One Mile Under (41 page)

“People were killed, Wade. My friend was killed. They tried to kill me up there as well a couple of days ago. And Ty. But you already know about all that, right? That’s actually what we’re doing here, isn’t it?” Her eyes drilled on him. It was like he was being controlled by somebody or something. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Wade?”

“Hell,” he said, continuing to drive. “Living hell. Nothing else to call it.”

“And now you’re going to do, what, climb deeper in it? Drag me in, too?”

“Don’t blame it on me. You dragged yourself in, Dani. You’ve been in it since you walked in my office that first day.”

“What are you going to do to me?” she pressed.

This time he didn’t answer. He just continued down 82, occasionally turning up the police radio to listen to the chatter.

“Just sit there. Nothing you can do about it anyway. I can’t let them kill him, Dani. I can’t. I’ve done enough wrong. That’s where I hold the line.”

“What are you talking about? Kill who?”

She saw it in the tightening on his face. The predicament he was in. She knew only one thing would make him do this. “Kyle?”

He switched lanes, turning the radio up higher.

“It’s Kyle, isn’t it? What are they making you do, Wade? They’re squeezing you, aren’t they, and you’re about to do something terrible? You don’t have to do this. You’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

He put on his blinker. “Maybe I will.”

He pulled off the highway at the outskirts of Glenwood Springs, and turned onto what Dani knew was Red Mountain Road for a while and started to wind into the hills.

She knew where she was. At the top was Cutter Point. She’d been up there once, with a bunch of paragliding friends. It was the spot they jumped from in Glenwood. There were houses on the road at first, on both sides, and past them, aspens rising into the sky as the road turned from paved to dirt.

There was nothing up there but a sheer drop.

“Where are we going?” Dani asked, trepidation setting in.

“Just shush.”

“You have to tell me, Wade! Where are you taking me?”

“There’s only one place up here, girl. I think you know that.”

Her thoughts flashed to Ty. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead now. Only that he hadn’t answered her all night and she’d called several times. It was clear he wasn’t going to save her this time. He wasn’t anywhere near her. Even if he was alive. She wrestled against her cuffs. She tried to slip her wrist through, but it only made the clasps tighter. She’d been stupid, she realized. She’d been stubborn and foolish, and bulled her way into things she didn’t belong in. Even Ty had told her that. She had dragged him in, too. And now she was going to pay. Wade had the flushed countenance of a trapped, hunted animal, looking for some way out of the box, but with a single-minded determination to do what he had to do.

He continued to wind up the road as it narrowed, putting on his brights.

“Please don’t do this to me, Wade. You were married to my mom. We’ve known each other since I was a child …”

“Best just hold on, Danielle.” The crackle of the police chatter grew thinner and less audible the farther up they climbed.

There was a time in her life when she had trusted him. He wasn’t exactly loving—she wasn’t
his
, Kyle was—but he was always fun and full of life. When she was a kid, he’d taken the two of them camping and rafting. She and Kyle. That’s how she first got started. When her mom got sick, he’d taken her to her college back east, almost like a dad. And now he was taking her where …? To do what?
Kill her
. Doing someone’s dirty work to shut her up. The car wound up higher and higher up the mountain. Dani knew it went two thousand feet up. There were no lights up here. Only the moon. There was a series of narrow switchbacks with only boulders to act as a guardrail; even by day it would make your stomach uneasy. Dani eyed the lock switch next to Wade. She thought about diving across and slamming into him when he slowed at one of the turns. Forcing the vehicle off the road. The car would surely roll. She didn’t know how high up they were now, but there were still trees to block their fall. Then maybe she could make her way out and run for it.

Whatever he was going to do, she wasn’t going to just go willingly. Without a fight. No way.

“Wade, I know they’ve gotten to you somehow. But you don’t have to do this. We can take it to Sheriff Warrick. This isn’t going to help you, Wade. Only suck you in deeper.” She saw she was talking to a stone wall. “
Wade, listen!
”

He put his foot on the brake and slowed to about ten miles an hour as they went around a turn, the car wheels grazing the edge. The lights of the valley flickered far below them. Dani suddenly dove across him and grabbed hold of the wheel and jerked it to the left toward the edge as hard as she could.

“What the hell are you—”

The vehicle lurched, its front wheels rolling off the embankment, teetering a second or two on the edge, just a foot or two from rolling off and tumbling down the mountain. It was her only chance. Dani kept the wheel pinned as Wade slammed on the brake, the vehicle hanging there over the darkness, front wheels spinning.

“You dumb little shit …” Wade said. He ripped her hands off the wheel and swung the back of his into her face.

Dani’s head snapped back, and she felt the warm drool of blood running down her chin.

She tried to dive across him again, this time to unlock the lock switch and somehow get out of the car. But Wade blocked her and pulled her back by the hair and struck her again, opening her lip. Dani gasped with pain. He pushed her back over to her seat, keeping his hand pinned on her throat, his thumb digging into her larynx, causing her to gag.

“Wade! Wade, please!” she pleaded, trying to tear away his hand. Tears burned in her eyes. “What are you trying to do? You’re hurting me!”

He kept his hand pinned there. Choking her. Driven by some uncontrollable urge in his ruined life to protect what he knew was now beyond protection. His rage seemingly built up from so many things. Anger. Shame. Guilt. Futility.

“Wade, please …” She shook herself free. “What’s the plan?” Dani stared at him incomprehensibly. “What are you going to do, Wade? Tie me into that parasail up there and throw me over the edge?”

He just kept his hands on her.

“Who’s going to believe it? Geoff’ll know that’s not how it happened. What are you going to do, kill him, too? People know I don’t even do this, never mind drive up here and do it at night.

“And how did I even get up here? Geoff was out. My car’s at my house. How are you going to figure that one out, Wade? It doesn’t make sense. Nobody’s going to believe it.”

He stared like some mute, hunted animal.

“What’s your plan, Wade? What’s the goddamn plan?”

“I don’t know what the fucking plan is!” he screamed. He took his hand away from her and pounded the steering wheel several times. “I don’t have a plan!”

Dani looked at him, barely able to breathe. “Wade, please …”

She sat there, catching her breath. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She thought she had reached him. She waited for his breaths to calm. Then he turned the car back from the ledge and righted it on the road.

“Do that one more time I’ll shoot you here,” he said, and pulled out his gun.

He threw the car back in gear and continued climbing.

“Sheriff Warrick, my name is Ty Hauck, and I was a police detective for years back in Greenwich, Connecticut. I’m here with Chief Joe Riddick of the Templeton police force up near Greeley. I know it’s late, but we have a bit of an emergency here that involves Chief Dunn of Carbondale and we need your help …”

Riddick had done about everything he could going through the skeptical night duty officer to raise the Aspen sheriff so late at night. Hauck couldn’t locate the number of the phone Dani had used to call him from earlier, his own phone no more than a mound of melted plastic back at Watkins’s barn, but he recalled Geoff’s name, Davies, and they were able to obtain his number, which they called, Robertson having told Hauck with relish that it was too late to stop it now, and, thank God, Davies answered. Saying how she was gone—the house empty—and only the dog was there, barking up a storm. And that she would never have left without leaving him a note, and anyway, the only car there had been his. He was worried out of his mind.

Their next call was to the Carbondale Police Department looking for Wade. Hauck was told he was out, on personal matters—that he had been for much of the day—and left strict instructions with the duty officer not to track him down. Hauck pleaded with the guy that it was urgent, but he wasn’t sure if the officer would do what had to be done against his boss with his career path on the line. That was when Hauck thought to bring in Aspen, which had the largest force in the valley.

“There’s been a number of people killed, both here and back where you are, Sheriff Warrick. Trey Watkins and the people in that balloon. And I’m sorry to say it appears Chief Dunn’s had a hand in them. But that’s not why I’m calling now. What’s pressing now is I’m pretty sure he’s got Dani Whalen with him, who’s aware of his involvement in these matters, and I believe he may have already done something terrible to her to keep her quiet. She’s gone missing and we don’t know where he is, and we need to find him, Sheriff, now—if it’s not already too late.”

“You think he’s going to
what
…?” the Aspen sheriff asked.

“I don’t know, sir. But he was apparently being squeezed by people up here to shut her up. Bad people.”

“Dani Whalen …” The sheriff already seemed to be in gear. “She’s Wade’s stepdaughter, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is, Sheriff,” Hauck said worriedly. “She is.”

They were almost at the summit now. Dani recalled that the access road led to a flat cliff top, which during the day paragliders and base jumpers used as a jumping-off point. And a sheer drop of two thousand feet.

She eyed Wade’s gun, but knew she couldn’t get close to it. What was he going to do, shoot her up there and then roll her body off to the valley floor? At the top, there would be nowhere for her to run or escape other than over the cliff.

Dani’s heart began to race. There was only a couple of hundred feet left to climb.

“I remember when I first met you,” Dani said. She wiped the blood off her chin. “I was what, ten? You were a whole lot different than my dad, and I went, ‘What the hell has mom brought home now?’”

He looked at her and tried to convey he wasn’t into this. “Shut up.”

“You weren’t exactly a girl’s dad,” Dani went on. “You were into all this cowboy stuff and had this hard exterior. But I got to like you, didn’t I? And I always thought you liked me. I kind of thought we had this deal. We didn’t show we liked each other, but inside we really did. In a way, I think you turned me a little into the person I am today. All the rough edges. And stubbornness.”

“I said, shut up!” He glared at her. “You were just a brat. You came with the deal.”

“No, I don’t believe you, Wade. We had good times. I can remember them. When you took me back east to school, all my roommates thought you were the bee’s knees. With your python boots and turquoise ring, all the big movie actors you knew …”

He shook his head. “It’s not gonna work, Dani. Please don’t make this harder than it already is.”

Dani saw that the tree line had thinned. Only another quarter mile or so of road. “I actually remember that I—”

A voice came over the radio. Up until then it had just been police cars and dispatchers talking between themselves. This time the voice was different.

“Chief Dunn. It’s Dave. Can you hear me?” Dave Warrick.

Wade slowed. He seemed startled. He turned the volume up, but didn’t make a move to talk back.

“Wade, we know where you are. You know as well as I do there’s a tracking device in the GPS of all your cars. We know you’re on Red Mountain. And we know who’s with you.”

Wade slowly pulled to a stop. They were only about a hundred feet below the summit. He sat there impassively. As if not knowing whether to go forward or turn back. Whether to reply or not. He closed his eyes.

“Wade, it’s all over now.” Warrick’s voice crackled in. “The people who were pressuring you are either dead or in custody. There’s no point getting yourself in any deeper. Or hurting people you care about. I spoke to someone named Hauck.” At the sound of his name, Dani’s insides soared. “He told me about Trey and those people in the balloon. Wade, I want you to stay where you are until we can get a car to you. Dani, can you hear me? Are you all right …?”

“Tell him I’m okay, Wade,” Dani said. “Please …”

Wade opened his eyes back up. His face seemed to have a different cast on it now. Like some doomed, trapped inevitability. Instead of nodding, he just put his foot back on the gas again and continued up the mountain.

“Wade, you can’t,” Dani pleaded. “They know. It’s over. There’s no point going forward.”

He just kept gunning the engine up to the last rise.

“Wade, I want you to answer me,” Sheriff Warrick said. “We’ve been friends a long time. You were always respectful to me, how things went, and I hope you always felt I was to you. I want to hear that Dani’s okay. You have to let her do that now, okay …?”

Wade ignored him and kept the SUV going forward.

“Wade, let me talk to him, please.
Chief … Chief!
” The reply button wasn’t on; there was no response. “Please, let me tell them that I’m okay and that you’ll wait for the other officers. I’ll be here with you. Kyle would want that, wouldn’t he?”

Wade pushed the accelerator up the last rise, his eyes narrowed ahead.

“
Wade, please …?
” Dani said, more firmly. The SUV picked up speed. “Wade!” she shouted, becoming scared he was about to do something crazy.

Finally they rose up over the last bumpy rise to the top of the mountain. The stars were close and bright. Millions of them. A canopy of lights. A thousand homes sparkling brightly on the valley floor. Wade traversed slowly over the ridges and rocky growths as what was left of the road came to a stop. Dani’s heart picked up. Wade pulled to within ten feet or so of the edge.