Obstruction of Justice (2 page)

Not far behind them they could see the small figures of the other hikers. "Not ... a ... happy ... group," Nina said between breaths.

"It’s a hard climb," Collier said. "The guy in front with the big backpack—the father, is my guess— sounds like the domestic-tyrant type to me. Maybe he’s the only one who wanted to come, but i
_t
’s hard to say no to a man like that."

"What about the second man?" Nina said. "He didn’t look like one of the family."

"Hard to say," Collier said. "How are you doing?"

"Sweating more," Nina said. "Is it my imagination, or is it getting a lot more humid?" They both paused and looked up again. The drifting clouds were now clumping rapidly into ominous thunderheads.

"Shit," Collier said. "The summit’s dangerous in a summer storm. Almost guaranteed to pick up a lightning strike, since Tallac is the tallest mountain around. I don’t know what to do. We’re only about four hundred vertical feet from the top."

"Oh, let’s keep going," Nina said. "If we don’t go on now, we’ll miss the whole experience, the night on the mountain, the shooting stars, all because it might have rained. If anything happens, we can always dive into a ditch. We’re supposed to be having an adventure."

"I don’t think we should assume there’ll be a ditch handy just because we need one."

They had stopped again on the narrow crest trail. A thunderhead had settled weightily above, poised to dump directly on their heads. Turning to look behind them, they could see the group they had run into before making the same ascent, coming up toward them.

A last ray of sun shot through the clouds, landing on the shining heads of the two young people, who had drawn together. They made a glorious sight, bursting with vigor and spirit like golden eagles perched on a narrow cliffside path, ready to spread their wings and fly lightly off the mountain to soar over the forests of green below. Their radiance was framed by the darkly threatening mountain backdrop. The dramatic contrast brought them into brilliant focus, as if even the sun paid homage.

Still at the front of the group, his shirt sticking to his body in the warm moist air, the bald man flicked angrily at the insects swarming around his face. He was sweating copiously. He said in a challenging voice to Collier, "Giving up?" His mouth moved into a cold smile.

"Considering it," Collier said.

The man tilted his head back, examining the sky. He rubbed his cheek with his hand. "It’s looking real bad," he concluded, and his voice held a gloom that suggested he meant more than the clouds above. "Goddamn ugly." He drew the words out, nodding to the group standing behind him, who tensed at the profanity, silent and alert to his every move, as if they were waiting for something else from him, something worse.

He said in a slow, deliberate drawl to Collier, "You wouldn’t want to get your hairdo all wet." He had the belligerent look of someone who enjoys insulting strangers. The rest of the group seemed to hang back, as if to say, he’s not with us.

Collier straightened up, stared back. The air between the two of them bristled.

Nina said quickly, "Are you going on?"

"Of course we are. We’re almost there. A little rain never hurt anybody." He gave Collier another long, aggressive stare, but the woman in the visor sat down suddenly on the trail and let out a sigh of exhaustion, and his hostile attention turned to her. "Quit malingering, Sarah. I’ll get you in shape yet."

"It’s my feet, Ray. I’m sorry."

" ’It’s my feet, Ray,’ " the man said in falsetto, mimicking her. "Here we go again. Whining and complaining. Rubbing my nose in it. Making sure I don’t get to forget it even for one lousy minute. Dr. Lee says you have to walk. So walk, damn it."

The girl hugged herself with her bare arms. "Dr. Lee never said Mom could climb a mountain. He didn’t mean that."

"She’ll do what I tell her to."

"You’re such an asshole,’ " the girl said in a low voice.

"What’d you say? Huh? What’d I just hear you say?"

"I said, ’you’re such an asshole,’ " the girl said, her chin jutted forward, her eyes filled with angry tears.

Before the rest of them could react, he gave her a stinging slap that sent her reeling toward her mother, who put her arms around her. "Big-mouth Molly," he said, looking around in an almost shamefaced way. "You see how she baits me?"

"I ought to break your face for that, Ray," the man in the bandanna said, his fist raised.

"Shut up, Leo. Or I might start wondering why Sarah insisted you come along."

"I said I’d come with you," Sarah said, stumbling to her feet. "Please, Ray. Don’t start anything." The girl helped her, hand on her cheek, holding her head high.

The boy took the light pack Sarah was carrying and swung it over his shoulder. He wore it and the heavy pack on his back lightly. Nina couldn’t see his eyes under the green sunglasses. "Come on, Mom. Let’s go down," he said.

"You’re not going anywhere with her, Jason," Ray said. He stepped forward and grabbed Sarah’s arm. "You’re all so worried about this sorry woman, you can finish the climb with us. Because we’re going up."

"Really, I’m okay," the woman said apologetically to the others. Beads of sweat stood out on her lip. "Let’s just do what Ray says."

"That’s better," Ray said. He turned back to Collier. "Go ahead, run back down like a scared rabbit."

Collier said, "As a matter of fact, we’re heading up. It’s looking a little better. C’mon, Nina."

"With pleasure," Nina said. They walked off, leaving the group standing there rigid and unspeaking, as if anger had turned them to marble.

They climbed on, north and up, doing the Swiss Army step, one step for each breath. They were almost at ten thousand feet now. They avoided looking at the sky, as though ignoring the clouds would make them go away.

A swell of delayed anger washed over Nina. "Jerk," she muttered as she fumbled her way through the loose rock. Between the ugly little family scene they had just witnessed and the threatening weather, she was starting to feel oppressed.

She followed Collier a little to the east to a weatherbeaten clump of conifers. He poked his stick into a pile of old snow cached against a tree.

"We could wait out a storm here," he said.

"Under a tree?" Nina said. "I should have known better than to climb a mountain with another lawyer. I thought everyone knew trees are dangerous if there’s any lightning."

"The main thing is to get below the summit as fast as you can if the weather breaks. At least here we’d have some protection from the wind." They both looked upward. The sky had turned murky, lightless, almost sooty, and the breeze felt stronger, but there were still no distant rumblings or flashes. They could see the pointed summit just two hundred feet up and away.

"What do you think?" Collier said. "We’re practically there."

"Go for it," Nina said, and he nodded.

"I suppose we’ll meet our friends up there. They’ll be following one of the parallel routes upward. At this point the trail hardly exists, anyway; it’s just a scramble."

"I can hardly wait," Nina said. "I felt like breaking his face too."

"I didn’t think we ought to—you know, get involved. The other man won’t let it happen again. Need a hand?"

"Certainly not." They began the scramble, northeast to the brink of a dangerously steep avalanche chute, then diagonally northwest. In places they could not avoid the snow, and once Collier slipped on an icy patch that had somehow persevered into August, catching himself just before tumbling headfirst down the slope.

The hike so lightheartedly begun had degenerated into an ordeal. Nina wanted to finish and retreat quickly to the cluster of conifers two hundred feet down. The unpleasant mood of the other hikers had affected her. She didn’t want to spend the night up there anymore, especially not with those folks. And the weather ...

She climbed the last few steps up the dark, friable metamorphic rock, weary but excited. Collier, already at the top, dropped his pack on the ground, his hair blowing in the stiff wind. Someone had assembled a cairn of rough-edged stones in the center of the solid sheet of granite.

"You wanted to spend the night here?" Nina called. The wind blew hard and steady, almost forcing her back, and it was warm, peculiarly warm.

Collier didn’t answer. He seemed transfixed by the scene, andesite-capped Mount Rose in the northeast, almost eleven thousand feet in altitude, the granitic western slopes of the Carson Range in Nevada in front of them across the lake, and on the South Shore, the casinos now considerably diminished, Legos abandoned by some giant kid. Below them many small, shadowy lakes spotted the long, lateral moraines.

"The glacier advancing down to the ice sheet over Tahoe was at least a quarter-mile thick, and it wasn’t that long ago," Collier said over the noise of the wind, and just then Nina felt a plump raindrop land on her lip.

She held out her hands, palms up, saying, "Hey, Collier—"

"The scene must have been even more incredible fifteen thousand years ago—"

"Collier!"

"What?"

"Rain!" More raindrops landed on her hands. She held them out mutely, and Collier’s eyes widened.

"Okay," he said. "We made it. Now let’s get out of here." His words were punctuated by a rolling, harsh noise that blasted up the mountain toward them. At the same time they saw, directly in front of them but several hundred feet out in the air, a sight as magnificent and terrible as the mountain they were now trying to escape, a bolt of lightning thrown down from the layers of clouds, met from below by its jagged twin.

As the bolts crashed together, crackling and hissing around them, the hairs on the back of Nina’s neck stood up. Clapping her hands to her ears, she tried to flatten herself, but Collier was grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her toward where the trail must be, extinguished in the torrent of rain that had suddenly begun falling. "Hold on to my pack!" he yelled.

Half-blind in the downpour, they groped their way frantically down toward the avalanche slope. The booming, rolling, noise never let up, as if they were trapped inside a big drum, more percussion than sound. Now and then a clap rent the sky and almost knocked them off their feet. More lightning flashed around the mountains, but now it had coalesced into a glaring sheet of light across the underbelly of the storm.

Collier held out his arm and stopped Nina, pointing toward a small boulder with an overhang. They hustled over and crouched under the rock, tearing off their packs and putting them in front for protection and then peering fearfully out at the frenzy. The din was incredible. The temperature plummeted, and hailstones began to batter the ground, gusting into their inadequate shelter and bouncing off the rocks outside like a blizzard of ricocheting BB pellets.

Nina unzipped her pack with clumsy fingers, managing to pull out a dry flannel shirt to shield their faces as they crouched behind the packs. Even shouting was impossible. For an endless ten minutes they curled up and buried their heads like animals, enduring the worst of the storm.

At last there came a sinister lull, and they pulled down the shirt, now heavy and stiff with melting hail. The light shooting through the clouds dimmed. Below the slick rocky ledge Nina saw remote trees flattened as if a meteor had passed by. She rubbed her numb hands, thinking, It’s over, we made it....

She turned her head to tell Collier, and he looked so funny, his hair was standing straight up, and then there was the smell of ozone and that awful tension in the air again, of something building, building up to intolerable stress, cracking ...

She heard a bang just before a terrific gash of lightning struck about seventy-five feet above, right at the summit rocks. They saw only the upper segment, blinding and terrible. They both yelled and clutched at each other.

And as they gaped out into the appalling light, their eyes shocked and dazzled, deafened by the thunder reverberating all around, they saw a body catapulting past, blown off the mountain, falling toward the rocks below.

2

THE SPECTRE OF A MAN WHIZZING BY IN BLURRY silhouette was followed by another torrent of cold rain turning to sleet that washed away the horrific image.

Had it been a hallucination? Nina blinked, saw a bright tree with zigzag branches inside her eyelids, and turned to Collier, who pointed outside, then at himself, and pulled open his own pack, finding a thin poncho folded tightly into a tiny nylon bag. He tugged it out, spread it enough to find the neck opening, and hung it around his neck.

Ice water spilled into their hidey-hole. Nina grabbed Collier’s arm and shook her head, shouting, "No! No!" but the noise of the wind and rain picked up her words and hurled them away.

"I’m going after him!" he yelled back. Somewhere her mind registered that she could hear him again.

"Me too!" she hollered, a foot from his ear.

"Too dangerous!"

"Then stay!"

He ignored her, crawling out on hands and knees, head down, leaving her with the packs. The wind had quieted for the moment, as if it, too, had been taken aback at the last lightning strike. The sleet became colder, lighter. Coasting in on a cold gust, heavy white flakes of snow began drifting down.

Cursing the mountain, Nina tied the flannel shirt over her head, bent to get out, and tried to follow Collier, but she found herself in white fog. She couldn’t see ten feet away. She didn’t know which way Collier had gone. He couldn’t see through this mist any better than she could. What if he fell? What if she couldn’t find him?

She made it about twenty-five feet before she knocked her knee into a sharp rock and had to sit down suddenly. Wet snow soaked through her clothes to her shoulders and legs. She touched her freezing fingers to the cut, but couldn’t tell how bad it was.

The swift succession of changes in the weather and atmospheric pressure, the afterimages burned into her retinas, and the temporary deafness from the thunder combined with the pain in her knee. She was going to pass out or get sick. But she had to find Collier!

So she crawled back under the crag again to take stock. Huddled safely out of the weather once more, she opened her pack again, searching for dry clothes to heap on her shivering body.

Her hand closed over her cellular phone, the new one she took everywhere and had stuck in the front pocket as they were locking up the car.

No way. No way!

"What the hell," she muttered, pushing the power button.

Orange light glowed on the phone’s face. It beeped. She listened. She heard a dial tone.

She punched in 911. Nothing happened.

Closing the phone, she pushed in the antenna, hot tears of frustration on her cheeks. Try again, Nina, she told herself. Don’t give up.

She tried the whole procedure again, this time more slowly. No reply. Nothing but the sound of dead air.

Peering out into the fog, she listened for some new sound that would tell her where Collier was, some sound that would remind her that she was not all alone on the top of a mountain in a monster storm. She might just lie there and die. She might freeze to death in August in California, which would surely be one for the record books.

She checked her limbs for numbness, but her fingers and toes burned with the cold. She didn’t want Collier to find her scrunched up under this rock, a beatific smile on her face from the warmth that she had heard crept up on people who were freezing to death.

A more distant clap of thunder interrupted her foggy meditations. The center of the storm was moving on, leaving the whiteout.

She sat back again, aware for the first time of blood spreading all over her pant leg. She opened the phone again to its spineless beep. She punched in the numbers, giving the little machine plenty of time to comprehend each one individually: 9 ... 1 ... 1.

Each beep of the buttons sounded weaker. She stared at the numbers. She read the labels. "Idiot!" she shouted. She had forgotten it again! "Send!" The magic send!

She punched it.

A calm female voice answered.

By the time the medevac helicopter arrived from Reno, setting off a flurry of fresh new snow, the clouds had broken up and blue sky showed above just as before. Two men in uniform jumped out and ran up to Nina, who sat on a rock next to her pack combing her long, wet hair, a bedraggled Lorelei.

"You okay?" They spotted her injury immediately. One of them ripped her jeans above the cut, examining her leg with expert speed, introducing himself as Sven. He cleaned the cut, pronounced it relatively minor, sterilized it, and covered it with a clean bandage as gently as a mother. While he worked on her, her voice returned.

"Boy, am I glad to see you guys. There are two men halfway down the slope. One of them is the man I think must have been struck by lightning. The other one is my friend, who went down there to help. I think I know which way they went. Let me show you." She heard herself jabbering, and didn’t care.

"How’s that leg feel?" asked Sven, substitute mom.

"Fine. The blood had me scared, but I can walk."

She led them to the edge of the slope, testing her leg gingerly and finding it really not too bad. They could see the two figures several hundred feet below. Collier waved. The other figure lay motionless.

"We can’t get any closer, Dave," one of the technicians said. "Let’s get the stretcher. What kind of shape are you in, miss?"

"Fine! Perfect!" The memory of her panic under the crag embarrassed her only a little. People did die on these mountains all the time. Look at that poor man lying down there, his life gone in an instant. They should have turned back. A perverse spirit had taken hold of them, and now—

"You need dry clothes. There are some in the chopper, and you can share them with the others as soon as we take a look at the injured guy."

"Sven, Dave, when we get back down, I’m going to do something for you. I’m going to ... make you a cake!"

The men grinned. "Lemon frosting," Dave said.

As they talked, they had been unloading their equipment and lacing on hiking boots. While they prepared themselves, a second chopper landed not far from the first one. A man introduced himself as Mike and took charge, directing the technicians. Nina, watching them, said, "Let me help."

"The slope is steep and slick. It’s nasty," said Mike.

"You might need another pair of hands."

He made an instant decision, bringing over a sling-like red contraption and a length of cable, and said, "Okay, we’re going to rope up. Put this on."

"What is it?"

"A Whillans harness. Put your legs through here, pull it up around your waist, and put this ’biner through the front tab. Here, I’ll do it." In a moment she was wearing the harness and he was tying her to the rope with a complicated knot at her waist. The EMTs got into their harnesses and Mike said, "Let’s go."

They began making their way down the slippery rockfall, Nina third in line and Mike in the back. "There are other people caught up here," Nina said between breaths. "The storm was terrible. They could be hurt too."

"One at a time," Mike said. "Don’t worry. We won’t forget anyone."

"The lightning ... it was horrible. He flew. I saw it, but I still don’t believe it," Nina said.

"Take it easy. It’s all over now."

The story seemed even more incredible now because, returning to its earlier state of apparent benevolence, the sky had cleared and the sun shone down, pure and golden in the afternoon. Yet the Tahoe Sierra gleamed white, as if it were December instead of August. Her watch said four o’clock.

After about ten minutes of slipping and sliding down the rocks, they could hear Collier. "I tried for a long time. Half an hour at least," he called plaintively. He sat next to the unmoving body, completely spent, his forehead matted with wet hair.

They slid down the last few feet to a level layer formed by a rock outcrop that had piled up loose rocks, making for unsteady footing. Nina stepped carefully over a rift, and reaching Collier, put her arms around his soaked shoulders. His face was drawn into the lineaments of deep sorrow. He buried his big head in her shoulder and said, "I breathed in and out a million times. I did it perfectly, perfectly. But she never moved."

"It’s all right. Shhh. You did everything you could."

"She’s dead," Collier said. "Isn’t she?"

"She?" Nina said. She looked over at the face she had been avoiding, the singed eyebrows that she had seen from the corner of her eyes, the skull with a few flaps of flesh left that had once been ...

Molly and Jason’s father. Ray, they had called him. He was obviously dead, his clothing hanging in black tatters, his bulky pack still stuck like a succubus to his back, a bit of burned wire hanging from the frame.

"Anna," Collier said. He wiped his mouth, started to cry.

Yelling came from up above. The man called Leo slid toward them, taking great, sliding steps that moved him down the slope twenty feet at a time. Collier pulled away from Nina, putting his knees up, one arm hiding his eyes. Nina looked over at the dead man. The technicians seemed to have dumped more equipment than their packs could carry all around the man, some of it on his body, including two black paddles, which they held against his chest....

"Clear!" Mike shouted, and they all moved back.

The dead man seemed to leap into the air. Then he fell back, while Mike listened to his chest through a stethoscope. "Again," he said. Dave held the paddles tightly to Ray’s chest, and the dead man heaved up again and again....

"Oh, God. Ray," Leo was saying. "His wife and kids are up there on the mountain somewhere. Is he ...?"

"Stay back," Mike said. The technicians continued to work doggedly over the man.

Finally Nina said, "Where’s the rest of your party?"

"I don’t know. We got separated when the storm struck. "

"C’mon, Ray, c’mon," Nina heard Sven say. She couldn’t watch anymore. She could hear them grunt, hear the noise of air artificially expelled.

"Is your friend hurt?" Leo asked.

"I don’t know," Nina said, turning back to Collier. "It’s not Anna, Collier. It’s a man. Anna’s been dead for a long time." Collier didn’t respond; he wasn’t moving at all, and a stab of apprehension went through her. "Look," she said, getting Sven’s attention. "I want to take him back up."

"He’s in bad shape, isn’t he?" said Sven. "Need a hand? If you want to wait, we could come back and take him up in the stretcher."

She helped Collier to his feet. He followed her lead. "No, we’ll make it up from here. I’m not sure about making it all the way down the mountain, though."

"We can take two plus one on a stretcher in each chopper," said Dave, still working on the body. "If nobody else is injured, you get first dibs. The three of us can wrestle the stretcher up. Go ahead."

Leo, who had been watching the proceedings from a few feet away, said suddenly, "Ray is dead, isn’t he? I’ll be damned."

"Yeah, I guess we’ve lost him," Mike said, rising wearily. "Let’s get him on the stretcher, Dave. We’ll all go up together. Safer going uphill."

"Collier, come on now." Nina took him by the arm, leading him across the split in the rocks, wondering how he had made it down there in the storm. He stopped on the other side, massaging his temples and eyes with both hands, as if to rub away his confusion.

Trying to determine the easiest route, squinting their eyes against the treacherous sun, they looked up.

Standing near the summit above them, still and silent, the dead man’s family was watching.