Hairpin Bridge

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  Lena was back to holding the Beretta with two hands.

  Ray’s .38 was growing heavy on his ankle now. Life or death would come down to a few flinching seconds. He rehearsed it mentally: dropping to a knee, tugging up his right pant leg (one one-thousand), grabbing the revolver’s checkered grip and twisting it free (two one-thousand), aiming it up at her, finding a sight picture on her chest, squeezing the trigger (three one-thousand), and . . . well, that’s it. Either he’d hit her or he’d miss.

  His odds were decent enough. If you stacked him and Lena together on a shooting range, she might shoot the tighter groups on paper. But real life isn’t a shooting range. There’s confusion, fatigue, adrenaline, fear. Sweat on your fingers. Sunlight in your eyes. The pucker factor, his father called it.

  He could see it now—a tremor to the weapon’s barrel. Lena’s forearms were getting tired. She wasn’t exactly built for this. The longer this skinny little thing held her stance, the more her accuracy would degrade. She was vulnerable.

  He pushed a little harder. “You have a blog, right?”

  She looked vaguely surprised.

  “Lights and Sounds. Nerd shit. You review text-based video games, sci-fi novels about spaceships, weird-ass horror movies. Confessions of a retail worker. That’s you, right?”

  She blinked.

  I hit a nerve, he thought. Good.

  “Don’t be surprised.” He smirked. “You researched me. I had to research you, too.”

  He was waiting for her to twist her hair again. Then he would draw while her guard was down. It would take her precious moments to reform her shooting stance and accurately return fire. Nervous tics are nice. They make you predictable.

  “You don’t have many friends, do you?” He kept pushing. “Or a boyfriend?”

  She said nothing.

  “Or leave your apartment much?”

  Nothing.

  “Social anxiety, maybe?” He rolled his shoulders in a faux stretch, loosening up to draw. “You’re twenty-four. College-educated. English major. You work at an electronics store on the verge of Chapter Eleven, making minimum wage and spending your evenings alone on your computer, laboring away on a blog that nobody reads. And your sister was out experiencing things, seeing white desert and Mount Rushmore and the Everglades and glass beaches. You were jealous, huh?” He studied her face, imagining the bloody crater his .38 Special would make. “You have no idea who Cambry really was, by the way.”

  He dropped that like trash and waited for her reaction.

  She didn’t react at all.

  Fine. He continued: “You know what? When we first got here, I thought you were just a sad-sack introvert who’d never gotten laid. I felt sorry for you. I genuinely wanted to help you achieve some sort of peace here with your grief. Before I knew you brought a gun and an agenda. But you mentioned . . . hey, you wanted gory details, right?”

  He gave her time to answer. She didn’t.

  “Yeah, you did. You wanted to know what Cambry’s body looked like down there on the rocks. And back then, I didn’t share details, because it would’ve been inappropriate. But we’re past that now. Far past it.” He stared down the gun. “Your sister looked like she melted, Lena.”

  Her jaw quivered. Just a faint twitch of her lip—but he noticed.

  “At free fall, she’d been traveling over a hundred feet per second. To decelerate from that velocity to zero, against solid granite, basically makes every organ in your body weigh ten thousand times more than normal. So even though she was still human-shaped . . . well, it’s like being ripped apart on a cellular level. Total annihilation. Her organs burst and leaking. Her brain liquefied. Her bones full of cracks. Big brown water balloons of blood pooling under her skin.”

  Tears glimmered in Lena’s eyes. She reached for her hair—and then she changed her mind, restoring her two-handed grip on the weapon.

  Ray’s heart heaved. Do it.

  He was ready to draw. His thumb and fingers kneaded the air with anticipation. He pushed again: “Cambry’s forehead was crushed in, like a stomped grapefruit. She had bugs in her mouth. Her eyeballs were soggy, blown out on strings, leaking tears of blood. Flies burrowing in, laying eggs.”

  Lena took this all in, like a stone. Saying nothing. Giving nothing.

  And she looked exactly like you, he almost added.

  He knew he was getting to her. Every word left an imprint. Some left dents. All adding up. She was about to break, to cave in and twist her hair again. He was ready.

  You have no idea who you’ve tangled with, he thought as he studied her. You poor, dumb girl. You think you’re the wolf here, just because you can shoot.

  The .38 was a tumorous lump on his ankle, begging to be let free. Lena adjusted her shooting stance again, and Ray’s hand nearly went for it. Almost. She was trying to fight her tic—trying—but she couldn’t resist her own nature. She needed to twist her hair again. It was her sensory comfort, her weakness, and today it would get her killed.

  I’ll blow your smug face off.

  As long as I have my hands—

  “Wait. You still have handcuffs, right?” Lena looked at his belt. “Cuff yourself, asshole.”

  * * *

  She was surprised—the cop looked suddenly crestfallen. He stared down at his slacks, and then back up at her. A strange, furious disbelief.

  Good. She would feel better with the big ape handcuffed. He was too dangerous, even at gunpoint. She drew the Beretta’s sights to his face, trying to hide the tremor in her arms. “I said cuff yourself. Slowly.”

  His glare intensified. Fear stirred in her gut.

  In answer, she curled her index finger into the trigger guard. He saw.

  Then his right hand moved—“Hey. Slowly.”—toward his belt, and he unlatched two metal rings. They jingled faintly, making that cliché sound they do on television.

  “Cuff your hands behind your back,” she clarified. “Not in front.”

  “I need to kneel,” he said, gesturing down toward his ankle. “To get them around my back, it’ll be easier if I crouch and—”

  “Nope. Do it standing.”

  He glared at her again.

  “Go on.” She pointed with the Beretta.

  For a long breath, Raycevic held the silver cuffs in one hand, like he was trying desperately to think of something else to say. To stall. Then, grudgingly, he fastened them around one wrist and tucked his arm behind his back. His other wrist engaged unseen with a scissor-like snick.

  “There. Happy?”

  “No,” she said. “Turn around.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Turn around. So I can see both hands are cuffed.”

  He rolled his eyes. Then, reluctantly, he turned to show her both wrists behind his back. As she expected, only his right was secured. His left hand held the cuff inside his palm.

  “You really thought that would work?”

  He grinned wolfishly. “It was worth a try.”

  “Try harder.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Try harder?”

  “You sounded exactly like her. The way you said it.”

  “You can cuff your other hand now, Ray.”

  He turned sideways so she could watch him slip the cuff around his left wrist. Then he fumbled. “I . . . I can’t do it from behind my back. I’ll need you to help close the cuff with your—”

  “Seriously, Ray?”

  After another pause, the faux surprise vanished from his eyes. Another act tried and discarded.

  That’s right. Keep underestimating me.

  “Worth a try,” he repeated, without the grin this time. With his right thumb he closed the cuff around his left wrist. Then he spread his bulging arms, ratcheting the metal jaws tight. “Happy?”

  “Getting there,” Lena said, easing her grip on the pistol, letting her muscles rest. Pins and needles in her fingers. “And by the way—all that stuff about the state of Cambry’s body? Awful as it was, with the liqu
efied guts and the blown-out eyes, my nightmares were still worse. So thank you, Ray. For shining a light on the monster for me.”

  He smiled. “Careful what you ask for.”

  More ashes drifted between them on silent winds, gray and darting. Like the half-glimpsed spots that float in your eyes. Lena blinked on reflex.

  He didn’t. He stared at her coldly, cinders collecting on his shoulders like apocalyptic snow. “If you shoot me, you’ll never know what happened to her.”

  “I already know.”

  “Do you?”

  “You confirmed it. When you lied to me.”

  “Yeah? So far, the only person who’s drawn a gun is you, Lena.” He squinted into the smoky distance. “And if anyone were to drive by and see us here, this situation would look an awful lot like a trooper under attack.”

  “Good thing you locked the gate.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Good thing.”

  For both of us, she knew he meant.

  It didn’t matter that they were speaking right now. It was only air and noise. If she let her guard down for a split second, Raycevic would seize his chance and headbutt her, kick the gun from her hands, and crunch her skull under his size 14 boot. Even handcuffed, he could kill her. Mercilessly. The way he killed Cambry. She imagined her sister’s face dented, concave—like a stomped grapefruit.

  It was real. All of it. It really happened.

  She would never admit this to Raycevic, but for the past weeks she’d nurtured a secret and childish hope: that when she arrived here at Hairpin Bridge, the internet myths would turn out to be real. She’d witness a spectral ghost or hear a whisper. The veil between past and present would be thin here, and her sister wouldn’t be gone. Not really. Maybe Cambry was reliving her final hours at this very second, her story unfolding parallel to Lena’s like a reflection.

  Hope is poison. Lena knew this.

  She exhaled and tried to clear her mind. No ghosts. No echoes from the past or messages from the grave. Just a guilty man, staring back at her.

  He wrinkled his nose. “You’re not really writing a book about her. Are you?”

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  She knew she didn’t have to answer. But she did anyway, and this time she didn’t have the energy to lie: “It bothers me when other people tell Cambry’s story. When she died, it’s like she stopped being a person and became public property. She became this troubled loner who got sad and jumped off a bridge. If anyone can or should tell her story . . . it’s me.”

  She almost left it there. But he was still waiting.

  So she spoke the hard part: “My mom is a strict Catholic. And she’s heartbroken, because she believes Cambry is in hell. Because she committed . . . you know.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s it.” She felt her cheeks flush. “That’s all of it, I think. I . . . I guess I just wanted to prove to my mom that her daughter isn’t in hell.”

  “So here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  Silence.

  She didn’t like opening up to him. She knew she was only handing him blades to cut her with. But she got the strange sense he was mourning, too. Like they shared Cambry, somehow.

  She hadn’t told him the full truth, anyway.

  After the service, she’d visited her parents’ house in Olympia to bring them dinner and noticed the pictures of Cambry were all gone. Some walls and shelves were still freshly bare, with lines etched in dust. At first Lena assumed the photos were being displayed elsewhere or reframed, but in the following weeks they never reappeared. Her sister had left them all with something deeper than the normal grief of having, loving, and losing. They never had her to begin with. She was always a runner, always looking out over the next hill, and now she was infinitely farther away than Texas or Florida. And worse, it’s a pretty shitty faith dilemma to have. If their God exists, their daughter is burning in hell. If He doesn’t, she’s gone entirely on a cellular level. Which is worse?

  That night her mother drank too much wine and gripped Lena’s wrist tightly enough to leave bruised finger marks. She said through shimmering eyes: You’re my daughter, Lena, and I love you.

  You’re my one daughter.

  It’s sickening, becoming an only child in an instant.

  This was the moment Lena decided she wouldn’t just capture her sister’s killer. She would tell Cambry’s story, too. It was too important to be told by anyone else. She would give her mother and father a version of their daughter they could remember and love. A version that didn’t steal from their wallets, that didn’t get arrested for shoplifting, that didn’t reek of weed and cigarettes and barrel out the door at age eighteen to never call them back, and that didn’t leave them now for real, just as cruelly and abruptly.

  The true Cambry was out there somewhere. Lena would find her. At any cost.

  Raycevic studied her. She regretted giving him this.

  “Trust me.” He smirked. “If hell exists, Cambry is there.”

  “Keep talking and I’ll send you there myself.”

  “Scary line. Did you hear that in a movie?”

  “I know what you are, Ray.”

  “No, you don’t. You came into this with your mind made up already. That’s your fatal flaw, Lena. See, I’m not a bad person. Even if I was—let’s say I really did take your sister’s life—I’ve saved lives, too. Multiple people are breathing today, right now, because of my actions. You’ve researched me. So you know my record. You’ve read about the woman I rescued from the river.”

  She had.

  “My commendation for saving a deputy under fire.”

  Yes, she had.

  “The kids I pulled out of the burning trailer.”

  Yes, yes, yes. The governor had even presented him with a medal. Somewhere in Billings was a park bench named in honor of the valorous Saint Raycevic, who charged heroically into a meth-lab fire. She wished the damn kids had burned up in there, just so he couldn’t gloat about it.

  “You may hate me, but I’m still one of the good guys, Lena.” He stood straighter, seeming to swell and grow before her eyes. “Okay? You can’t argue that four isn’t a bigger number than one. That’s still a total gain of three people. Three human beings who should be worm food right now, but aren’t, because of me. Because of what I do. I work my ass off at it. I’m born to do this. I protect the public. More accurately, I save people. I have saved people. God willing, I will keep saving people. Why would all of those lives, past, present, and future, add up to less than your sister’s?”

  A line of spittle hung off his chin. He licked it back up, lizard-like.

  Now we’re getting somewhere, Lena thought. “Are you confessing?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m defending myself from a personal attack.”

  “Do you believe in hell?”

  “I believe in balancing the scales.”

  Balancing the scales. Like being a good person boiled down to math.

  “Okay, well, here comes another personal attack: You murdered my fucking sister, Ray. And you had to cover it up. So you threw her body off the bridge, to stage it like another suicide—”

  “Nope. Try again.”

  “You beat her to death first—”

  “That leaves bruising.”

  “Or you strangled her.”

  “That leaves ligature marks—”

  “Not always. Not if you had her head in a plastic bag.”

  “She died on impact. The M.E. ruled it.”

  “Okay. You picked her up and threw her off the bridge, then, while she was still alive.” Lena struggled to keep her voice level, controlled. “Why?”

  “You’re still wrong.”

  “Then enlighten me, Ray.”

  “Why would I do that?” He chewed his lip, the daylight vanishing from his eyes. “You want something, Lena. That makes you controllable. Because for as long as what you want is inside my head, you won’t dare put a hole in it.”


  She realized she had nothing to say to this. It enraged her. For a moment she considered making good on her threat and shooting him in the balls.

  Am I ready to do that?

  She wasn’t sure. Her hands stank with gunpowder from the three shots fired already. There was something unsettling to firing a gun outside of the structured confines of the range. It was real now. It made her oddly self-conscious. Like driving barefoot.

  He smirked. “You assumed I’d just cooperate?”

  He’d read her. It was his job to read people, and he’d already identified Lena as a rule follower. Face-to-face conflict made her cheeks burn. She was naturally passive—making plans only when others suggested, speaking only when spoken to, taking action only when absolutely necessary. And now here she was on Hairpin Bridge, holding the gun, making the demands.

  “Now what, Lena?”

  It should be Cambry here, she knew. Not me.

  I should be the dead one.

  Back when Lena and Cambry were twelve, they used to spend summers at their uncle’s farmhouse in east Oregon. The farm itself was perfectly boring for a kid—the cable was pixelated and the alpacas were prissy assholes. But a mile down the road, the neighbor kids had a rope swing over a creek, and occasionally their father blew up tree stumps with Tannerite. One walk back under a darkening evening sky, the Nguyen twins came across a brown shape on the road.

  It was a whitetail doe, struck by a logging truck and dragged under the tires. Her eyes found them drowsily. Lena remembered watching the animal try to stand with a severed spine, her hind legs flat and limp. When she tried to brace her front leg, the knee bent backward like a broken stick. She cried a strange throaty whisper, like a cat’s purr. In her twelve years, Lena had never felt so powerless before. She couldn’t touch the suffering animal. She couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t do anything at all, and she hated herself for it. She just stood and stared and cried until her throat was raw.

  At this time, twelve-year-old Cambry quietly slid off her backpack (even back then, she preferred to carry a pack) and knelt with one palm on the doe’s ribs to feel the gentle rise and fall of her breaths.