Hairpin Bridge
Page 16
But I know where the sky is, at least—I orient myself—and I wait for someone else to shatter the shimmering surface above, to come pummeling down on me feetfirst and break my neck. It takes a few more moments of icy quiet to realize that I’m alone, that not one of Cambry’s friends—not even her boyfriend—is jumping off the bridge to follow my sister down.
It’s just me.
I’m the only one who jumped.
I’m alone under a heavy blanket of cold. My lungs burn with pressure. I’ve lost my breath upon impact. I know I should thrash upward through the layers of warmer water, to break the sun-stippled surface and take a gulp of air before diving again. But I won’t. I can’t.
I’m a lousy swimmer. My form is sloppy. I can’t dive more than a few vertical feet. So this moment, right now—this ten feet or so of depth, gained by my thirty-foot plunge off this trestle—is my only chance to find her. I’ll never get this deep again. And she’s running out of air, wherever she is down here in the blackness of the river’s bottom. Somehow I’ve already made up my mind: if my sister drowns down here—well, so do I.
I find gnarled tree roots. Slimy alien plants tangle between my fingers. I sweep them away but keep finding more, clinging in heavy knots. And my lungs are on fire now, and my brain is screaming for oxygen, and even my own body—in its stupid desperation—urges me to open my mouth, to try inhaling this dark water.
I’ll be honest. I don’t remember much of the searching in the crushing, cold vault.
I know only that I found her.
We explode to the surface together. I gulp a breath on a raw throat, gagging green water, fiery sunlight in my eyes. I don’t remember daylight ever being so bright. I hold my sister. I can’t tell if she’s conscious or even alive.
Struggling to keep both of our heads above the surface, I lean back and begin a lurching backstroke. I can’t see the shore. Only a vast blue sky and the tar-black skeleton of the bridge we leaped from, blurred by surges of water. I time my breaths between them. My chest throbbing, my bruised arms and legs melting with every kick and stroke. I’m running out of energy. I’m fading. We’re sinking.
Cambry’s head is on my shoulder, the lapping water coming to cover her face, and I’m afraid to look at her. I’m afraid she’s already dead, and I would apologize if I had the breath, because I’m failing, letting her down, and we’re both vanishing under the pull of the slurping waves—
Rocky ground scrapes my back.
We’re ashore.
I heave onto the cold bank with her in my arms, rolling onto wet sand. I cough up water, spitting grass and twigs, and now the others show up—her boyfriend and friends followed the railroad tracks and took the long way down—and only now do they crowd us, asking if we’re all right, a forest of arms and legs and shoulders blocking the sunlight. Cambry is just beside me, sprawled on the sand, and Terrible Guy #11 is tugging her upright, and I dread seeing her face—oh, God, if she’s unconscious, none of us know CPR.
Her eyes are wide open.
She’s in his arms, but she’s staring over his shoulder at me with perfect razor-sharp awareness. There’s an awed terror in her gaze, like she’s met the Reaper and witnessed her own end in the black water. And it’s hard to describe, but I feel like I’ve already lost her to it in some intangible way.
A fresh red rivulet runs down her eyebrow, beading on her eyelashes. She blinks it away. Only now do I get it, that the smack I’d heard wasn’t her wrist hitting the beam.
I wish I hadn’t been rooting against her.
We didn’t speak at all. We just sat in shivering, exhausted silence, as others spoke for us. Clapping our backs, complimenting, joking. Someone cracked another PBR and shoved it in my face. We left the river soon afterward. Her friends went their separate ways in the evening. Most I never saw again. One of them died last year, I learned via Facebook. Overdosed on something.
Cambry and I never spoke of this afterward, either. We took separate cars home, and by the next week she’d moved out in a tornado of slammed doors and thrown suitcases. I don’t think she visited the Yakima River or that wooden railroad bridge ever again. To be harshly honest, I don’t know if she ever knew it was me who jumped in after her and dragged her out. I think she might’ve assumed it was her boyfriend. I’m sure he liked it that way. Who knows if any of her people told her? Because I never did.
I’m not sharing this to brag. I just need to write it down, because there’s a decent chance that by the time you read this, I won’t be alive to tell it myself. I like this memory, I always have, and I privately hold to it when people urge me to remember the good. Not out of vanity—just because, in a small way, for a few terrified moments, our incomplete relationship as sisters felt whole and meaningful. She needed help, and I was there.
I hope she knew it was me.
Not her shitbag boyfriend, long forgotten.
That I loved her. That I still love her. She may be a stranger to me, but for all the miles of unknown space between us, now and forever, if she needed me, I’d follow her without hesitation.
So tomorrow I’ll jump into that dark water again.
And this time, whatever happens, I know I won’t be able to pull her out. God, how I wish I could. I wish the ghost stories of Hairpin Bridge would turn out to be real tomorrow, that I’ll discover the fabric of space and time to be thin there and I can slip from present to past, to the moment Raycevic killed her. I’d tug a cosmic string to change her fate. I’d fix it so she never stopped at that bridge and could be that racing girl in my mind forever, exploding down highways and back roads from White Sands to the Everglades, the running girl with a notepad and her wits, who never, ever stopped. I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat. I wish I could.
But maybe when I confront her killer on that bridge, I’ll make sense of what happened to her. Maybe I’ll learn a little more about who she really was. Maybe I’ll sleep better. Maybe the night terrors will end, and I’ll stop seeing the plastic bags and throaty screams and unraveling intestines on the ceiling of my bedroom.
And if I succeed at none of that . . .
There’s always revenge.
I’ll settle for revenge.
* * *
She doubted her single hastily aimed shot had hit the gunman inside the cab. She saw the half-open window go opaque with cracks. And the rifle barrel swung up, falling back inside.
Silence.
Her Beretta’s report flattened across the open land, rolling like thunder. Brass pinged off concrete. She dropped her purse and corrected her shooting stance, bringing her gunsights back up on the truck’s driver’s side door. The old man had ducked out of view. He’d crouched, or perhaps he’d been hit. She hoped she’d hit him but knew her luck wasn’t that good. Not today.
Her thoughts raced. The Beretta’s sights wobbled in her hands.
They murdered my sister.
Both of them.
It came down to this: a one-eyed trucker with a silly accent and a corrupt highway patrolman. She’d been prepared to capture Cambry’s killer. But not Cambry’s killers. For all her strategizing, she’d made a critical assumption that she recognized now: she’d never, until earlier today, considered the possibility of facing multiple enemies on Hairpin Bridge. She could hold one man at gunpoint. But not two. Certainly not this rifle-wielding stranger in the truck and Raycevic . . .
Raycevic, she remembered with a jolt of terror. She’d forgotten about him and given him the opening he’d been waiting for.
She spun to her left, aiming at the handcuffed cop. She feared he’d be midcharge already, tackling her to wrench the Beretta from her fingers, but no—he’d dropped to the pavement. He was twisting his cuffed hands behind his back. Sliding them to his ankles, under his raised boots—
“Hey!” she shouted, unsure of what else to say. “Stop.”
The echo of her gunshot still crackling in the distance. An odd time to feel socially awkward.
On the concrete, Raycevic ke
pt twisting his hands around his feet. Vaguely pathetic, like a flipped tortoise. He threw his head back toward the semitruck and shouted, “Shoot her.”
Lena aimed at him instinctively. For a split second, her nerves buzzing with wild panic, she almost shot Raycevic. Right there. Right in the stomach.
His voice rising, a string of saliva on his lips: “Shoot-her-shoot-her-shoot-her—”
The truck, her mind screamed.
The fucking truck with the fucking man with the fucking rifle—
The air went syrupy. Adrenaline mired in quicksand as Lena whirled back to face the semitruck—yes, the man’s rifle was back up on the door, nestled right there between the window’s corner and her fresh bullet hole. The barrel pointed directly at her. A pulse of fiery light—
Lena hurled herself down to the concrete under a deafening cannon blast. A powerful disturbance of pierced air, startling in its closeness, a whine over her head as his high-caliber bullet came and went. Sprawled belly down on the road, she twisted and aimed and fired again.
A bad shot. She wasn’t even sure she hit the truck.
The rifle bobbed, repositioning. She couldn’t see the man crouched inside—just flickers of dark motion, a few inches of exposed scalp, as he aimed at her again. The concussive blast must have blown out the damaged window; safety glass poured down the door in a glittering blue-white shower. Whatever weapon he held in that nest of darkness, it was huge. It was loud. And he was ready to fire it again.
I’m exposed.
She needed cover. She needed to get behind something solid. Twenty feet back, to her left, was Cambry’s Corolla. It would have to do.
She scrambled upright.
Raycevic’s voice: “She’s running.”
On her palms first—the Beretta’s barrel scuffed pavement, a gritty scrape—and then up into a runner’s crouch, launching forward. Get to the car. No time to stop—
The trucker fired another blast. Again, she felt the bullet rupture the air as it struck to her left, peppering her with chips of concrete. She stumbled through it, dust in her eyes, as the rifle’s report boomed in the sky. Still running, she twisted her head left to check on Raycevic. He was upright, too. Crouching, one pant leg hiked up, still shouting: “Shoot her, just shoot her!”
Her heels high. Palms slicing air. Don’t stop.
Her sister’s blue car came up fast. Lena kicked up her toes and hurled herself backward to slide the final five feet, slamming down hard on her back, sliding on the rough surface. Her tailbone mostly shielded by her jeans. Her right elbow skinning raw, as if chewed by a cheese grater.
She cried out, still sliding.
A rifle round struck the Corolla—the license plate frame exploded off—and she slid past it, slamming her knee against the bridge’s guardrail. Safely behind the car. She made it.
Her dust cloud caught up with her and blew past. Her heart slamming in her chest. None of this seemed real. The entire last twenty seconds, the visceral alarm of both shooting and being shot at, couldn’t have really happened. She realized her right hand was now empty.
No, the Beretta was in her left now. She couldn’t remember changing hands, but she must have. Her kneecap throbbed where she’d knocked it against the railing post. Her chewed-up elbow stung. She felt blood racing down her sleeve, hot and sticky under the fabric. And the sun in her eyes was so strangely, unnaturally orange. The wildfire smoke was darkening the air. Like a strange dream, the sun looked like a dying star on some alien planet.
Focus. Her brain was tugging in a million directions. A million sensory details, all distractions. She rolled onto her stomach and crawled against the Corolla’s front quarter panel, her back to the metal, shielding herself behind the engine block. The densest, most solid part of any car.
Across the bridge, the rifle fired again. A metallic thud as the Corolla took a bullet. She felt the concussive shock in her bones. She almost dropped the Beretta between her knees.
Okay.
She wiped dust from her eyes. Her fingers shaking. Tried to collect her thoughts.
Okay, Lena. Think.
The trucker was firing from a sniper’s nest in his cab across the bridge, but he couldn’t hit her without relocating. She was protected by the bulk of Cambry’s car, lengthwise. She’d barely made it there, and shredded her elbow badly enough to need stitches, but yes, she was temporarily safe.
Although his thunderous weapon—whatever the hell it was—clearly outmatched her Beretta Px4 in range. And power. And accuracy. And noise. And pretty much everything.
Focus. What would Cambry do?
She peered up over the Corolla’s hood. Sideways, exposing one eye. She couldn’t see the trucker in the shaded interior. She caught something, though—more motion—the rifle’s barrel moving on the door. Aiming. Preparing to fire again—
So Lena fired first.
She raised the Beretta over the warm hood and shot a staccato string at where she guessed the asshole’s face was. She couldn’t be sure. She was panic-firing at glimpses. Her shots went fast and without conviction, and she counted down in her mind—Twelve left, eleven, ten, nine, eight—knowing that all she was accomplishing was sailing harmless bullets over his head, through one window and out the other, making him crouch behind cover and wait. Still, she hoped she’d get lucky, that she’d nail him with a ricochet, or that he’d stupidly peek over the door and take one to the forehead.
A distant voice shouted, tinny in the crowded air, and she recognized that silly leprechaun accent and her heart sank with embarrassment: “She’s wasting her ammo.”
Despite herself, she fired one more furious shot (Seven left now, for fuck’s sake) and smacked the truck’s lantern-shaped mirror, spilling crunchy shards to the road. Not even close. An embarrassing miss. How many playing cards was that? At Sharp Shooters she would never, ever miss like this.
“Think she . . .” The trucker’s voice burbled with rotten laughter. “Think she has a second mag?”
She stopped firing and ducked behind the hood.
Raycevic didn’t answer the question. But the answer was yes. She had brought a second seventeen-round Beretta magazine to Hairpin Bridge, but her waistband holster didn’t have a mag pouch and her jeans pockets were too much of a giveaway, so she’d kept it in her purse. And her purse was back in the center of the bridge, twenty feet away, where she’d dropped it after the first bullet snapped over her head.
She was pinned behind the Corolla’s engine. More than half her magazine gone already. Shit.
She wanted to punch the concrete.
“Dumb bitch.” A breathy laugh from the cab. “Must be her first gunfight—”
She hated him. Whoever this man was, she loathed him. And she loathed herself, too, for giving in to the pressure. For wasting precious ammunition. For living down to their assumptions, for revealing herself to be the frightened amateur they thought she was. She was better than this. She had to be.
A sour thought made her cheeks flush: What would Cambry think?
She’d tell me to be tougher. Be smarter.
Fight harder, Ratface.
Another rifle round thudded into the Corolla’s engine block. Flinching behind it, Lena glimpsed motion in her periphery—Raycevic had moved. He was now standing in front of his black Charger, with a clear view on her left. Unprotected, in the open, like a shell-shocked soldier. For a surreal moment, they made eye contact.
No emotion in his eyes. No urgency. Just blank calm tinged with despair, like when he’d begged her to walk away. How long ago that seemed. It was strange—something like Stockholm syndrome—but seeing Corporal Raycevic gave her a flicker of relief. Familiarity. Maybe it was the lesser danger he posed handcuffed and unarmed, but she was almost glad to see him, like greeting an old friend.
Then Raycevic raised both cuffed hands together, and in them, a stubby shape her gut recognized immediately as a compact revolver. His eyes still blank, cold.
She thought: Oh, come on—
A starfish of cracks appeared on the Charger’s windshield, to Raycevic’s right. He ducked behind his car. Out of sight.
He’d be back.
I have five shots left now.
She scooted back against the car, a frenzied voice in her mind: This is bad.
She was squished up against a compact car, pinned by a devastating rifle on one side and a cop with a revolver on the other. They had her at a ninety-degree cross fire. The Corolla couldn’t shield her from both angles. She knew it. They would know it soon. She pressed herself against the car’s hot metal, her ankles pulled in, her shoulders flat, but it wasn’t enough.
They have you from two sides, Lena.
Simple geometry. She was exposed. Raycevic would pop out again from behind his Charger on her left, on her unprotected side, and take another shot at her.
This is bad.
This is so, so bad.
Her right elbow crunched against the car, full of gravel. Blood beaded between her fingers, bright as ketchup. The chemical smell of gunpowder. More details, more distractions. She urged herself: Be like Cambry, living like a rover in her car. Focus on the important things. Dump everything else.
She caught herself absently curling strands of hair around her index finger and twisting violently. She couldn’t believe herself. Hair-pulling, even now?
Even during a gunfight?
The rifle boomed again. The Corolla shuddered, and engine fluid splashed the road. It had been a few moments since the last shot from that direction—maybe he’d been reloading. If so, that meant his rifle held five shots. But this, too, was a distraction, because the danger wasn’t the fat bastard camped across the bridge. The danger was Raycevic. To her left.
She aimed back at his cruiser and waited for him to reemerge. Salty sweat stung her eyes. The Beretta rattled in her hands, her sight picture veering. She couldn’t keep the front and rear sights together. She couldn’t focus.