Galvin turned around, looking at Danny. “I want us to talk in private,” he said. His eyes slid toward the driver and back again. Was Galvin saying he didn’t want his driver to hear? “We’re gonna go for a walk.”
They kept on driving for a while. Danny had no sense of how long it was. He’d grown sleepy, lulled by the monotony of the road, yet he was too apprehensive to doze. A few cars passed, but not many. Then the Suburban signaled left and turned onto an unpaved road. Not just a dirt road, but rock-strewn: The vehicle canted and crunched and sidled and shuddered. They came upon a yellow diamond-shaped sign:
4-WHEEL DRIVES ONLY PAST THIS POINT
That was followed by another sign, bigger and rectangular and more urgent:
ATTENTION DRIVERS
EXTREMELY ROUGH ROAD AHEAD
VEHICLE TRAFFIC DISCOURAGED
4X4 WITH EXPERIENCED DRIVERS
AND NARROW WHEEL BASE ONLY
“What’s the plan?” Danny said uneasily.
“You’ll see,” Galvin said.
The road quickly grew narrower, lined on either side with trees and wild shrubbery: spindly spruce and fir trees caked with snow, dense stands of barren aspens, wind-deformed willows and scraggly branches, snow-dusted scrub oak and pines.
Another road sign loomed into view:
THIS IS THE LAST CHANCE TO TURN AROUND OR
PASS ANOTHER VEHICLE FOR MILES.
NARROW ROAD WITH STEEP DROP OFFS.
IF YOU ARE NOT ON FOOT, A BIKE, OR AN ATV
YOU SHOULD TURN AROUND NOW!
In another five hundred or so feet the road ended. A ROAD CLOSED sign, striped with orange reflective tape and screwed on to a couple of ground-mounted I-beam supports, barricaded the way. It didn’t look temporary. It looked seasonal. The road was closed for the winter.
Danny now had a fairly good idea what kind of walk Galvin intended to take him on, and he was finding it hard to breathe.
There was no one around, no one within sight, no one within earshot. For miles, probably.
Lucy was the only one who’d seen Galvin leave with Danny, and as far as she knew, Galvin was dropping him off at home. He’d made a point of saying so, Danny now recalled.
The Suburban pulled over to the side of the road, next to a downed paper birch.
Galvin said something to his driver in rapid Spanish.
“Tom,” Danny said.
But Alejandro had switched off the engine and gotten out, then came around and opened the middle passenger door and reached in to get him.
49
Something in the set of the driver’s grim expression told him not to bother struggling. He got out of the car and said, “What’s going on?”
“I told you. I want us to go for a walk.”
“I’m not really up to it, Tom.”
“I want to show you something.”
Alejandro went around to the passenger’s side of the front seat and opened the door for Galvin, who also got out.
Galvin crossed in front of the Suburban and put an arm around Danny’s shoulder and walked with him toward the ROAD CLOSED sign.
“What’s this all about, Tom?”
At the barrier, Galvin stepped ahead of him, between a fence post and a coil of orange plastic road barrier mesh that looked like it had been just tossed there. Danny looked back, saw Alejandro standing by the car, waiting.
Reluctantly, he followed Galvin.
Just up ahead, he saw, the mountain road juked at a sharp angle.
“I want you to see one of God’s miracles,” Galvin said. He leaned down, picked up a stone, and hurled it.
Danny didn’t hear it drop.
When he rounded the bend, he saw why. The road was no longer a road. It had become a narrow ledge that ran along the side of a jagged, rocky canyon cliff.
A cliff that dropped straight down forever.
The canyon wall below the path was a sheer, straight drop, virtually perpendicular. It looked like a shelf that had been blasted out of the rock face. He didn’t see how even a small four-wheel-drive vehicle could fit all four of its tires on the one-lane road. Or how a car approaching from the opposite direction could possibly get by.
There was no guardrail. There were patches of snow and ice.
His heart began hammering.
Galvin was wearing Timberland boots; Danny wore sneakers. It wouldn’t take much for Danny to lose his footing on the ice or the rubble-covered ledge and slip and plummet a thousand feet into the ravine.
The body probably wouldn’t be recovered until the spring. The assumption would be clear: out-of-town hiker, inexperienced and on his own.
An unfortunate accident.
He’s going to kill me, Danny realized.
It was perfect.
Galvin beckoned him on. His face was grim. “Let’s go. Come on.”
“I can see quite well from here, actually.”
“Come on. I won’t let you fall.”
“I can see it great from here.”
“This is my favorite place in the world.”
“Yep, it’s nice.”
“No, Danny boy. It’s not ‘nice.’ Get over here. Do I have to ask Alejandro to carry you over here?”
Danny hesitated, but only for a few seconds. A scuffle on the edge of a cliff would be risky for Galvin, though not as risky as for Danny. But Danny was determined to put up a struggle. If he was going over the edge, Galvin was coming with him.
He thought of the old Hitchcock movie in which Joan Fontaine is convinced that Cary Grant is trying to kill her. He brings her a glass of milk, and Hitchcock supposedly put a little battery-powered lightbulb in it to make it glow ominously, to turn something comforting into something terrifying.
Maybe Joan Fontaine was imagining things, but Hitchcock made sure we shared her suspicion.
The view over the canyon was indeed remarkable-the crystalline blue sky with white cirrus smudges, the raked bristles of pine forest blanketing the folds and ripples and gouges of the mountainside, the boiling pristine waterfall far below.
The wind howled and bit.
“That’s the Devil’s Punchbowl down there. And that’s Crested Butte. Imagine driving this, huh?”
Danny paused for a few seconds. “Lot of fun, I bet.”
Galvin laughed again, one sharp bark. “This is an old wagon road built to connect a couple of mining towns. Hacked and blasted out of the mountainside over a hundred years ago. I’ve driven it, and let me tell you, it’s an asshole-puckering experience.”
They stood there in silence for a long moment. Galvin at the edge of the cliff and Danny ten or twenty feet away, not far enough.
“Don’t do this, Tom.”
Galvin didn’t reply. A long silence passed. Maybe it was only a minute, but it felt like four or five.
Then he said, “I know you went to the back of the mountain, and you saw I wasn’t skiing. You saw me with someone.”
“I got hit in the head. I don’t remember anything.”
Galvin inhaled, exhaled. “You know about the Parsis in India, what they do when they die?”
Danny shook his head.
“The Parsis believe that earth and fire and water are sacred elements that must never be defiled. So they prohibit cremation or burial.”
“What do they do instead?”
“They take the bodies of their loved ones to a place they call a Tower of Silence, and they put them on a marble slab for the vultures to eat. A couple of hours later, the vultures are fat and happy and the flesh is gone.”
“Leaving only the bones.”
“That goes to feed the soil, I think. I forget. Anyway, so a while back, the vultures in India started dying out. And it turned out that the hospitals in India were administering painkillers to patients. Painkillers that are toxic to vultures. So you kill pain in humans, you kill the vultures.” He paused. “But we need the vultures.”
“The circle of life.”
“Like this road, sorta. You can be the best professional driver in the world, but one slip, and you’re over the side. Or there’s a rock slide. Or a boulder comes down at you. Or your brakes get wet. You do everything right, but there’s always a factor out of your control.”