G
alvin gave his driver a sidelong glance. Alejandro nodded, barely perceptibly.
Danny’s forehead thrummed as fast and as violently as his heart.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s time.”
Another long silence. The Suburban pulled into a gas station parking lot, bypassed the pumps, and executed a U-turn. No one said anything. After a moment, Danny noticed the terrain changing, unfamiliar. “Aren’t we heading back to the house?”
“Not just yet,” Galvin said. “There’s some Motrin back there in the seat compartment. You should probably drink some of that water there. You’ll feel better.”
“I’ll be fine when I get some rest.”
“First we’re going for a drive,” Galvin said.
Danny felt his stomach flip over. He started to protest, then sat back in his seat.
He heard the whine of the Suburban’s automatic transmission as it shifted gears.
They were heading northwest on Highway 82, Danny noticed. Galvin didn’t speak. Neither of them did.
Finally, when the silence had gone on long enough, Danny said, “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere we can talk in private.”
“You want to talk, let’s talk. Pull over.”
A long pause. “There’s a place I want to show you.”
“Some other time.”
He wondered whether Galvin was planning a talk. Or something else. He tried to suppress a surge of panic. He thought about texting Slocum and Yeager to let them know what had happened, how he’d been knocked out. . . .
Which reminded him about the camera Slocum had given him. He was pretty sure he hadn’t taken any pictures of Galvin meeting with whoever he was meeting with. He hadn’t gotten the chance before someone—was it in fact Alejandro the driver?—struck him, knocked him out. Which meant the camera was still in his pocket. He patted the pockets of his down parka, then rummaged through them but found nothing. The camera wasn’t in the zippered pocket. Or had he been holding it when he’d been knocked out? Probably so.
Making it likely that someone—Alejandro?—had taken it.
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.
S
omething 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.”
“What’s your point, Tom?”
“I need to come clean with you,” Galvin said. “I’m in serious trouble.”
“W
hat kind of trouble?” Danny asked. He felt his body start to uncoil.
“Ever think about just, you know, disappearing? I mean like, go off the grid.”
Danny nodded, didn’t know what to say.
“Just disappear forever,” Galvin went on. “Leave all this behind. Shuffle off this mortal coil. Erase your digital footprints and go somewhere like Belize or Madagascar or New Zealand and start over.”
“Sure,” Danny said slowly. “Sometimes.” But he had the feeling Galvin wasn’t speaking hypothetically. “Of course, it’s probably not so easy to do anymore. With everything online and all . . .”
“There are books about how to do it. People who specialize in it. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m out on my boat and I slip and fall over the side and my body’s never found.”
“And you’re alive and living in Madagascar.”
“Like that.”
“A fantasy, sure. But you can’t do it. You have a wife and kids. We have people who depend on us.”
Danny turned to look, but Galvin seemed to be peering into the chasm. “Tom,” Danny said quietly. He paused for a few seconds. “You almost sound like you’re planning to kill yourself.”
“Remember I told you I was just a lucky son of a bitch?”
A smile played on his lips, but not a happy smile. Danny watched and waited. Galvin was still peering down at the yawning chasm below their feet. “Look up
right place, right time
, you’re gonna see my picture, right? Well, my luck finally ran out.”
Danny nodded. “Your luck . . . with, what?—Money? Business?”
He shook his head. The wind howled. It stung Danny’s cheeks and ears.
His mind raced. Was Tom Galvin about to unspool some elaborate lie to explain what Danny had seen? When in fact Danny had seen nothing more than a meeting, two men in a slopeside shack. Galvin, though, seemed to be agonizing over something, struggling.
“About twenty years ago,” he said, “I went down to Cancun to scout out an investment opportunity in Playa del Carmen. A couple of Mexican businessmen had a vision for a high-end, luxury resort on the Mayan coast near Tulum. I thought the business plan looked great, the location was perfect. The lead partner was this guy named Humberto Parra Fernández y Guerrero.” Galvin pronounced the name quickly and fluently in his native-sounding Spanish. He paused for a long time. “The guy seemed to be loaded. Someone told me he used to be the governor of the state of Michoacán before he went into business. I guess that’s one way to get rich in Mexico—get elected to political office and then make a bunch of deals.”
Danny nodded.
“So Fernández and his associates wined and dined me, showed me a good time. They knew I was working for one of the biggest mutual fund companies, so I represented a hundred billion in assets. And they really seemed to want me to invest some of that money.”
“Okay.”
“I went back home. Told my bosses I thought we were onto something that might really work big-time. I convinced them to make the investment. A month later I went back down to Playa del Carmen, and we closed the deal.” He paused. “Mexicans are big into family, you know? Fernández invited me to have dinner with his wife and his daughter. His beautiful daughter.”
Danny smiled. “Celina.”
“I asked her to join me for dinner the next day, and we totally, you know, clicked. Head over heels. I stayed down there in Mexico and we started seeing each other. Really fell in love. When I first met her, I spoke a little high school Spanish, but, man, did I learn the language.” He laughed ruefully. “After I got back to Boston, I started making up reasons to fly back to Mexico. I had to see her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Lina would fly to Boston, or we’d meet here, in Aspen, or go to New York for a weekend. Four months later we got married.
“Well, I guess her dad saw something in me he liked. I was family now, but that wasn’t the main thing. He saw I had a good head for deals. I was a young guy on the make, and he liked that. He gave me some money to invest on my own, not with Putnam—half a million US dollars—and I guess I did all right. More than all right. Good timing, good picks, whatever whatever—and I more than doubled it in five months. So he gave me more cash.” He shrugged, turned back to Danny. “What can I say? When you’re hot, you’re hot. I didn’t double it in five months again, but I beat the market easily. He said no one in Mexico even came close to what I was doing. Pretty soon he was one of my biggest private clients.
“And then one day, I told him I was thinking about leaving Putnam and going off on my own, starting my own investment-management firm, and he said he had a proposal for me. He had a hundred million dollars for me to invest.”
“Jesus.”
Galvin nodded slowly, as if remembering his own amazement. “He said he’d see how I did after a year, and if I kept performing the way I’d been performing, there’d be more. A lot more.”
“Amazing. So he wasn’t just rich, he was
super
-rich.”
Galvin made a funny head movement, half nod, half tilt, accompanied by a shrug. “Or so I thought. But the money came with one condition. He had to be my
only
client. I had to agree to invest no other money besides his. So I had this huge decision to make. Do I leave Putnam and go off on my own with one client? Who happened to be my father-in-law?” He turned slowly and said, “Let’s walk, okay?”
Danny followed Galvin along the middle of the road. It was off camber, sloping down toward the outside edge. The surface was dirt and loose gravel, caked with snow and ice and scattered with the detritus of broken rock.
Galvin pointed. “If you look over there, you can see the old mining town. It’s a ghost town now.”
“You’ve really driven this road?”
“Sure.”
“Not in the Suburban, though . . . ? The wheel base is too long.”
“No, I used to have an old Land Rover Defender 90.”
“Love those trucks.”
“I miss it.”
“But I wouldn’t call this a road.”
“Not here it’s not. It’s barely a trail. Forest Service wants to close it. They’re losing too many tourists.” He kicked a rock, sending it over the edge. It rolled wildly downhill, accelerating, and then launched into the air and plummeted down toward the stream.
Danny couldn’t hear the rock hit ground. It was too far away.
“So obviously you made the deal,” Danny prompted.
“Here’s the thing. I’d been working for Putnam for five years by then, and I was making around three hundred grand, maybe three fifty. And I’m thinking, why in hell should I bust my butt working for chump change when I could be making real money?”
“Sure.” Danny winced inwardly—three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year didn’t sound like chump change to him—but he said nothing.
“I was tired of being a lackey. Working for idiots in a giant bureaucracy. The only reason to keep working there was job security. And, I mean, you want job security, go work for the post office.”
“Sure.”
“Here, finally, was a chance for me to prove how good I really was. Put myself on the line every single day. And I ran the numbers. I figured, if I run my own fund, I’m gonna make two and twenty—two percent management fee, twenty percent of the profit, right? Assuming I make twenty percent and I don’t splurge on fancy office space, whatever whatever, I’m taking home five mil.
In one year
, Danny. Five million bucks in my first year.”
“Not bad for a plumber’s boy from Southie.”
“And get this: Worst-case scenario, if I screwed up and
lost
money, I’d still pocket a million bucks! How could I say no to that?”
“You couldn’t.”
“I couldn’t. A no-brainer.”
“But you strike me as the kind of guy who always does his due diligence.”
Galvin looked at him, surprised to find Danny a step ahead, then gave a sly smile. “You really are a smart SOB, aren’t you? But look, here’s the reality: A guy offers you a hundred million dollars to play with, the chance to set up your own shop, how close are you really gonna look? You think Putnam or Fidelity asks all their investors how they made their money? Right?”
“Of course not.”
“Anyway, my first year, I beat the S&P by eight points. The guy was happy. His partners were happy.”
“Partners?”
“Turns out my bride’s dad wasn’t your run-of-the-mill entrepreneur.” He paused for a beat. He looked at Danny. He waited a few seconds longer.
Maybe he was being dramatic. Or maybe he knew that once he told Danny, nothing would ever be the same.
Galvin let out his breath. “Turned out I was working for a Mexican drug cartel,” he said.