by TAYLOR ADAMS
With her other, she cut the animal’s throat.
It should be her here. Lena wiped her eyes. Out on this bridge, facing a duplicitous killer cloaked in a badge and a uniform.
Not me.
“Don’t you . . .” Raycevic eyed the Shoebox recorder. “Don’t you need to change out VCR tapes on that piece of shit?”
She’d forgotten about it. The cassettes recorded ninety minutes. She tried to remember—how many minutes had it been now? Seventy? Eighty? There couldn’t be much time left. And she’d be vulnerable when she flipped the tape over. She would make Raycevic lie down for that part.
“You’re something.” He studied her. “You work at an electronics store, and that’s the best you could do? Digital mics are, like, forty bucks—”
“Practice ammo is expensive.”
“You should have stayed home, Lena. In my line of work, you learn to pick out the wolves from the sheep, and you’re one hundred percent sheep.” He looked her up and down. “Is there a spiritual angle to this? You think Cambry’s ghost sent you here to get me? Did you dream about her or something?”
Lena, go. She pushed her sister’s voice out of her mind.
Please, go—
“Are you trying to prove you’re as tough as she was?”
“No. Cambry was always the tough one, and I accept that.” She was aware that Raycevic was steering the conversation, dominating her even while at gunpoint. She bit her lip, and it came out like a slashed vein, despite herself: “Sometimes I used to think that my sister and I were the same person, just cut in half. Like that’s what twin siblings are, on a cellular level. Our shapes are jagged, incomplete. I got the book smarts. She got the street smarts—”
He snorted derisively.
She looked him in the eye. “Rick got the morals, didn’t he?”
“Cambry sure didn’t.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know. After what she did to her boyfriend in Florida.”
She stopped.
“You . . . you knew about that, right?”
She shook her head.
“Really?” He rolled his eyes. “Your sister drove off after they got the windshield repaired. Just left poor Blake at a gas station out by Fort Myers with a few dollars in his pocket. She stole everything. Their shared supplies, the money in the lockbox, his trailer—”
No, she wanted to say.
No, that’s backward. Blake ditched her. He left her. He was Terrible Guy #17.
“She stole his pistol, too,” Raycevic said. “A little .25-caliber Baby Browning—”
“They interviewed Blake?”
“They did, yeah.”
“He lied, then. He stole from her—”
“I’m curious how you’ll explain this part, Lena. If your sister had Blake’s gun with her on June sixth, why didn’t she defend herself with it? When I chased her?”
She didn’t have it. That’s why.
There was no record of a .25-caliber Baby Browning, whatever that was, recovered in her car. Ditto for her KA-BAR knife.
She was robbed in Florida. That was how it happened.
Lena had planned for this. Corporal Raycevic had everything to lose. Of course he would lie. She’d expected to disregard or challenge most of what he said today. This conversation was already a mistake. She shouldn’t have let her walls down, even an inch. He would do anything to get under her skin, to tip her off balance, to dull her reflexes—
He glanced sharply left. He saw something.
Lena followed his gaze—backing up a step in case it was another trick, to keep him in her sight—and scanned the hills off Hairpin Bridge, but saw nothing. Just gauzy, toxic smoke. Much thicker now. Pines turned to prickly shadows in the mist.
Looking away from him made her nervous. She glanced back at him.
He nodded. “See it?”
“See what?”
“There.”
She squinted again. Just acres of gritty smoke.
He’s toying with me.
“Take my cuffs off,” he said. “I’ll point it out for you.”
“You’re a funny guy.”
“Your sister thought so.” He grinned, all crusty teeth.
Again, she almost shot him where he stood. Her finger found the Beretta’s trigger, her guts squirming like a ball of centipedes. She saw red, the warm spurt staining Cambry’s hands like brake fluid as she sliced the doe’s throat, and she wanted to scream in his face: What do you see out there, Ray? Cut the mysterious crap. What the hell do you see?
That smug, creeping smile. “It’s getting closer.”
She looked again, searched for the road’s hairline path among the trees, and now she saw it along the valley of Silver Creek. Maybe a half mile out. A dark smudge in the dirty air. Inching into clarity.
An approaching vehicle.
Chapter 11
“This is a closed road,” she whispered.
He shrugged theatrically.
“I saw you lock the gate—”
Another shrug. “The combination gets out.”
“Did you call someone?” She looked him up and down, searching his brown uniform for a shoulder radio, a microphone, anything she could’ve missed. “Is that your backup coming?”
“I told you. Truckers use this road to make a shortcut to the north, to hit I-90 without passing through Magma Springs. It’s illegal, but it saves about an hour—”
“Did you call someone?”
“I didn’t call anyone.”
“When you were in your car earlier, on your radio—”
“If I’d called someone,” he said icily, “you’d hear sirens.”
She repositioned left, so she could watch both Raycevic and the incoming vehicle. She kept the Beretta trained on the big man, but her arms were still shaky. Her body was fatiguing. If she were back at Sharp Shooters, firing at her usual deck of fifty-two, her five-shot groups would be inexorably drifting off the cards. She wasn’t even sure if she could hit that sign now.
Raycevic laughed, as if he’d peeked into her mind and liked what he saw. It was a harsh chainsaw sound that originated deep in his belly. She had never heard this man laugh before and found it profoundly ugly. “This guy . . . he’s going to drive right past us. He’ll see everything—”
“Shut up.”
“Who looks like the bad guy here?”
She couldn’t let herself appear nervous because that would only delight him. But this was a serious problem, approaching fast. Raycevic was exactly right: to an uninvolved party, she’d certainly look like the aggressor, holding a uniformed cop at gunpoint.
Shit. She hadn’t anticipated this. This road was supposed to be locked and closed. Isolation was the plan, the assumption, and why she didn’t just meet this murderer for coffee in a Starbucks—
“He’ll see your gun,” he whispered.
“So?” She forced a confident shrug. “He’ll call the police. Your buddies will show up. We’ll all go to the station and I’ll tell them everything. That helps me.”
“Does it?”
“The truth will come out.”
“You’re sure?” he said. “You’re recording me this whole time, yeah, but what have you really learned? Go ahead. Listen to the whole thing. You’re holding a cop at gunpoint, so step one is you getting arrested. Do you think you have enough evidence right now to prove that I killed your sister?”
“You admitted to following her. On tape.”
“Tapes can disappear.”
“You’re literally saying that on tape.”
She wondered how deep his professional connections were. In the fuss of her own arrest, could he really make the recording disappear? Could his career really withstand all of the added scrutiny at this point? It seemed impossible. Unbelievable. The world doesn’t work like that.
“What if my buddies shoot you?” Raycevic supposed. “You are holding a gun.”
“We’ll sort it out.” She watched the vehicle draw closer. It was a red eighteen-wheeler, she could now tell. It charged uphill through the hazy air. Sunlight glinted fiercely off the windshield.
A minute away. Maybe less.
“Yeah?” He licked his lips, glancing between her and the oncoming truck. “I don’t think you really want interference, Lena. Any more than I do. Because you’re here to solve a mystery that’s been tormenting you at night. And you haven’t solved it yet.”
“And you haven’t killed me yet.”
He smiled.
We both have unfinished business, don’t we?
“Here’s the deal,” Raycevic said. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened to Cambry. How she died. What I saw happen. If you just hide your gun, please, so that dickweed thinks I’m just pulling you over for a traffic violation and keeps driving.”
Lena said nothing. Thirty seconds now.
“My handcuffs are a giveaway. I have a backup key in my vehicle, if you’ll help me take them off,” he said. “And I’ll stand here and pretend to be writing you a citation—”
“Try harder, Ray.”
“Got a better plan?”
She didn’t.
She glanced at the Shoebox recorder, still listening, and wondered what she’d really captured so far. How much of Raycevic’s description of Cambry’s last moments was true or even reliable. He’d pulled her over. She’d bolted. He’d chased her. She’d eluded him, first with a daring one-eighty, and then with a clever detour into a side road. Spoiled only by an unlucky lightning flash.
Why was she running? Why was he chasing her? And what happened next?
All questions. All burning in her mind.
Hairpin Bridge was Lena’s controlled experiment. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to let the variables of the outside world in yet. Even if Raycevic’s career went down in flames, he could hold his tongue. Tapes could disappear. The truth could remain lost.
And she was so close. I have to know.
I have to know exactly what happened to you, Cambry.
“Ticktock. Make a choice, Lena.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Think faster. He’s about to see your gun.”
The truck reached Hairpin Bridge’s opposite ramp, belching a cloud of black exhaust. A hundred yards out now—just seconds from witnessing the standoff. And that wasn’t even the worst possibility.
This guy could be Raycevic’s backup, she knew. Here to kill her.
She couldn’t get that thought out of her mind. The convenience of this new development bothered her, that a bystander would bumble through an abandoned road on a closed bridge, at right this very instant. Perfectly foiling her trap. As the seconds ticked down, Raycevic’s voice melted into poison in her ear, a rotten whisper: “Did you get what you came for, Lena? Can Cambry’s ghost rest?”
He’s saying this only because he wants me to lower my gun.
So when his twin brother in the truck starts shooting, I’m an easier target. She imagined a mirror-image Raycevic—big brother Rick, alive and well—driving toward them now in the truck’s dark cab. Same flinty cop eyes. Same bulging action-figure arms and buzz cut. With a rifle on a gun rack, waiting to be lifted and fired at her. In the rock-paper-scissors of gunfighting, rifle beats pistol. Every time.
Somehow that clinched it. It clinched everything.
She moved again, nodding sharply. “Stand here. Don’t move.”
“What are you doing?”
“I said don’t move, Ray.”
She circled behind him and aimed the Beretta to the back of his neck. Her finger tense on the trigger. Her heart thudding in her neck. She positioned Raycevic between herself and this new arrival.
A handcuffed human shield.
She leaned left around the cop’s bulky shoulder and watched the truck approach the bridge’s final stretch, exposing as little of her face as possible. If this guy was an ally of Raycevic’s and he took a shot at Lena from his cab, he’d need to shoot through Raycevic first. As long as he wasn’t a gold-medalist sniper, he’d have serious trouble.
Right?
“Smart girl,” Raycevic whispered.
“Shut up.”
“Believe me, Lena, I wish he was my backup.”
The truck slowed, idling now at a walking pace. The windshield was tinted dark. No view of the driver inside. But he certainly saw them. Lena tried to visualize this stranger squinting through the glass at them with undetermined motives as the air brakes whined a final cry and the truck stopped.
Just thirty feet away. On the bridge’s opposite lane.
The world hung on a knife edge. Just the low breath of ashy wind, and the diesel growl of the truck’s engine. Like a caged animal.
She held her Beretta to the tanned skin on the back of Ray’s neck, careful not to expose herself. Like a villain taking a hostage in a movie, shortly before the good guy blows their brains out with a single sure shot. Now I really do look like the bad guy, she realized.
“Nice, Lena. I think he’s spooked—”
“Stop talking.”
“Or what? You’ll execute me? In front of him?”
She wiped sweat from her forehead. What next?
It was hard to think. Smoke and sunlight burned her eyes. Her mouth was dry. She repositioned again, exposing even less of herself, with her trigger finger curled tight—now maybe a quarter ounce of pressure away from killing Raycevic. She held her breath, studying the big truck, waiting for the rattle of gunshots to shatter the silence. For something, for anything to happen, to relieve this suspended moment.
Another breath of smoky wind. The bridge seemed to wobble underfoot.
The rig sat in silence. Another chuff of exhaust.
“Idiot,” Raycevic muttered.
“What’d you say?”
“I said he’s a clown-fart fucking idiot. For stopping a ten-ton rig on an unsound bridge.” He sighed, annoyed. “We’re all going to end up at the bottom of the valley.”
Sure, Lena thought. What else can go wrong today?
Hairpin Bridge was built in the thirties. Closed in 1988. Rust-eaten, paint cracked away like dry skin, lashed by bitter winters and a merciless sun. She hadn’t considered until now how dangerous it might be to park multiple cars on it, suspended two hundred feet in the air.
Everything, suspended.
The heavy silence dragged on and on. She read the stenciled print on the trailer: SIDEWINDER. The word was somehow familiar. It flitted through her mind, stirring a memory. Another time, another place, a past life refracted through the prism of Hairpin Bridge, perhaps.
Sidewinder—
A sharp, glassy squeal.
She jolted, nearly yanking the Beretta’s trigger and blowing Raycevic’s throat out. It was the truck’s window rolling down, inching to halfway. From the shaded darkness, a face peered over the glass at them. At thirty feet, she could tell only that the driver was an old man—not Raycevic’s twin, at least. Scruffy gray hair. Flushed red cheeks. And strangely—a black eyepatch.
“Are you all right?” he shouted. Another surprise: he spoke in a thick Irish accent.
Raycevic shouted, “I’m under attack—”
“Shut up.” She jabbed the barrel into his neck.
The one-eyed truck driver froze in fear. He’d already glimpsed the gun in Lena’s hand. He got it. He was now comprehending the gravity of what he’d stumbled across: a hostage situation, with a cop—
“Get out of your truck,” Lena commanded.
The truck’s door creaked open and the old man obeyed, sliding down the footrail and landing clumsily on his feet. He was fat, dwarfish, wearing a T-shirt and cargo shorts. Pale Q-tip legs. At this distance, she was confident she could shoot him center-mass. If she needed to.
His Irish accent spooked her, though. Like a jutting split fingernail. It was the last thing she expected to hear from the driver of a semitruck in rural America.
She focused. Firs
t things first.
“Hands up,” Lena shouted. “Pull up your shirt.”
He obeyed. His shirt hiking up, revealing flabby white flesh.
“Now turn around.”
He did. No guns on his back, either.
“Do you have a gun in your cab?”
He shook his head. Blankly. His hat fell.
Raycevic grumbled, “I stop these guys all the time. I guarantee he’s got a shotgun in his cab—”
Lena ignored him. “What are you doing here?”
“The fire is—” The trucker pointed back, his voice muffled by another stir of wind.
“What?”
“I said, the fire is jumping I-90. If so, this road will become an evacuation route. They sent me to unlock the second gate, to clear a path to Highway 200.”
The gate we passed.
The damn wildfire. Still, Lena had no way to verify this. No reason to trust his word on any of this. But the horizon had darkened noticeably since they’d arrived, smoke banding the sky like oily brown paint. The air tasted like cinders.
At least this fat little man was unarmed. That made her feel better.
She squinted up into the shaded cab. “You . . . have a radio in your truck, right?”
He nodded.
“Call the emergency frequency, then.” She tried to explain, but the words were thick as peanut butter in her mouth: “This cop—he’s dangerous. He murdered my sister on June sixth and he staged her death to look like a suicide. I need you to call the authorities and get every cop in Montana out here right now, because I can prove it.”
“Can you?” Raycevic whispered.
The old man with the eyepatch still stared at Lena, paralyzed and useless. His hands still raised halfway. His belly still exposed. She wished he’d tuck his shirt in.
“Call the cops,” she repeated. “Now.”
That did it. He nodded, turned, scrambled up the truck’s footrail, and slipped inside the cluttered interior. The red door swung behind on him on a dry hinge.
She heard his faint voice as he lifted the handheld receiver: “Emergency-one, emergency-one. I’ve got, uh, an officer held at gunpoint—”
Officer held at gunpoint. There really was no nice way to phrase it.
The door gently clicked shut, muffling the rest.
Corporal Raycevic cursed under his breath and his big shoulders slumped. It must have been finally sinking in, that he’d soon be explaining this whole mess to his superiors. But first, Lena knew, she’d be arrested. The authorities would take her gun, which was fine, and her Shoebox, which was also fine. Like Raycevic said, items can disappear—and she had a plan for that, too. She wasn’t naive.