Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Between the Dark and the Daylight by Tom Piccirilli

© 2008 by Tom Piccirilli

A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, Tom Piccirilli makes his EQMM debut here with a tale involving one of the most unusual scenarios for murder we’ve ever come across. He’s also the author of 17 novels. Of one of them, Headstones, the New York Times said: “beautiful and funny... a hardboiled hallucination... it gives you the distinctive shiver all good writing provides: the certainty that the writer’s own ghosts are in it.”

His face was so anguished it was writhing. That was Frank Bradley the first time I saw him, about sixty feet off the ground.

His feet twined above me while we both dangled from the safety-line ropes. His forlorn moans echoed across the front-range hills, and he’d bitten through his bottom lip. Blood misted on the wind and flew down against my forehead.

The balloon smacked broadside into a pine tree and shook the other two guys on the ropes loose. Neither of them screamed on their way down. One landed on his back, and the impact drove him three feet underground. The other smacked a boulder that shattered his pelvis, severed his spinal column, and saved his life. He pinwheeled off the rock and came to rest on his face along the dog walk, in front of an elderly woman clutching a Pomeranian.

I held on, just like Frank Bradley, who shrieked at me, “Don’t let go! My son, my boy! Johnny!”

I wasn’t letting go. You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.

Spinning in the wind, I couldn’t see the kid in the basket, but I could hear him crying. He sounded terrified and very young. Maybe only six or seven. Too damn young to work the controls and hit whichever valve had to be pressed to lower the thing. I thought, What kind of father takes a child that young up in a hot-air balloon? And how the hell did the idiot get outside of it on the ropes with the kid still in the basket?

A lot goes through your mind when you’re six stories in the air and rising.

Despite his misery, I wanted to beat the hell out of Bradley — whose name I didn’t know then — all across the park meadow speeding by below us. Except I was still holding the line, and we were running out of acreage fast.

The balloon caromed into another stand of pine, and thick branches brutally scraped across Bradley’s back, breaking his grip. His fists opened and he flailed, slipping fifteen feet until he was side by side with me, holding the other rope. He screamed, “Don’t let go!”

I’d hold on as long as I could, but eventually I would have to let go. We’d both have to, and the idea scared the hell out of me. I had the rope in a death grip and didn’t want to wind up like the guy who’d be found planted half as deep as his casket would be. They were going to have to dig him up just to bury him again.

“There’s no way to do it!” I shouted.

“Don’t let go!”

“Listen—”

“Don’t let go!”

I wanted to shout, Stop saying that!

The balloon bounded from pine to pine, nothing slowing it. You’d think maybe the branches would’ve pierced the silk, but somehow — miraculously, really, if you could call it that — they didn’t. We had about another couple thousand feet of parkland forest to go and then there’d be nothing but empty fields until the first break of front-range stone ridges. After that, there were the canyon cliffs and brutal mountain winds working up for another fifteen miles until we’d be high in the Rockies.

I kept thinking, I never should’ve moved out West.

I kept thinking my crappy apartment in the East Village really hadn’t been so bad.

We couldn’t bring the balloon down by ourselves. It bounced into another huge tree and the awful, overwhelming crashing sound was harrowing around us. The balloon shook insanely and the ropes twisted. I cracked sideways into the trunk and pine needles tore at my face. My feet touched branches. Then I was standing on air, and then there were branches again. I had to drop. It was something you couldn’t think about, you just had to do it.

Another vicious collision nearly ripped my arms from the sockets and Bradley and I both let go at the same moment. We clung to thick tree limbs seventy-five feet off the ground. He let out a screech. I think I did, too. He glared at me with his agonized eyes and edged his way across the branch looking toward the balloon, which had almost cleared the trees and started to rise again.

The basket slipped free of the last limb with an enormous scraping noise, but the silk still hadn’t been pierced. Bradley worked like a maniac to get up to the basket, hand over hand as wads of bark came off and rained down to the ground. His palms were shredded. There was no way for him to get to it.

The boy inside cried out and a sob broke in my own throat. He whimpered, “Daddy, please, Daddy—” He was petrified but still thought his father could save him.

But he never raised his head over the top of the basket. I wanted to see his face, if only for an instant. It was extremely important to me, and I didn’t know why.

Bradley screamed, “Johnny!”

He and I watched the balloon soar away until we couldn’t hear his son anymore. It lifted higher and higher, caught on the canyon winds, occasionally bouncing against the cliff walls until it was over them and almost out of sight.

We were both breathless from our exertions, but he had enough left in him to turn back and glare at me some more. He said, “You let go!”

“So did you. We had no choice.”

“You could’ve held on!”

“We couldn’t have.”

Talking to the guy this high in the air, covered in pine bristles and sap, his blood drying on my face — just hanging there and waiting for the next moment to happen as his son floated away.

It took me twenty minutes to climb down out of the tree.

Bradley stayed up there wailing and cursing me as I cautiously clutched at branches and lowered myself. By the time I hit the ground there were two ambulances, a fire truck, and eight cruisers parked at the edge of the woods, cops and park rangers prowling everywhere.

The shock of what had happened hit me all at once, before I’d taken two steps toward anybody. A heaviness thickened in my chest and my hands started to tremble badly. My legs weakened and I could feel the blood draining out of my head. A wash of blackness passed across my eyes and I might’ve toppled over if a cop with the name badge Kowalski hadn’t grabbed me.

He had gray eyes and some real muscle and power to him. He held me up with one hand and said, “Sit down.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, but sit down.”

But I didn’t want to sit anywhere among the pines. I scanned the sky and didn’t see the balloon anywhere.

“The kid?” I asked.

“What kid?”

“The one in the balloon.”

“Somebody was in there?”

“The hell do you think we were all trying so hard to hold on to it for? Is anyone following it?”

“It’s gone over the tree line and ridge of the canyon.”

“You’ve got to get some rangers up there.”

He thumbed his radio but there was already lots of buzzing going on, people squawking and more sirens erupting in the distance. They were coming in from Fort Collins and Greeley and other nearby towns, everybody driving to the wrong place. I saw a helicopter go overhead.

Kowalski said, “Tell me what happened.”

“There’s not much.”

“Tell me anyway.”

We recognized each other as former New Yorkers transplanted to Colorado for reasons we still weren’t sure about. We both had the same general air of confusion and homesickness about us, mired in a false toughness and a general who-gives-a-damn attitude to hide our fears. It took one to recognize one. It was pretty obvious that somewhere along the way he’d made a misstep and it had fouled up his life so badly that he had to move two thousand miles away to get clear of it. Some kind of scandal — he’d taken money from the wrong guy or hadn’t given a cut of it to the right one. Whatever the mistake, it was costing him now and it would for the rest of his life. I was a different story.

A ring of cops stepped in close but no one said anything.

I explained how I’d been in the park staring off at Long’s Peak trying to find inspiration for the next story or song, the way I usually did when my thoughts ran dry.

I’d been sitting around the park a hell of a lot lately and not much had been shaking loose inside my head. I’d written one line — Between the Dark and the Daylight — knowing I was lifting it from somewhere but not caring so long as something else followed. Nothing did.

So I tried to sweat the next sentence out, staring into the white of the page. Sitting there like that for a while, waiting for something to guide my hand.

Instead, a tremendous shadow crossed over my notebook and a man howled and two guys ran past directly in front of me.

I looked up and there was the balloon, with Bradley dangling off one of the safety lines and shouting for help, the other two guys doing their best to catch up, reaching for the trailing ropes as the balloon swung low but still didn’t hit the ground.

You’re sitting there waiting for your next sentence and instead you get this.

I hadn’t seen a hot-air balloon since I was kid on Long Island and couldn’t figure out how anybody could lose one.

I got to my feet and started stumbling in that direction, the sheer forceful oddity of the situation sort of pulling me after it. The guy who’d eventually be paralyzed from the neck down looked back to me while he ran and shouted, “There’s a boy in there! We have to get it back down!”

I hesitated another second. It’s normal, it would happen to anybody. We don’t trust unfamiliar conditions and unknown people, it’s easier to sit back down and fight the empty page. But the kid let out a murmuring whine that caught on the wind and somehow that got me moving.

I sprinted maybe fifty yards across the park before I finally caught up to the lines. By then, Bradley had actually managed to climb up a few more feet, almost to within reaching distance of the basket, and the other guys had grabbed hold of the ropes. I did a weird flying dive that should have made me land on my head, but somehow it worked. I was on a safety line draping from the basket, flitting there, sort of flying along with three other men, and we were rising.

There should’ve been about ten emergency shut-offs and built-in features to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Without anybody working the burner, the balloon should’ve been lowering, even in the wind. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything but the bottom of the basket. Then the rope I was on flailed outwards a few feet and I spun around.

There were health nuts in the world that did this sort of thing for fun, I was sure. I craned my neck and saw that the burner was still lit, a lick of orange and blue flame igniting. Something had gone seriously wrong, and I’d jumped right into it. The balloon wasn’t going to come down on its own.

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.

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.

I noticed an odd sound, a tiny ringing in the car. I glanced over and saw that he was spinning a key on a chain. He noticed me looking and held it up, but said nothing. It was a bus-station locker key. I’d seen plenty of them when I was roaming the country, trying to settle down somewhere to find my art again. Sometimes you start to drift and you just keep going, for no reason you can name. You ride and ride and hope the right thing appears around the next corner, even though you have no idea what it might be. He shoved the key back in his pocket.

We kept climbing higher until we were in the switchbacks. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees over the last several miles. Another thousand feet and we’d be able to see our breath. We’d left the towns and the cabins behind and kept threading through the mountains. The car started puttering, the thin air fouling the engine. You were supposed to do something to the timing or the spark plugs or the air filter, who the hell knew. Bradley was getting more and more excited, as if he knew we were heading to a special, secret place where he’d put his past to rest.

Snow started to appear on the ground, on the rock. The air thinned but held in the cold, the atmosphere lush and vibrant around us. I’d never been up this far. The wind tore at the car, rocking us on our shocks. The trails thinned. Finally, we ran out of road.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Get out. Climb.”

We got out and he prodded me forward across the rugged, stony landscape. I’d been in Colorado five years and had never hiked through the national park, or anywhere else for that matter. Now he had me clambering up rocks like those adrenaline junkies who scaled sheer bluff faces. I was out of shape and I wouldn’t last long. Not that Bradley would need me to. I knew he was leading me to an edge someplace. His edge, my edge. Maybe he’d been here himself before, ready to throw himself off the rim. Maybe he was walking as blindly as me, just waiting for the next thing to come along.

We came to a slope that dropped off into nothingness. We were so high up that there was an electrical buzzing in my fingers and toes and chest, an assaulting awareness that one foot further would be a step into oblivion.

The wind slithered around us. Bradley jabbed the gun into my back again. “Move.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll kill you.”

“You know, Bradley... you give a man two choices at death and he’s going to choose the one that makes you work a little harder for it.”

“It’s just pulling a trigger.”

“It’s better to make you do it than do it myself.” I didn’t know why that was the case, but I knew it was true. I still wasn’t all that worried — maybe it was altitude sickness, or maybe I’d had a death wish for a while and only now was starting to realize it.

“Move! To the edge!”

“I’m not going down there.”

“Yes, you are. We both are.”

“Why are you doing this?”

He rushed me and jabbed the barrel under my chin. It hurt like hell. “I want you to know what it was like for my son.”

I growled, “You’re the one who put him in it. You’re the one who took him up.”

“Shut up!”

“You’re the one who let go, same as me. We had no choice.”

“Shut up, damn you!”

He jabbed the barrel harder into my throat until I gagged.

“Now, jump! Do it or I’ll put one in your brain.”

“How is that supposed to scare me at this point?”

“You might survive if you jump.”

“At twelve thousand feet? Yeah, right.”

Twelve thousand feet. One hundred and twenty stories. We were higher than the Empire State Building.

Not only had he gone insane with his rage and grief, but he really hadn’t thought about the end game at all. There wasn’t enough thrill in it for him. He was starting to understand that my death wouldn’t take away an ounce of his agony. It was descending on him very quickly now and an unbearable horror came with it. He’d be alone soon with nothing but his guilt. The fear in him was much greater than my own. I saw the realization grow in his eyes along with his terror.

My feet were slipping out from beneath me on the icy rock. I was gearing up for some kind of a stupid move. Everybody thinks it’s easy, you just attack, you just spin and kick, punch and whirl and karate chop. These people, the kind who never say boo to the boss, let their relatives roll over them, and take every gram of garbage force-fed to them through their entire lives. These people, they think it’s easy to make your move on death.

Then I saw it, no more than fifty feet from us, down in the rocks, nearly at the rim. I’d been expecting it the whole ride up, because when facing your fear you also face your fate, and in that moment, any damn thing can happen.

I pointed over his shoulder and said, “There’s the balloon.”

It had drifted twenty miles and more than six thousand feet thanks to the front-range winds. It was impossible, I thought. It had to be. There was no way the balloon could have gotten up this high. Even with the updraft carrying the kid along, it never should have made it this far. Even if the kid had accidentally gotten the burner opened up all the way, it shouldn’t have been enough to get the balloon this high.

It should have bounced into one of the cliffs miles ago. The silk would have torn and the whole thing would have plummeted down in the middle of the mountains. But somehow the flight of the balloon had missed every jagged rock. Hiding behind the ridges and within the thinning tree line of the national park so nobody could see it, dancing so close to the craggy banks that he just kept rising. With hundreds of volunteers searching for him and nobody seeing.

The balloon had wedged into a tight stony niche. The basket had folded in half and the deflated silk had collapsed on top of it. When you saw a hot-air balloon you saw a beautiful mammoth thing. This you could’ve fit in your closet.

Bradley let out a cry that was part despair and part elation. He dropped the gun and forgot about me. I had to keep reminding myself that he was crazy.

He ran up to the niche and started yanking at the silk, trying to pull the basket free. He screamed his son’s name, and the echoes swarmed across the cliffs like a thousand distressed men calling out the names of their thousand dead sons.

I picked up the pistol and tossed it over the edge.

Bradley yelled, “Help me!” I stared at him for a moment and then climbed over there.

It wasn’t for him. I wanted to see the boy’s face. It still felt very important that I actually see what the kid looked like.

Bradley gripped one end of the basket and I took hold of the other and we pulled until we got it open wide enough that he could climb in. He ducked low for a second and I lurched aside until I could peer into the cramped space.

The dry, cold mountain climate had preserved the boy these last several days. At this elevation, no animals or insects had been at him in the crags. Even though the basket had struck the mountain hard enough to crumple in on itself, his skin hadn’t been touched. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers with holes in the big toes. The basket had folded around him like a cocoon, without actually coming in contact with his flesh. It was another miracle, depending on whether you saw it that way.

He was still facing away from me.

From what I could see, except for his coloring, he looked like a perfectly healthy, sleeping child.

Bradley screamed, “Johnny!” He took the boy in his arms and fell against the side of the basket.

It started to slide. I had a chance to dive, maybe grab ahold of it, but I didn’t see much point anymore. It skidded across the rock ledge and the deflated silk washed across the rocks and rippled like river water.

The basket began to tip but bumped an outcropping and righted itself. The silk flapped out as if trying to inflate, but failed.

For a moment, Bradley hung there in space with his arms around his dead little boy.

He stuck his hand out to me. I reached and he clutched my right forearm. I had maybe five seconds to haul him out of the basket before it flopped over the rim.

I stared into his eyes and thought, He’s just as insane now as he was a half-hour ago. Maybe more so. He still blames me. He’ll never see it any differently, especially after the kid falls into the chasm and his body is lost forever.

You can make decisions in an instant that will forge the direction of the rest of your life. You can perform acts that will curse you with a hellish mark forever. You can sell your conscience by making a single mistake. You can do your best and still not make things right.

I kept thinking, Here it is.

I kept thinking, One last chance.

I wondered if Bradley could see the same things in my face that I saw in his — the foolishness, the screwed-up attempts, the ridiculous efforts and disappointments.

I never should’ve let the stalker scare me out of New York. I shouldn’t have lost my dream. I could’ve made it through the fire if only I’d held strong.

I snaked my free hand into his pocket and snagged the locker key.

It’s where the money would be. Thirty grand would help me get home again. A little start-up fund to make something right happen for once. A demo reel, time to write another book. One that would sell well enough that I could feel vindicated for all the hours I wasted glaring into the abysmal white of the endless empty page.

I leaned in closer and said, “You’re an idiot for putting your kid in a stolen hot-air balloon, you bastard.”

I had to snap my forearm hard aside twice before I broke his grip.

The basket dipped another foot over the edge, the silk whispering like a child. Bradley could’ve done something — made a wild dive the way I had the afternoon I caught the rope — but I could see he just didn’t have the resolve for it. He really had lost the will to live. Imagine.

He stood there with his lost son in his arms, no expression on his face, as he tipped out of sight.

The key chimed faintly in my hand, like the final small toll of every man’s wasted life. I still hadn’t seen the boy’s face, but it would be with me forever, on every page of my life and work from here on out.

I figured I could handle it.