Andrew Gross - One Mile Under

The balloon became engulfed in flame.

“ Do something! ” the financial guy’s wife shrieked, her eyes bulging in terror.

“There’s nothing I can do!” Ron replied, continuing to rev heat into the useless, crumpled canopy. He grabbed the radio. “Mayday, mayday, we’re going down!” They started to fall out of the sky, picking up speed. The ropes holding the basket could catch at any second and then …

The financier’s wife was sobbing on the floor mat. Her husband gripped the basket’s rim and looked down in disbelief. The Japanese couple huddled together.

Ron shouted, “You know a prayer, this would be the time to say it.”

He always wondered what this would feel like. How he would react. In his dreams he had dreamed it many times. It was like a bad trip. And he’d had many of those. “Mayday, mayday!” he screamed uselessly into the radio as the basket began to plummet. “ Oh Jesus Lord, we’re going down! ”

Dani saw it as she headed into town before her rendezvous with Ron.

Around the cutoff to the Aspen Industrial Park just after the airport, traffic was being slowed into one lane. She saw EMT vehicles, their lights flashing, and it seemed as if every cop in the valley was there. A throng of people, many out of their cars, were lining the highway looking on. In the large field which the Aspen by Air Balloon Adventure used as their takeoff site, a plume of black smoke funneled high into the air.

What the hell had happened?

Dani pulled up to one of the cops who was waving on traffic. She recognized him as a guy she had gone to high school with, Wesley Fletcher. She rolled down her window and leaned out of her wagon. “What’s the hell’s going on, Wes?”

“Balloon dropped out of the sky. Five people on board, Dani. Traffic’s being routed onto Rectory Street into town.”

“Five people.” Dani felt her stomach tighten “ Whose? ” she asked, though she was sure she knew the answer even before the question even was out of her mouth. “Whose balloon was it, Wes?”

“Aspen by Air. Rick Ketchum’s company. They’re up every day.”

“I don’t mean who owned it. Who was operating it?” Dani pressed, a feeling of dread grinding in the pit of her stomach. “The one that went down.”

“All I was told was that there were four tourists on board. And everyone’s dead. And some guy named Ron.”

“ Ron? ” Dani’s heart went still. Rooster.

“I guess the balloon fell apart at five hundred feet into a ball of flames. But, look, I have to wave you on now, Dani. Gotta get these vehicles routed over onto Rectory, and as you can see—”

“Is that Chief Dunn’s car over there?” She saw a white and green SUV with the Carbondale police lettering on it, among the many vehicles pulled up in the field.

“I think that’s him. I saw him drive up earlier.”

“Thanks, Wes.” Dani pushed on the gas and caught up to the car in front of her. She got as far as the rotary until she realized she no longer had any reason to be here now. She pulled over to the side and let her head drop against the wheel. Poor Rooster . Her heart felt heavy as she tried to imagine such a grisly descent. Things like this just didn’t happen here. But that was only part of it. Part of what was making her insides feel so worrisome. The rest was what Rooster had claimed he’d seen yesterday, and now he was dead. The fool was going around shooting his mouth off.

He wasn’t alone out there. That wasn’t no accident.

Dani looked one last time at the plume of black smoke. Hot-air balloons just didn’t fall out of the sky.

She waited until the end of the day, until she saw his vehicle parked outside the station back in Carbondale. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to see him at work. Years. Certainly not since her mom had died.

“He’s on the phone,” a female duty officer said. Dani didn’t recognize her.

It wasn’t a big station, tucked into a corner of the Carbondale Town Center. Three or four desks, and some workstations. A room with a vending machine that doubled as an interrogation room. There were one or two detectives; whatever they did, Dani never knew. Any real investigation or forensic work was handled out of Aspen. When Wade took the job—the only job he could get—he joked that it was mostly setting up DUI roadblocks and the occasional marijuana bust.

And now, new state laws had even taken that away from him.

“If you wait over there I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“I’m his stepdaughter,” Dani said. “He’ll see me.”

She went right past her, the duty officer standing up, surprised, going, “Hey!” Wade was at his desk on the phone, his feet propped up against a drawer. The ever-present python-skin boots and that large, turquoise, Indian ring. He’d probably die with them on. On the shelf behind him were a couple of photos. Wade in his glory days. With his arm around Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. Another with a younger-looking ex-president Gerald Ford. There were a couple of Kyle. One in his army uniform while in Afghanistan; the other, he and Wade fishing up in Idaho. Apparently, Dani hadn’t make the cut. There were a couple of AA books stacked on the credenza, and an empty bourbon bottle, which he always said he kept close as a constant reminder of worse days.

“Let me know when they finish up …” Wade was saying. He eyed Dani unhappily, as the young officer who had asked her to wait rushed in after. Wade waved her off with a Don’t worry about it gesture, motioning Dani into a chair.

She didn’t take it.

“I’ll check in with the guy from the Parks Service as soon as he finishes up,” he said. “Be talking with you then. Thanks.” He hung up and took his feet off the open drawer.

“The duty officer out there didn’t make it clear I was on with business,” he said, scowling at Dani like she’d burst in to sell him a new cell phone contract.

“You’ve got a problem, Wade.”

“Thanks for pointing that out to me, Danielle. Let’s see, five people are dead. The whole world’s gonna be breathing down our backs looking for answers. I always knew we did a good job by sending you back east to that fancy college.”

“ Six, Wade. There are six people dead. And just to keep the record clear, you didn’t send me. Mom did.”

He wheeled his chair around to face her. “Well, I sure took you, didn’t I? So anyway, six. If you count what happened out on the river. You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been a pretty crazy twenty-four hours here. Not that the two are in any way related.”

“But that’s just the problem.” Dani stepped up to the desk. “I’m pretty sure they are. Related.”

Wade snorted a short blast of air out of his nostrils, his round, sagging eyes regarding her both skeptically and condescendingly. “I asked you to sit, Danielle.”

This time she sank into a hardwood chair across from him.

“And what makes you think some hotshot kid taking a spill on the river would be related to a tragedy like this …?”

“I was headed into to town to meet with Rooster,” Dani said. “Just after it must’ve happened.”

“ Rooster? ” Wade shrugged.

“Ron. Kessler, I think was his last name. He was manning that balloon.”

“I knew who was manning the balloon, Danielle. And I knew his name. I called him a lot of things, but Rooster wasn’t one of them. All right, you barged in here, you’ve got my attention. I don’t know why your paths would cross with the likes of him, but you were going in to meet with him why …?”