It was already too late to jump. We were over the small lake in the center of the park. Pretty but man-made, only about four feet deep. If any of us cut loose now, even over the water, we’d hit with enough force to drive our kneecaps up through our chests. My father used to tell me about parachuting soldiers who’d leaped out over the Nam jungles and landed wrong. Twenty years later and the images were still sharp and bright in my mind. On top of everything else, I wanted to clock my father.
The kid was crying and Bradley was moaning, unable to climb any higher. He didn’t sound smart or sane or even human. He should’ve been yelling to his kid to hit the kill switch. I opened my mouth to shout and could barely hear myself. The rushing wind drove my voice back into my throat.
If you’re lucky, you get to puzzle out your what-the-hell-am-I-doing moments later on in the game. You look back and you can’t believe it occurred, and you’ve got no idea how it was you wound up there, doing that thing.
Now I’d made it down again intact. The other two guys who’d lent a hand hadn’t.
“What the hell happened?” I asked. “Who is this guy? Where’d this balloon come from?”
There was a second when Kowalski almost gave me the “I’ll ask the questions, sir” speech, but he could see it wasn’t going to work on me the way it did on the rich retirees waiting out the end of their lives up in Estes Park.
A lot of yelling was coming from Bradley’s tree. It took three firemen on cherry pickers working up into the pine to finally grab hold of him and pull him down. He screamed as they lowered him and went wild when he hit the ground. He started seething and throwing punches and hissing worse than an animal, calling for Johnny like the kid might be just a few feet behind him, just out of eyeshot.
He spun on his heels and began to laugh in a way I’d never heard anybody laugh before, not even the schizos and addicts in the East Village alleys. It was so chilling it brushed me back a step. Kowalski felt it, too, and he puffed his chest out and held his chin up as a way to defend himself against it.
Three officers joined the firemen and they all wrestled Bradley onto his belly and got the cuffs on him.
I said, “Hey, come on...!” but Kowalski just scowled at me and started listening to and talking into his radio again. It looked like Bradley had slugged and elbowed a few of the cops. Blood speckled their faces. They’d follow procedure when it came down to somebody attacking their brother officers. It didn’t matter where you went, cops would always be the same about that.
They carried him to a cruiser and tossed him into the back. As it pulled across the field, Bradley turned in the backseat to stare at me. He wasn’t laughing anymore, but that goddamn chill stayed with me.
“Tell me what you people know so far,” I said.
Kowalski tightened his lips and then shrugged. “Information is still coming in. Looks like this one, his name’s Frank Bradley. Used to run some book in Nevada before he took a fall for bank robbery.”
“What?”
“Yeah, his wife split with the son. He figures it’s because he’s not making enough cash. So he walks in, grabs a manager by the throat, forces the guy to clear a couple of the tills. Sets off about five silent alarms. He gets something like three grand, walks outside, the dye pack explodes, and he’s standing there in the parking lot turning purple when the local PD arrives. He’s not what you call one of your better planners.”
I shook my head. “That’s more than just stupidity. This guy’s crazy.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. He did two years in the state pen. Gets out and goes looking for his wife. Finds out she’s split the state and come to Colorado. Tracks her to Berthoud. Grabs the kid and wheels off with him. Tells the boy he’s going to get him ice cream and toys and balloons. They drive by the spring carnival down there, off 17 and 287. They’ve got a hot-air balloon set up.”
“My God. So he hijacks it?”
“Figured he’d be funny, I guess. Probably tells his boy, ‘Look at the balloon I got you.’ Anyway, the thing is roped to the ground, it’s just supposed to go up twenty feet or so, then back down. But Bradley takes the kid up and unties the safety lines, forces the carnival guy to fire it all the way up. They start hovering and catch a stiff breeze. The carnival guy jumps out the other side of the basket, falls ten feet, and sprains his ankle. Bradley tries to screw around with the controls and the next thing you know—”
“The maniac is drifting over Loveland Park, holding on to one of the ropes himself.”
“Yeah.”
“Any chance the kid might be okay?”
“Maybe, if we can find him in time.”
It wasn’t going to happen.
He knew it and I knew it. I looked at the expanse of the Rockies, thinking about how far the balloon had already traveled, up from Berthoud. If the wind hadn’t been from the east, and the balloon had instead carried out toward Greeley, they could’ve tracked him no matter how long it took. There was nothing for thirty miles in that direction except farmland.
But heading west from the foothills, with the balloon drifting higher from the jammed burner, it would float across the range and just keep going until it hit a cliff and dumped the kid across a couple thousand feet of mountain.
Kowalski stared off in the direction the cruiser had gone with Bradley. I looked that way too, the chill working against me, tightening the skin on the back of my neck. That laugh. Jesus.
I made a full statement at the police department and signed the paperwork. They escorted me to my apartment and didn’t look back after they’d dropped me off. While I sat on my couch drinking a tumbler of whiskey — feeling the walls closing in on me, my hands twitching as if I were still holding on to the line, thinking I’d maybe never sleep again — I slept and dreamed of the boy.
He was dying, but not quite there yet. He stood in front of me, one small hand pressed against my chest. But his head was turned completely around. He spoke, and his words faded out behind him. I heard “Daddy,” and “Help,” and even my own name. It was one of those dreams where you couldn’t run or speak or do any damn thing at all. I knew I was asleep but couldn’t break out of it. I could feel myself gripping the cushions someplace far away, and heard a voice that wasn’t entirely my own, mewling there. I grabbed the kid by the shoulder and tried to spin him around, but his head kept turning away from me.
The media went nuts. It was a big story for Colorado. Bizarre and full of human interest. You looked at it one way and you saw a bunch of strangers trying to help out a kid, one of them losing his life, another paralyzed from the shoulders down. His name was Bill Mandor and he was on every channel. Half his face was bandaged and around the edges it looked like he’d been scraped to the bone when he hit the dog walk. The one good thing about his being paralyzed was that he couldn’t feel his shattered legs and spine and didn’t need painkillers. He looked clear-headed and spoke like the kind of heroes I remembered from when I was a kid. Men who could staunchly handle the worst events and injuries through willpower and nobility. He made me shake my head.
Reporters camped out on the lawn in front of my apartment manager’s door. I took the phone off the hook and didn’t answer the door for three days. Eventually the camera crews got bored and left. I watched cable news programs every waking moment hoping there’d be information about the boy, but despite hundreds of volunteers hiking all over the front range, the canyons, and the east side of the divide, nobody had seen the balloon. It seemed impossible.