Читать книгу Yosemite Fall - Scott Graham - Страница 15

5

Chuck sprinted around the base of the cliff with Ponch a step behind him. He came to an abrupt halt beside Janelle, who stood where the cliff band gave way to a sun-splashed slope of tufted grass, spindly brush, and scattered ponderosas. Granite walls boxed the slope on both sides, forming the notch in the top of the ridge known as Sentinel Gap.

The leg was wedged ten feet off the ground between the trunk and lowest branch of a ponderosa growing in the middle of the gap, thirty feet ahead. Janelle reached toward the appendage, her hands arrested in midair.

Sunlight broke through the tree’s branches, speckling the human limb. The leg had ripped away from its body below the hip. A white sock and thick-soled landing shoe clad the foot. Otherwise, the leg was bare, its skin battered and bruised. Blood from a deep cut in the ankle soaked the sock and shoe. More blood from the place where the leg had torn free from its body coagulated on the pine-needle-covered ground at the base of the tree.

Chuck pressed his forearm to his mouth.

Beside Chuck, Ponch spoke, his voice trembling. “I should’ve stopped him.”

Chuck lowered his arm. “You suggested he quit.”

“He wouldn’t hear it.”

“He never listened to anyone when we knew him twenty years ago. I’m not surprised he wouldn’t listen to you now.”

“I should have told him what the cards said.”

“He wouldn’t have listened to that, either.” Chuck didn’t add that no one else in their right mind would have listened to Ponch’s tarot-card nonsense as well.

Ponch dug his phone from his pocket while Janelle approached the wedged leg, her steps slow but purposeful, her hands at her sides.

“We have to find him,” she said. “We have to make sure he’s . . . he’s . . .”

Chuck trailed after her, his legs shaky. He said over his shoulder to Ponch, “She’s right. Then we’ll call.”

Janelle stopped beside the thickened pool of blood below the suspended leg. She turned uphill, studying the gap in the ridge. Chuck eyed the gently sloping ramp between the rock faces with her. Somewhere in the notch, Thorpe’s flight had gone horribly awry.

Janelle turned a slow circle. “The same forces that brought his leg here—” she pointed at the battered limb in the tree above them “—should have propelled the rest of his body in roughly the same direction.” She pointed at the far cliff wall. “There. See?”

He looked where she pointed. “I don’t see anything.”

“More blood.”

He squinted. She was right. A streak of dark cherry shone in the sunlight, splashed across the quartz crystals that spotted the granite face.

She aimed a finger down the slope, where Sentinel Gap opened to the forested lower ridge. “And there,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Oh, my God,” Ponch moaned from behind Chuck.

A piece of red fabric was tucked at the bottom of a headhigh boulder resting on the forested slope below the opening of the gap.

Janelle side-hilled to the boulder ahead of Chuck and Ponch. She put a hand to the stone and leaned around it. “He’s here,” she said, her voice controlled. “The rest of him.”

Chuck looked over her shoulder along with Ponch. The piece of fabric visible from above was the corner of Thorpe’s wingsuit airfoil. Thorpe lay facedown on the far side of the boulder, his arms and remaining leg splayed. Blood was gathered in a small depression beyond and below his head.

Janelle dropped her medical pack to the ground. Donning a pair of latex gloves from an outside pocket of the pack, she knelt and turned Thorpe’s head to her. Thorpe’s black helmet encased his skull. Somehow, his camera remained affixed to the helmet’s crown. His goggles were smashed, his eyes, nose, and cheeks pulverized.

Janelle pressed two fingers to the side of Thorpe’s neck below his jawline, then rocked back on her heels. “No pulse, of course. But we’re always supposed to check.” Her gloved hands, cupped around one another, hung between her legs, her forearms resting on her thighs. “He must have died instantly.”

Ponch turned away and vomited down the slope. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he returned to studying Thorpe’s body with Chuck and Janelle.

“What’s this?” Janelle asked. She touched the suit’s lower airfoil, two swaths of fabric held a few inches apart by stays that lay on the ground between Thorpe’s left leg and where his right leg should have been. One of the swaths of fabric had separated along a seam in the airfoil, resulting in a V that extended several inches into the wing from the foil’s bottom hem. The separation had exposed one of the stays that held the fabric swaths apart to form the airfoil.

The stay, a plastic rod half the thickness of a drinking straw, stuck out from the fabric. The rod was white to its final inch, which was red, like the wingsuit.

Janelle ran her gloved finger along the last inch of the stay. Her fingertip came away smudged. “It’s blood.”

“The suit must have torn,” Chuck said, “when he . . . when his . . .”

“It doesn’t look like a tear to me. It separated. It came apart.”

Chuck leaned around Janelle for a closer look. A length of nylon thread extended from the top of the V’ed separation and lay crumpled on the ground below the loosed plastic stay. “No wonder it came apart, considering the forces involved.”

Janelle cleaned the blood from her covered finger with an antiseptic wipe from her kit. She continued to eye the airfoil and Thorpe’s corpse along with Ponch, but Chuck stepped away. He’d seen enough. The stench of Ponch’s vomit mixed in the air with the rank odor emanating from Thorpe’s mangled body. Chuck swallowed, his stomach heaving.

“I’m tempted to grab the camera from his helmet and smash it to bits,” Ponch said, “even though I know the investigators will want it.”

“You think the footage will reach the internet?”

“I bet it’ll go viral. The whole world will watch him die, over and over and over again.”

“The investigators should keep it private. That’s their job.”

“Huh,” Ponch scoffed. “Everything reaches the internet these days.” He lifted his phone. “It’s time,” he said grimly.

Chuck took out his phone, too. “From way up here, it shouldn’t take long for one of us to get through.”

“As twisted as this may sound,” Chuck said to Ponch as they walked down Four Mile Trail, “I’m not sure how much Thorpe would mind if the footage of his death made it to the internet.”

They’d left Thorpe’s body thirty minutes ago. After getting through to a 911 operator, they had waited until an advance team of half a dozen YOSAR team members arrived before leaving the scene.

“He lived his life in the public eye,” Chuck continued. “He made his living putting himself on display.”

Ponch spun and walked backward, facing Chuck. “Him and all the babes he hung out with.” He turned forward and continued down the trail.

“Hey,” Janelle warned from the front of the line. “That’s the second time you’ve used that word.”

“Young ladies,” Ponch corrected himself.

“Some of us ‘young ladies’—” she made air quotes with her fingers as she hiked a step ahead of Ponch “—don’t have a problem hanging out with older guys.”

“Thanks,” Chuck said. “I think.”

“Janelle’s right,” Ponch said over his shoulder to Chuck. “It’s no secret that Thorpe’s success as an older guy was the result, to a significant extent, of the young ladies who hung out with him.”

“Success?” Janelle asked, an edge to her voice.

“Remember,” Chuck told Ponch, “she’s the mother of two little girls.”

“Who,” Janelle added, “are growing up way too fast.”

“She’s already on her guard for them,” Chuck said to Ponch. “So am I.”

“Thorpe figured out what you two already know,” Ponch said, “which is that boys like girls—a lot. He realized right away that nine out of ten extreme-sport viewers online are males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. The best way to increase his viewership numbers, he figured, was to give those young males what they wanted.”

“Babes,” Janelle said, biting off the word.

“Young ladies,” Ponch agreed. “Thorpe made sure he included a scantily clad female in every one of his videos—hanging out with him in the back of his van, zipping him into his wingsuit on the edge of a cliff before he flew, cracking open a can of beer for him after he landed.”

“How professional,” Janelle deadpanned.

“If by professional you mean building a solid, money-making profession, you’d be right.”

“He was that successful?”

“He and Jimmy were pioneers in the whole idea of outdoor athletes making a living through sponsorships. At their peak, they had lots of sponsors—High Summit energy bars, Rinson ropes, Trongia harnesses, their backpacks, and all their clothes, from their long underwear to their hats to their rain jackets. They’d take anything that came their way. They even accepted a stake in MoJuice, the energy drink, when the company was just getting started. You know the one: For Renegades Only. The MoJuice people didn’t have any money, so they gave Jimmy and Thorpe some stock in the company to sell after it went public. Of course, MoJuice has stayed private while talking about holding its initial public offering year after year all the way through to this year.” Ponch shrugged. “What are you going to do? When Thorpe went off on his own, he got sponsorships as a flier—his wingsuit manufacturer and parachute company, even the maker of his landing shoes. He sold advertising on his website and YouTube channel, too.”

“How do you know all this?” Janelle asked.

“I’m an adjuster for State Farm in L.A., so I’m online all the time. It was easy for me to keep tabs on his new videos—featuring his latest, um, young ladies. He plugged his sponsors every chance he got.”

Janelle glanced up, taking in the ridge above, as she continued along the trail. “You’re making me less and less upset about what happened to him up there.”

“There’s never a lot of public grief for wingsuit fliers when they get killed. Most of them are estranged from their families. That was true of Thorpe, from what I gathered. I heard he’d gotten himself a girlfriend of late, but he never married. I can’t imagine the women he featured in his videos will spend too much time mourning his passing, either.”

“Bad timing for this to happen, though,” Chuck said. “At the start of the reunion.”

“Or suspiciously good timing,” said Ponch.

“What do you mean by that?”

“If you’d watched Thorpe’s most recent videos, you’d know what I’m talking about. There was a certain melancholy to his latest postings. Fewer babes and more scenic shots while he talked about how great his years of flying had been—in the past tense.”

“You’re suggesting he might have killed himself?”

“His last video really made me wonder what was going on with him. He was alone in his van, at night, talking to the camera. He started out defending the fact that he’d turned away from Sentinel Gap three times in a row, and he claimed wingsuit flying had become a cult of death. But then, in his very next breath, he swore he would shoot the gap the next time he jumped off Glacier Point. He said everybody should keep an eye out for his next video because it would be incredible.”

The trail snaked through the trees, descending toward the valley floor. Chuck tripped on a rock protruding from the path and jogged a few steps forward, catching his balance.

“And then I dealt the cards,” Ponch continued. “The message was so clear when I laid them out. By the end of the hand, there was no question. I planned to tell him when I met up with him this morning. After the tone of his last video, I figured I could for sure get him to stop. But he wasn’t at all like what I was expecting. He joked around, seemed perfectly happy. He was so jazzed to make his big entrance to the reunion and to see everyone again. I kept thinking, who was I to say anything? He’d been flying all these years. He knew what he was doing. I couldn’t bring myself to mention the hand I’d dealt.” Ponch’s breathing was in check now that he was walking down the path rather than trudging up it. “If I’d had any sense whatsoever he wanted me to talk him out of his flight, I would have. But he was stoked. He talked about how excited he was to shoot the gap and post the footage online right away, to kick off the weekend.”

Chuck frowned. “So you don’t think he was suicidal, or you do?”

Ponch glanced back at Chuck. “Based on the video he posted when he was alone in his van, I’d say yes. But based on how he acted this morning, I’d say no way.”

“There’s that thing about people being really happy, almost euphoric, right before they kill themselves.”

“Which is why, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t know.”

Janelle said to Ponch, “I overheard you telling Chuck about your tarot cards when you first got to the campground this morning. You said they told you more than just that something bad was going to happen to Thorpe. You said the bad thing was going to happen to him at the hands of someone else.”

“That’s right,” Ponch replied, subdued. “Me. I’m the ‘someone else.’ I didn’t tell Thorpe about my reading, and now he’s dead.”

“I’m not convinced the cards were referring to you.”

From the back of the line, Chuck waved his hands in exasperation. “One crazy card person is enough,” he said to Janelle. “There’s no need for two of you.”

She stopped and turned to Ponch and Chuck. They halted on the trail. She circled her thumbs around the shoulder straps of her pack. “This isn’t necessarily about the cards. It’s about the loose thread and the separation in the wingsuit.”

Chuck frowned. “That was from when he hit the cliff. It had to be.”

“I might agree with you—if it weren’t for the cut in his ankle.”

Chuck’s frown deepened.

“You saw it,” Janelle said. “On his leg, in the tree.”