by TAYLOR ADAMS
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve already assaulted an officer.” He turned to face her with a dry squint. “You’ll get ass-rammed in court. Nobody is going to care about your dead schizoid sister. You’re looking at a class C with a firearm. You know what that means, right? Hope you didn’t make plans for the next fifteen years. Hope you didn’t want to vote afterward. What now?”
“You sing Katy Perry’s ‘Firework.’”
He spat onto the concrete between them. It landed heavily, a jellied glob.
“I’m not going to prison,” she said. “You are.”
He huffed again, red-faced in the sunlight. “Really, Lena? This is your plan? Hold me at gunpoint so I tell you a story? I didn’t kill your sister—”
“You keep saying that.”
“She killed herself.”
“You murdered her, Ray. At nine p.m. on June sixth.”
“I didn’t. I’m starting to wish I had, though.”
“Are you trying to get shot?”
He punched his chest. “Go ahead.”
She’d expected the truth to come pouring out by now. On the drive here, she’d imagined Cambry’s killer would try to barter with her, or even beg. But he was still defiant. Pissed off.
A question flickered through her mind: What if Ray was telling the truth? What if he didn’t actually kill her?
Someone did.
She thought about Ray’s twin brother, Rick. The convenience of that little sob story. Maybe he didn’t really shoot himself at age eighteen. A twelve-gauge under the chin will obliterate a human head, right down to the dental records, after all. Maybe Rick was still alive and Ray was protecting him. If he’d always wanted to be a cop and he was rejected by the academy—hell, maybe he stole Ray’s car and uniform one night and joyrode? And he took his fantasy too far and murdered Cambry, and now poor good-guy Ray Raycevic was struggling to keep a lid on it?
Unlikely? Yes. But no more unlikely than the official cover story. Or that poor Japanese man catching two A-bombs to the face in one week.
Worse, it meant Cambry’s real killer was still out there.
She’d researched Raycevic’s internet presence extensively in the weeks building up to this—she knew about his extended family in Arkansas, his test scores, his petty gun-forum arguments about what grain of .17 HMR is best for killing varmints—but his brother never, ever came up. It was as if he’d buried Rick himself. Just like Cambry.
And now Lena was here to dig.
“You know . . .” Corporal Raycevic ran his tongue over his lip. He studied the gun in her hands, and then the bridge’s cracked roadway between them. Then his eyes lit up, as if struck by an idea. “How far apart would you say we’re standing?”
She realized Raycevic was standing.
He’d been kneeling, just moments ago. How did he do that?
“I’m guessing . . . ten feet, maybe?” He played dumb. “Would you say we’re standing about ten feet apart, give or take?”
“Get to your point.”
“We train for what’s called the ten-foot doctrine. Let’s say a suspect is armed with a knife. And I have a firearm. If he’s within ten feet of me, he’s an imminent danger to my life.”
“Because you’re a crappy shot?”
“I took the regional centerfire bronze with my AR-15 last year,” he said coldly. “No, Lena. Because guns don’t have the stopping power you see in movies. You know that, right? You’ve shot that Beretta before, I hope? You didn’t just steal it from Dad’s closet. You know how to load and unload it? Clear jams? Where the safety is?”
She said nothing.
He squinted. “You do have the safety off, right?”
Still, she said nothing.
“See, getting shot doesn’t send the victim flying backward into a wall, like in the movies. Newton’s first law: the force is only equal to the weapon’s recoil in the operator’s hand. So, if a suspect with a knife has decided he wants to stab me, I can fatally shoot him several times as he crosses the ten-foot distance between us, and he can still cut my throat before he succumbs to his wounds.”
He studied the ten feet between them, his lips moving. He was making a show of counting the paces it would take.
Then he glared back up at her, his voice slowing, hardening to a menacing whisper. “I don’t have my Taser anymore. But I’m a strong guy. I can bench three-ten. And I’d wager, Lena, that I can probably break your neck with just my hands. Even if you shoot me three times on my way to you, I’ll still snap your spine between my fingers before I bleed out. Unless you can shoot my heart or my brain. Think about it, Lena. Can you hit a moving target, that fast?”
“They’re both pretty small targets,” Lena said.
He lost it. “Jesus fucking Christ—”
“I bet a groin shot would work, too.”
“You’re playing with fire, girl.”
“I mean to,” she said, taking aim and closing her right eye.
She put the Beretta’s front sight into sharp focus and allowed the two rear sights to blur. So did Raycevic. The key, she knew, was that front sight. That dark little block. A strange truth of marksmanship, and maybe life—that to hit your target, you must allow it out of focus.
“You’re bluffing. You need me alive, Lena.” He stared down the barrel. “Because you need to know what I know. You can’t shoot me. You’d like to, but you can’t and you won’t. The gun you’re pointing at my head is just an empty threat.”
She watched his smirk grow.
“You desperately need the information up here.” He tapped his temple. “That still puts me at an advantage, because I know that no matter what, you won’t dare pull the tri—”
She pulled the trigger.
* * *
It hit Ray as a deafening explosion of pressurized air. A blast of heat and scorched grit on his cheeks, rattling his teeth, warping his eardrums.
This is it, he thought—this girl had just killed him. She’d just blown his brains out over Hairpin Bridge to dry under the scorching summer sun. It was all over, instant oblivion, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect Two Hundred Dollars, and no one would help his father remember his Sunday meds or explain to his wife what had happened, or cover up all of his secrets, like the dead kid rotting at the bottom of his well, as the neurons in his brain fired a final salvo and a random memory flashed: A child’s shoe. Red and white, with two Velcro straps—
No. He pushed it away.
I’m a good guy.
Then he hit a kneecap on the concrete and caught himself with an outstretched palm, his ears ringing a warbling bird cry. And following the concussive boom of Lena’s gunshot, a strange and metallic sound reached his ears. Like a . . . slap? He didn’t know how else to describe it.
He looked up through watery eyes, blinking away scorched gunpowder, and saw Lena still standing in a rigid shooting stance, aiming over and past him. Then she fired again, two more earsplitting blasts, as rapid as a double-clicked mouse.
Ray flinched again.
He realized Lena wasn’t aiming at him—she hadn’t been aiming at him on the first shot, either—as he heard two more distinct metallic slaps. The same sounds he couldn’t place.
They came from behind him.
Still on a knee, he turned around as the echoes faded, in time to see that three-by-three-foot UNINSPECTED BRIDGE sign still wobbling on its post, as if disturbed by wind. It stood at the bridge’s entrance, just above the structure’s famous Marbleworks twist, a full fifty yards back. Too far to discern the small-caliber bullet holes that were most certainly punched through it.
She’d shot the sign.
From fifty yards.
Three times, in rapid succession: slap, slap, slap.
He looked up at her—again—as she lowered her aim back to him. His right eardrum still rang furiously. Her first shot, before he’d reflexively hit the deck, had been close. The bullet might’ve passed within inches of his right earlobe. He could be facing permanent hearing damage in
that ear.
None of this was on Ray’s mind. He was still stuck on what he’d just witnessed, paralyzed by it, and he couldn’t fathom how this small-boned, doll-like Vietnamese girl could drill a target three times, half a football field away like that. At twice a handgun’s effective range.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know where the safety is, asshole.”
His mind raced: Where . . .
“Next one goes through your balls, Ray. How’s that for an empty threat?”
He hated himself for flinching, for undermining his own ten-foot doctrine and wavering in the face of her sudden gunfire, in spite of all of his training. But still he had to marvel at her, openmouthed.
Where in the hell did she learn to shoot like that?
* * *
Surprise: I took up a new hobby.
I should clarify, dear readers, that I’ve always had an entry-level familiarity with firearms—our father had insisted, to our mother’s chagrin, that both of his twin girls know how to shoot and clean a Ruger 10/22—but after Cambry’s bizarre suicide and my ensuing emotional tailspin, I found myself desperately needing a refuge.
Some people find Jesus.
I found shooting.
I immersed myself in it. I sold my TV and spent $900 on a pistol—a Beretta Px4 Storm in 9-millimeter. I memorized the manual. I watched YouTube instructional videos. I bought a membership at a local indoor range where women shoot for free on weekdays. Boy, did I hold them to it.
In just over two months, I estimate I put ten thousand rounds downrange. Probably more.
At the front counter you can buy poster-size paper targets for fifty cents each: shambling zombies, cartel thugs holding big-breasted hostages, the always-deserving Jar Jar Binks. My favorite, though, is “The Deck of Fifty-Two.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: a pack of life-size playing cards arranged on a grid. I tape it up and send it to twenty-five feet, thumb fifteen rounds into the seventeen-round mag, and then slowly and systematically fire five-shot groups into every card, one at a time. Left to right. Three cards per reload. Two hundred and sixty rounds a day.
Every weekday, a new deck of fifty-two.
My first week or so, I struggled to keep my hits on the intended cards. But I persisted. I recognized my bad habits and corrected them. I kept punching paper Monday through Friday in a rote routine, left to right, five per card, three per mag. By week three, I was proud to see my shot groups shrinking to the size of a grapefruit. Now at week nine, my bullet holes almost always touch, like ragged little clovers of scorched paper.
And that’s just the live ammo. Double that—maybe triple it—in dry-fires. I practiced trigger control by firing plastic dummy cartridges (snap caps) many more times a day inside my apartment with the blinds drawn, until the pads of my fingers were raw and blistered.
The key to marksmanship is squeezing the trigger without allowing your body to anticipate the blast. The gunshot should surprise even you, the shooter. Otherwise your muscles tense in anticipation and your flinch contaminates the shot. It’s like shooting hoops or honing your golf swing—all about good habits. I dry-fire every morning after waking up, take the bus to work, hit the range to live-fire into a deck of fifty-two on the way home, research Cambry’s death for a few hours in the evening, dry-fire another couple hundred times, and collapse into bed weary, soul-sick, on an empty stomach. Monday through Friday. Repeat.
I dry-fired into my chin once.
For research, dear readers! I promise.
I admit, I was curious what it would feel like. What might have gone through Cambry’s mind if she really did contemplate suicide at the edge of Hairpin Bridge, hanging by her fingertips at the knife edge of oblivion. (Turns out it felt exactly like any other trigger pull. The human body knows when it’s being fooled, I guess.)
I called it a hobby earlier, but I’ll be honest: there’s no joy in it. I don’t give a shit about the craft or the sport. I sample-fired a few—a Glock, which I hated, and a SIG Sauer, which I liked but couldn’t afford—before choosing the perfectly adequate Beretta. To me, shooting is a rote action, as grim as facing the aisles at work. Whether I’m pushing papers at two or punching holes in them at six, it all feels about the same.
I had bad nights.
Bad weeks.
If I’m honest, all three months have been pretty awful.
But every minute of it, I grew increasingly certain that this stranger who phoned my family, this Corporal Raymond Raycevic, was involved in Cambry’s death. It was in her suicide text. It was in his voice. Somehow I knew it. This conviction built in me, every day. It was the reason I got out of bed in the morning, drank a thermos of black coffee, and dry-fired beside my bathroom mirror, so I could pretend Cambry was watching in my reflection, urging me to keep practicing, to keep pulling that trigger. It was my lifeline in the darkness: my sister didn’t kill herself, because someone killed her. And with every 9-millimeter hole I ripped through a playing card, and every click of a firing pin striking a snap cap, I was hardening myself to take the bastard down.
For Cambry.
I can’t emphasize enough how valuable it is to be doing something. Even if it’s this. If I didn’t have this crusade, I don’t know what I would have done. Ghost hunting, maybe? Painting?
And even still, on the bad nights when the trains are loud and the bedsheets cling with sweat and I can’t sleep, the worst thing I can fathom is driving all the way out to Montana . . . only to discover I have it wrong. That poor old Raymond, perhaps out there writing a speeding ticket right now, is just a normal God-fearing guy and not the secret monster I’ve convinced myself he is. That Cambry really did drive out to that remote bridge, leave her car idling on an empty tank, and leap over the guardrail to her death, her atoms rejoining a pointless universe of dead stars.
That terrifies me some nights. Keeps me awake.
Yes, I might be wrong.
I have my deep, diamond-hard conviction, but the truth is: I won’t truly know until tomorrow. When I’m face-to-face with him. Standing on the very bridge Cambry allegedly jumped from.
And I’m not walking into this rendezvous unarmed. He’ll underestimate me—especially at first, when I show up carrying a laughably outdated Shoebox recorder—but I sure as hell won’t underestimate him. If I’m right, he’s a man with the competence of a cop and the savagery of a criminal. I’ll be grateful for my Beretta and every minute of bloody-fingered practice with it.
All of this gun talk isn’t to brag. I’m a respectable shot now, but I have no formal training. I’ve never been in a gunfight. I don’t know jujitsu or anything. Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde would still thoroughly kick my ass. But grief leaves you reeling, empty-handed, searching for a devil to rage against. I guess I’m fortunate, then, that I found mine, and he turned out to be very real.
Cambry: However tomorrow unfolds, I promise I will get him. I’ll trap him. I’ll make him confess to the entire world what he did to you on June 6, and what he truly is.
I do know this: he’s not a cop.
He’s a man-size insect that crawled into a uniform. Whatever his formal decorations may say, he’s hiding a monstrous act in his closet, and he’s a disgrace to every brave man and woman with a badge. He’s a wrong that needs to be righted.
I’ll get him, sis.
* * *
She’s got me.
Ray knew he was in a decidedly tight spot here. Held at gunpoint under a hammering afternoon sun. His words recorded. His Glock, his Taser, his keys, all at the bottom of the ravine. He couldn’t reach the radio in his vehicle, or the AR-15 in his trunk. But he still had one final hope: a holdout weapon on his ankle. A snub-nosed five-shooter in .38 Special gripped in a tight holster against his sock, clammy with sweat.
Lena didn’t know about it.
She’d backed up to twenty feet away, keeping the pistol trained on him. Her posture was relaxing a bit, he noticed. Her elbows bending. She was coming down from the adrenaline kick. You can’t live di
aled up to ten, after all. Your body won’t allow it. Sooner or later, you’ll have to settle back down to a seven or eight, and so, too, would Cambry’s revenant.
She’s nothing special, Ray decided as his stomach growled. She’s not like her sister. She’s not a survivor. She’s not a killer.
She’s just a mixed-up girl with a gun.
For all her posturing, her tough talk, and even her trick shooting, Lena was still in hopelessly over her head here. She had no idea who Cambry was. No idea what she’d stumbled into. And no—she definitely didn’t know about the revolver on his ankle.
Otherwise it would be at the bottom of the ravine, with his other equipment.
Ray just needed to hike up his trouser leg and grab it. That was, maybe, a one-second motion. Another second, he estimated, to crouch, take aim, and fire. Lena was a formidable markswoman, clearly, but all he had to do was shoot first.
I just need an opening. He watched her.
She took another step back. She was looking anxious, seasick. A pallor in her cheeks. A growing tremor in her hands. Coming down from the high does that. She’d probably murdered scores of paper targets—but what about the real thing? The real thing shoots back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer.
“Huh?” He couldn’t resist. “You didn’t plan this far ahead?”
Instead of speaking, the young woman did something unexpected. She switched her grip on the weapon in her right hand, now unsupported (Ray considered making a move for his .38 Special now, but didn’t), and she drew her left hand back to her loose hair. She curled a lock around her index finger and, in a wincingly sharp motion, twisted it.
Just like he’d seen Cambry do, in that same vehicle, three months ago.
They really are twins, he thought.
He knew this shouldn’t get under his skin—hair-twisting is a common nervous tic, like nail-biting—but it still felt, in some strange way, like he was outnumbered. Like the dead girl from June and the living girl here were the same person, somehow, united against him. Two versus one. Here to punish him for his sins. He thought about the dead kid in his well and swallowed with a dry throat.