I didn’t make it, and neither did Angie.
When we smashed into the Lexus, my body shot airborne. I cleared the hood of the Celica and landed on the trunk of the Lexus like a porpoise, my chest slashing through the beads of water and pebbled glass without slowing down much. I heard something crash on my right, a cement crashing that was so loud it sounded as if the night sky had been torn in half.
I hit the tarmac with my shoulder and something cracked by my collarbone. And I rolled. And flipped. And rolled some more. I held tight to the gun in my right hand, and it discharged twice as the sky spun and the bridge twirled and dipped.
I skidded to a stop on a bloody, howling hip. My left shoulder felt numb and flabby simultaneously, and my flesh was slick with blood.
But I could flex my right hand around the gun, and even though the hip I’d landed on felt as if it were filled with sharp stones, both legs felt solid. I looked back at the Lexus as the passenger door opened. It was about ten yards back, its trunk attached now to the crumpled hood of the Celica. A stream of hissing water shot from the Celica as I stood unsteadily, a tomato paste combination of rain and blood streaming down my face.
On my right, on the other side of the bridge, a black Jeep had skidded to a stop and the driver was shouting words at me that were lost in the wind and rain.
I ignored him and concentrated on the Lexus.
The Weeble fell to one knee as he climbed out of the Lexus, his white shirt saturated red, a meaty hole gouged across where his right eyebrow used to be. I limped toward him as he used the muzzle of his pistol to push himself off his knee. He gripped the open car door and watched me come, and I could tell by his bobbing Adam’s apple that he was swallowing hard against nausea. He looked down at the gun in his hand uncertainly, then at me.
“Don’t,” I said.
He looked down at his chest, at the blood pumping from somewhere in there, and his fingers tightened around his pistol.
“Don’t,” I said again.
Please don’t, I thought.
But he raised the gun anyway, blinking at me in the downpour, his small body wavering like a drunk’s.
I shot him twice in the center of the chest before his gun hand cleared his hip, and he flopped back against the car, his mouth forming a confused oval, as if he were about to ask me a question. He grabbed for the open door, but his arm slid down between the doorframe and the windshield pillar. His body began a cascade to his right, but his elbow got pinned between the door and the car, and he died there—half-pointed to the ground, vise-gripped to the car, the beginnings of a question lying stillborn in his eyes.
I heard a ratcheting sound, and I looked up over the roof of the car to see Mr. Cushing leveling a shiny shotgun at me. He sighted down the bore, one eye squinting shut, a bony white finger curled around the trigger. He smiled.
Then a puffy red cloud punched through the center of his throat and spit over the collar of his shirt.
He frowned. He reached a hand up toward his throat, but before it got there, he pitched forward and his face hit the car roof. The shotgun slid down the windshield, came to rest on the hood. Mr. Cushing’s tall thin body folded to its right and he disappeared on the other side of the hood, his body making a soft thump as it hit the ground.
Angie appeared in the darkness behind him, her gun still extended, the rain hissing off the hot barrel. Slivers of glass twinkled in her dark hair. Several razor-thin lacerations crisscrossed her forehead and the bridge of her nose, but otherwise she appeared to have survived the crash with a lot less damage than either the Weeble or I had.
I smiled at her, and she gave me a weary one in return.
Then she looked at something over my shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Patrick. Oh, Jesus.”
I turned, and that’s when I saw what had made the loud crashing noise when I was thrown from the Celica.
Jay’s 3000 GT sat upside down fifty feet away. Most of the car had smashed through the barrier, and I was momentarily amazed that it hadn’t dropped off the bridge entirely. The rear third of the car was perched on the bridge. The front two thirds hovered over nothing at all, the car held to the bridge by nothing more than crumbling cement and two mangled steel coils. As we watched, the front of the car dipped slightly into space, and the rear rose off the cement foundation. The steel coils creaked.
I ran over to the barrier, and got down on my knees, looked over it at Jay. He hung upside down in his seat, strapped in by the seat belt, his knees up by his chin, his head an inch from the car ceiling.
“Don’t move,” I said.
His eyes curled toward me. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
I looked at the barrier. Slick with beads of rain, it moaned again. On the other side of it was a small strip of cement foundation, not enough to be considered a good foothold for anyone over the age of four, but I wasn’t in a position to sit back and wait for it to grow. Below the cement strip waited nothing but black space and water as hard as cliff face a hundred yards down.
Angie came up beside me as a breeze swept off the gulf. The car shifted to the right a bit, then jerked downward another inch.
“Oh, no,” Jay said. He laughed weakly. “No, no, no.”
“Jay,” Angie said. “I’m coming out.”
“You’re coming out?” I said. “No. I got a longer reach.”
She climbed over the barrier. “And bigger feet, and your arm looks fucked up. Can you even move it?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She gripped an intact section of the barrier and eased herself along it toward the car. I walked beside her, my right hand an inch from her arm.
Another gust of wind cut through the rain and the whole bridge seemed to sway.
Angie reached the car, and I held tight to her right arm with both hands as she lowered herself to a tenuous squatting position.
She leaned out from the barrier and extended her left arm as sirens rang in the distance.
“Jay,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I can’t reach.” She strained against my grip, the tendons in her arms pulsing under the skin, but her fingers fell just short of the upside-down door handle. “You’re going to have to help out, Jay.”
“How?”
“Can you open your door?”
His head craned as he tried to locate the door handle. “Never been upside down in a car before. You know?”
“I’ve never hung from the side of a bridge three hundred feet over the water,” Angie said. “This makes us even.”
“Got the door handle,” he said.
“You’re going to have to push the door open and reach for my hand,” Angie said, and her body swayed slightly in the wind.
He blinked against the rain blowing into the window, puffed up his cheeks, and exhaled. “I feel like if I move an inch, this thing’s going to tip.”
“Chance we have to take, Jay.” Her hand slipped down my arm. I squeezed, and her fingers dug into my flesh again.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “I’ll tell ya, though, I—”
The car lurched, and the whole bridge gave a loud creak, this one high-pitched and frantic like a scream, and the torn cement holding the car crumbled.
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Jay said.
And the car dropped off the bridge.
Angie screamed and jerked back from the car as the torn steel coil snapped into her arm. I gripped her hand tight, and pulled her over the barrier as her legs kicked at the open air.
With her face pressed against mine, and her arm wrapped tight around my neck, her heart hammering against my biceps, and my own pounding in my ear, we peered down at the place where Jay’s car had plummeted through streams of rain and disappeared into black.
25
“He going to be okay?” Inspector Jefferson asked the EMT working on my shoulder.
“He’s got a cracked scapula. Might be broken. I can’t tell without an X ray.”
“A what?” I said.
“Shoulder blade,?
?? the EMT said. “Definitely cracked.”
Jefferson looked at him with sleepy eyes and shook his head slowly. “He’ll be fine for a while. We’ll get a doctor take a look at him soon enough.”
“Shit,” the EMT said and shook his own head. He wrapped the bandage tight, running it from under my armpit, up over my shoulder, down across my collarbone, around my back and chest, and up to my armpit again.
Inspector Carnell Jefferson watched me steadily with his sleepy eyes as the EMT did his work. Jefferson looked to be in his late thirties, a slim black guy of unremarkable height and build, with a soft, easygoing jaw and a perpetual smile playing lazily at the corners of his mouth. He wore a light blue raincoat over a tan suit and white shirt, a silk tie with a pink and blue floral print hanging slightly askew from an unbuttoned collar. His hair was cut so short and tight to his skull, I wondered why he bothered having any there at all, and he didn’t even blink as rain dripped down the tight skin on his face.
He looked like a nice guy, the kind of guy you’d shoot the shit with at the gym, maybe have a few pitchers with after work. Kind of guy who loved his kids and had sexual fantasies only about his wife.
I’d met cops like him before, though, and he was the last guy you’d want to get too comfortable with. In the box, or testifying at a trial, or hammering away at a witness, this nice guy would turn into a shark in less time than it took to snap your fingers. He was a homicide inspector, a young one, and black in a southern state; he didn’t get where he was by being any suspect’s friend.
“So, Mr. Kenzie, is it?”
“Yup.”
“You’re a private dick up in Bahstan. Correct?”
“That’s what I told you.”
“Uh-huh. Nice town?”
“Boston?”
“Yes. Nice town?”
“I like it.”
“I hear it’s real pretty in the autumn.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “Hear they don’t like niggers much up there, though.”
“There are assholes everywhere,” I said.
“Oh, sure. Sure.” He rubbed his head with the palm of his hand, looked up into the drizzle for a moment, then blinked the rain from his eyes. “Assholes everywhere,” he repeated. “So since we’re standing in the rain talking all friendly about race relations and assholes and the like, whyn’t you tell me about that pair of dead assholes blocking all this here traffic on my bridge?”
Those lazy eyes found mine and I saw a glimpse of the shark in them for just a moment before it disappeared.
“I shot the little guy twice in the chest.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I noticed. Yes.”
“My partner shot the other guy as he drew down on me with a shotgun.”
He looked behind him at Angie. She sat in an ambulance across from the one where I sat as an EMT wiped at the scratches on her face, legs, and neck with an alcohol swab and Jefferson’s partner, Detective Lyle Vandemaker, interrogated her.
“Man,” Jefferson said and whistled, “she’s a first-class mega-babe and she can pump a round through the throat of an asshole from ten yards out in the pouring rain? That’s one special woman.”
“Yeah,” I said, “she is.”
He stroked his chin and nodded to himself. “I’ll tell you what my problem is here, Mr. Kenzie. It’s a matter of discerning who the real assholes are. You see what I’m saying? You say those two corpses over there—they’re the assholes. And I’d like to believe you. I would. Hell, I’d love to just say, ‘Okay,’ and shake your hand and let you go on back to Beantown. I mean, really. But if, oh let’s just say, you were lying to me, and you and your partner are the real assholes here, well, I’d look awful stupid just letting you go. And seeing how we don’t have any witnesses as yet, well, all we got is your word against the words of two guys who can’t really give us their words because you, well, shot them a few times and they died. You follow?”
“Just barely,” I said.
Across the median divider of the bridge, traffic seemed heavier than it probably was normally at three in the morning because the police had turned the two lanes of normally southbound traffic into one southern and one northern lane. Every car that passed on that side of the bridge slowed to a crawl to get a glimpse of the commotion on this side.
In the breakdown lane, a black Jeep with two bright green surfboards strapped to its roof was stopped completely, its hazards flashing. The owner I recognized as the guy who’d shouted something at me just before I shot the Weeble.
He was a sunburnt rail of a guy with long, bleached-blond hair and no shirt. He stood at the rear of the Jeep and seemed in heated conversation with two cops. He pointed in my direction several times.
His companion, a young woman as skinny and blond as he was, leaned against the hood of the Jeep. When she caught my eye, she waved brightly, as if we were old friends.
I managed a half wave back at her, because it seemed the polite thing to do, then turned back to my immediate surroundings.
Our side of the bridge was blocked by the Lexus and the Celica, six or seven green and white patrol cars, several unmarked cars, two fire trucks, three ambulances, and a black van bearing the yellow words PINELLAS COUNTY MARITIME INVESTIGATIONS. The van had dropped four divers at the St. Pete side of the bridge just a few minutes before, and they were somewhere in the water now, searching for Jay.
Jefferson looked at the hole Jay’s car had left behind in the barrier. Bathed in the red of the fire engine’s lights, it looked like an open wound.
“Fucked up my bridge pretty good, didn’t you, Mr. Kenzie?”
“That wasn’t me,” I said. “It was those two dead assholes over there.”
“So you say,” he said. “So you say.”
The EMT used a pair of tweezers to remove pebbles and slivers of glass from my face, and I winced as I stared off past the flashing lights and dark drizzle at the crowd forming on the other side of the barricade. They’d walked up the bridge in the rain at three in the morning, just so they could get a firsthand look at violence. TV, I guess, wasn’t enough for them. Their own lives weren’t enough for them. Nothing was enough.
The EMT pulled a good-sized chunk of something from the center of my forehead and blood immediately poured from the opening and split at the bridge of the nose and found my eyes. I blinked several times as he grabbed some gauze, and as my eyelids fluttered and the lights of the various sirens flickered like strobes, I saw a glimpse of rich honey hair and skin in the crowd.
I leaned forward into the drizzle and peered into the lights, and saw her again, just for a moment, and I decided my fall from the car must have given me a concussion, because it wasn’t possible.
But maybe it was.
For one second, through the rain and lights and blood in my eyes, I locked eyes with Desiree Stone.
And then she was gone.
26
The skyway bridged two counties. Manatee County, on the southern side, consisted of Bradenton, Palmetto, Longboat Key, and Anna Maria Island. Pinellas County, on the northern side, was made up of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Beach, Gulfport, and Pinellas Park. St. Petersburg police had been the first on the scene, as had their divers and their fire trucks, so after some arguing with the Bradenton PD, we were transported off the bridge by the St. Pete cops, and driven north.
As we came off the bottom of the bridge—Angie locked up in the backseat of one cruiser, and me in the back of another—the four divers, dressed in black rubber from head to toe, carried Jay’s body from Tampa Bay, up onto a grassy embankment.
As we passed, I looked out the window. They laid his wet corpse down in the grass, and his flesh was the white of a fish’s underbelly. His dark hair plastered his face, and his eyes were closed tight, his forehead dented.
If you didn’t notice the dent in his forehead, he looked like he was sleeping. He looked at peace. He looked about fourteen years old.
“Well,” Jefferson said as he came back into the interrogation roo
m, “we have some bad news for you, Mr. Kenzie.”
My head was throbbing so hard I was sure a band of majorettes had taken up residence in my skull and the inside of my mouth felt like sunbaked leather. I couldn’t move my left arm, wouldn’t have been able to even if the bandages had permitted it, and the cuts on my face and head had caked and swelled.
“How’s that?” I managed.
Jefferson dropped a manila folder on the table between us and removed his suit jacket and placed it over the back of his chair before he took a seat.
“This Mr. Graham Clifton—what’d you call him back on the bridge—the Weeble?”
I nodded.
He smiled. “I like that. Well, the Weeble had three bullets in him. All from your gun. The first entered his back and came out through his right breast.”
I said, “I told you I fired into the car while it was moving. I thought I hit something.”
“And you did,” he said. “Then you shot him twice as he came out of the car, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s not the bad news. The bad news is you told me this Weeble guy, he worked for a Trevor Stone of Marblehead, Massachusetts?”
I nodded.
He looked at me and shook his head slowly.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“Mr. Clifton was employed by Bullock Industries, a research and development consulting firm located in Buckhead.”
“Buckhead?” I said.
He nodded. “Atlanta. Georgia. Mr. Clifton, as far as we know, never set foot in Boston.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“’Fraid not. I spoke to his landlord, his boss in Atlanta, his neighbors.”
“His neighbors,” I said.
“Yeah. You know what neighbors are, don’t you? The people who live beside you. See you every day, nod hello. Well there’s a whole bunch of these neighbor types in Buckhead, who swear they saw Mr. Clifton just about every day for the last ten years in Atlanta.”
“And Mr. Cushing?” I said as the majorettes in my head started banging their cymbals together.