LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

airfoil, resulting in a V that extended several inches into the wing from the foil’s bottom hem. The separation had exposed one of the stays that held the fabric swaths apart to form the airfoil.

      The stay, a plastic rod half the thickness of a drinking straw, stuck out from the fabric. The rod was white to its final inch, which was red, like the wingsuit.

      Janelle ran her gloved finger along the last inch of the stay. Her fingertip came away smudged. “It’s blood.”

      “The suit must have torn,” Chuck said, “when he . . . when his . . .”

      “It doesn’t look like a tear to me. It separated. It came apart.”

      Chuck leaned around Janelle for a closer look. A length of nylon thread extended from the top of the V’ed separation and lay crumpled on the ground below the loosed plastic stay. “No wonder it came apart, considering the forces involved.”

      Janelle cleaned the blood from her covered finger with an antiseptic wipe from her kit. She continued to eye the airfoil and Thorpe’s corpse along with Ponch, but Chuck stepped away. He’d seen enough. The stench of Ponch’s vomit mixed in the air with the rank odor emanating from Thorpe’s mangled body. Chuck swallowed, his stomach heaving.

      “I’m tempted to grab the camera from his helmet and smash it to bits,” Ponch said, “even though I know the investigators will want it.”

      “You think the footage will reach the internet?”

      “I bet it’ll go viral. The whole world will watch him die, over and over and over again.”

      “The investigators should keep it private. That’s their job.”

      “Huh,” Ponch scoffed. “Everything reaches the internet these days.” He lifted his phone. “It’s time,” he said grimly.

      Chuck took out his phone, too. “From way up here, it shouldn’t take long for one of us to get through.”

      “As twisted as this may sound,” Chuck said to Ponch as they walked down Four Mile Trail, “I’m not sure how much Thorpe would mind if the footage of his death made it to the internet.”

      They’d left Thorpe’s body thirty minutes ago. After getting through to a 911 operator, they had waited until an advance team of half a dozen YOSAR team members arrived before leaving the scene.

      “He lived his life in the public eye,” Chuck continued. “He made his living putting himself on display.”

      Ponch spun and walked backward, facing Chuck. “Him and all the babes he hung out with.” He turned forward and continued down the trail.

      “Hey,” Janelle warned from the front of the line. “That’s the second time you’ve used that word.”

      “Young ladies,” Ponch corrected himself.

      “Some of us ‘young ladies’—” she made air quotes with her fingers as she hiked a step ahead of Ponch “—don’t have a problem hanging out with older guys.”

      “Thanks,” Chuck said. “I think.”

      “Janelle’s right,” Ponch said over his shoulder to Chuck. “It’s no secret that Thorpe’s success as an older guy was the result, to a significant extent, of the young ladies who hung out with him.”

      “Success?” Janelle asked, an edge to her voice.

      “Remember,” Chuck told Ponch, “she’s the mother of two little girls.”

      “Who,” Janelle added, “are growing up way too fast.”

      “She’s already on her guard for them,” Chuck said to Ponch. “So am I.”

      “Thorpe figured out what you two already know,” Ponch said, “which is that boys like girls—a lot. He realized right away that nine out of ten extreme-sport viewers online are males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. The best way to increase his viewership numbers, he figured, was to give those young males what they wanted.”

      “Babes,” Janelle said, biting off the word.

      “Young ladies,” Ponch agreed. “Thorpe made sure he included a scantily clad female in every one of his videos—hanging out with him in the back of his van, zipping him into his wingsuit on the edge of a cliff before he flew, cracking open a can of beer for him after he landed.”

      “How professional,” Janelle deadpanned.

      “If by professional you mean building a solid, money-making profession, you’d be right.”

      “He was that successful?”

      “He and Jimmy were pioneers in the whole idea of outdoor athletes making a living through sponsorships. At their peak, they had lots of sponsors—High Summit energy bars, Rinson ropes, Trongia harnesses, their backpacks, and all their clothes, from their long underwear to their hats to their rain jackets. They’d take anything that came their way. They even accepted a stake in MoJuice, the energy drink, when the company was just getting started. You know the one: For Renegades Only. The MoJuice people didn’t have any money, so they gave Jimmy and Thorpe some stock in the company to sell after it went public. Of course, MoJuice has stayed private while talking about holding its initial public offering year after year all the way through to this year.” Ponch shrugged. “What are you going to do? When Thorpe went off on his own, he got sponsorships as a flier—his wingsuit manufacturer and parachute company, even the maker of his landing shoes. He sold advertising on his website and YouTube channel, too.”

      “How do you know all this?” Janelle asked.

      “I’m an adjuster for State Farm in L.A., so I’m online all the time. It was easy for me to keep tabs on his new videos—featuring his latest, um, young ladies. He plugged his sponsors every chance he got.”

      Janelle glanced up, taking in the ridge above, as she continued along the trail. “You’re making me less and less upset about what happened to him up there.”

      “There’s never a lot of public grief for wingsuit fliers when they get killed. Most of them are estranged from their families. That was true of Thorpe, from what I gathered. I heard he’d gotten himself a girlfriend of late, but he never married. I can’t imagine the women he featured in his videos will spend too much time mourning his passing, either.”

      “Bad timing for this to happen, though,” Chuck said. “At the start of the reunion.”

      “Or suspiciously good timing,” said Ponch.

      “What do you mean by that?”

      “If you’d watched Thorpe’s most recent videos, you’d know what I’m talking about. There was a certain melancholy to his latest postings. Fewer babes and more scenic shots while he talked about how great his years of flying had been—in the past tense.”

      “You’re suggesting he might have killed himself?”

      “His last video really made me wonder what was going on with him. He was alone in his van, at night, talking to the camera. He started out defending the fact that he’d turned away from Sentinel Gap three times in a row, and he claimed wingsuit flying had become a cult of death. But then, in his very next breath, he swore he would shoot the gap the next time he jumped off Glacier Point. He said everybody should keep an eye out for his next video because it would be incredible.”

      The trail snaked through the trees, descending toward the valley floor. Chuck tripped on a rock protruding from the path and jogged a few steps forward, catching his balance.

      “And then I dealt the cards,” Ponch continued. “The message was so clear when I laid them out. By the end of the hand, there was no question. I planned to tell him when I met up with him this morning. After the tone of his last video, I figured I could for sure get him to stop. But he wasn’t at all like what I was expecting. He joked around, seemed perfectly happy. He was so jazzed to make his big entrance to the reunion and

Скачать книгу