Finally I spotted Cassie maybe ten yards below me. She was standing there, ten feet from the edge of the roaring, snow-fed creek, looking up at the bridge, to all appearances unharmed. Her shell-shocked gaze met mine as I dropped to the rock-studded floor of the ravine, jarring my left calf yet again.
I looked up and down either side of the ten-foot wide creek. No attackers prowling along the bank. No dead Bambis rotting alongside the water that might have shocked that scream from her. No mountain lions crouching in the willows and blackberry brambles that had choked out the manzanita.
Her mouth hung open in horror as she turned to gape up at the bridge again. I followed her line-of-sight to the overpass forty feet above us.
With the sun glaring in my eyes, I couldn’t tell at first what that sad, man-sized pendulum was. Then I shaded my brow with my hand and saw it was a boy hanging there, his body suspended by a jury-rigged harness fashioned out of red and black rope. The harness had been tied to one of the bridge railing’s pillars. A graffiti tag dripped in red paint on the solid concrete railing to his right, so badly scrawled, I couldn’t make it out. To either side of him, several older tags had been painted over with white.
The boy’s arms dangled limply, his head lolled to one side. And now I registered the red and black rope tangled around his neck.
He rotated slightly and even from that distance, I could see his face, the milky eyes, the protruding tongue. He was dead.
Cassie screamed again.
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