Читать книгу Yosemite Fall - Scott Graham - Страница 13

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Chuck took a backward step, the muscles on either side of his spine drawing up tight. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“The cards.” Blood drained from Ponch’s face. He pounded his cupped palm with his fist. “I should have told him.”

“Your tarot cards?”

Ponch nodded. “I should’ve spoken up.”

“They told you something might happen to Thorpe?”

“Not might. Would. Something awful would happen to him, at the hands of someone else.”

Chuck’s back muscles loosened. “I can’t believe you’re still into those things.” He shook his head. “You’re saying your cards are telling you Thorpe is in some sort of trouble, is that right?”

“I laid them out a few days ago, alone at my place. I figured I’d get a sense of what was up with him since he’d asked me to be with him this morning when he flew.”

Chuck raised his arms, imitating a soaring bird. “You mean . . . ?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. In his wingsuit.”

Chuck’s back again grew tense. Tarot cards or not, he knew the risks of Thorpe’s chosen sport.

“The cards told me he was in danger,” Ponch said. “I did a Two Paths spread. The major Arcana cards were fine, but the Death card was upright instead of reversed. The danger was clear as could be, but I convinced myself not to say anything to him. I mean, come on—he’s a wingsuit flier.”

“Danger is what he does,” Chuck concurred.

“I figured I hadn’t heard anything yet because of the bad reception in the valley.” Ponch dug his phone from his pocket, punched its face, and turned it to Chuck. “See? Nothing.” Again, he scanned the empty campsite. “But he’s not here.” He pointed skyward, toward the head of the valley. “I was with him at sunrise on Glacier Point.”

“He jumped?”

“He flew.” Ponch’s jaw muscles twitched, his face still white. “He dropped off the point into the shadows and then out across the valley. I lost sight of him pretty quick.” He stared up through the trees, where the valley’s south wall showed between outstretched branches. “He planned to shoot Sentinel Gap.”

Chuck sucked a breath. “The notch in the ridge?”

Ponch lifted and dropped his chin, a grim up-and-down movement. “If conditions were right, he was going to fly through it, then swing around and pop his chute to land here, in the parking lot. It was supposed to be a big surprise. He figured the helmet-cam footage of his fly-in to the reunion would make for a great online post. But it all depended on the wind—shooting the gap, landing here, the whole thing. If the winds were too strong after he jumped, he could have landed anywhere, even outside the valley altogether.” Ponch looked around him. “But if he’s not here by this—”

A male voice broke in from behind Ponch. “Chuck Bender?”

A park ranger approached on the path through the campground. The ranger carried a metal clipboard thick with papers. He looked eerily familiar to Chuck. The uniformed man was in his early thirties, his regulation gray shirt and evergreen slacks crisply pressed. A flashlight, walkie-talkie, and holstered pistol hung from his black leather belt. Buzz-cut hair showed beneath the circular brim of his straw, Smokey Bear ranger hat. He was clean shaven, his piercing gray eyes set close on either side of a long, hooked nose.

The broad-shouldered climbing tower attendant walked with the ranger, their feet crunching on the graveled path.

Chuck lifted a hand. “That’s me.”

The two men stopped next to Ponch. The tag pinned to the ranger’s chest above his brass badge was inscribed with the name Owen Hutchins. Chuck stared at the engraved name. He should have known—the hooked nose; the eyes the same slate gray color as the ranger’s shirt.

“Would you come with us, please?” the ranger, Owen, asked Chuck without introducing himself.

“I’m pretty busy right now. What is it you need?”

Owen indicated the tower attendant beside him with a tilt of his head. “Alden here tells me you belayed a youngster on the climbing wall immediately preceding the accident. I tracked down your name on the campground register.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Did you or did you not,” the ranger broke in, his face set, “adjust the auto-belay mechanism when you tied yourself into the climbing rope?” He tucked the bulky clipboard beneath his arm, his eyes on Chuck.

“I didn’t touch the auto-belay,” Chuck said, meeting the ranger’s gaze. “As light as my daughter is, I was afraid it wouldn’t kick in if she fell. All I did was release the rope and belay her off the top pulley myself.”

The attendant, Alden, said, “You’re supposed to let me detach the rope from the auto-belay for you.”

While Chuck had released the rope from the device and set up his own belay for Carmelita, Alden had chatted with the female climber on the far side of the line of boulders, his gaze fixed on her bikini top.

Chuck looked the attendant up and down. “You were otherwise occupied, if you recall.”

Alden’s eyes darted away.

Owen stepped forward. “I’m performing a preliminary Q&A to determine if a special agent from the Investigative Services Bureau should be assigned to investigate the incident.”

“A special agent?”

“The National Park Service takes all accidents that occur in its parks seriously. The agent, if assigned, will determine whether an SAIT should be formed.”

“An SAIT?” Chuck asked, repeating the letters.

“A Serious Accident Investigation Team.”

“A whole team of investigators? Sounds pretty over the top.”

“The park service will decide what’s over the top and what’s not.” Owen pulled the clipboard from under his arm. “You claim you did not turn off the auto-belay device, is that correct?”

“I just told you, I didn’t touch it. I had no reason to.”

“But you took it upon yourself to—”

“Look,” Chuck cut in. “I belayed my daughter myself, that’s all. People do that all the time on sport walls.” He turned to Alden and waited until the tower attendant met his gaze. “You know I’m right . . . Alden, is it? Everybody knows. That’s why you didn’t have any problem with what I did.” Chuck pivoted back to Owen. “The only thing I touched was the climbing rope.”

“Which was attached to the auto-belay mechanism.”

Chuck’s voice quivered. “I simply released the rope from the device to belay my daughter myself.”

“I want you to show me exactly what you did.”

“I already told you what I did.”

“There’s no need to get defensive, Mr. Bender.”

Chuck felt his face growing hot. “All I did was—”

Owen held up a palm. “Please.” He turned sideways, his black boots grinding in the path’s chunky stones, and indicated the direction back through the campground to the parking lot with an outstretched hand. “If you’ll come this way.”

Chuck said to Ponch, “I’ll be right back. We’ll figure out what to do next.”

Falling into step with the ranger and tower attendant, Chuck bit down on the inside of his cheek to control his anger. There was more going on here than just Owen Hutchins’ undue suspicion regarding the auto-belay device, and Chuck suspected what it was.

“Here we are,” Owen announced, halting at the base of the climbing tower with Chuck and Alden.

Chuck looked past the tower. Sedans and SUVs glittered beneath the sun in the parking lot, the oversized Bender Archaeological pickup truck among them. Presumably, Thorpe had planned to end his dawn flight by landing in one of the open stretches between the rows of parked cars. Instead, Chuck assured himself, Thorpe had touched down safely somewhere else. As for Ponch’s overwrought concerns? Nothing more than tarot-card-inspired paranoia.

“Let’s take a look at the auto-belay mechanism together,” Owen suggested.

Alden squatted next to the device, a metal cylinder six inches around and eighteen inches long bolted to the climbing tower two feet above the ground. A wire cable ran from the top of the cylinder to a pulley affixed to a steel stanchion extending three feet from the top of the tower. “The disable switch is under here,” Alden said, pointing to the base of the cylinder.

“Did you check it after Jimmy fell?” Owen asked him.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It was turned off, deactivated.”

“Meaning?”

“The rope had no tension. With the device disabled, the rope spools in, but the ratchet doesn’t engage when a climber falls.” He pointed at the top of the wall. “It’s used for retrieving the rope at the end of a climbing session.”

“But if it’s turned off when someone is climbing . . . ?”

Alden aimed a thumb at the ground and whistled through his two front teeth, a single, descending note, imitating the sound of a falling bomb. “That’s why the switch is underneath the cylinder, where it can’t be turned off by mistake.”

Owen turned to Chuck. “You say you didn’t touch it?”

Chuck thrust out his chin. “I keep telling you, I released the rope and tied myself into it. That’s all I did.”

Owen asked Alden, “How closely did you observe his actions?”

“Not very,” Alden admitted.

Chuck pointed past the line of boulders. “He was back there, under the trees.”

“Is that true?” Owen asked the tower attendant.

“I was making sure no one cut in line,” Alden said, his face coloring. “People get pissed off when that happens.”

“You say you found the auto-belay in the off position when you checked it after the accident?”

“Right.”

“So someone had to have turned it off.”

“Or,” Chuck said, “it’s broken and it switched off by itself.”

Owen appraised Chuck with cold eyes. “That’s possible, I suppose.” He faced Alden. “Whatever the case, we can’t allow the Yosemite Slam to take place tomorrow without knowing what happened.”

“I’ve got an extra auto-belay along,” the attendant said, aiming his square jaw at the semitruck attached to the portable tower’s flatbed trailer. The words “Sacramento Rock Gym” emblazoned the front door of the truck in gold letters above the stenciled silhouette of a climber leaning back from the face of a cliff. “I’ll switch out the old one and test everything to make sure we’re good to go.”

“Correction,” Owen said. “I’ll be the one who will test everything, before the start of the Slam tomorrow morning. If there’s any question things aren’t right, I’ll shut the whole competition down. Understood?”

“Sure,” said Alden. “But Jimmy . . .” His voice trailed off.

The ranger snapped, “He’s the whole reason I’m doing this. An hour ago, Jimmy O’Reilly, the man everybody in Yosemite Valley knows as Camp 4’s best friend, nearly died on your climbing wall. My job is to figure out what happened, to recommend whether an ISB special agent should be assigned, whether we need an SAIT. The way I see it, either something made the auto-belay mechanism turn off—” he directed his gray eyes at Chuck “—or someone turned it off.”

Chuck raised his hands with his palms out. “I’m as upset about what happened as you are. Jimmy and I go way back. I’m here for the reunion.”

“The reunion,” Owen repeated, his brows drawing together. “Of course.”

Chuck lowered his hands. “I assume you’ve heard about it.”

“Jimmy mentioned it to me. I know all about you and your old friends. My father was a ranger here before me.”

As Chuck already had deduced. “So you’re Owen, Jr.”

Time unspooled in Chuck’s mind. Owen Hutchins, Sr., had been one of a handful of rangers known unofficially as the Yosemite mafia. Allegedly, the small group of rangers had formed a secret, unspoken fraternity dedicated to ridding Yosemite National Park of visitors such as hippies and drug users considered less than desirable by mafia rangers, who even had been accused of illegally bribing informants to implicate suspected drug dealers in the valley. Nowhere in the Yosemite mafia’s vision of the valley had there been room for the unshorn, dirtbag climbers who populated Camp 4.

“Dad retired a long time ago,” Owen, Jr., said. “He died a year later. I’ve been a ranger here for five years now.”

Of the members of the Yosemite mafia, Hutchins, Sr., had been known for his particularly intense devotion to the cause. “You probably know your father wasn’t the most popular guy in the park,” Chuck said.

Owen’s eyes grew flinty. “He did his job, just like I do mine.”

“He rode climbers in the valley pretty hard, especially those of us who hung around with Jimmy O’Reilly and Thorpe Alstad. The way I remember it, he wrote us up for pretty much anything he could think of—noise infractions, open container violations, campsite fee payments that were just a few minutes late.” Chuck glanced past the tower where Thorpe had planned to land in the parking lot; Ponch was waiting back at the reunion campsite.

Owen’s lips flattened. “He kept guys like you in line. He had no choice. It’s the same now. Four million people visit Yosemite Valley each summer, with more coming every year, all of them trying to squeeze into a place not much bigger than an oversized bathtub. The only way that works is with a lot of planning, a lot of control.”

“Planning I’m okay with,” Chuck said. “But control? A lot of people thought your dad was a total control freak.”

“He kept a lid on things. That was his job. When something bad happened, like with Jimmy this morning, he jumped on it right away, hard. That’s the right thing to do—get it figured out before the evidence disappears.”

“Evidence? It sounds like you think someone was out to get Jimmy.”

Owen’s face hardened. “I don’t work with what I think, I work with what I know. And what I know is that sport climbing on walls with bolted holds is, or should be, one-hundred-percent safe. The YOSAR team rescues people off the big walls around the valley all summer long. But sport climbing? Nothing should go wrong with that.” The ranger looked at the auto-belay mechanism at the base of the tower, then said to Chuck, “Maybe the switch is faulty. Maybe it turned off by itself somehow. That’s possible, sure. But the odds of it happening? Astronomical. Whereas, the idea that somebody turned off the switch by mistake—or maybe, even, on purpose?—that’s what makes the most sense to me.”

“I understand you need to look into what happened to Jimmy,” Chuck told the ranger. “I get that.” He extended a stiff finger at the auto-belay device. “But there’s no need for me to examine that thing with you. I didn’t do anything to it, and, to be perfectly honest, I resent any insinuation that I did.”

He spun on his heels and strode past the small A-frame office at the entrance to the campground and back into Camp 4. Halfway to the campsite, he came up short.

Owen Hutchins, Jr., was convinced someone—specifically, it seemed, Chuck—had deactivated the auto-belay mechanism on the climbing tower in an attempt to kill Jimmy. But what if someone had switched off the device earlier—not before Jimmy’s climb, but before Carmelita’s climb? That someone could not have predicted Chuck would detach the rope from the mechanism and belay Carmelita on his own.

Chuck gritted his teeth. No one who knew the ins and outs of an auto-belay device could possibly have anything against twelve-year-old Carmelita. Rather, if the mechanism had been turned off before her climb, it was because someone had it in for Chuck—and had come at him by attempting to harm his family.