripping sound of the Velcro closure loud in the muffled silence.

  He trained the strong lens on the window, dialing the focus in and out until a face came into focus.

  Galvin’s.

  Even this far away he could smell one of Galvin’s cigars.

  Galvin seemed to be rocking back and forth. No, he was pacing. Behind him was a man, or maybe two men, both of them wearing dark coats. One of the other men was bald. Danny refocused on the bald man. A plump, cue-ball round face with a goatee festooning a double chin. A heavy brow, unshaven-looking. He heard the crack of a tree branch, and he turned to look.

  A man in a black parka and ski mask was lunging toward him. Before Danny could scramble to his feet, something crashed into the side of his head, an almost inconceivable explosion of pain, and the white light had bloomed to blot out his entire field of vision, the blood bitter and metallic, like copper pennies in his mouth, and then everything was absolutely quiet.

  47

  Later, the paramedics told Danny that he’d probably lost consciousness for no more than twenty or thirty seconds. But whatever happened in the hour that followed, he had no recollection of it. Later he was told he kept asking, over and over, “Where am I?” and “What happened?” He had nothing more than fleeting strands of memory, swirling like the streamers of yolk in a partly scrambled egg.