One Mile Under (5 page)

A call came in on the radio. Steve, in the next balloon. “Ron, you got something wrong on your right side. You’re definitely losing your pitch. Can you see it? You better get yourself down. Pronto.”

“I hear ya,” Ron replied. “Exactly what I’m doing, Sorry, folks, seems to be some kind of malfunction up there. I’m going to have to take her down. Shouldn’t be a problem.” He kept pumping in as much heat as the balloon would take. But still they kept coming down.

“Cole! Cole!” he radioed in to the company attendant at the landing field. “Something’s wrong with the balloon. We’re leaking air. I’m coming back. Now.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said supportively to his passengers, who were now clearly anxious. “We’ve got a malfunction in the canvas. But I’ll get you down. These babies are fit to—”

Suddenly he heard another tear. They all heard it this time.
Phhfft
. “What the Sam Hill …”

The basket lurched again, this time terrifyingly. Then there was a deep groan emanating from above, hot air leaking out, colder air coming in.

The balloon swaying and collapsing.

Over the radio he heard, “Ron, you’ve got a full-scale implosion going on! I can see it. Get your ass down as fast as you can.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Ron replied. He continued to rev the valves, thrusting as much heat as he could into the envelope, compensating for the cold air rushing in through the tear, to bring them down at a manageable speed.

It wasn’t working.

“
What’s going on? What’s going on?
” the financial guy was yelling. Their descent started to pick up speed. “Do something!”

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Ron said. “Everyone be calm.”

They were still five hundred feet up. He looked up and saw the huge tear on one side, a flap in the material buckling and falling over, a huge swath of it suddenly falling down on top of the basket, and to Ron’s horror, catching the flame and suddenly igniting.

The balloon became engulfed in flame.

“
Do something!
” the financial guy’s wife shrieked, her eyes bulging in terror.

“There’s nothing I
can
do!” Ron replied, continuing to rev heat into the useless, crumpled canopy. He grabbed the radio. “Mayday, mayday, we’re going down!” They started to fall out of the sky, picking up speed. The ropes holding the basket could catch at any second and then …

The financier’s wife was sobbing on the floor mat. Her husband gripped the basket’s rim and looked down in disbelief. The Japanese couple huddled together.

Ron shouted, “You know a prayer, this would be the time to say it.”

He always wondered what this would feel like. How he would react. In his dreams he had dreamed it many times. It was like a bad trip. And he’d had many of those. “Mayday, mayday!” he screamed uselessly into the radio as the basket began to plummet. “
Oh Jesus Lord, we’re going down!
”

Dani saw it as she headed into town before her rendezvous with Ron.

Around the cutoff to the Aspen Industrial Park just after the airport, traffic was being slowed into one lane. She saw EMT vehicles, their lights flashing, and it seemed as if every cop in the valley was there. A throng of people, many out of their cars, were lining the highway looking on. In the large field which the Aspen by Air Balloon Adventure used as their takeoff site, a plume of black smoke funneled high into the air.

What the hell had happened?

Dani pulled up to one of the cops who was waving on traffic. She recognized him as a guy she had gone to high school with, Wesley Fletcher. She rolled down her window and leaned out of her wagon. “What’s the hell’s going on, Wes?”

“Balloon dropped out of the sky. Five people on board, Dani. Traffic’s being routed onto Rectory Street into town.”

“Five people.” Dani felt her stomach tighten “
Whose?
” she asked, though she was sure she knew the answer even before the question even was out of her mouth. “Whose balloon was it, Wes?”

“Aspen by Air. Rick Ketchum’s company. They’re up every day.”

“I don’t mean who owned it. Who was operating it?” Dani pressed, a feeling of dread grinding in the pit of her stomach. “The one that went down.”

“All I was told was that there were four tourists on board. And everyone’s dead. And some guy named Ron.”

“
Ron?
” Dani’s heart went still.
Rooster.

“I guess the balloon fell apart at five hundred feet into a ball of flames. But, look, I have to wave you on now, Dani. Gotta get these vehicles routed over onto Rectory, and as you can see—”

“Is that Chief Dunn’s car over there?” She saw a white and green SUV with the Carbondale police lettering on it, among the many vehicles pulled up in the field.

“I think that’s him. I saw him drive up earlier.”

“Thanks, Wes.” Dani pushed on the gas and caught up to the car in front of her. She got as far as the rotary until she realized she no longer had any reason to be here now. She pulled over to the side and let her head drop against the wheel.
Poor Rooster
. Her heart felt heavy as she tried to imagine such a grisly descent. Things like this just didn’t happen here. But that was only part of it. Part of what was making her insides feel so worrisome. The rest was what Rooster had claimed he’d seen yesterday, and now he was dead. The fool was going around shooting his mouth off.

He wasn’t alone out there. That wasn’t no accident.

Dani looked one last time at the plume of black smoke. Hot-air balloons just didn’t fall out of the sky.

She waited until the end of the day, until she saw his vehicle parked outside the station back in Carbondale. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to see him at work. Years. Certainly not since her mom had died.

“He’s on the phone,” a female duty officer said. Dani didn’t recognize her.

It wasn’t a big station, tucked into a corner of the Carbondale Town Center. Three or four desks, and some workstations. A room with a vending machine that doubled as an interrogation room. There were one or two detectives; whatever they did, Dani never knew. Any real investigation or forensic work was handled out of Aspen. When Wade took the job—the only job he could get—he joked that it was mostly setting up DUI roadblocks and the occasional marijuana bust.

And now, new state laws had even taken
that
away from him.

“If you wait over there I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“I’m his stepdaughter,” Dani said. “He’ll see me.”

She went right past her, the duty officer standing up, surprised, going, “Hey!” Wade was at his desk on the phone, his feet propped up against a drawer. The ever-present python-skin boots and that large, turquoise, Indian ring. He’d probably die with them on. On the shelf behind him were a couple of photos. Wade in his glory days. With his arm around Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. Another with a younger-looking ex-president Gerald Ford. There were a couple of Kyle. One in his army uniform while in Afghanistan; the other, he and Wade fishing up in Idaho. Apparently, Dani hadn’t make the cut. There were a couple of AA books stacked on the credenza, and an empty bourbon bottle, which he always said he kept close as a constant reminder of worse days.

“Let me know when they finish up …” Wade was saying. He eyed Dani unhappily, as the young officer who had asked her to wait rushed in after. Wade waved her off with a
Don’t worry about it
gesture, motioning Dani into a chair.

She didn’t take it.

“I’ll check in with the guy from the Parks Service as soon as he finishes up,” he said. “Be talking with you then. Thanks.” He hung up and took his feet off the open drawer.

“The duty officer out there didn’t make it clear I was on with business,” he said, scowling at Dani like she’d burst in to sell him a new cell phone contract.

“You’ve got a problem, Wade.”

“Thanks for pointing that out to me, Danielle. Let’s see, five people are dead. The whole world’s gonna be breathing down our backs looking for answers. I always knew we did a good job by sending you back east to that fancy college.”

“
Six,
Wade. There are six people dead. And just to keep the record clear, you didn’t send me. Mom did.”

He wheeled his chair around to face her. “Well, I sure took you, didn’t I? So anyway, six. If you count what happened out on the river. You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been a pretty crazy twenty-four hours here. Not that the two are in any way related.”

“But that’s just the problem.” Dani stepped up to the desk. “I’m pretty sure they are. Related.”

Wade snorted a short blast of air out of his nostrils, his round, sagging eyes regarding her both skeptically and condescendingly. “I asked you to sit, Danielle.”

This time she sank into a hardwood chair across from him.

“And what makes you think some hotshot kid taking a spill on the river would be related to a tragedy like this …?”

“I was headed into to town to meet with Rooster,” Dani said. “Just after it must’ve happened.”

“
Rooster?
” Wade shrugged.

“Ron. Kessler, I think was his last name. He was manning that balloon.”

“I knew who was manning the balloon, Danielle. And I knew his name. I called him a lot of things, but Rooster wasn’t one of them. All right, you barged in here, you’ve got my attention. I don’t know why your paths would cross with the likes of him, but you were going in to meet with him why …?”

“He was at the Black Nugget last night.”

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me one bit.” Wade snorted derisively.

“A few of us were having a little tribute to Trey. Rooster … Ron was at the bar and cut in about how he saw something yesterday morning from his balloon.”

“He saw something …?” Wade rolled his eyes.

Dani said, “Exactly how I thought you’d react, Wade. And why Ron said he didn’t want to come to you with it in the first place. He heard us talking and he said what happened out there to Trey wasn’t an accident. That he wasn’t alone out there. He said he had seen something, but he backed down because Trey’s friend Rudy Thommasson and John Booth were a little drunk and got him all nervous. You know how Rooster gets. Anyway, he called me after I got home and asked me to meet him this morning in town.”

“Asked you to meet him …?” Wade scrunched his brow. “To tell you that Trey Watkins wasn’t alone on the river. Meaning, what, that someone was along with him? Or was there when it happened? You’re saying someone was responsible for his death?”

“I don’t know what he meant. Only that he said it wasn’t an accident. He was about to tell me after his run.”

“Look, Danielle.” Wade squared around. “I don’t mean to speak poorly of the dead, but Ron Kessler was a person who wouldn’t know what was real from a half-gallon jug of rotgut vodka. And when he wasn’t boozing he was just a fool who would say anything that came into his mind if he thought it would get a rise. I bailed his ass out in AA enough times and he was never once honest with me. I even volunteered to be his sponsor once, when no one else in the program would have him. I don’t know how they even let him operate that balloon, but from all I heard he did his job and it wasn’t his fault.”

“He wasn’t drunk,” Dani said.

“He wasn’t drunk?” Wade eyed her skeptically and snickered.

“Last night. He wasn’t. I know everything you said. We all thought so. But he made a big point of saying he’d been sober for three weeks. And I believe him. He even showed what he was drinking at the bar. Ginger ale.”

“Dani, I don’t care if the guy was sober as a preacher, Kessler would tell you whatever you wanted to hear if it stepped him up one tiny notch in his own importance. Your friend flipped his raft five miles out of town on the Roaring Fork River. Even if something did happen out there, whatever the hell he meant—which I’m not saying, only making a point—no way he could have seen that from the air.”

“He said he was the only balloon up that morning and he took some extra cash from the customers to stay up and let it drift a bit over the valley. That’s why he didn’t want to bring it up. He didn’t want what he did to come back to his boss and bite him. That, and because he knew you’d say exactly what you did. Which was why he came to me.”

“Well, I guess I never made it much of a secret.” Wade nodded. “You learn to live with people’s weaknesses in the program. God knows, I’ve had to own up to enough of mine. But let’s just keep it that ol’ Ron, or Rooster, or whatever the hell he went by, zigged when the world zagged one too many times over the years and the world hasn’t been a straight line to him since.”

“Then I’d guess you ought to understand that yourself,” Dani stared at him, “and be a little more sympathetic.”

Wade’s eyes grew fiery, but then they calmed, and he let out a long exhale. “Yes. On that point you’re right. I do. Understand. But I don’t have the time to argue that with you now …”

“Wade, look,” Dani pulled up her chair, “anyone who knows anything knows Trey could handle the lower Cradle rapids in his sleep. And even if what took place happened somewhere farther upstream, say around the falls, the raft likely would have washed up somewhere north.”

“So you’re saying, what? Someone killed him? Someone was out there with him, like this Rooster said. And then what? That what happened to
him
up there this morning, and all those other poor people, was
what …
to keep that gerbil from running off his mouth off or something? To stop him from telling the world what he claims he saw. You did start this whole thing off implying they were connected.”

“I don’t know what I’m saying, Wade. But balloons just don’t fall out of the sky. A day after someone goes around saying that they’ve seen something. Whatever else you might want to say about him, Ron did know how to handle himself up there. He’d been doing it for a lot of years.”

“I don’t know, maybe there was a rip or a flaw in the fabric or something. Or maybe something flammable got caught in the gas jet. The right people will figure that out. Or maybe your poster boy there just did something stupid, which he was eminently capable of doing, Dani.” He shook his head.