Maybe I needed to redecorate. Yeah, then I could move back in.
VICKI MET me at the Loose Rock climbing gym almost an hour later.
“Early?” I cocked my eye at her with a sly grin.
“Yep! Honore let me go early ‘cause of your mystery here.” She nodded at the large, clear plastic bag full of Celia’s climbing gear.
We decided to climb first, and see who else would show up. My muscles positively sang with joy at the exertion, my hamstrings screamed in pain after having been idle for too long, and the gunshot wound in my ass was but a distant, dull ache. I strapped into my harness for the first time in what felt like forever, taking my time in ascending one of the easier routes to the top. Vicki belayed me down; then she took her turn, upping the ante by avoiding the easier and more obvious handholds and footholds.
“Boring,” I laughed. “I’ll try that route over there”. I nodded toward the nasty piece of work in the corner of the gym, the one with an overhang. There were no obviously easy routes marked out that particular wall; I made it under the negative incline, a foothold available to my far right if only I could reach it with my toe. My fingers dug in tight, shoulders working hard to keep steady, my abs sucked to the wall. I let my butt hang out momentarily, smearing my feet against the smooth surface, using my lats to swing and lift the right foot up toward my goal.
Almost.
Wheee!!!
Free fall – then a tug, then a harder arrest and I was swinging fifteen feet above the padded floor, breathing hard.
Vicki let me down.
“Your glute’s still bothering you,” she commented. “You’d had no trouble with this section before.”
I rubbed my sore butt, then I rubbed my sore hands and fingertips.
“Yeah. It’ll come back, though.”
“Why did that guy shoot you again?” Vicki asked. I’d never confided in her, uncertain of the reception I’d receive. Not everyone wanted to be best friends with a burglar and a thief.
Then again…
“If I tell you, it goes no further, right?”
She nodded. I looked around the empty gym; we were alone. I got us each a bottle of a vile, blue sports drink out of the vending machine. Bright blue… it reminded me of Rafael’s eyes and it didn’t seem so bad anymore.
I told her.
“So you’re telling me only because you’re retiring?” Vicki asked, her dark eyes thoughtful.
“I haven’t mentioned anything about retiring,” I said, suddenly peevish.
“Raf doesn’t like it.”
“Yeah.”
“Will you miss it?”
“I hope not.”
Vicki downed the rest of the blue sports drink.
“Too bad. Ever thought of getting a partner?” She asked, her eyes suddenly on me, her question loaded.
“Ever thought of getting a criminal record?” I shot back, sounding too much like Rafael.
“We wouldn’t have to steal anything. Just think of the prank potential!” Her wistful voice awakened a latent desire deep in my soul. It’s been a while since I invaded somebody else’s space. The blue drink in my bottle glared at me, blue and unyielding. My thought process was disturbed by Taylor’s voice, calling out a hello. The door opened again and Chico Garces walked in. After a brief hiatus, our group was together again.
“So, Eve. What’s the big mystery?”
CHICO GARCES was approximately my height, but slightly narrower in the torso. He wore purple microfiber tights and a black, tight sleeveless shirt. His sinuous and well-defined muscles harkened back to his days as a gymnast and the conditioned gleam of his black, chin-length hair betrayed his fixation with his appearance. He was the type of a guy who would have regular facials, manicures, pedicures and massages, which he traded in kind for his services as a chiropractor. When we had parties, we ribbed him over it incessantly but he would just smile, tossed his mane of shiny hair to the side, and offer us another round of his awesome frozen margaritas. Right now, his nails were short, covered with two layers of clear shellac polish. Nails take an awful beating during rock climbing – mine were scraped and chipped constantly, never growing past my finger’s natural length. I remember having asked him why he even bothered applying nail polish.
“It protects my nails,” he had said, bending his hands to show his one-week old manicure. “Without those two layers, my hands would look pretty trashed. And only shellac will take this kind of abuse, too. My patients find trashed hands disconcerting.” And, truly, one week and three climbing sessions later, his nails looked only a bit scratched up. That was Chico for you, though. He cared about that kind of a thing.
I TOLD THEM to sit down and set the plastic bag with Celia’s climbing gear in the middle of our little circle. They all waited until I was finished with the story.
“So, the timeline looks like this,” I summarized. “She was climbing as a semi-pro, and picked up a part time job doing accounting for Provoid Brothers. She was okay for maybe half a year. Then all the media started to notice the discrepancies in Provoid Brother’s stock valuation. Somebody from inside the company leaked some information, which pointed to Provoid Brother’s being just a house of cards, financially speaking – and they were hiding it using fraudulent accounting and reporting practices. Three weeks after this, Blaine Kirby, the VP of collections, took Celia out on their first date. According to Raf they got along pretty well, and Celia started to teach Blaine rock-climbing. All the while not realizing that he is, in fact, a top-notch, world-class climbing legend who just happens to hide behind his pseudonym, “Demon of Santa Teresa”.
Taylor Nolan, who worked for a regional newspaper, drew a sharp inhale.
“Yeah, a guy like that has no business making any mistakes while checking her fall.”
I took her gear out piece by piece. I examined each component and passed it to Vicki, who passed it to Chico, who passed it to Taylor.
We found nothing wrong with her harness; its nylon webbing was strong and its buckles were fully functional.
The carabiners looked okay – they were simple, oval devices made to screw shut and stay that way.
The rope was slightly worn, the sinuous, green coil sitting snake-like in our midst. This very rope slipped through Blaine Kirby’ belay device, allowing Celia to fall to her death.
Next came the two belay devices: a blue-colored Petzl GriGri, which was used by Blaine to belay Celia, and a GriGri 2, which Blaine used to belay himself.
“Were the GriGri’s theirs?” Nolan asked, suspicious.
“So I’m told. Blaine bought his shortly after Celia started to ‘teach’ him.”
“Yet he handled her device for her. How come?” Vicki asked, curious. “Wasn’t it just a level III climb?”
“She was ‘teaching’ him to belay her while she climbed the lead,” I sighed. “From what I’ve read about the accident at the North Face gym - where they don’t really want to talk to me about it, by the way - she usually climbed solo. That’s why she had a GriGri to begin with.”
We all handled the small metal objects, nodding. When securing one another, all we needed was just a simple stitch plate. Climbing on your own, it was advisable to go a little more high-tech. But high-tech toys tended to break at times, and that’s why Taylor brought out the toolbox.
“Let’s have a look at these babies,” he said. Tampering was, of course, strictly prohibited by the manufacturer, but we did it anyway. We found ways of improving our own gear that we bought already used, saving a lot of money. If you and your buddies build something with your own hands, tested it, and trusted it, well… then you were good to go.
The metal plate snapped off, showing the mechanism on the inside. The rope was supposed to pass through multiple openings. If it did so slowly, the rope would pass with ease. If it got yanked hard, though, the increased friction made it choke up those little holes, and the rope stopped going through.
“He has a newer model,” Taylor noted. The anodized metal gl
eamed yellow and bright. There was really no reason to tamper with it, but we opened it up anyway. Still, no problem presented itself: both devices looked sound. We put them back together.
“Let’s try it,” Chico said as he clipped Celia’s GriGri to his harness. He walked up to the wall, picked up one of the ropes already hanging from the rafters, and fed the end through it. After a bit of tugging, he climbed up a few feet, took the slack out of his own line, and let go.
There he was, dangling in the air on one of our green, ten-millimeter thick ropes.
“Worked fine for me,” he said, shrugging once he let himself back down. “Now Blaine’s device,” he said, repeating the process with an equal amount of success.
“Any difference?” Vicki asked.
“Blaine’s was a bit smoother, but it’s newer, and a newer generation, too. I was thinking of buying one like that.”
“What about the rope?” I asked.
“Just a rope,” Chico shrugged, picking it up, coiling it about his hands. “Used, a bit dirty. Wow!” He reached for his water bottle and squirted his fingers clean. I saw him rub his hands. Eyes the color of smoky amethyst widened in dismay.
“Why the hell are my nails so dirty all of a sudden?” I gave him a bemused look. His formerly white, pristine fingers now sported black half-moons under the edge of his nails. “How beautiful, Chico,” I teased, unable to resist.
He snorted. “Let me go wash this off. The rope has been used outside, after all.”
We played with the rope some, waiting.
“All clean, Princess?” Taylor Nolan teased.
“Shut up, Taylor. It’s even worse now.” We looked at his hands. Blue stain seeped from under his fingernails and over the rough calluses of his finger pads, and he looked a right mess.
“Heh, that reminds me of the time we were in college, tie-dying t-shirts without gloves,” Vicki chortled.
There was something important here, something significant. Green rope. All green ropes made by SpiderSilk were between ten and eleven millimeters thick. The thinner ones were red, the thinnest one went down to seven to eight millimeters and were yellow.
“Wait… wait, guys. How thick is this rope really?” Taylor’s voice was deadpan straight as our thoughts moved in the same direction. His face was as white as a sheet.
“It’s green, it should be a ten,” I said. I bent over to pick up the coil and walked it over to the wall, comparing it to one of our own green, 10 mm ropes.
“Is it just me, or does Celia’s rope look thinner than it should?”
“Tie dyeing,” Vicki exhaled next to me. “I’d bet my next week’s salary that that bastard over-dyed a thin yellow rope with blue dye to make it look green. Out in the field you’d never notice.”
“Not if you think it’s your own old line,” Chico said, his expression grim. “When I was looking into buying the GriGri 2, like Blaine Kirby had used, I wanted it because it can handle any thickness – but the older model Celia had, well…”
“It can use only the thick rope,” Taylor finished for him. “Rated 10-11 mm. The thinner ropes will slide right though. That bastard.”
WE RAN a simple test, designed to prove whether we were right. Chico used Celia’s GriGri and Celia’s thin, green-colored rope. He was being double-belayed. I secured him on Celia’s device, Vicki had him on our regular thick, green rope with a number-eight plate. Both of us were anchored to the ground straps through our harnesses. I watched Chico’s lithe, graceful form climb all the way up to the ceiling.
“One, two, three: GO!”
Chico let go of the wall, falling backward, simulating Celia’s fall. I did my best to make Celia’s older GriGri arrest his fall; he slowed down a little, but not nearly enough. The thin, green-dyed rope sped through the belay device as he hurtled toward the ground. As he descended, the thick belay rope kept slipping through Vicki’s alert hands and through her stitch plate.
Vicki was giving the thin rope and the GriGri a chance.
It failed.
Two-thirds of the way down the wall, Vicki lifted the rope up and over in her experienced hands, exerting force, creating friction and slowing Chico’s calamitous descent toward the thinly padded floor.
There.
Chico Garces swung on the end of Vicki’s rope, having been halted only five feet before he hit the ground. His luminous, black hair looked even blacker in contrast with his pale face.
“You okay, Chico?” Taylor asked.
The slighter man swallowed a few times before his voice returned. “Yeah.”
Once down and back on the ground, he straightened and took a few deep breaths, letting the air out in a long stream.
“How far did you let me fall, Vicki?” He asked in a conversational tone.
“Little over twenty feet,” Vicki said. “Sorry. Had to give the GriGri a chance.”
Chico nodded. “It’s okay. The GriGri usually engages within five feet; it gives a famously hard stop. It definitely flunked the test.”
We looked all the way up the forty-foot wall. The former warehouse building was tall enough to accommodate our needs; it was also tall enough to kill us if we failed to treat it with proper respect.
WE WERE all shaken up and starving; a pizza was in order. The natural course of action was to go to Conti’s, a joint near the gym where the locals knew us and we knew the menu by heart.
The mood was somber. Now we knew how Celia had died; however, the chain of evidence had been broken long ago and there was no way to prove that Blaine Kirby was the murderer.
“I bet he let her climb all the way up,” Vicki ruminated over her beer. “I bet he stopped feeding the rope to her, which took her off balance.”
“He might have even pulled,” I said. “GriGri’s can have that problem in the hands of less experienced belayers.”
“Which would have covered him for the accident,” Taylor murmured, his voice bitter and dark. “Just pull and let her fall until the rope slips out of the device itself. And the thin rope would have done just that; we saw Chico test it.”
We ate a lot of pizza and wings, and drank a lot of beer. None of us had to drive, so we did some shots. The topic slowly drifted to our own climbing war stories, close calls of bad falls, incidents of hanging on a wall in a rainstorm…
“Once I hung on a building in a rainstorm,” I said, alcohol having loosened my tongue.
“No shit!”
“Yeah.” I hiccupped and giggled. “I was delivering a marketing study to Rafael, my esteemed client.” I hiccupped again.
“What happened?” Chico asked, his eyes glimmering with amusement.
I told the story – only the good parts. Then I did another shot of tequila.
“The rest is history. That’s how I got together with her brother.”
We all spoke of Celia as though we knew her personally. There were people out there who had in fact known her, and would have been interested in finding out what happened.
“We have to take this to the North Face,” I said. “We…we need to reasshure ourselves that we’re right.” I rubbed my numb cheek with my hand, vaguely aware that I was slurring my words.
“All the guys at the North Face are stuck up bitches,” Chico said, tossing his head.
“You know them personally?” I challenged. The bald guy, Frankie, he’d been really nice.
“No, but…”
“Grrrawwwrrr!”
Everyone looked toward me, seeking the source of the unusual sound. Vicki’s eyes brightened in amusement, and I felt myself redden.
My phone had another two orgasms before I managed to extricate it from the bottom of my backpack pocket. They stared at me, incredulous, not quite believing their ears.
“Heya, Rafaelie,” I said in a jaunty tone. “I missh you.”
“Evelyn – are you alright?”
He had been asking me that question all day long today.
“You betcha your schweet assh I’m awright!” I slurred some more. Vicki
broke into her typical, uncontrollable peals of laughter and the guys snickered, banging their fists on the table.
“You are drunk.”
“Yesssh. I am. But I love you…hic!...anyway.” Now I wasn’t only slurring, I was hiccupping and saying…
Oh gods.
Not that.
Tell me I didn’t say that.
“Coming home soon, Evelyn? It’s after midnight.”
“Oh. I dunno. I’m on the other side of town.” Usually, when we climbed late and drank even later, we all crashed over at Chico’s place.
He nodded at me, encouraging.
“Chi…Chico lets us crash at his pad when we get…hic!...like thish.”
“Who are you with?” Raf asked, and I could just feel the tense set of his shoulders in his voice.
“Our climbing gang,” I said, enunciating very, very slowly. “My best friends! Vicki, and Taylor, and…hic!...Chico.”
“I’ll come get you,” Raf said, sober and calm. I could feel his steely resolution but I wasn’t ready to leave my buddies yet. I wanted to bunk with them and endure their rude farting jokes and pretend the whole thing with Chico falling over twenty feet never happened. In fact, I haven’t seen them in too long and crashing at Chico’s overnight was exactly what I needed at the time.
“No. I…I’ll stay here tonight…Hic!”
“What’s Chico’s address?” Now I could hear the way his jaw muscles worked, all tight and struggling for control.
I sighed. There was nothing for it – I just had to tell him the truth.
“Don’t worry, Rafaelie! I jus…Hic!...I jus need shome time with Vicki and the guys. We figured out how your shister…Hic!...was killed, and we are all traumatized. Poor Chico, he fell over twenty feet testin’ it…We’re gettin’ sssshitfaced, Rafaelie!”
I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances Page 29