“Let’s get back to the shoulder,” he told Serena. “I don’t like being in the middle of traffic.”
“Great,” she said without enthusiasm.
He held up his hands and crossed in front of a Chevy minivan that was angling toward the left lane. When they reached the shoulder, he increased his pace, marching faster.
“Watch your step, the gravel’s loose here,” he told her.
“You, too.”
He passed the first of the thick girders that sprouted upward like an erector set into a tree of beams and rivets. Circular holes allowed the wind to pass through the steel. Twin sets of cables hung elegantly from the top of the span like piano strings, suspending the roadbed on which they walked. From the lake, gusts pummeled them, dancing around the towers like sprites. He steadied himself against the concrete barrier, but the sensation of height briefly took his breath away. He could feel the rocking sway of the bridge up here.
Traffic accelerated around them. Cars that had merged into the left lane squealed and left rubber on the asphalt as they roared out of the clogged pipeline of vehicles. Stride made a frantic downward motion with his palms, trying to slow them down. No one paid attention. They sped by like giants.
He heard something. Not the howl of the wind. This was a scream.
An updraft separated the fog like a curtain. Thirty yards away, he spotted a tan Impala, half blocking the right lane of traffic at the very peak of the bridge. A trail of restless cars sped around it, sailing down the open space of the highway toward Duluth. A tall woman stood outside the car, buffeted by the wind. She was dressed in black, and she came and went in the cloud like a witch.
Rikke.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
Serena saw her, too. “What do you want to do?”
Stride grabbed his cell phone and pushed it into her hand. “Call Maggie and get Duluth cops up here from the other side of the bridge. Then see if you can stop these goddamned idiots and shut down the traffic.”
He jogged away from her, then turned back and shouted. “Tell Maggie to get hold of the Coast Guard, too. I want them under the bridge right now in case we need a rescue operation in the water.”
He pulled his gun. He ran.
Rikke gazed downward into the windy stretch of air leading to the bay. “Fast and free,” she murmured.
A wild impulse almost made Tish bolt from the car and push her, but the roadbed vibrated, and the Impala began to move, inching along the highway. Tish screamed, scrambled across the seat, and jammed the emergency brake with her foot.
Rikke ripped open the passenger door and yanked her across the torn vinyl. Tish clutched the steering wheel, but Rikke was stronger, and when Tish felt her fingers torn away from the wheel, the two of them lurched backward. Tish spilled out of the car onto the bridge deck. Rikke cursed and lost her balance, nearly tumbling over the edge.
Tish flattened herself facedown on the ground and covered her head with her hands. She heard a roaring noise from the wind and traffic. Every muscle in her body tightened like a spring. Her fear of heights thumped in her head, shooting panicked impulses to her brain. The voice was seductive, like a Pied Piper telling her to get up, run, and leap for the water. Jump. Make the terror stop.
Rikke squatted beside her. She took a fistful of Tish’s coat and wrenched her up, propping her back against the side of the car. Tish closed her eyes, but Rikke pushed them open with her fingers, and Tish saw the concrete barrier and the open air beyond it, beckoning her with open, breezy arms.
Rikke clutched her face with both hands. “All these years, I wondered if you knew. If you’d seen me. If Laura had told you what I did. I kept waiting for you to come back and expose me. And then, after all these years, you did.”
“I didn’t know,” Tish said. “Please let me go. I can’t take this.”
“I went to pick Finn up in the park that night. He was stoned out of his head, babbling about Laura, about the two of you in the woods. I found the baseball bat in the field, and I knew what I had to do. Silence Laura. And pay her back for leaving me.”
“I loved her!” Tish screamed. She beat her hands ferociously on Rikke’s chest, driving her back toward the edge of the bridge. “You goddamned bitch, how could you!”
Rikke recovered and stumbled forward on her knees. She bunched the lapels of Tish’s jacket in her fists. Their faces were an inch apart. “What about you? I spent my whole life looking over my shoulder because of you. You ruined my life. You ruined Finn’s life.”
Tish slapped her hard. “You took Laura away!”
Rikke pushed herself to her feet, swaying and towering over Tish. “Get up.”
Tish wrapped her hands around Rikke’s ankles and pulled violently. Rikke shouted and tumbled like a tree, landing in the gravel. Tish crawled away toward the speeding cars on the highway, but Rikke threw herself onto Tish’s back and drove her to the asphalt. Rikke rolled her over. Sharp rocks sliced into Tish’s skin. The older woman’s face was blood red and twisted with fury.
Rikke’s fingers curled like talons and seized Tish’s neck. Her thumbs drove into Tish’s windpipe, making her gag and choke. She couldn’t breathe. Her body spasmed. She tore at Rikke’s hands, but they were two blocks of granite.
“Rikke!”
They both heard the voice.
Rikke let go of Tish’s neck and peered through the fog on the bridge deck. Tish gasped for breath and twisted away. Behind her, she saw Stride, his gun out, sprinting toward them. Tish tried to wriggle free, but Rikke came off her knees and stood up, wrapping another choke hold around her neck and dragging Tish to her feet. Tish struggled and kicked, her eyes growing white and wide as Rikke inched toward the edge of the bridge. Tish clawed for the safety of the car, but Rikke held her tight, forcing her to stare into the black abyss below them.
Tish could see it clearly. In her head, she was already falling. Her breath left her chest, and she thought her heart would burst.
“Stop!” Rikke shouted at Stride. “I’ll kill us both.”
Stride stopped. He holstered his gun and held up his hands. “Let her go, Rikke.”
Tish squirmed like a frightened animal in Rikke’s arms. Her fingers tore at Rikke’s clothes.
“If I let her go, she’ll jump,” Rikke said. “She’s out of her head.”
“Put her back in the car.”
Rikke’s legs nudged against the concrete barrier on the edge of the bridge deck. The height of the barrier barely came up past her knees. She leaned into the wind, carrying Tish’s torso with her. Tish wailed, a noise so primal and terrified that it made Stride flinch.
“I’ll do it,” Rikke said. “I’ll take her with me. I don’t care.”
Stride’s mind shut out the world. Distractions fell away. He didn’t notice the wind or the height or the thumping of the highway under his feet. He took two steps closer to Rikke. She was six feet away.
“Stay back,” she warned him.
He was conscious of the fact that Serena was behind him, stopping the flow of cars heading west. On the opposite side of the bridge, he heard the siren of a squad car speeding from Duluth. The squad car stopped twenty yards away at an angle across both eastbound lanes, and a young policewoman bolted out of the car, her gun drawn. He slowly brought up his hand, keeping her where she was. The cop held her ground, and traffic from the Duluth side bled away to nothing as cars backed up behind her car.
They were alone up here.
“I want you both to get back in the car,” he told Rikke.
Wisps of fog floated lazily between them. The bridge was in and out of the flow of clouds. Far below, Stride heard a boat whistle. He recognized it as the call of a Coast Guard rescue cutter, churning toward the span of the bridge and positioning itself in the bay. He had been on that boat many times. Most jumpers didn’t come out of the water alive.
He took another step.
“Let her go,” he told Rikke. “Give her to me.”
Rikke’s
eyes were like blue stones. “Don’t move,” she said.
Stride put his hands up. “I’m not moving.”
One of the twin sets of vertical cables supporting the roadbed was immediately behind Rikke. She slid her left arm around the cables to brace herself and hoisted Tish bodily off the ground with her other arm. Tish’s legs kicked madly, and her blond hair twirled around her head in the back-and-forth of the wind.
“Go ahead,” Rikke told Stride with scorn. “Come get me.”
“Tish never did a thing to you,” Stride said. “Whatever happened between you and Laura has been over for years.”
“Then she should have stayed away.”
Stride saw the policewoman on the opposite side of the bridge climb silently over the barrier between the lanes and sidle into his line of vision. She was thirty feet behind Rikke. She signaled Stride with her left hand, then pointed at herself and aimed her gun where it would fire harmlessly over the water. She looked at him with a question in her eyes.
Fire or not fire. Create a diversion.
Almost imperceptibly, Stride nodded.
The policewoman held up her left hand and lifted one finger into the air. Then two. As she lifted the third, her finger depressed the trigger on her gun, and a sharp report cracked on the bridge.
Rikke flinched, and at the same instant, Stride dove. He wasn’t fast enough. Rikke launched Tish violently against the concrete guardrail, where she lost her balance and toppled forward. Rikke turned and ran. Stride clawed for Tish and nearly had her, but her torso slipped through his grasp, and she kept falling. His right hand grazed her thigh, and his left hand caught behind her knee, but she stripped past him, picking up speed on her drop toward the bay. She was sliding, falling, and wailing, until his hands locked around her thin calf and her right foot caught on his clenched fingers, and she finally jerked to a stop.
Tish hung suspended over one hundred and twenty feet of air between the bridge and the water.
Her weight pinned Stride against the concrete barrier. He felt her squirming, fighting him, almost as if she wanted to fall. His upper body was bent over the bridge; he was being pulled, dragged down. He couldn’t lift her up. All he could do was hold on to her ankle, but the muscles in his arms groaned and weakened.
“Serena!” he shouted. He could hear her running behind him.
“Hold on!”
Stride tried to make time stop. He tried to clear his mind of everything except the lock-hold of his hands around Tish’s ankle. They were like handcuffs. Tight. Not giving up.
“Hold on, Jonny, I’m here.” Serena leaned over the edge, stared down at the dark water, and cursed. “Oh, son of a bitch, I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You have to. I’m losing my grip.”
Serena bent over and hunted for a hold on Tish’s body. She bunched Tish’s blouse between her fingers, but the fabric tore away when she pulled, and Serena gasped and fell against Stride. He staggered, and the vise he kept around Tish’s ankle nearly broke apart.
“Your hand, give me your hand!” Serena shouted at Tish, whose arms made a Y below her head, reaching toward the bay.
“No, no, no, I can’t!”
“Reach back, Tish, you can do it.”
“No!”
Stride’s fingers grew numb and sweaty, and pain screamed along the nerve ends in his shoulders and neck.
“See if you can get her other ankle,” he said. They were running out of time.
Tish’s leg spun along with her body. The wind played with her like a toy, pushing her back and forth in circles. Serena grasped for her flying ankle, missed it, and tried again, and finally she shouted, “Got it! Pull! Pull!”
Stride yanked upward with a shout, scraping backward from the edge of the bridge. Serena was beside him, doing the same thing. Inch by inch, they fought their way from the concrete barrier, and Tish came with them. They saw her knees, then her thighs, and when they saw her waist clear the bridge, Serena took one hand, grabbed Tish’s belt, and spilled her back onto the highway, where she twitched like a fish pulled from the water.
Stride let go and fell backward against the Impala. His chest heaved. Pins and needles assailed his arms.
Tish was incoherent, moaning and crying.
“Get her in the back of the Impala, make her lie down,” he mumbled to Serena. “She’s going to need to be sedated before we can move her to our truck.”
“Lieutenant!”
Stride’s head snapped up.
Thirty feet away, the policewoman who had fired the warning shot lay on her back on the asphalt, entwined in a violent struggle with Rikke. The two bodies rolled and fought, and as he watched, the gun skidded away across the lane, out of reach. Rikke reared back and chopped the officer’s face with a crack of her elbow. The cop’s head snapped against the pavement, and she went limp.
Stride swore, pushed himself off the car, and ran. His legs felt like gelatin. Beside him, he was stunned to see cars whipping down the slope of the bridge deck toward the Duluth side as if it were a racetrack. The fog made him almost invisible, and he dodged cars that began to merge into the right lane before they saw him. He charged down the shoulder, gaining ground on Rikke, who staggered to her feet. When he thrust out his tired arms to stop her, she swung wildly at him with both fists. She connected with his jaw, and there was surprising strength in the blow. He grabbed for her wrists, but she shoved his chest, and he skidded backward, losing his balance.
Rikke bolted away.
Stride heard horns and saw dazzling white lights. Cars stampeded like blind elephants. He sprinted after Rikke, but she weaved away from him and darted to his left out into traffic. He shouted a warning, but she didn’t stop. Like a cannon barrel coming out of the fog, a huge black Escalade rocketed down the highway in the left lane, and Rikke stumbled directly into its path. Stride saw the red flash of brake lights. Tires screeched and burned. Rikke screamed, but her cry was chopped short as the SUV hammered her torso and nearly cut her in two.
Rikke’s crushed body spun off the grill of the truck and rolled to a stop twenty yards away. She didn’t move.
Before Stride could react, he felt the presence of something giant and dangerous behind him. He turned to see a white sedan sail like a pirate ship out of the fog. When the driver saw the Escalade stopped in the left lane, he swerved right, coming directly at Stride, who leaped and rolled onto the hood as the sedan struck him. His body bounced on the metal. The windshield hit his chest. He felt air burst from his lungs. He hung on to the hood with his fingertips as the car slammed into the concrete barrier on the side of the bridge, and then his hold gave way.
Stride flew.
He was a bird in the air, shot from the hood of the sedan, launched out over the side of the bridge into nothingness.
Then he was falling.
50
Time stretches out on a long fall.
In Stride’s brain, he knew that it was one hundred and twenty feet to the black water and that he would plummet through that distance in about three seconds. Even so, his thoughts accelerated like shooting stars, giving him enough time to watch himself fall and be acutely aware of his sensations. He had no time at all to be afraid.
As he was thrown into midair, he thought he heard Serena cry, but her voice was gone instantaneously, and the only noise around him was the deafening roar of the wind. Air hurtled against his body, cold and fierce, as fast as a bullet. Its wail sounded like a scream, shouting out from his chest. He hoped it wasn’t. He didn’t want to die screaming.
He caught a last glimpse of the bridge as it disappeared above him. Its lights were a half-moon of blurry white, and then the lights blinked out, and he was enveloped in blackness. He saw nothing below him, no water, no light, and he realized he had squeezed his eyes shut. He forced himself to open his eyes, to take advantage of the strange elongated sensation of time to orient himself. When he did, he could see the lights of the Point, where he lived, and something about that glimmer o
n the narrow strip of land made him want to see it again.
He tried to breathe, but he couldn’t. His lungs had been hammered by the impact of the hood of the car, and they refused to swell to take in the speeding oxygen around him. He felt light-headed, swimming, dreaming, as if he were already underwater.
Three seconds.
He had time to think about the fact that he wasn’t seeing his life pass before his eyes. No clickety roll of images like film on an old movie projector. No recollections of Cindy, Maggie, or Serena. No voices, sounds, memories. No angel caressing his arm and showing him the loved ones who had gone before him. He was in a vacuum filled with air, about to hit water that was not soft like a knife cutting through butter but was solid like concrete and would savage his bones and tissue and kill him instantly, the flicking of a switch from alive to dead.
That was the first conscious thought to penetrate his mind in that first long second.
He was about to die.
He thought about people jumping from towers. People in planes about to crash. They must have had that same brilliant moment of clarity. You are alive now, and in another moment, you will be dead. He was almost curious about what it would be like, and he realized that death had a strange seduction to it.
But he had time enough to realize that he didn’t want to die, not now, not for a long time, and he had time enough to remember that the Golden Gate Bridge was a lot taller than the Blatnik Bridge, and people had been known to survive the big drop into San Francisco Bay, even when they didn’t want to. Not a lot. But a few.
And those that did went in feet first.
Feet first.
His brain began screaming at him. Feet first.
If he hit the water with his head or his shoulder or his chest, he would die hitting the water as if it were made of brick. His only hope was to cut a little tear in the liquid concrete and slip through. With his eyes open, and that odd, elastic time stretching out like a pink roll of taffy, Stride uncurled his body into the straightest line he could make it, pointed his toes toward the water, lifted his arms straight over his head, and tilted his chin toward the sky. In the lightning span of less than a second, he twisted himself into an arrow heading for a bull’s-eye.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 34
