“Save her from who?”
“Turn off the recorder.” Raycevic nodded down at it, as if he knew he was being watched. “Turn it off, and I’ll tell you.”
“No deal.”
His voice bristled. “Turn it off.”
“You’re lying—”
“I’m not the bad guy, Lena.” He clasped his hands together in a prayer-like gesture. The huge man was almost groveling. “Yes, I chased your sister on June sixth. Yes, I lied about it in my report—but for a good reason. She was driving like a bat out of hell, almost ninety, running scared. We were barreling down this winding road. I couldn’t stop her. And she didn’t trust me anymore—”
Lies. Every word of it could be lies.
“I wouldn’t trust you, either, Ray.”
“I couldn’t make her stop. So . . .” He cleared his throat. “I pulled my gun on her. Not to shoot her. Just to try and force her to stop.”
Yeah, no shit, she didn’t trust you, Lena wanted to say. But she couldn’t form the words. It was staggering, being in the presence of someone privy to Cambry’s last moments alive. Lies or not. She caught herself leaning in, hanging on his words—because in a soul-sick way, yes, she wanted to believe Raycevic was telling her the truth. “You chased her. You pulled a gun on her. But how’d she die?”
“She killed herself.”
“Bullshit.” Back to this.
“She jumped off this bridge, right in front of me—”
“Yeah? Did she write that suicide text, too? Hopefully you can live with it, Officer Raycevic?”
“She did.”
“That wasn’t my sister’s voice.”
“It was, Lena. You just didn’t know her.”
“You’re lying. You’ve already incriminated yourself.” She remembered to breathe. She was firing questions faster than he could answer. Her sinuses ached—the start of a migraine. “Fine. Who were you trying to protect her from?”
Raycevic turned away.
He stared off Hairpin Bridge, refusing to look her in the eye. She almost grabbed his thick shoulder and tugged him back to face her. Just like Cambry in her dream (Go, Lena), everyone held all the answers but refused to talk. It was exasperating, being so close to the truth.
“I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I’m giving you one last chance. I’m not threatening you. You can still walk away, right now. Just go.”
Just go, Cambry’s ghost whispered in Lena’s ear. Lena, go.
Please go—
“Leave Hairpin Bridge. Move forward, live your life, put your sister in the past, and honor her memory. There’s nothing good for you here. The truth will wreck you.” He licked his lips. “We can go our separate ways, you and I, and we can let this situation be. Think long and hard.”
She didn’t have to. “I’m not leaving.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.”
“Walk away,” he said again. “I’m begging you.”
He was begging her.
His choice of words thrilled Lena, to be in such a position of power over this man in uniform, and she replied with something she immediately regretted, something that landed like a curse:
“Over my dead body.”
* * *
That’s the plan, Lena.
Corporal Raymond R. Raycevic pulled a long breath through his nose and looked away from her, off Hairpin Bridge’s western overlook. On a clear blue day, a viewer could see past Magma Springs all the way into Watson County, and trace Silver Creek’s hairline path all the way to Lake Saint Byron.
Today was not a clear day. Brown smoke clung to the hills like acrid rain clouds, gritty and poisonous. Visibility was less than a mile. The air tasted like charcoal. The Briggs-Daniels wildfire was indeed coming their way—he hadn’t been lying about that—but at this point, Lena didn’t believe anything he said. So be it. He’d tried, hadn’t he? He’d warned her. He’d given her every opportunity to leave, to give up her search, to go home.
She was too determined.
He wished Cambry had never sent that goddamn suicide text before she died. It had unleashed dozens of chain reactions, tipping hundreds of dominoes, some of which were still quietly toppling three months later. All from one text message. One error.
And now it had brought nosy Lena to his doorstep. To be dealt with.
Over your dead body, indeed.
He should have smelled this trap from the very first email. No therapist on earth would endorse tracking down the cop who discovered your sister’s corpse, driving to the very site of her suicide, and marinating in the hideous details. Asking about the blood and guts. From minute one, Lena had been too alert, too poised, to not have an agenda. Hell, even the email’s subject line had been suspicious—RE my sister’s death on 6.6—as eerily formal and detached as a party invite.
He stared out into the hazy horizon. He couldn’t look at her. Eye contact was too much. How clever she must have felt. So pleased with herself. What arrogance, to expect to lure him out here and capture his admission on tape without incident.
You have no idea, he thought, with a twinge of sympathy. You poor, grieving girl.
Worse, he’d proven her right. He’d allowed himself to be drawn all the way out here into her snare on Hairpin Bridge. He’d been distracted this week after what happened on Thursday. He wasn’t sleeping and his guard was down. That was on him. But cockiness is a killer—Ray knew this all too well—and Lena was getting there herself.
Because she’d already stepped into a snare, too.
These foothills of Howard County were a trap all their own—the nearest cell towers were split between Polk City and Magma Springs, and they were early generation. There was no signal anywhere on this road. Certainly none on Hairpin Bridge. If you mean to hunt a wolf, you pick an area that’s advantageous to you. You don’t crawl face-first into its dark, dripping den and challenge it to a debate. That was Cambry’s first error—
Lena, he corrected himself. Lena’s error. He had to stop doing that.
Hell, who brought more weapons to Hairpin Bridge today? His duty pistol was a Glock 19 with three spare mags. He had a Taser. Pepper spray. A .38 Special concealed on his ankle. And his big-boy gun, an AR-15 in the trunk. Even if you stripped all of the toys away, Ray was a big man, half protein shakes, built like a fridge. He could lift this tiny Asian girl in a one-handed suplex and smash her skull against the pavement. It wasn’t even a contest.
What did Lena have? A tape recorder. How scary.
Because it was a well-documented fact that Hairpin Bridge received no cell service, Ray knew it was impossible for Lena to be recording him on an internet-connected gadget. It was only that clunky-looking analog recorder he had to worry about, and it was only here. Six feet away.
A recorder can be smashed.
So really, he could confess to anything on it. He didn’t need to be so cautious. As long as he destroyed the recorder—alongside Lena’s body—he’d be fine.
The problem was Lena.
Not the little bitch herself, but the trail she’d leave. Even with all the fuss over the Briggs-Daniels fire, there were witnesses at Magma Springs who could pin her to him. Lena was clearly a bit of a loner, like Cambry before her, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d certainly told other people in her life—friends, roommates, family—what she’d planned. Where she was going. Who she was meeting. And perhaps why.
A disappearance wouldn’t play well at all. He’d be suspect one. Again. How humiliating it was, to be on seven days of paid leave while some dick from Missoula rummages through your life. Not that his life was great now. His wife, Liza, refused to speak to him, which was honestly how he liked it. He hated looking at her. Every time he saw her, he swore he saw five new pounds of blubber jiggling on her upper arms or under her chin. So, best not to look at her.
He considered turning back around and surprising Lena right now, grabbing her by her shoulders and pitching her over the bridge’s railing. He might be able to sell that. A tormented young woman decides to join her twin sister in death by committing suicide at the exact same site, stunning the hapless cop who brought her there. Gen Z and their avocado toast, huh? He liked the sound of it, but that was the problem. It was too neat. It wouldn’t withstand the scrutiny—
“Ray?” she asked behind him. “Can we continue?”
He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. Christ, he hated this girl. He hated the smug deadpan of her voice. He hated the way she was forcing his hand.
He took another breath and decided: There would be no body. And he would craft an alibi later. Lena Nguyen would become one of the disappeared ones. As cutely poetic as it might be to hurl her smug ass off Hairpin Bridge and testify that she’d planned a suicide all along, it was simply too much. He had to be practical. Bodies make the news. Missing people don’t.
Yes, he’d shoot her.
Here and now. As Rodney Atkins says: If you’re going through hell, keep going.
“Ray? Today, please?”
He rested his palm on the checkered heel of his duty weapon. He breathed in again. Studied the smoky horizon. Feeling better now.
He’d turn around and do her quickly. No explanation. He owed Lena that much. She may have ruined Ray’s day, she might’ve been the turd slapping into his cereal bowl to cap off a truly awful week, but it wasn’t her fault. She was reacting, just like him. She was a lost soul sent spinning by grief, and she’d landed in something she couldn’t possibly understand.
And he had to marvel: The balls on her, to confront the wolf in its den.
“You’re something,” he said. “You know that?”
Behind him, Lena said nothing.
“But you made a mistake,” he said, quietly popping the holster’s button with his thumb. “If it’s all true, and I’m really a murderer, and I killed Cambry in cold blood, then you’re a complete idiot for driving all the way out here with me, alone. And confronting me without a gun—”
He was interrupted by a metallic snick.
* * *
Lena Nguyen held her 9-millimeter Beretta Px4 Storm in both knuckled hands, aimed squarely at Corporal Raycevic’s forehead. “That’s why I didn’t,” she said.
He stared.
His eyes goggled. His lips agape. Dumb, oafish surprise, like he’d just discovered his car had been towed. In his shattered world, this gun must have materialized impossibly out of thin air, instead of from Lena’s concealed waistband holster, where it had been all day.
Loose-fitting clothes, for the win.
For the past two hours, the pistol had been clamped to her lower back like an itchy tumor, clammy with sweat, and now it was finally in her hands, aimed at Raycevic.
The cop’s palm was still frozen on his sidearm. Resting flat. The holster’s button unclasped by his thumb. This was dangerous.
“Hands up,” she hissed.
Still, he only stared back at her. Not defiant; just dumb. Pants-down disbelief. Maybe he’d forgotten he had his hand on a perfectly functional firearm. Or maybe he was just waiting for his chance.
“Now, Ray.”
Finally, he lifted both hands. Palms out.
His department-issued Glock was Lena’s primary concern. With the holster unbuttoned, he could grab it and fire in under a second. She considered stepping in close and grabbing the pistol herself, but she’d be within his reach. Vulnerable to a counterattack. Raycevic had over a hundred pounds on her, and real combat in his muscle memory. Cops are trained to fight.
She decided she’d make him do it, instead. “Clasp your hands together. Behind your head.”
Grudgingly, he did.
“Now turn around.”
He did, his fingers interlocking behind his buzz cut. The dumbfounded stare had melted away into embarrassment. He was probably wishing he’d frisked her. How deeply humiliating it must be, being held at gunpoint by a twenty-four-year-old civilian.
She considered—again—reaching for his Glock and grabbing while he was facing away from her. But it was still too risky. His biceps looked like fat pythons. For a big guy, he could move fast.
Raycevic was too dangerous.
“Get down,” she said. “On your knees.”
“Are you going to shoot me?”
“Not if you get down.”
He wavered for a moment, looking out at the smoky brown horizon, as if drawing strength from it, and then he lowered to the concrete. With his hands still clasped together behind his head, he hit his kneecaps on the roadway painfully. Left, then right.
Lena followed him down with the Beretta’s sights. Her index finger on the trigger. This, she knew, would be the most dangerous part.
“Now, Ray,” she said in a monotone, “when I instruct, you will slowly lower your right hand toward your gun. You won’t turn around. You won’t look back at me. You will slowly lift your gun out between two pinched fingers, holding it like it’s a shitty diaper. And you’ll toss it off the bridge.” She crouched as she spoke, ten feet behind him in a careful marksman’s stance.
Still kneeling, Raycevic seemed puzzled. “You’re not going to . . .”
“What?”
“You’re not going to take my gun?”
“It’s a Glock.”
“So?”
“I hate Glocks.”
“Seriously?”
Lena fought a satisfied smirk. He’d made a lot of assumptions about her today, no doubt—and he sure as hell hadn’t figured her for a gun nut.
The huge man sighed. He looked dizzy, nauseated. The tables had just turned on him so suddenly and violently. He was still disoriented by the power shift.
Lena was ready. She placed the Beretta’s squared front sight center-mass, right on Raycevic’s spine. She locked her elbows in an isosceles shooting stance. The pad of her index finger gently touching the trigger. She squeezed the pistol tightly enough to imprint the weapon’s grip into her palms. A good, tight grip makes for a good, tight shot, as one of the instructional posters at Sharp Shooters said.
A drop of sweat hit the pavement.
She took a breath. Let it half out. “Now,” she said. “Slowly.”
The kneeling cop’s right hand moved down toward his waist. He flipped the holster’s leather guard—already unbuttoned—in a smooth, instinctive motion—
“Hey. Hey. Slower—”
And he lifted the pistol by its heel, pinched between his index finger and thumb, exactly as ordered. It came up into view—a black, blocky thing, all right angles. Lena really did hate Glocks.
“Now throw it.”
Still facing away, he raised it and flicked his wrist. The pistol twirled over Hairpin Bridge’s guardrail and, after a few airy moments, lightly thumped two hundred feet below.
Three seconds, Lena thought. She’d been counting.
If Cambry was still conscious when Raycevic threw her off this bridge, she would have been alive for three full seconds of terrifying free fall.
“Can I stand now?” he asked.
“Nope.” She studied his belt. “Throw your Taser, too. And your pepper spray. And that baton-looking thing right there.”
“For Christ’s sake—”
“And your keys. Definitely your keys.”
One item at a time, Corporal Raycevic’s state-issued gear vanished over the blistered guardrail and thumped down in the arroyo below. There was now only one firearm in play, and Lena controlled it—unless, of course, there was another in Raycevic’s patrol car. She hadn’t seen a rifle or shotgun mounted between the front seats, but there was the trunk to consider. This was why she’d asked him for his keys. They flew over the railing last of all, with a light jingle.
“That was a big key ring.” Lena whistled. “Was one of those your house key?”
“It was. Are you done yet?”
“No. I’d like you to sing a song for me.”
“Fuck you.”
“Do you know any Katy Perry?”
“What you’ve just done is a felony,” the cop said. “I’m turning around.”
“Fine.” Lena adjusted her grip on the Beretta. “But keep your hands up there, behind your head. And if you take a single step toward me, Ray, I swear to God, I will kill you.”
“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 dialed 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.
Lena was back to holding the Beretta with two hands.
Ray’s .38 was growing heavy on his ankle now. Life or death would come down to a few flinching seconds. He rehearsed it mentally: dropping to a knee, tugging up his right pant leg (one one-thousand), grabbing the revolver’s checkered grip and twisting it free (two one-thousand), aiming it up at her, finding a sight picture on her chest, squeezing the trigger (three one-thousand), and . . . well, that’s it. Either he’d hit her or he’d miss.
His odds were decent enough. If you stacked him and Lena together on a shooting range, she might shoot the tighter groups on paper. But real life isn’t a shooting range. There’s confusion, fatigue, adrenaline, fear. Sweat on your fingers. Sunlight in your eyes. The pucker factor, his father called it.
He could see it now—a tremor to the weapon’s barrel. Lena’s forearms were getting tired. She wasn’t exactly built for this. The longer this skinny little thing held her stance, the more her accuracy would degrade. She was vulnerable.
He pushed a little harder. “You have a blog, right?”
She looked vaguely surprised.
“Lights and Sounds. Nerd shit. You review text-based video games, sci-fi novels about spaceships, weird-ass horror movies. Confessions of a retail worker. That’s you, right?”
She blinked.
I hit a nerve, he thought. Good.
“Don’t be surprised.” He smirked. “You researched me. I had to research you, too.”
He was waiting for her to twist her hair again. Then he would draw while her guard was down. It would take her precious moments to reform her shooting stance and accurately return fire. Nervous tics are nice. They make you predictable.
“You don’t have many friends, do you?” He kept pushing. “Or a boyfriend?”
She said nothing.
“Or leave your apartment much?”
Nothing.
“Social anxiety, maybe?” He rolled his shoulders in a faux stretch, loosening up to draw. “You’re twenty-four. College-educated. English major. You work at an electronics store on the verge of Chapter Eleven, making minimum wage and spending your evenings alone on your computer, laboring away on a blog that nobody reads. And your sister was out experiencing things, seeing white desert and Mount Rushmore and the Everglades and glass beaches. You were jealous, huh?” He studied her face, imagining the bloody crater his .38 Special would make. “You have no idea who Cambry really was, by the way.”
He dropped that like trash and waited for her reaction.
She didn’t react at all.
Fine. He continued: “You know what? When we first got here, I thought you were just a sad-sack introvert who’d never gotten laid. I felt sorry for you. I genuinely wanted to help you achieve some sort of peace here with your grief. Before I knew you brought a gun and an agenda. But you mentioned . . . hey, you wanted gory details, right?”
He gave her time to answer. She didn’t.
“Yeah, you did. You wanted to know what Cambry’s body looked like down there on the rocks. And back then, I didn’t share details, because it would’ve been inappropriate. But we’re past that now. Far past it.” He stared down the gun. “Your sister looked like she melted, Lena.”
Her jaw quivered. Just a faint twitch of her lip—but he noticed.
“At free fall, she’d been traveling over a hundred feet per second. To decelerate from that velocity to zero, against solid granite, basically makes every organ in your body weigh ten thousand times more than normal. So even though she was still human-shaped . . . well, it’s like being ripped apart on a cellular level. Total annihilation. Her organs burst and leaking. Her brain liquefied. Her bones full of cracks. Big brown water balloons of blood pooling under her skin.”
Tears glimmered in Lena’s eyes. She reached for her hair—and then she changed her mind, restoring her two-handed grip on the weapon.
Ray’s heart heaved. Do it.
He was ready to draw. His thumb and fingers kneaded the air with anticipation. He pushed again: “Cambry’s forehead was crushed in, like a stomped grapefruit. She had bugs in her mouth. Her eyeballs were soggy, blown out on strings, leaking tears of blood. Flies burrowing in, laying eggs.”
Lena took this all in, like a stone. Saying nothing. Giving nothing.
And she looked exactly like you, he almost added.
He knew he was getting to her. Every word left an imprint. Some left dents. All adding up. She was about to break, to cave in and twist her hair again. He was ready.
You have no idea who you’ve tangled with, he thought as he studied her. You poor, dumb girl. You think you’re the wolf here, just because you can shoot.
The .38 was a tumorous lump on his ankle, begging to be let free. Lena adjusted her shooting stance again, and Ray’s hand nearly went for it. Almost. She was trying to fight her tic—trying—but she couldn’t resist her own nature. She needed to twist her hair again. It was her sensory comfort, her weakness, and today it would get her killed.
I’ll blow your smug face off.
As long as I have my hands—
“Wait. You still have handcuffs, right?” Lena looked at his belt. “Cuff yourself, asshole.”
* * *
She was surprised—the cop looked suddenly crestfallen. He stared down at his slacks, and then back up at her. A strange, furious disbelief.
Good. She would feel better with the big ape handcuffed. He was too dangerous, even at gunpoint. She drew the Beretta’s sights to his face, trying to hide the tremor in her arms. “I said cuff yourself. Slowly.”
His glare intensified. Fear stirred in her gut.
In answer, she curled her index finger into the trigger guard. He saw.
Then his right hand moved—“Hey. Slowly.”—toward his belt, and he unlatched two metal rings. They jingled faintly, making that cliché sound they do on television.
“Cuff your hands behind your back,” she clarified. “Not in front.”
“I need to kneel,” he said, gesturing down toward his ankle. “To get them around my back, it’ll be easier if I crouch and—”
“Nope. Do it standing.”
He glared at her again.
“Go on.” She pointed with the Beretta.
For a long breath, Raycevic held the silver cuffs in one hand, like he was trying desperately to think of something else to say. To stall. Then, grudgingly, he fastened them around one wrist and tucked his arm behind his back. His other wrist engaged unseen with a scissor-like snick.
“There. Happy?”
“No,” she said. “Turn around.”
“Excuse me?”
“Turn around. So I can see both hands are cuffed.”
He rolled his eyes. Then, reluctantly, he turned to show her both wrists behind his back. As she expected, only his right was secured. His left hand held the cuff inside his palm.
“You really thought that would work?”
He grinned wolfishly. “It was worth a try.”
“Try harder.”
“Say that again.”
“Try harder?”
“You sounded exactly like her. The way you said it.”
“You can cuff your other hand now, Ray.”
He turned sideways so she could watch him slip the cuff around his left wrist. Then he fumbled. “I . . . I can’t do it from behind my back. I’ll need you to help close the cuff with your—”
“Seriously, Ray?”
After another pause, the faux surprise vanished from his eyes. Another act tried and discarded.
That’s right. Keep underestimating me.
“Worth a try,” he repeated, without the grin this time. With his right thumb he closed the cuff around his left wrist. Then he spread his bulging arms, ratcheting the metal jaws tight. “Happy?”
“Getting there,” Lena said, easing her grip on the pistol, letting her muscles rest. Pins and needles in her fingers. “And by the way—all that stuff about the state of Cambry’s body? Awful as it was, with the liquefied guts and the blown-out eyes, my nightmares were still worse. So thank you, Ray. For shining a light on the monster for me.”
He smiled. “Careful what you ask for.”
More ashes drifted between them on silent winds, gray and darting. Like the half-glimpsed spots that float in your eyes. Lena blinked on reflex.
He didn’t. He stared at her coldly, cinders collecting on his shoulders like apocalyptic snow. “If you shoot me, you’ll never know what happened to her.”
“I already know.”
“Do you?”
“You confirmed it. When you lied to me.”
“Yeah? So far, the only person who’s drawn a gun is you, Lena.” He squinted into the smoky distance. “And if anyone were to drive by and see us here, this situation would look an awful lot like a trooper under attack.”
“Good thing you locked the gate.”
His eyes narrowed. “Good thing.”
For both of us, she knew he meant.
It didn’t matter that they were speaking right now. It was only air and noise. If she let her guard down for a split second, Raycevic would seize his chance and headbutt her, kick the gun from her hands, and crunch her skull under his size 14 boot. Even handcuffed, he could kill her. Mercilessly. The way he killed Cambry. She imagined her sister’s face dented, concave—like a stomped grapefruit.
It was real. All of it. It really happened.
She would never admit this to Raycevic, but for the past weeks she’d nurtured a secret and childish hope: that when she arrived here at Hairpin Bridge, the internet myths would turn out to be real. She’d witness a spectral ghost or hear a whisper. The veil between past and present would be thin here, and her sister wouldn’t be gone. Not really. Maybe Cambry was reliving her final hours at this very second, her story unfolding parallel to Lena’s like a reflection.
Hope is poison. Lena knew this.
She exhaled and tried to clear her mind. No ghosts. No echoes from the past or messages from the grave. Just a guilty man, staring back at her.
He wrinkled his nose. “You’re not really writing a book about her. Are you?”
“I am.”
“Why?”
She knew she didn’t have to answer. But she did anyway, and this time she didn’t have the energy to lie: “It bothers me when other people tell Cambry’s story. When she died, it’s like she stopped being a person and became public property. She became this troubled loner who got sad and jumped off a bridge. If anyone can or should tell her story . . . it’s me.”
She almost left it there. But he was still waiting.
So she spoke the hard part: “My mom is a strict Catholic. And she’s heartbroken, because she believes Cambry is in hell. Because she committed . . . you know.”
“I see.”
“That’s it.” She felt her cheeks flush. “That’s all of it, I think. I . . . I guess I just wanted to prove to my mom that her daughter isn’t in hell.”
“So here you are.”
“Here I am.”
Silence.
She didn’t like opening up to him. She knew she was only handing him blades to cut her with. But she got the strange sense he was mourning, too. Like they shared Cambry, somehow.
She hadn’t told him the full truth, anyway.
After the service, she’d visited her parents’ house in Olympia to bring them dinner and noticed the pictures of Cambry were all gone. Some walls and shelves were still freshly bare, with lines etched in dust. At first Lena assumed the photos were being displayed elsewhere or reframed, but in the following weeks they never reappeared. Her sister had left them all with something deeper than the normal grief of having, loving, and losing. They never had her to begin with. She was always a runner, always looking out over the next hill, and now she was infinitely farther away than Texas or Florida. And worse, it’s a pretty shitty faith dilemma to have. If their God exists, their daughter is burning in hell. If He doesn’t, she’s gone entirely on a cellular level. Which is worse?
That night her mother drank too much wine and gripped Lena’s wrist tightly enough to leave bruised finger marks. She said through shimmering eyes: You’re my daughter, Lena, and I love you.
You’re my one daughter.
It’s sickening, becoming an only child in an instant.
This was the moment Lena decided she wouldn’t just capture her sister’s killer. She would tell Cambry’s story, too. It was too important to be told by anyone else. She would give her mother and father a version of their daughter they could remember and love. A version that didn’t steal from their wallets, that didn’t get arrested for shoplifting, that didn’t reek of weed and cigarettes and barrel out the door at age eighteen to never call them back, and that didn’t leave them now for real, just as cruelly and abruptly.
The true Cambry was out there somewhere. Lena would find her. At any cost.
Raycevic studied her. She regretted giving him this.
“Trust me.” He smirked. “If hell exists, Cambry is there.”
“Keep talking and I’ll send you there myself.”
“Scary line. Did you hear that in a movie?”
“I know what you are, Ray.”
“No, you don’t. You came into this with your mind made up already. That’s your fatal flaw, Lena. See, I’m not a bad person. Even if I was—let’s say I really did take your sister’s life—I’ve saved lives, too. Multiple people are breathing today, right now, because of my actions. You’ve researched me. So you know my record. You’ve read about the woman I rescued from the river.”
She had.
“My commendation for saving a deputy under fire.”
Yes, she had.
“The kids I pulled out of the burning trailer.”
Yes, yes, yes. The governor had even presented him with a medal. Somewhere in Billings was a park bench named in honor of the valorous Saint Raycevic, who charged heroically into a meth-lab fire. She wished the damn kids had burned up in there, just so he couldn’t gloat about it.
“You may hate me, but I’m still one of the good guys, Lena.” He stood straighter, seeming to swell and grow before her eyes. “Okay? You can’t argue that four isn’t a bigger number than one. That’s still a total gain of three people. Three human beings who should be worm food right now, but aren’t, because of me. Because of what I do. I work my ass off at it. I’m born to do this. I protect the public. More accurately, I save people. I have saved people. God willing, I will keep saving people. Why would all of those lives, past, present, and future, add up to less than your sister’s?”
A line of spittle hung off his chin. He licked it back up, lizard-like.
Now we’re getting somewhere, Lena thought. “Are you confessing?”
“No,” he said. “I’m defending myself from a personal attack.”
“Do you believe in hell?”
“I believe in balancing the scales.”
Balancing the scales. Like being a good person boiled down to math.
“Okay, well, here comes another personal attack: You murdered my fucking sister, Ray. And you had to cover it up. So you threw her body off the bridge, to stage it like another suicide—”
“Nope. Try again.”
“You beat her to death first—”
“That leaves bruising.”
“Or you strangled her.”
“That leaves ligature marks—”
“Not always. Not if you had her head in a plastic bag.”
“She died on impact. The M.E. ruled it.”
“Okay. You picked her up and threw her off the bridge, then, while she was still alive.” Lena struggled to keep her voice level, controlled. “Why?”
“You’re still wrong.”
“Then enlighten me, Ray.”
“Why would I do that?” He chewed his lip, the daylight vanishing from his eyes. “You want something, Lena. That makes you controllable. Because for as long as what you want is inside my head, you won’t dare put a hole in it.”
She realized she had nothing to say to this. It enraged her. For a moment she considered making good on her threat and shooting him in the balls.
Am I ready to do that?
She wasn’t sure. Her hands stank with gunpowder from the three shots fired already. There was something unsettling to firing a gun outside of the structured confines of the range. It was real now. It made her oddly self-conscious. Like driving barefoot.
He smirked. “You assumed I’d just cooperate?”
He’d read her. It was his job to read people, and he’d already identified Lena as a rule follower. Face-to-face conflict made her cheeks burn. She was naturally passive—making plans only when others suggested, speaking only when spoken to, taking action only when absolutely necessary. And now here she was on Hairpin Bridge, holding the gun, making the demands.
“Now what, Lena?”
It should be Cambry here, she knew. Not me.
I should be the dead one.
Back when Lena and Cambry were twelve, they used to spend summers at their uncle’s farmhouse in east Oregon. The farm itself was perfectly boring for a kid—the cable was pixelated and the alpacas were prissy assholes. But a mile down the road, the neighbor kids had a rope swing over a creek, and occasionally their father blew up tree stumps with Tannerite. One walk back under a darkening evening sky, the Nguyen twins came across a brown shape on the road.
It was a whitetail doe, struck by a logging truck and dragged under the tires. Her eyes found them drowsily. Lena remembered watching the animal try to stand with a severed spine, her hind legs flat and limp. When she tried to brace her front leg, the knee bent backward like a broken stick. She cried a strange throaty whisper, like a cat’s purr. In her twelve years, Lena had never felt so powerless before. She couldn’t touch the suffering animal. She couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t do anything at all, and she hated herself for it. She just stood and stared and cried until her throat was raw.
At this time, twelve-year-old Cambry quietly slid off her backpack (even back then, she preferred to carry a pack) and knelt with one palm on the doe’s ribs to feel the gentle rise and fall of her breaths.
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.