by TAYLOR ADAMS
Enjoy!
But listen responsibly. It might contain my murder.
* * *
Raycevic looked up at her. Eyes wide. “Where’s . . .”
She grinned. It made the muscles in her cheeks ache.
“Where’s the other walkie-talkie?”
She shook her head, dropping more red blots to the concrete. She turned away, watching the wall of fire in the distance. Lodgepole pines going up in flamethrower jets, feeding billows of roiling cauliflower smoke. Ever since she was a girl, she’d always loved watching things burn.
He roared: “Where is it?”
“Really?” She looked back to him. “You still haven’t figured it out? You were there. Back at the Magma Springs Diner. Remember?”
His eyes narrowed. He didn’t.
“I didn’t go in there to buy water, asshole. The second walkie is linked to my laptop. Every word you and I have spoken here is already uploaded. The big cassette recorder was just a redundancy. It’ll all auto-publish, embedded in my blog, tonight at midnight. No force on earth, short of an EMP blast, can stop it.” She spat a glob of heavy blood at his uniform. “You could drive back to Magma Springs right now and smash my laptop, too, if you’d like. Won’t matter. It’s already done. Your confession is up there in space, right this second, waiting to drop.”
He took it all in.
Lena couldn’t fight it. She laughed, her cheeks taut and swollen: “Did you really think I’d be that naive? That I’d be so certain you were a murderer, but then I’d gamble it all on a gunfight with you?”
The kid killer said nothing.
“I’m willing to risk my own life. To throw it away, even. But I won’t risk the truth. The truth is too valuable. For the truth, I took precautions, to ensure that whatever happened on this bridge today, the world would hear it.”
And you gave me shit for working in an electronics store, she almost added. Gripping the sun-cooked handrail, she tried to stand up. Better to die on her feet.
“The edge is right there,” she said, pointing. “In case you want to . . . you know. Before your department finds out you dropped a child down a well this week.”
He looked smaller. He was slouching, shrinking, an impostor in his uniform. The gun rattled in his hand. A feverish shiver. Maybe it was all coming down on him like a wheelbarrow full of cinder blocks, that by this time tomorrow, he would be the target of a nationwide manhunt.
“But . . .” Lena caught her breath. “I can say one thing for certain.”
He looked back at her.
She smiled. “You won’t be going back to work on Monday.”
The cop smiled, too. But not entirely—the edges of his mouth curled like a grin caught on a snag. The muscles in his face seemed to disagree. Then in another blink he’d gone eerily blank again. His mind was made up. She read it easily.
“You can shoot me,” she added. “It won’t change your outcome.”
“It’ll change yours.”
He pressed the Beretta to her forehead and pulled the trigger.
The gunshot is earsplitting.
Cambry screams against a blast of pressurized air. Her shoes lose traction on the concrete precipice and she catches herself with fingertips on the guardrail. She can’t hold on much longer.
“Five. That was a warning shot, over your head.” He aims the semiautomatic rifle lower. “The next one explodes right through it. And then your problems are over, but as for your mom and dad and sister’s problems? Oh, boy howdy, are they just beginning.”
Cambry sags against the railing. She’s strong and scrappy, but her muscles must feel like dead flesh by now. Her fingers are slick with cold sweat. She’s slipping, surrendering to gravity, every inch a slow slide to free fall.
“Four. Just let go, Cambry.” He softens again. “Don’t worry. I’ll write a nice suicide note to your family. I’ll text it to your sister. Okay?”
The Plastic Man mocks in a girlie voice: “Please forgive me. I couldn’t live with it—”
A hoarse sputter rattles behind them. The Corolla’s engine finally going dead. The last of its fuel burned. How much farther could she have driven it, even if she’d tried to run? Another mile? Estimates vary. No one knows the exact quantity she’d started with.
The creek bed is a black void, calling her under. And Raycevic’s voice is a venomous whisper in her ear: “No one will miss you, Cambry. You know that, right?”
God, I hope she didn’t believe him.
“You’re just a basket-case loner running from her problems. Thousands of you die every year. You’re a statistic—”
What was my sister thinking in that moment as she looked down off Hairpin Bridge? This part is difficult for me to write.
Who can possibly say?
“Three.”
Christ, I wish I knew.
“Two.”
I know what I believe, in my heart: She decided she would save us. Cambry Lynne Nguyen assessed a no-win situation and made a rational choice to protect our mother and father and me from the revenge of that psychopathic cop. She must have known we’d never know the truth. We would trust Raycevic’s lies, that she fell victim to her own furies on a desolate Montana highway, that Mom would believe her daughter was sentenced to hell.
She did it for us. On June 6, she became our guardian angel.
“Ray-Ray, shoot the bitch.”
Raycevic’s voice rises, and he aims. “One—”
My sister lets go.
I’m dead.
It took Lena an airy moment to realize she wasn’t.
The distant flames were still roaring, seconds still racing, her heart still slamming in her chest, and the Beretta in Raycevic’s hand—her gun, in his hand, pointed at her forehead—had abruptly failed to fire. He jerked the trigger again, harder, and then stared wide-eyed at the malfunctioning weapon.
This thrilled Lena. Exhilarated her. She wanted to laugh again in his reddening face—because Corporal Raymond (Rick) Raycevic, who’d already confessed to concealing fourteen homicides and murdering a child on tape, who would be a national headline by this time tomorrow, couldn’t even execute the woman who’d make him famous.
Cambry, she thought with a chill.
She knew better. She knew what had really happened. But still: Thank you, Cambry, thank you—
She rolled away from Raycevic and scrambled upright, her blood-drenched hair whipping. Her Toyota keys in her fist. And she broke into a heaving, wounded run toward her Corolla.
Thank you, sis, for one last assist.
I’ll take it from here.
* * *
Raycevic racked the Beretta’s slide in his fist, ejecting brass.
It was no miracle. Nothing supernatural. During the scuffle, their hands had been locked around the pistol, and when it fired, the action had failed to properly cycle. An easy fix, and one of the first malfunctions the instructors train you for.
He let the weapon’s slide clack forward with satisfying power. He raised it again smoothly to draw a bead on the running girl’s back. She was just reaching her vehicle twenty feet away, skidding on her heels and twisting open the door—
He fired as she dove inside. The side-view mirror shattered.
He sidestepped right for a better angle and aimed through the Corolla’s lined back window. She was still exposed. A flimsy seat wouldn’t protect her. He saw Lena through the glass, her frantic movements in the driver’s seat as she jammed in the key.
The Corolla’s engine thrummed to life. The taillights glowed red. But running away wouldn’t save her, either. As he aligned the pistol’s black sights on the headrest, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment in the girl he was about to kill.
Really, Lena?
You came all this way, he thought as he squeezed the trigger. You found me.
And now you’re running?
* * *
She slammed the shifter into reverse.
I’m not running, motherfucker.<
br />
She stomped the gas pedal and the Corolla whiplashed backward on screaming tires. Straight back. Straight at Raycevic.
He opened fire.
She ducked as bullets pierced the rear window and shredded her seat, spewing gouts of yellow foam. The gauge cluster exploded. The windshield spiderwebbed with cracks. She scooted low, low, as low as possible under the steering column and jammed the pedal with her knee, and the car kept barreling backward, and she knew that all of this deafening gunfire was a good thing—because Raycevic had spent his valuable seconds shooting instead of moving, and it was now too late for him to dive out of her way.
She felt the car’s tailgate ram into him with a solid thump.
A satisfying, fleshy impact. She loved it. She twisted her neck back around the seat and saw his huge shoulders sprawled over the Corolla’s rear window, the big man winded by the hit. Riding the moving car atop its trunk, his left hand grasping the spoiler—
His right hand raised. With the gun.
Aimed directly at her. Too close to miss now. Grinning cruelly at her through the cracked glass. He wouldn’t have been grinning if he knew what was behind him, coming fast.
Lena did. And she braced.
As the Corolla plowed trunk-first into Corporal Raycevic’s cruiser.
* * *
He felt his knees snap like dry sticks.
The human brain is supposed to shut down as a shock response to bodily trauma—that’s what every medical class had assured him for two decades—but somehow, the man who called himself Raymond Raycevic experienced every sensory detail in IMAX clarity. The detonation of colliding metal. The screeching, live-wire pain. The shocking visual of his legs vanishing from the knees down. They were still somewhere down there between the crumpled metal jaws, hopefully still attached.
Then a violent whiplash as momentum sprawled him over the hood of his own Dodge Charger, cracking his skull with a glassy thud.
Time dilated here. He remembered staring into the Mars-like orb of the sun, low and alien. He saw embers riding thermals like fireflies. He’d lost the pistol in the crash—but somehow, impossibly, his right hand was still full. He was holding something else. He twisted his neck to look.
A cloth child’s shoe with a Velcro closure.
His guts churned. No.
Yes. There in his palm, its rubber soles porous with detail in the hard sunlight. It had slipped off its owner’s little foot purely by accident—
No, no, no.
As he stood over that dried-up groundwater well, hearing the little boy’s trailing scream vanish down a tunnel of dark stone. Then far below, a reverberating thud, sickening in its heaviness. Like a bag of flour. The scream ended instantly and that was it. It couldn’t be undone. His stomach gurgled with acid. With nothing else to do and sensing the awkwardness of a task left half-done, he dropped the small shoe in, too, to join its owner forty feet down.
It had to be the well. He couldn’t burn such a small body. It was too ghoulish to even imagine the specifics of where he’d cut. In the lonely vault of his thoughts last night, six inches from his wife’s head on the pillow beside his, he’d resolved to fill the well with wet concrete on Sunday, to bulldoze the stonework and bury it forever.
This brown-haired little boy who came to him in a car seat covered with Marvel stickers was the first human being he’d ever personally killed. Forty-eight hours ago.
I should have just left him at a fire station, he’d decided last night with teary eyes under the rumble of Liza’s snore. If he grows up and ID’s us someday, fine.
I made an evil choice.
I’ll never, ever balance the scales for it.
His legs ignited now. A rolling, crashing wave of pain as frayed nerves sparked and fizzed to terrible life. He thrashed and screamed through locked teeth, but he was trapped between Cambry’s vehicle and his own. He tried to hoist himself up and felt his left kneecap pop messily inside a broken socket. Through watery eyes, he glimpsed a bright knuckle of exposed bone.
Ahead, he heard the Corolla’s door creak open. Glass fragments sprinkled on the road. Another jangling pain on his pinched nerves—the vehicle’s suspension relaxing—as someone climbed out.
Judgment was coming for him.
Wearing Cambry’s face.
* * *
That’s it, everyone.
Blog over, I guess.
It’s past midnight as I type this in my apartment, so I guess it’s technically today now—September 21. The day I face him.
Everything is in place. My letters to my parents, my coworkers, and my friends are all written and sealed. Some went in the mail today. Some are digital. The rest are neatly arranged on my coffee table. And now I need to crawl into bed to secure at least five hours of sleep, to be decently well rested for what will be the most important day of my life on Hairpin Bridge.
But before I go . . .
One final letter. To you, Cambry. Because I’m realizing I never wrote anything for you. Not officially.
So, to my twin . . .
Whatever our differences, whatever the distance between us, I’m proud to wear your face. At one point in the womb, we were even the same person. We shared atoms. And someday, when our bodies are dust, we will again. I’m sorry I lied to Mom and Dad about that deer. I’m sorry I never told the truth for all those years. I’m so sorry we barely spoke. I could have been there for you and I wasn’t. It’s my fault you ended up on that bridge.
Tomorrow, I atone for it.
I’m going to bed now. And when I wake, I’ll drive to Montana and fucking destroy the man who murdered you, sis.
Ratface, out.
9/21/2019 12:11 a.m.
Chapter 26
She watched him writhe, pinned between the Corolla’s tailgate and the grille of his own cruiser like a mashed insect. She couldn’t see his legs below the knee, and she didn’t wish to. The spreading puddle of blood on the pavement was enough.
She picked up her Beretta.
“I . . .” He struggled to speak. “You need to know this . . . before you kill me—”
She checked the chamber and aimed. “Talk fast.”
“It’s not your fault,” he gasped. “What happened . . . to Cambry.”
She stopped. Her finger on the trigger.
She’d expected venom from Corporal Raycevic, more lies and taunts and hate. More gory details. Maybe a final I fucked your sister or She loved my cock through gnashed teeth. Anything but this, as the ruined man took another long breath, bracing his crunchy legs between the cars, struggling to turn air into words. His slacks were shiny with blood.
She waited.
“Cambry was her own person.” He forced a guttural whisper. “I learned . . . when Ray shot himself, that you have to let the dead share the blame. Hating yourself won’t bring her back.”
Her eyes watered. The gun growing heavy on her wrist.
“Lena, it’s not your fault Cambry died. Her choices brought her to this bridge.”
She twisted her head away.
She wouldn’t let him see her cry. She stared out into the horizon, blinking hard, focusing on the spurts of flame. The smoke bleeding into the sky like brown paint. The bleak beauty to how things char and wilt and scatter. She remembered staring entranced into the campfire for hours as a girl, while Cambry searched the dark for insects for her jar.
Restless Cambry. Always moving. Always searching.
It’s not your fault.
Finally, she looked back. “Thank you, Ray.”
“Call me Rick.” He smiled gently, and for a moment she saw the man he must have wished he’d grown up to be, not the one who threw kids down wells. “God, you look . . . exactly like her.”
“I know.”
“Like seeing a ghost—”
“I know.”
“She never mentioned you,” he whispered. “Not once.”
Wait. This piece snagged in Lena’s mind. Refusing to fit.
What?
He was unbuckling his belt now, tying a crude tourniquet above one knee. He winced with pain as he tugged the knot tight. She waited for him to speak again, replaying his words in her mind—no, that was incorrect. It was still wrong. He was lying again. More mind games.
She remembered his wallet.
In the road. Like a hockey puck. Right where she’d dropped it an hour or two ago, the instant she called Raycevic’s ruse while his father trained a rifle on her back and squeezed the trigger. To distract her, he’d been lying. She’d been certain of it. So certain.
Now a sour chill crawled up her spine. One vertebra at a time.
She paced back to the center of the bridge on numb legs. She knelt, lifting the billfold in trembling fingers. She opened it sideways, letting his cards spill out and hit the road—
In the back. The very last photo . . .
This time she tucked the Beretta under her arm and used both hands. She found it inside a hidden pocket. Thick paper, like card stock. She peeled it out with her thumbnail and turned it over.
She didn’t recognize Raycevic in civilian clothes—ripped jeans and a salmon-pink shirt, aching in its humble dorkiness. He sat in a two-seater canoe with a fishing pole across his lap and glassy water behind him. From the other seat, the boat’s second occupant had leaned in close for the self-shot photo, jutting her neck into frame with her palm resting on Raycevic’s thigh, and she was—
Lena thrashed her head away. She wanted to drop it. Throw it off the bridge, let the fire take it.
He watched. “I told you, Lena.”
She stared up into the dirty sky, blinking hard. She cried out, a long and strange moan. There was no unseeing it, and this time no gunfight to change the subject. Finally, with a pounding heart, she looked back down at the photo.
At her own face.
“I knew I liked her.” Raycevic smiled wistfully. “Ever since I first caught her stealing gas outside the Super One and convinced her to stay in town awhile. That was March, I think—”
No, no, no. It didn’t make sense. It contradicted everything.
