A blue Dodge Ram pickup with Florida plates skidded to a stop beside me.
“Alex!” Pinkie yelled as he jumped from the cab.
“Help me up,” I said, gasping. “Get me out of here.”
“There were shots!” he said.
“Which is why you need to get me out of here,” I said, fighting to get to my feet. “I do not want to talk to the Starksville police.”
Powerful hands caught me under the arms. I gritted my teeth at the pain in my ribs and hobbled to the passenger door. Pinkie lifted me into the truck and had us off the bridge before I heard the police sirens.
My cousin flipped off his headlights and turned down a road that paralleled the gorge. We were a quarter of a mile away before I saw distant blue lights go whizzing by, heading toward the bridge.
“Where to?” Pinkie asked.
“Somewhere we can wait them out for a little while,” I said. “Then we’ll circle back to Birney on the Eighth Street bridge.”
My cell phone rang. Bree.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“With Pinkie.”
“Did you hear those shots?”
“Yes,” I said, and I told her what happened.
“Don’t you think you should go to the hospital?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I want to stay under the radar on this.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain when I get home,” I said. “Give me forty-five minutes.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, and I love you.”
“I love you too, Alex.”
I hung up.
We’d left the east side of town and were heading down a long, gradual slope on a windy rural road when Pinkie finally turned his headlights back on.
“What the hell were you doing out on the bridge anyway?” he asked.
I started to tell him about my dream but stopped when I realized that wasn’t why I’d gone out there.
“It was something Cliff said about my dad.”
Pinkie shot me a quick glance. “What about your dad?”
“He said there were deep pools below the gorge, and when I said I didn’t know them, he told me my dad used to swim in them.”
“Okay…”
“I don’t know. The conversation just made me want to go to the bridge and look at the river, you know?”
Pinkie said, “I guess I can see that.”
We were almost to the bottom of the hill by then and traveling through deep forest.
“You know where those pools are?” I asked, looking out the side window.
A nearly full moon hung in the sky, throwing the woods into dark blue light.
Pinkie was quiet, but he slowed the truck and said, “Sure.”
A minute later, he stopped and gestured at a muddy lane that left the pavement. “That will take you in there.”
“Your truck make it?” I asked.
Pinkie hesitated, but then he turned us into a two-track that cut across a wooded pine flat. I could see by the ruts that the road was well used, but the forest pressed in from both sides, and thorny vines and branches scratched at the side of the truck.
Ten minutes later, we pulled into a turnaround. Pinkie stopped the truck, shut off the headlights. Here, where the trees opened up, the moon threw an even brighter light.
“Where are the pools?” I asked.
My cousin pointed at a gravel trail. “They’re not far. Lot of people go swimming here.”
“Got a flashlight?” I asked.
“What do you think you’re looking for, Alex?”
“I don’t know. I just want to see the pools.”
Pinkie paused before he asked, “You sure you’re up to it?”
“You give me a hand over anything rough, I think so.”
He sighed, said, “Suit yourself.”
My cousin came around to my side, opened the door, and helped me out. He fished in a toolbox in the bed of the truck and came up with a portable spotlight. He flicked it on. The shadows fled.
Moving slowly, guarding my ribs, I followed him down the gravel path to a grassy flat area by the banks of the Stark River. Moonlight bathed the place, which featured two large pools almost bisected by an outcropping of granite that looked like a chess bishop laid on its side.
Pinkie turned off the spotlight after we walked out on the ledge. Where the channel narrowed and flowed around the round knob of the outcropping, the current was swift. But in the pools, it was much stiller, and the moon reflected off them brightly. A quarter mile upriver you could make out the wall of the ridge and hear the roar of the water spilling out the mouth of the gorge.
“You ever hear of anyone falling into the gorge and surviving?” I asked.
Pinkie said nothing for several beats before replying, “They got kayakers in there all the time nowadays.”
“I meant a swimmer. Have you ever heard of someone swimming out of the gorge after falling from the arched bridge?”
Pinkie didn’t reply for several long moments. I turned and looked at him in the moonlight. He was staring at the water.
“Only one, Alex,” he said quietly. “Your dad.”