Hairpin Bridge

by TAYLOR ADAMS

She searched the picture for Photoshopping errors, for incongruous shadows or snipped edges. Signs of duress, maybe, like a gun against her ribs, because there was no way Cambry could look so effortlessly happy with this man, fishing with him, kissing him, talking by firelight and drinking from the same bottle. Her skin was tanned, her mouth curled into that familiar smirk. Aglow with mischief.

  “You didn’t know her, Lena.”

  She forced herself to speak. “But you chased her.”

  “I did.”

  “After she saw your burn pit—”

  “It’s all true. You know every minute of the chase, and why we chased her.” His eyes shimmered, holding something back. “But you don’t know why she ran.”

  The pause was excruciating.

  The silence before the drop of a guillotine blade.

  “Cambry and I spent that afternoon on the lake. We had a good time. Our last good time. She caught a cutthroat trout the size of my arm. But by the end she was noticing that my heart wasn’t in it, because all I could think about was the little boy in my shed. It tore me up, being a secret monster. And Cambry knew I was hiding something from her. Lying just made it worse. We had a fight. She left angry. And I left, too, with a cooler full of fish melting in my boat, just drove back to my dad’s property, so fucking furious at him, at what he’s twisted my life into. I really could’ve killed him that time, I think. But of course he wasn’t home.

  “And then I . . . I heard this gentle clanging sound, coming from inside my dad’s truck trailer. Like a metal chain, softly swinging side to side. And I’m just realizing what it is—empty handcuffs—when a rifle touches the back of my neck.”

  Empty handcuffs.

  He swallowed.

  “It’s my dad’s latest stray. A mother, thirties, abducted from the interstate. She’s just freed herself. Slipped her cuffs somehow, or maybe Dad was too drunk to lock them fully the night before. And she stole the rifle from his cab and crawled out and ambushed me with it. Just my luck, right? She’s blood-soaked, in a frenzy, snarling at me with her finger on the trigger: Tell me where you took my son. Or I blow your head off.

  “And I’m telling her, with that .30-30 barrel jammed into my throat: I’m not the Plastic Man, I just clean up after him. And I promise her that her little boy is fine, that I took him for his own protection, that she doesn’t have to kill me, that we’ll figure something out—”

  He exhaled.

  “Then Cambry shot her.”

  * * *

  No.

  Lena’s thoughts dropped into terrible free fall.

  No, no, no—

  “She’d followed me. And then she saw a stranger holding a gun to my head. Okay? She acted. Your sister saved my life.”

  His words were tinny. Far away.

  “But then she sees inside the trailer. The handcuffs. The camcorder. She notices the woman she’s just shot in the back still has duct tape hanging off her. It’s all dawning on her. And I have to look her in the eye and explain the truth. What my father is. What I do for him. And now what she’s just done.”

  The coldness of it.

  “And she’s . . . she’s mortified—”

  Lena felt the bridge wobble dizzily underfoot. Nearly losing her grip.

  “. . . kissed her on the head and told her she was safe, that she was part of the Raycevic tribe now, that no one will ever know what she did—”

  Her stomach turned.

  “I showed her how I cut up the bodies and drain them—”

  She hit the pavement on her palms and coughed. Acid in her throat.

  “I loved her, Lena. I loved her. I told Cambry I’d take her out for a sundae the next morning. I wanted to cheer her up. That’s the sad part. I felt like I was celebrating something. Like all my life, I’ve carried my dad’s burden alone, and maybe now I didn’t have to—”

  He forced a smile. No malice. Heartbreak.

  “So I showed Cambry the little boy in the shed. I had this brilliant idea—me and her, we would raise the kid ourselves. Right? I’d already decided I would leave my dairy cow of a wife for her, and we’d become a little family of our own. It was fucking perfect. We’d make some good from this wrong. We’d save the kid. She could atone for her sin. Balance the scales. But Cambry wasn’t listening. She just sat on the hill and watched me burn the woman’s body. I didn’t get it back then, but I think I understand now, how seeing the little boy broke whatever was left to break inside her. She didn’t just kill an innocent woman by mistake. She killed a mother.”

  With Blake’s gun, Lena realized. She did steal it.

  Raycevic spat a blood glob. “She played me, too, okay? She asked me if she could go to her car and roll a cigarette and think about everything. I said fine, because at this point I’d already taken her gun and siphoned her gas. What could she do? But I’d forgotten about the reserve in the tank. About a gallon.”

  That’s why she ran.

  “She started the engine and drove like hell.”

  Tears welled in her eyes.

  “I only wanted to talk to her, to calm her down, before she got to Magma Springs. I didn’t want to hurt her. But she could destroy us. She was in tears, her car running on fumes, trying desperately to call 911, to escape and turn us all in—”

  In Lena’s mind, the chase replayed. Cambry tricking Raycevic after he stopped her. Losing him at the junction, then the unlucky lightning flash. Dodging his fishtail maneuver by inches and sending him spinning off the road. Chasing down the semitruck, fighting the Plastic Man—

  “We cornered her here on the bridge. My dad was furious about his eye, hollering at me to just shoot her. And Cambry had nowhere to go. No options. She knew I couldn’t possibly protect her now. She tried to send a final text message and exited her car and climbed that railing, right there, and before I could stop her, she—”

  Lena kept shaking her head with battered, powerless horror. She wished he could stop, that he would just please stop—

  “She jumped, Lena.”

  “Stop talking—”

  “She killed herself. It’s true. You’ve been putting her on a pedestal.” He smirked, as if remembering something funny. “Hey. Will that be in your book? Some heroine she makes—”

  “Stop—”

  “Won’t that just break your mother’s heart? Cambry didn’t just kill herself—she killed someone else, too. So she’s definitely in hell—”

  “Please, stop—”

  “Her suicide text was the problem. When I took her phone off-site, the message auto-sent to you. Can you believe it? If it weren’t for that one little text, I could have just burned her body like any other. But now there was a message straight to her family, with my name in it, so I had to make up a story—”

  Lena’s heart tugged with bruised hope as she remembered the text’s final sentence: Please forgive me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic.

  “Revenge,” she whispered.

  “That’s not it—”

  “Cambry texted me your name, so I would come for you—”

  “No.” He looked reluctant. As if this revelation was too cruel, even for him. “That text wasn’t meant for you, Lena. Cambry was apologizing to me. She couldn’t live with murdering that woman. And maybe she was a little disgusted that I could. But when she tried to send it on that clunky flip phone, I think she selected your number accidentally in the contacts list. Ratface is right above Ray.”

  A hollow cavity opened up inside her stomach.

  “I don’t . . .” He shrugged weakly. “I don’t think she had anything to say to you.”

  In the trembling photograph, her sister smiled up at her. The grin of a stranger wearing their shared face, impenetrable, unknown.

  “You thought . . . what, her ghost sent you here in a dream? Grow up, Lena.”

  She turned away.

  “Wait. There’s more—”

  She left him there. Shooting the vile man didn’t even enter her mind. May
be he’d bleed out. Maybe the heat and smoke would broil him alive—

  “Hey,” he called out. “Want to know her last words?”

  She didn’t.

  “On that railing, before she jumped—”

  She ignored him, twisting open the Corolla’s door.

  “Your sister begged me with teary eyes: Ray, please don’t tell my family—”

  She hit the seat, slammed the door.

  “Please.” His voice rang through broken windows. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad what I did—”

  Lena set her gun in the cup holder and shifted into drive. She couldn’t execute Raycevic like an animal, but she took a visceral pleasure in the way he screamed as she separated their cars and spilled the kid killer to the pavement behind her on his own exposed kneecaps.

  Chapter 27

  Excruciating pain.

  Theo was hoisting himself the final agonizing inches up to the cab’s door when he heard his son’s echoing screams. In the side-view mirror’s broken glass teeth, he glimpsed the two cars separate. Ray-Ray sprawling to the concrete. The Corolla pulling away and leaving.

  Driving toward Theo.

  He was almost out of time. His ruined jaw pumped rhythmic squirts through his fingers. He was leaking, losing himself to his fatal wound drop by drop as that blue car drew closer in the mirror. Inside, little Lena Nguyen thought it was all over, that she was leaving Hairpin Bridge victorious. In another few seconds her path would take her past his truck, and for a magic half second, Theo Raycevic would have a perfect angle on her.

  So he made a choice. The only choice.

  For Kitty.

  He lifted his sticky hand from his throat and heaved the Winchester .30-30 to prop the barrel on the door. One final time. Raising the weapon was a Herculean effort, but he groaned and pushed through. He pressed his cheekbone to the stock and took aim as the car approached.

  One last stray. One last ambush.

  He steadied the rifle. Kitty, you’d love this one.

  Without his fingers to his throat, hot blood spurted freely down his shirt. He would die putting Lena Nguyen down, and it was a perfectly fair trade. Why fear death? Oblivion is painless, the default state of everything is nothing, and hell, it solved the prostate issue. The world swam around Theo, all sickly oranges and whites. He guessed he had maybe thirty seconds of consciousness left.

  Which was fine, because Lena had fewer. Three seconds, maybe?

  The Corolla came up. Her face took shape through the cracked windshield. She was pale, haunted, drenched with blood. She had no idea she was to be the Plastic Man’s final victim. The tension was delicious. This was the climactic moment of Theo’s life, as good a note as any to go out on: like a stray nonchalantly approaching the slatted closet door of a Super 8 to grab her bathrobe, Lena drove closer and closer, slipping into beautiful alignment, granting him his shot through the glass.

  Two seconds now.

  He didn’t even need to move his rifle. He let Lena’s face slide perfectly into his gunsights. And carefully, as all vectors aligned, he squeezed the trigger.

  One . . .

  Death is painless.

  Her brain is instantly destroyed.

  After approximately three seconds of free fall from the railing of Hairpin Bridge, Cambry impacts the rock floor headfirst at almost a hundred miles per hour. It’s all over in a thousandth of a second. The soft matter of her brain liquefies, every synapse explodes like a million strings of ruined Christmas lights, and everything that is Cambry Lynne Nguyen is instantly, irretrievably gone. All of her secrets, her jokes, her passions. Bob the Dinosaur, her favorite lyric of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” the unknown reason she called me Ratface. Electrodes in a shattered circuit board, their data gone forever.

  Right?

  That’s how I imagine it happened.

  The medical community agrees with Raycevic’s testimony—falling from such a height, you can’t possibly feel the pain of impact. So that’s how I wrote it. But the truth is . . . I have no goddamn idea. And I hate saying that. Who can possibly know how it feels to die? All I know, dear readers, is that my sister’s story ends here, and I wish it ended differently.

  More than you will ever understand.

  I’ve written this account as accurately as possible, based on the verbal testimony I recorded on September 21 during my confrontation with Corporal Raycevic and his father, Theo—the serial killer now more famously known as the Plastic Man. After I crushed Raycevic’s legs between our cars, he told me one final thing: that he was sorry he murdered my sister. The walkie unit was destroyed (by him) at this point, so there is no audio record of his confession. But it’s important to note that after hours of bullying and lying that day, he did finally confess to my sister’s murder.

  I’m sorry we killed Cambry.

  Those were his exact—and final—words to me.

  I couldn’t give him the validation of forgiveness. I couldn’t execute him. I didn’t know what to do. I left him there, got back in my car, and drove away.

  No. Drove is the wrong word.

  I ran away.

  And in my weakness, I left an evil man with a still-functional car and a semiautomatic rifle in its trunk. Even injured, he could have fled, taken hostages, or ambushed first responders. The incoming wildfire wouldn’t have killed him—Hairpin Bridge stands to this day, blackened with soot but unscathed.

  As I left it behind me, I remember glancing up to the rearview mirror and seeing Cambry’s bruised, bloody face. A clear thought entered my mind.

  Earlier in the day’s transcript, I repeat something from her service: when you die, you’re transformed from a person into an idea. Back in June, I only thought I’d understood, but now I fully grasp it—the cruelty of what death is. My sister has lost her physical membership to this world. Cambry has no voice, no body, no self. She exists only in the ways we remember her. We carry her entire being within ourselves now, the way nomadic tribes used to carry fire inside a horn to keep the embers alight.

  As I drove past the crashed semitruck containing the Plastic Man’s body, I decided that only one person would carry the fire of Cambry’s memory. And it won’t be her sole surviving killer.

  The final hours of my sister’s life aren’t Raycevic’s story to tell. They’re mine.

  That’s why . . .

  That’s why I turned around, I think.

  The Corolla swerved hard, out of Theo’s gunsights.

  What?

  Shock became disbelief—

  No, no, no—

  The blue Toyota whirled a skidding one-eighty, denying him his perfect shot on Lena Nguyen. In a blink, her face was gone, now obscured by the body of her car. Moving away.

  He couldn’t believe it. He’d had her. He’d had her. How could she have known to turn around, at that exact moment, at that exact place?

  The rifle wobbled in his hands. Sights blurring. He wanted to lean outside and fire at the girl’s car anyway—now racing away from him, back up the bridge—but it would be pure guesswork at such a severe angle. He was too weak to hoist himself up over the door anyway.

  He’d already paid his price. Blood pumped down his shirt to the slowing metronome of his heart. His mind went sludgy and dark as she left his cracked mirror, and a single disbelieving thought echoed against the shrinking walls of his brain: I had her. I had her. I had her.

  I always get my strays . . .

  * * *

  Lena accelerated back up Hairpin Bridge.

  Back to Raycevic’s cruiser, coming fast through smoke. The kid killer himself was on the ground, leaving a slug trail of blood as he dragged himself away on shattered legs. Not fast enough.

  She hit her brakes, lifted the Beretta from the Corolla’s cup holder, and ejected the magazine into her palm: empty. Just one 9-millimeter round left, seated in the chamber.

  She needed only one.

  Fifty yards ahead, Raycevic saw her coming. He knew. He crawled faster on crunchy bones. Panicking,
trying feebly to stand, scrambling for the back of his cruiser.

  Lena clicked the empty mag back into the pistol. The few ounces of added weight would help steady her aim. She lifted her sister’s eyeglasses from the dashboard and slipped them on. She mashed her eyes with her thumbs, took a deep breath, and exhaled a final heartsick promise—Mom and Dad will never, ever know—before stepping outside into the scorched air and slamming the door hard behind her, to face Corporal Raycevic one last time.

  I promise, sis.

  Mom will never know.

  Up the bridge, Raycevic reached his Charger’s trunk—unlocked now—and pushed it open with bloody handprints on the tailgate, and reached inside . . .

  * * *

  And lifted his AR-15 into daylight.

  It had waited in darkness all day, and now it was finally, finally in his hands. Black and shiny with beaded oil, pungent with the sweet candy odor of solvent. He fought burbling laughter—“Surprise, bitch”—as he looked back at Lena.

  She was out of her car now. She calmly stopped beside her door with her feet shoulder-width apart. Her elbows came up, forming a perfect practiced isosceles grip as she raised her Beretta to aim at him. She wasn’t even using her vehicle for cover.

  More perplexing was the distance. They were still fifty yards apart.

  Raycevic slapped the bolt catch to chamber a round. He brought the rifle up on her, resting the barrel shroud on his Charger’s bumper. The red holographic reticle found her easily. Hungrily.

  Cambry stood tall. Aiming back at him.

  No, Lena. Wearing Cambry’s glasses. She was a statue a half a football field away, pinned in the glassy bowl of Rick’s rifle scope, staring back at him down unmagnified pistol sights of her own. For a surreal moment, he felt like they were making eye contact over their weapons. Something about this—this straightforward duel under a fiery sky—frightened him. No cover. No words. No excuses.

  Really, girl? he wanted to shout. This isn’t like trick-shooting a sign.

  Fifty yards—a hundred and fifty feet—was easy for his AR-15 and its magnified optic, but it was twice the effective range of her handgun. Pistols are close-range weapons, extraordinarily difficult to accurately fire at range. Low-velocity rounds are much more vulnerable to wind and gravity. Certainly, this was farther than whatever air-conditioned shooting range Lena had practiced at back in Seattle. He still had his ballistic vest, too, shielding him from anything short of a head shot. She was a good markswoman. But she couldn’t be that good. Right?