I ran over to the barrier, and got down on my knees, looked over it at Jay. He hung upside down in his seat, strapped in by the seat belt, his knees up by his chin, his head an inch from the car ceiling.
“Don’t move,” I said.
His eyes curled toward me. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”
I looked at the barrier. Slick with beads of rain, it moaned again. On the other side of it was a small strip of cement foundation, not enough to be considered a good foothold for anyone over the age of four, but I wasn’t in a position to sit back and wait for it to grow. Below the cement strip waited nothing but black space and water as hard as cliff face a hundred yards down.
Angie came up beside me as a breeze swept off the gulf. The car shifted to the right a bit, then jerked downward another inch.
“Oh, no,” Jay said. He laughed weakly. “No, no, no.”
“Jay,” Angie said. “I’m coming out.”
“You’re coming out?” I said. “No. I got a longer reach.”
She climbed over the barrier. “And bigger feet, and your arm looks fucked up. Can you even move it?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She gripped an intact section of the barrier and eased herself along it toward the car. I walked beside her, my right hand an inch from her arm.
Another gust of wind cut through the rain and the whole bridge seemed to sway.
Angie reached the car, and I held tight to her right arm with both hands as she lowered herself to a tenuous squatting position.
She leaned out from the barrier and extended her left arm as sirens rang in the distance.
“Jay,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I can’t reach.” She strained against my grip, the tendons in her arms pulsing under the skin, but her fingers fell just short of the upside-down door handle. “You’re going to have to help out, Jay.”
“How?”
“Can you open your door?”
His head craned as he tried to locate the door handle. “Never been upside down in a car before. You know?”
“I’ve never hung from the side of a bridge three hundred feet over the water,” Angie said. “This makes us even.”
“Got the door handle,” he said.
“You’re going to have to push the door open and reach for my hand,” Angie said, and her body swayed slightly in the wind.
He blinked against the rain blowing into the window, puffed up his cheeks, and exhaled. “I feel like if I move an inch, this thing’s going to tip.”
“Chance we have to take, Jay.” Her hand slipped down my arm. I squeezed, and her fingers dug into my flesh again.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “I’ll tell ya, though, I—”
The car lurched, and the whole bridge gave a loud creak, this one high-pitched and frantic like a scream, and the torn cement holding the car crumbled.
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Jay said.
And the car dropped off the bridge.
Angie screamed and jerked back from the car as the torn steel coil snapped into her arm. I gripped her hand tight, and pulled her over the barrier as her legs kicked at the open air.
With her face pressed against mine, and her arm wrapped tight around my neck, her heart hammering against my biceps, and my own pounding in my ear, we peered down at the place where Jay’s car had plummeted through streams of rain and disappeared into black.
25
“He going to be okay?” Inspector Jefferson asked the EMT working on my shoulder.
“He’s got a cracked scapula. Might be broken. I can’t tell without an X ray.”
“A what?” I said.
“Shoulder blade,” the EMT said. “Definitely cracked.”
Jefferson looked at him with sleepy eyes and shook his head slowly. “He’ll be fine for a while. We’ll get a doctor take a look at him soon enough.”
“Shit,” the EMT said and shook his own head. He wrapped the bandage tight, running it from under my armpit, up over my shoulder, down across my collarbone, around my back and chest, and up to my armpit again.
Inspector Carnell Jefferson watched me steadily with his sleepy eyes as the EMT did his work. Jefferson looked to be in his late thirties, a slim black guy of unremarkable height and build, with a soft, easygoing jaw and a perpetual smile playing lazily at the corners of his mouth. He wore a light blue raincoat over a tan suit and white shirt, a silk tie with a pink and blue floral print hanging slightly askew from an unbuttoned collar. His hair was cut so short and tight to his skull, I wondered why he bothered having any there at all, and he didn’t even blink as rain dripped down the tight skin on his face.
He looked like a nice guy, the kind of guy you’d shoot the shit with at the gym, maybe have a few pitchers with after work. Kind of guy who loved his kids and had sexual fantasies only about his wife.
I’d met cops like him before, though, and he was the last guy you’d want to get too comfortable with. In the box, or testifying at a trial, or hammering away at a witness, this nice guy would turn into a shark in less time than it took to snap your fingers. He was a homicide inspector, a young one, and black in a southern state; he didn’t get where he was by being any suspect’s friend.
“So, Mr. Kenzie, is it?”
“Yup.”
“You’re a private dick up in Bahstan. Correct?”
“That’s what I told you.”
“Uh-huh. Nice town?”
“Boston?”
“Yes. Nice town?”
“I like it.”
“I hear it’s real pretty in the autumn.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “Hear they don’t like niggers much up there, though.”
“There are assholes everywhere,” I said.
“Oh, sure. Sure.” He rubbed his head with the palm of his hand, looked up into the drizzle for a moment, then blinked the rain from his eyes. “Assholes everywhere,” he repeated. “So since we’re standing in the rain talking all friendly about race relations and assholes and the like, whyn’t you tell me about that pair of dead assholes blocking all this here traffic on my bridge?”
Those lazy eyes found mine and I saw a glimpse of the shark in them for just a moment before it disappeared.
“I shot the little guy twice in the chest.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I noticed. Yes.”
“My partner shot the other guy as he drew down on me with a shotgun.”
He looked behind him at Angie. She sat in an ambulance across from the one where I sat as an EMT wiped at the scratches on her face, legs, and neck with an alcohol swab and Jefferson’s partner, Detective Lyle Vandemaker, interrogated her.