Free Fall (39 page)

Darby looked above her as the shouts below started to increase in volume and anger. The next bolt was only about five feet away, but the wall turned almost blank above her. She could already feel her grip weakening and what little focus she'd had slipping away. She'd never make it.

"She come down!" The words were barely decipherable around the thick Thai accent. Darby looked down again just in time to see her friend absorb another firm kick to the ribs and one of the Thais hang his weight on the rope. She tried to brace herself, but her feet slipped out from under her again.

The tension on the line and laughter below increased as the man lifted his feet off the ground and left her supporting his entire body weight as well as her own. They were ignoring Sam now, and in a desperate glance in his direction she could see that he had taken up what slack he could and braced himself. When he looked up at her and gave a terrified nod, she let go.

The way the wind felt as it blew through her newly cut hair seemed strange when mixed with the familiar sensation of falling. She let her body go completely limp, knowing that there was nothing she could do now but hope that it would be the rope, and not the ground, that broke her fall.

She came to an abrupt halt to the sound of a shrill scream from the man who had been trying to pull her off. She opened her eyes in time to see him stagger back a couple of feet, staring down at the deep wound the rope had cut into his palm. Judging by the volume of his friends' laughter they thought that was pretty funny, too.

She had stopped about fifteen feet from the ground, close enough to see the rage on the injured man's face when he turned it up to her and pulled a knife from his pocket.

Darby tried to swing back to the rock but it was too far away. She searched hopelessly for a safe landing in the jagged boulders that littered the ground as the man went for the rope. He was within inches of it when Sam jumped to his feet and ran to his left, leaping off the ledge he had been standing on.

She felt herself pulled up about a foot as his body weight hit the rope, then she was in a free fall to the ground. Just before she impacted, the rope went tight for a moment slowing her down enough to leave her lying among the scattered boulders dazed, instead of dead.

The Thai who had been injured was on her the moment her back hit the ground, knife cocked back in hand. She tried to grab a rock to defend herself but didn't have any strength.

"Stop!"

The Thai froze, knife hand still cocked by his ear and face still full of fury. Darby turned toward the voice and saw the blond head of Vili Marcek appear through the trees.

The Thai man on top of her adjusted himself so that his knee was planted painfully in her chest, effectively pinning her to the ground. The blood from his hand had spattered onto his face and combined with the rage etched there made him look like a deranged killer from a slasher film.

"My, this was close, was it not?" the Slovenian said, smiling as he approached.

"Vili? What ... why " Darby looked into his bright blue eyes, but the wind had been knocked out of her too badly to get a full sentence out.

Marcek placed a hand on the shoulder of the man pinning her to the ground. The Thai stood and let Marcek lead him past his companions to the edge of the drop that Sam had jumped from. Darby struggled to her feet and limped up behind them.

"He's the one who did that to you," Marcek said to the Thai, pointing to her friend's semiconscious form. He patted the man on the back and then turned back to Darby, who was trying desperately to unbuckle the harness at her waist and escape the rope tied to it. She looked up just as the Thai started climbing down the rock toward Sam.

"Stop! Vili stop him!"

Marcek jumped in front of her and kept her from going to her friend's aid.

A moment later, she heard a loud grunt and the unmistakable sound of the impact of flesh on flesh. Marcek let her go just in time for her to see the Thai stand, leaving his knife buried to the hilt in her friend's chest.

She stepped backward and tripped over the harness that had fallen around her ankles, landing on her back among the boulders. For the first time in her life, she felt herself give up. Her muscles went slack and her brain seemed to short-circuit. She was only vaguely aware of Vili Marcek standing over her and the four Thai men scooping her off the ground.

None of it mattered. Maybe they'd kill her. Then it would be over.

Darby Moore squinted into the blackness as the rotting wooden door opened, and was staggered by the stench that washed over her. The four Thai policemen holding her seemed to be temporarily confused.

The ones who had already staked out the more interesting parts of her anatomy seemed unwilling to let go long enough to get through the door, afraid that on the other side they might end up with a less titillating selection.

The argument that ensued between the men was loud but brief. When a post-threshold hierarchy had been tentatively sketched out, she felt herself being shoved through the doorway and dragged to one of four empty cells along the right side of the narrow passageway. But it didn't really feel like it was happening to her. She felt completely disconnected--as if she was already half dead.

A de facto leader had obviously been chosen during the negotiations, and he was the one who accompanied her into the cell. Once inside, he jerked her around to face him and ran a hand slowly down her cheek.

"You pretty." She looked at the handkerchief covering the deep cut her rope had left in his hand and wondered if all the blood on it was his or if some of it had come from Sam. The image of her friend's dead body lying below the cliffs that he'd loved so much melded with the one of Tristan's blood-spattered foot hanging from the door of her van, and her disconnection turned to fury too quickly for her to control.

In one smooth motion, she grabbed the man's injured hand and squeezed with everything she had. He opened his mouth to cry out, but then realized that his comrades were watching from just outside the cell.

His teeth clenched tight, stifling any sound, and he forced himself to do nothing for long enough to prove that he couldn't be hurt by a mere woman. Then he swung his good fist at her head.

Darby released him at the last possible moment and ducked, letting the blow glance off the top of her skull. He connected solidly on his second try, and though the blow wasn't really powerful enough to hurt her, she dropped to her knees hoping he would be satisfied.

She wasn't that lucky. The next shot caught her in the back of the neck and had the Thai's full weight behind it. Stunned, she fell to her side in the wet, foul-smelling grime puddled on the floor. She brought her arms up to protect her face, noticing for the first time that Vili Marcek was standing just inside the door they'd brought her through. He was enjoying this.

"Enough!"

The Thai standing over her had been about to let loose with a vicious kick but froze at the sound of the man's voice. Darby lowered her arms a few inches and looked in the direction it had come from.

At first, all she could see was a sweat-stained, white dress shirt hovering in the gray gloom of the jail. When she concentrated a little harder she was able to make out a pair of dark slacks that blended almost perfectly into the stone wall behind them.

Darby redirected her gaze up a bit as the Thai retreated a few feet.

Whoever the man was, he was white, but with dark, almost black, hair combed over in a way that suggested it was hiding a bald spot. The lower part of his face was padded with heavy jowls surrounding what once must have been a strong jawline.

"Get out," he said authoritatively.

The Thai man who had been beating her said something as he backed away.

She hadn't been quick enough to translate it, but the lecherous titters from his companions made the meaning fairly clear.

She laid there in the filth until the Thai locked her cell, then pushed herself to her knees and stood, scraping the sludge from her side and staring directly at the man standing against the wall. She was sure now that she had never seen him before. She'd expected the man who had turned up at Lori's ranch, but it definitely wasn't him.

He turned to Marcek.

"You, too."

The Slovenian looked like he was going to say something, but ended up just shuffling out with an expression of deep disappointment on his face.

"Tell me, Darby. Do you regret saving him?" the man said as Marcek pulled the door at the end of the corridor closed.

"What?"

"It's a simple question. Do you regret risking your life to save Vili?

He obviously wants to see you dead for doing it."

"I never really thought about it."

The man nodded and leaned his considerable weight against the wall behind him.

"It doesn't have anything to do with you rescuing him, you know. I've been unlucky enough to have had to spend a lot of time with him over the past two weeks and it's pretty obvious that he has some kind of infatuation for you. A man scorned ..." His voice trailed off.

Darby had known about that. She'd let him down as easily as she could, but he'd gone nuts, showing up at places she was climbing, calling her whenever she was staying somewhere with a phone. The story had quickly made its rounds through the eternally gossipy climbing community and then the whole thing had ended with the rescue on Ama Dablam. The humiliation had just been too much for him.

"As big a fuckup as I've ever met," the man continued.

"You'll be happy to know that he'll never get the money he's been promised. When I'm done with him, I'll put a bullet in the back of his head. I'll enjoy doing it, too."

Darby just stared at him, still trying to process what had happened to her and what, if anything, she could do about it.

"Do you want me to thank you?"

"No, I guess not," he said, punctuating his words with a slow shake of the head.

"Honey, I don't know what you stole and I don't want to but whatever it is, it was a big mistake."

"I didn't steal anything."

He didn't seem to hear her.

"There's a gentleman on his way here now who's very interested in talking with you. I don't think you're going to enjoy the conversation much, though."

"I didn't ask for any of this," she said quietly.

"It doesn't have any thing to do with me. I'll tell them what they want to know. I don't really have a choice now, do I?"

The man took a deep breath of the foul-smelling air and coughed loudly as it lodged in his chest.

"Doesn't really matter now. The Thais were asking an outrageous amount of money to help me find you. Comes out of my pocket, you know, so I had to do a little negotiating. I'm afraid I promised them whatever's left of you after your, uh, conversation."

She looked around her at the seeping walls and the hole in the floor of the cell that passed as a toilet, sucking her lower lip between her teeth and trying not to let her mind project the meaning of the man's words.

"Why are you telling me this? You just want to be sure I know who's responsible for killing me?"

"No," he said seriously.

"I guess I wanted to offer an apology. I've read and heard a lot about you in the past few weeks. A person like you shouldn't have to die like you're going to."

Darby stepped forward and wrapped her hands around the rusting bars, getting as close to the man as she could.

"I appreciate the sentiment, but in the end, I don't think it's going to do me much good. Why don't you help me get out of here? It'll be good for your soul."

He laughed.

"I feel bad, honey, but I don't feel that bad. I worked hard all my life and didn't get shit for it. This job is paying enough to get me a new house and a hell of a nice sports car, with some cash left over for gas." He turned and started for the door.

"You'd do this to me for money?" Darby called after him.

"For money?"

"What other reason is there?" He stopped for a moment, but didn't look back at her.

"I'm sorry, I've really got to get out of here. The smell is starting to get to me."

As morbid as it was, she'd played the game for years.

Blizzard, rockfall, avalanche, unidentifiable intestinal parasites and tropical disease. No matter how grim her situation, it seemed that she could always think of a time she'd been worse off. It would always be something like, "Sure it's a hundred and twenty-five below zero, but remember that time the rock we were anchored to started sliding toward the edge of a cliff and we couldn't get untied from it?" Unfortunately, that little mental trick wasn't working this time. Instead, she'd been forced to accept that the situation was hopeless and start to think about exactly what that meant.

The cell was almost completely desolate. The only sound came from the occasional drip of water as the humidity accumulated on the stone ceiling and finally fell to one of the puddles in the floor. She didn't have a watch, but from the position of the sunlight struggling through the tiny hole cut high in the wall, she assumed that she'd been there about twenty-four hours. She hadn't so much as heard another human voice since her brief conversation with the semi remorseful American who was responsible for imprisoning her here.