A few times he spotted Abby and Jenna on the chairlift or cruising down the slopes. Abby seemed to be doing just fine. Twice he and Galvin met up with Lucy and Celina on the Shadow Mountain chairlift line. If Lucy was annoyed about being left behind in favor of Galvin, she didn’t display it.
At a few minutes past one thirty, the adults all gathered out behind the Sundeck restaurant by the picnic tables to wait for the girls. They stashed their skis in a rack. Galvin lit up a cigar. He waggled it at Danny with a questioning look.
Danny shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”
A few diners at the picnic tables were giving Galvin poisonous glares, but he didn’t seem to notice, and if did, he didn’t care.
Something about him seemed different. He was unusually preoccupied, pensive. Maybe he’d made a bad trade at work. Lost a couple hundred million dollars. Maybe he and Celina had had a fight.
Maybe that was all.
Anyway, how well did he really know the guy? They’d had a couple of friendly chats. They’d bonded over their similar backgrounds. Men don’t sit around sharing their feelings. They do stuff together. They don’t cry together or gossip; they watch football on TV, maybe play poker. They drink together, rib each other.
Maybe he was preoccupied. Or maybe he really was about to meet his contacts from the Sinaloa cartel.
“Hey, you,” Lucy said to Danny. “You took off.”
“I’m sorry about that. I guess I just wanted to push the edge of the envelope. My bad.”
“Men and their competitiveness,” she said, shaking her head, amused.
Danny made a stop in the men’s room, clomping, with his ski boots on, like Frankenstein’s monster.
When he returned, Galvin was gone.
“Tom went back to the slopes,” Celina said. “He said he wasn’t hungry.” Something about the way she spoke, the way her eyes wouldn’t meet his, prickled Danny’s suspicions.
“Which way did he go?” Danny said. “I think I’ll join him. I don’t mind skipping lunch.”
“I saw him going that way,” Abby said. She pointed vaguely toward the uncleared back section of the mountain, away from the blue and black trails, down the hill on the other side of the gondola landing.
“Oh, stay with us,” said Lucy.
“Knowing Daddy,” said Jenna, “he’ll be doing one of the double black diamond runs.”
“I wouldn’t mind trying a couple of double black diamond runs,” Danny said.
“I think maybe Tom is just wanting to ski by himself,” Celina said. Her tone was brittle. She gave Danny a quick but penetrating look.
Danny, pretending not to hear her, headed toward the uncleared area.
“You’re not staying for lunch?” Lucy said. “You sure?”
“I’m good,” he said.
And he set off in search of Tom Galvin.
46
On this side of the mountain, beyond the railing, were yellow signs on tall posts warning SKI BOUNDARY. The area was cordoned off with a pink neon rope. A diamond-shaped yellow caution sign: DANGER-NO SKIING BEYOND THIS POINT. Another one read WARNING! HAZARDS EXIST THAT ARE NOT MARKED-SKI WITH CARE. Just beyond that, a red sign mounted on a pole declared: THIS IS YOUR DECISION POINT. BACKCOUNTRY RISKS INCLUDE DEATH.
There were no marked trails here. There were no trails at all. This was the off-piste, ungroomed section, reserved for the most adventurous expert skiers, the hard-core powder heads and freeriders, the rippers and the shredders.
He could see a few lone tracks from skis and snowshoes. Also the parallel corduroy tracks laid down by the teeth and tread of a Sno-Cat, the snow vehicle that could climb up or down the mountainside. People generally didn’t ski terrain this rough on their own. Adventurers usually went in groups led by guides on Sno-Cats.
Had Galvin really taken off down this side of the mountain? It didn’t seem likely.
It didn’t seem at all likely that Galvin had gone this way. Abby must have been mistaken.
Then he noticed something dark and gnarled and malodorous in the snow a few paces ahead: the discarded butt of a cigar, like the turd of a small dog.
He peered down the mountainside, hoping to catch a glimpse of Galvin’s yellow parka among the glades. Nothing. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t skied down this way. He might just be out of sight, down a gulley, on the far side of a swell.
The sunlight reflecting off the snow dazzled his eyes. He put on his goggles and took a deep breath and stood at the lip of a cornice.
The snowdrifts looked seriously deep. Based on the diameter and taper of the tree trunks, he estimated that the snow was as deep as six feet in some places. This was not terrain he was used to skiing. Untouched, ungroomed runs like this, with such a deep snowpack, were meant for backcountry skiers.
Not him.
He briefly weighed making a desperation move-attempting a controlled descent, carving long turns side to side, zigzagging to slow his speed. But standing on the ledge and looking down, he realized what a preposterous idea it was to try skiing this side of the mountain. He turned his skis to one side-and felt the ledge crumble beneath him.
Suddenly he was plummeting, rocketing down the steep decline. He found himself whooshing through powder a foot deep, unlike the hardpack on the other side of the mountain, where the snow was flattened by hundreds, maybe thousands of skis every day. Here the snow was fluffy and lighter than air. It was like gliding through a cloud.
But the wide-open bowl quickly gave way to a more densely forested area, the tall pines scattered on the mountainside. Now he found himself weaving in and among and around the trees, picking up speed. Pines popped up before him like the looming obstacles in a video game. He carved a hard turn to one side, swerved to the other, slaloming between closely set tree trunks. From somewhere deep in his memory he recalled that the best trick for swooping between the trees was to focus on the white spaces in between, aiming carefully.
He swooped and carved, faster and faster, propelled down the hill by gravity and momentum, and he tried to slow himself down. But the only way to do that was to carve back and forth, shift his weight from one side to the other. And that he couldn’t do. Because he was catapulting downhill so fast, with so little clearance between the trees, he couldn’t afford an unnecessary turn even a few degrees to one side or the other. His skis shuddered. His legs and thighs burned from the unaccustomed muscular exertion. And the terrain between the trees was wildly inconsistent. In some places the snow was deep and fluffy; in other places were sheer patches of ice, and every so often he hit a rocky knuckle. His face felt frozen solid. He caromed faster and faster, always aware that the slightest miscalculation would send him crashing into a tree trunk.
Suddenly his skis crunched against something, which he realized only too late was a ridge, a cliff.
Midair, soaring, he felt time slow. He could see the sharply pitched slope, the rocky chasm directly below, and he knew that if he dropped too quickly, he would hit the rocks and be instantly killed.
He knew his fate was outside his control. He couldn’t alter the force of gravity or the trajectory of his descent. He’d vaulted down an icy chute into a twenty-foot drop, a vertical rock wall, with nothing but slippery boards strapped to his feet and no brakes.
And yet, for one brief passing moment, it was exhilarating. To feel nothing below him. Airborne, free falling, a human projectile, a missile. It was thrilling. Like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The wind howled in his ears.
He was just a few seconds, and one wrong turn, away from the finality of death.