At night, helicopters buzzed through the skies, heading up to the national park and the thousands of square miles of mountain terrain and forest land.
Kowalski called me five days later, on an afternoon full of sirens, and said, “Bradley’s loose.”
“What’s that mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“A former bank robber out of the joint only a couple of days hijacks a balloon that causes the death of a good samaritan, and you spring him?”
“Blame your judicial system, not me. He was obviously out of his head, so they put him under guard at the hospital, in the mental wing. They said it was depression brought on by grief. You can’t help but feel sorry for the guy, his kid gone and all. He got flowers and prayer cards by the truckload. He slept for ninety-six hours straight, cuffed to the bed. What they call nonresponsive. Not a coma, just a deep sleep. They thought he might be dying. Losing his will to live.”
“Cripes.”
“Like he was forcing himself to kick the bucket. He started going into respiratory failure, so they got a crash cart in there, defibrillator, oxygen mask, the whole works. Five minutes after they got him breathing normally again, he woke up, kicked the hell out of a nurse, and stole a car from the parking lot.”
I think I hissed. “This is terrific.”
“Anyway, Bradley knocked over another bank an hour after he got free, still wearing his hospital gown. Nobody knows where he got the gun. This time he smartened up some. Got almost thirty grand, no dye pack, though he set off an alarm. But he was out of there in a hurry, and now he’s on the run.”
I thought about the kind of man who would stop off somewhere for a gun but not put on a pair of pants before committing grand larceny.
“He’s going to come after me,” I said. “He thinks I killed his kid because I let go of the rope.”
Even if I hadn’t been a paranoid writer with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, I would’ve thought that. It had been that laugh of Bradley’s. It wasn’t only insane. It had that see-you-later quality to it.
Kowalski grunted. “He’s a nut. If he goes anywhere, it’ll be back to his ex-wife’s place.”
“No, he only went there for his son. Any word on the kid?”
“No, no sign of the balloon. Maybe it held to the front range and came down in somebody’s field. I don’t know. We probably won’t know for a while yet.”
“Listen—”
But he was done. Kowalski was the type of cop who got bored easily and always had to be in charge of a conversation. “I picked up one of your books,” he said. “I read about half of it. I didn’t like it. So I gave it to my wife.”
“Listen—”
“She reads everything. She didn’t like it either.”
“Listen to me. Bradley will show up here next.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“More than that, he just walked in my door. He’s got a gun on me. Gotta go.”
I hung up and Bradley smiled at me from my apartment doorway. I figured the apartment manager had gotten tired of dealing with reporters trying to get into the building and had disconnected the buzzer wiring. I was going to die because I hadn’t double-checked it. I’d gotten slack in Colorado. I wasn’t paranoid enough anymore, just bored, like Kowalski, and waiting for the end.
Bradley started in with that hideous laughter until every muscle in my body had tightened to the point of trembling. At least he’d put on pants, I was glad to see. How awful it would’ve been to get snuffed by a guy in a hospital gown. The noise got louder and I started breathing so fast that I got light-headed. For a second I saw the kid with his backwards head standing behind his father, still saying “Daddy,” his white hand pointing at me.
I’d had my run-ins with maniacs before. Most people in the world have, but definitely everybody in New York. They were common maniacs, but still pretty “out there.” With me, it had mostly been ex-girlfriends who started off talking about taking care of me for the rest of my life and ended up setting fire to my cars. I’d had an obsessive stalker who claimed one of my horror stories had opened a portal to hell and released his father. He’d shown up at my apartment in Manhattan with a switchblade and tried to stab me with it overhand instead of slipping it between my ribs. I had a half-inch-deep scarred gouge from where the knife had deflected off my sternum. It was one of the reasons why I’d left home.
Frank Bradley held a snub-nosed .38 on me. It wasn’t a Colorado gun. The guys out here carried Colt .45s and rifles, but nothing as slick as a snub .38. You didn’t show off to your cowboy barroom cronies or go hunting elk with a .38. There was only one purpose to it. You put it up to somebody’s forehead and you took him out of the game fast.
We stood there like that for two minutes. It was a long two minutes. It gave me time to think about my regrets. There were a lot of them. Bradley’s laughter eventually died out, but he kept sneering at me. It was an expression I’d seen many times in my life, and it infuriated me as much now as it always had before.
Up close now I saw the kind of man he was — had been, would always be. Every smashed hope etched into his features. The lost chances, the missed turnoffs. The failed efforts, the stupid moves, and the mistakes that shouldn’t have cost him as much as they had. All of them his own fault, by his own hand. All of them covered by a hundred excuses and scapegoats. You didn’t have to look hard to see it all there.
“Bradley, think about—”
“Don’t talk. I don’t want to hear you talk.”
So we stood there for another few minutes. It gave us both more time to think about the past, to wonder if there’d be a future.
You can get used to anything if you endure it long enough. Even with the gun trained on me, I started to relax. The longer someone doesn’t pull a trigger, the more you believe it won’t happen. Anything was better than listening to that laugh.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing with the barrel.
I moved down the hall and out into the parking lot with all the false dignity of an aristocrat heading for the guillotine. He pointed to a Mustang with the engine running. “You drive.”
“Where?”
“Don’t talk, I’ll tell you.”
I drove as he directed me. We roamed the area for a while in a strange pattern that I eventually recognized as the path the balloon probably took from Berthoud up 287 to the park. I saw the empty grounds where the carnival had set up. We slipped back into town and around the park and the lake before he aimed us toward the mountains.
I drove the canyon roads heading higher and higher into the Rockies, wondering if I should try something stupid like crashing into the narrow cliff walls. My mind was stuffed with dumb thoughts and I kept trying to cycle through them until something intelligent hit me. Nothing did.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“Because you’ve got a gun on me.”
“Here, in this town.”
“I’ve been trying very hard to figure that out.”
He swiped the pistol barrel across my head. I was lucky it was only a snub-nose. Despite his silence and his outward relative calm, he was wired and explosive. He really didn’t know how to handle a gun. He barely tapped me, but I didn’t take it lightly. The fact that he didn’t know what he was doing meant he might crack my skull open next time, or the .38 might accidentally go off.
“Do you know what you did?” he asked.
“Got involved,” I said.
“You killed my boy.”
“I tried to help. I held on to a rope sixty feet in the air for as long as I could.”
“Not long enough! You couldn’t hold it long enough!”
“Neither could you.”
He shoved the barrel into my ribs this time, growling and groaning, speaking words that weren’t words except maybe in his nightmares. For four days he’d forced himself to sleep, on his way toward death, but had woken up just so he could make this play for me, the scapegoat for his own stabbing conscience.