I hit the water and for a split second it feels as solid and unyielding as asphalt. I swear I’m splattering against it the way an insect streaks against a windshield. The air punches from my chest. My shins and knees instantly bruise.
I don’t remember deciding to jump in after her.
I just did.
But I remember the fall itself, how Terrible Guy #11 and all the others vanished behind me under a turbine-engine roar of racing air. A disorienting tumble as sky, trestle, and water rearranged wildly. Upon landing, I know I did everything wrong and hit the river sideways. I definitely, certainly, one hundred percent did not clench my butt cheeks.
And now I don’t know which way is up. I’m still whirling, slowing now under icy water clouded by a rush of bubbles. My teeth hurt. There’s a ringing in my ears. I open my eyes but see only a glaucoma of dimness pierced by faraway rays of sunlight. I sweep my sore fingers to my sides, exploring, feeling for my sister in all this darkness. Finding nothing.
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 kept 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—
The weapon barked and the Corolla’s side-view mirror exploded over Lena’s shoulder, showering her with glass and plastic. She was exposed again, now lengthwise beside her car. She dove to her stomach, thrust the gun toward Raycevic with knuckled hands, and fired back twice. No trigger control, no sight picture, all reflex.
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.
Bad odds, she knew. He had cover. She didn’t. He had her entire unshielded body to shoot at. Her target would be a sliver of his exposed face. Half a card in her deck of fifty-two.
Don’t miss.
Her index finger crawled to the trigger and squeezed it halfway. Down to a millimeter, a muscle twitch from firing. The guys at Sharp Shooters called this staging the trigger.
“Ray-Ray.” From across the bridge, that familiar Irish accent rang in the pressurized air, so strangely alien in Montana: “Oi. Ray-Ray.”
Behind his car, Raycevic’s voice was alarmingly close. “What?”
“Did you see her?”
“Yeah. I saw the little bitch.”
They’re working together. It was chilling to hear them communicate. They didn’t care if she overheard. They outnumbered her. They’d encircled her.
“I’ve . . .” Raycevic’s voice lowered to a growl. “I’ve got a clear shot on her.”
She held her aim and waited. She had no choice. Moving anywhere else was instant death. The trucker’s rifle boomed again, but Lena tried to ignore it. She knew it was another distraction, just suppressing fire. Meant to pin her down while Raycevic fired the killing shot.
She glimpsed him now, a blurry shape peering around his cruiser’s taillight. She fired again, too late. Another waste.
Four left, you idiot.
She held her aim. Bit her tongue hard. Blinked away another drop of sweat.
You’re losing.
“She’s wasting her ammo,” Raycevic hooted. “She’s pissing herself.”
She wanted to shout back—Speak for yourself, asshole—but it was a waste of breath. He had her. It was a losing engagement, him versus her forced lengthwise against her car. He knew it.
“She knows she’s pinned,” the cop crooned. “She’s got nowhere to run. Nowhere to relocate to. I’ve got her. She’s completely exposed from my side, with no cover. There’s nothing between us—”
Lena grabbed the Corolla’s door and opened it—between herself and him.
“Oh, goddamnit—”
She scooted low. Now shielded from Raycevic’s revolver by the open passenger door. Shielded from the trucker’s rifle by the engine block. A wedge of safety.
The trucker shouted, “What? What happened, Ray-Ray?”
“Nothing. It’s fine.”
“Did she block you with a door?”
“I said it’s fine.”
She laughed a hot gasp. She hunkered against the Corolla’s lifesaving passenger door, nearly bumping it shut. She held it open with one palm to the blue paint, slipping her knees underneath herself. To better crouch and return fire.
She was still in this fight, protected on both sides, dug into cover like a tick. Her Beretta in her right hand, noticeably lighter as its ammunition depleted. Her situation was still terrible—she was still cornered, outgunned, with four shots left—but hell, she was rolling with it, adapting, proving to be a royal pain in their asses. Would spartan, scrappy Cambry approve? She hoped so.
Good move, Ratface. Keep it up.
“Hey.” The cop shouted to his buddy abruptly, a jarring question: “What’s the difference between cover and concealment?”
Bizarre silence.
The trucker answered: “I don’t know, Ray-Ray. What?”
Lena’s blood chilled.
Cover versus concealment. This stirred another memory from Sharp Shooters. Something written. Where did she see it? A poster? Yes. A cartoon poster by the restrooms—just to the left of the drinking fountains—posed that very riddle, with pictures of ordinary objects sorted into two columns. Cover was boulders, cement, brick. Concealment was things like bushes, walls, furniture . . .
“Ice the bitch—”
. . . And car doors.
The painted metal exploded inches from her face. Shrapnel slashed her cheek, stung her eyes, peppered her front teeth. She screamed with shock, slapping a hand to cover her face and slamming down low to the road. Raycevic fired again—a second hole punched through the door, shattering the handle into plastic shards.
His gunshots echoed. Crisp thunder.
Lena stayed flat. Her cheek pressed to the concrete. Blood in her teeth, the taste of copper.
“She screamed!” the trucker giggled. “I heard it. Sounded exactly like Cambry—”
Hunched fetal below the pierced door, she caught her breath. Still alive? Yes. Crunchy flecks of Toyota paint on her tongue. Her cheek turning warm, a dozen tiny paper cuts soaking with blood. The window disintegrated above her, showering her with blue-white fragments. Yes, the door had been concealment, not cover. Raycevic’s bullets had punched right through it, like it was paper.
Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid.
I should have paid more attention to the posters.
And she realized her hand was empty. In her panic, she’d dropped her Beretta.
Piggish laughter from the cab. “I . . . I love that scream—”
She found her pistol on the concrete to her left and grabbed it with numb, blood-slippery fingers—accidentally slapping the trigger—and it fired sideways into the Corolla. Three shots left. Three left now, you fucking clumsy idiot.
“Ray-Ray. Did you hit her?”
“Can’t tell.”
“Then shoot again. Lower.”
“Okay.” His voice focused—he was aiming at the door again.
Lena’s stomach heaved with terror.
She was already pressed as low to the concrete as she could possibly flatten. No space to move. No escape. All she could do was close her eyes, cover her face, and wait for it.
In her awful, dwindling seconds she tried to picture Cambry’s face, to sear it into her mind. She couldn’t. Her thoughts were water. She tried to hold on to something. Anything. Only the bad. Fights. Plastic. Steaming guts. Barbies with molten faces. Twelve-year-old Cambry’s knife sliding through the doe’s fur with a splash of warm blood. The deep ache of last night’s dream, of being shoved away and scolded and rejected from the grave: Go, Lena. Please go.
Just go—
Raycevic’s revolver barked again and a third hole pierced the blue paint above her in a gritty blast. She held her breath as the echo faded—waiting for a bone-splitting bolt of pain, for nonexistence, for the bright tunnel of death, and experiencing none of those things.
The echo faded.
Still alive? Yes. His third bullet had hissed over her head. She had gotten lucky. She held the Beretta in livid knuckles in a bed of glass kernels, listening, blinking sweat from her eyes.
“Did you get her?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully.” Raycevic audibly smirked. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was the same venomous grin she’d seen once today, an hour ago.
Because she did toss herself.
Catching her breath, her heart slamming in her throat, Lena made a desperate promise: She would kill him. She would kill them both. Forget bringing them to justice. Forget the audio record. Forget writing a book. Today wasn’t about building a case or taking the proper channels. Today was about killing the men who took Cambry’s life.
And right now they were winning.
Raycevic shouted, “Still alive, Lena?”
She didn’t answer.
“You came all this way to find the truth. So, what do you think? Was it worth it? I gave you a chance to walk away, Lena. You should’ve taken it.”
She wouldn’t have. Even now.
He darkened. “You’re all that’s left of your sister, you know.”
She said nothing.
“So, when we kill you today, Lena, it’ll be like she’s really, truly gone. Erased.”
He’s goading me, she knew. Trying to make me talk.
“You should know, Lena.” His voice lowered: “I fucked her.”
She wouldn’t take his bait.
“She loved my cock, Lena.”
Still she said nothing.
She waited. So did they. The silence built and built.
A shadow darted over the bridge. It was a vulture crossing overhead, its black wings stuttering through a flash of sunlight. Its flaps sounded like sighs.
Wait, Lena. She held her breath.
Wait, and force them to make a move.
“You could’ve fucking warned me she had a gun, Ray-Ray,” the trucker finally shouted abruptly. “I wouldn’t have parked so close—”
Raycevic sounded defensive. “I didn’t know she brought one.”
“You didn’t pat her down?”
“It was just a meetup.”
“And you wonder why you’re the one that flunked academy selection?”
The trucker’s words were vicious. Hateful.
She enjoyed hearing the men bicker. She kept her breaths controlled, in and out, and waited. She didn’t dare move—even the lightest crunch of glass would give her away. She gripped the Beretta, sticky with her own blood, and aimed up at the door. If she played dead, she’d force Raycevic to come in close to verify his kill, and then she could surprise him with a bullet to the face.
The trucker again: “She could be playing dead. To lure you in close and surprise you.”
“I know.”
For Christ’s sake. She could do without the commentary.
“Be careful, Ray-Ray.”
Ray-Ray. And she hated the man’s singsong nickname for Raycevic. There was no affection or humor in it. It was a taunt—sarcasm and cyanide.
She heard a dry click. Then another. Another. Her eardrums still cottony from the gunfire, it took her a few moments to recognize the small sound of footsteps on pavement. Raycevic’s boots.
He was coming.
This was her chance. She elbowed upright into a better shooting position, glass kernels crunching beneath her. Her heart slamming vivid blasts of color in her eyes. She listened as the cop’s boots clicked closer and closer. Every sound seemed magnified. The sigh of the wind. A faint ring in her ears.
His footsteps changed course. Moving right. She understood—rather than approach the open door directly, he was moving to encircle her from the right.
She repositioned, her back touching the punctured door. She aimed right.
“Passing through your line of fire.”
His voice moved, one footstep at a time. The shooter in the truck was doing his job, keeping Lena fixed with covering fire while Raycevic maneuvered. Executing a pincer move. It was unfair, but gunfighting isn’t about playing fair. Duels are for the movies. Gunfighting is about advantages, about stacking the odds in your favor, and fighting dirty and smart.
His footsteps slowed with anticipation. He was circling the Corolla’s front now, sidestepping the headlights with his revolver aimed. Rounding the corner a few degrees at a time, clearing the space beyond it inch by inch.
Crouched beside the front tire, Lena raised the Beretta and drew a shaky bead where she estimated the cop’s face would appear. She held her aim exactly there, on that unremarkable patch of smoky sky, staging the trigger with her index finger and focused on his footsteps. The creak of flexing leather. The click of the sole touching down.
So close now.
The trucker shouted, “Ray-Ray, is she dead?”
He didn’t answer. Another footstep. Was he ten feet away? Eight?
“Ray-Ray?”
She held her aim and waited.
Sweat dripped into her eye. She blinked it away.
“Ray-Ray. Hey. Talk to me.”
A small consolation: Raycevic had to be getting just as annoyed with the old man in the truck as she was. Predator and prey were mere feet apart on opposite ends of the car and drawing closer, guns up, trigger fingers rigid, a heartbeat away from instant death, and the faraway asshole would not shut up—
Ray’s sunburned face entered Lena’s sights.
Six feet away.
Right over the Corolla’s hood. Her blocky sights were right on his sweaty forehead, right between his surprised eyes as they found her, too—dead center, as sure as a shot can be—and as he thrust his gun back down at her, she was already pulling the trigger.
Nothing happened.
No kick, no noise. Nothing. The Beretta suddenly inert in her hands—
Jam.
Her mind screamed with white-hot panic—jam, jam, jam—and she kicked and scooted backward as Raycevic fired at her. Concrete chips exploded off the road, inches to her right. This close, she felt the revolver’s blast rattle her teeth.
The big man crouched behind the Corolla’s grille, huffing with adrenaline. This close, she could hear his panting breath, smell his sweat. “Holy shit.”
She kept scooting back, back, knocking the bullet-riddled passenger door shut, but there was nowhere to go. She was pinned behind her sister’s compact car. The gun useless in her hands. She recognized Raycevic’s throaty laugh, alarmingly close. “She almost got me.”
“What?”
“I think she’s jammed—”
Yes, the Beretta Px4 was jammed and slide-locked in Lena’s hand. She already knew what had happened: a stupid amateur mistake. She’d broken a cardinal rule of shooting. When she’d grabbed the weapon with her finger on the trigger and accidentally fired it off the ground, the slide had skimmed the pavement. Interrupting the cycle. She saw a gleaming brass casing pinched inside. A failure to extract, the rangemaster had called it at Sharp Shooters. They can be fussy.
She tugged the pistol’s slide—firmly stuck.
“No more chances.” She heard Raycevic lick his lips, crouched at the front of the car. His voice was calm, coaching. “She’s behind the vehicle’s front doors. You’re shooting the .30-30 big boy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Front doors. Not the back ones.”
“Okay.”
Lena understood. Oh, come on.
She scrambled farther back on her elbows and knees, the slide-locked Beretta clattering in her hand, as another high-caliber round exploded through the passenger door behind her, slamming it violently back open. It left a crater, dwarfing Raycevic’s three pea-size holes.
She cursed through her teeth.
The Corolla was becoming Swiss cheese, leaving her unprotected. Only the steel engine block could reliably stop a bullet. That was why Raycevic had moved there—to cut her off from it.
“Did I get her?”
“She moved.”
“Where now?”
“Rear doors.”
She crawled farther back, a racing animal scramble, stopping at the Corolla’s trunk because there was nowhere else to go. She hunched up in a fetal position, covering her face, waiting. She knew it was coming. For a nerve-shredding second, nothing happened.
Then it did: another tooth-rattling detonation behind her, another crater blasted through the rear passenger door. Glass kernels fell out of the windows. Whatever this rifle was, it tore gaping, illogical holes into everything it touched. Like taking fire from a Civil War–era cannon.
A dreamy yellow substance wafted down around her. Snow? Ash?
No. Obliterated seat foam.
She gripped the Beretta with both hands and fought the weapon’s jam under the surreal blizzard, twisting the slide in her bloody fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. The 9-millimeter brass was smashed inside the mechanism’s teeth, a wicked metal clog.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Nowhere to hide.” That rancid smirk in Raycevic’s voice. “She’s behind the trunk now.”
She knew he was right; she was out of space. Trapped behind a perforated car. Struggling with a jammed pistol, useless and slippery in her hands.
She was tugging her hair again, wrenching her scalp hard, like pulling up carpet. It had all gone to shit so fast. Fifteen minutes ago, she’d had Raycevic handcuffed and alone at gunpoint. She knew he’d radioed someone. How arrogant she’d been, to believe she could handle it alone. She’d brought a gun when she should have brought backup. From the very beginning she’d assumed Corporal Raymond Raycevic was an outlier, a single rogue cop operating alone. Serial killers are always loners, right?
She thought about Cambry in her dream, heartbroken and defiant. Refusing to let her in, refusing to say I love you, or explain anything.
I’m sorry, Cambry.
Fighting the locked pistol in her hands, she felt it coming—a wave of hot tears welling in her eyes—and she hated herself for it. It felt fundamentally wrong to cry here, while crawling behind a shot-up car with blood and scorched gunpowder on her hands. This was a gunfight. There’s no crying in a gunfight.
I screwed up, sis.
I underestimated him, and I’m so sorry.
This was it. The assholes who murdered her sister would kill her, too, on this very same bridge. All because she had the audacity to challenge a law enforcement officer to a shootout, of all things. To something he was literally trained for. And now she was pinned, encircled, almost out of ammunition, and she couldn’t even fire her three remaining shots, as the gunmen’s withering fire pierced the car’s flimsy metal, corroding it before her eyes—
Then she froze.
Meaning . . .
It hit her now, a quiet bolt: Meaning my bullets will, too.
She pictured that smug asshole in his cab, crouched behind the shelter of his own door. She gave the Beretta another twist in her hands, harder, harder, straining with pinched fingers and watery eyes—and with a gasping release, the mechanism finally opened.
A squashed shell casing fell in her lap.
She let the gun’s slide rocket forward. It clacked home on an oily spring, chambering a fresh round. Ready to fire.
Yes.
She exhaled a hot, shivery breath, and across the bridge, a matching dead-bolt click-clack echoed from the truck’s cab. As if in unison, the trucker shouted, “Ready to fire.”
“She’s right behind the trunk.”
“Gotcha.” She imagined the one-eyed man taking aim again with that devastating rifle, leveling his scope on the Corolla’s trunk. His grubby fingernails crawling over the trigger, squeezing.
Raycevic panted: “Blow her guts out.”
Lena had an idea. A bad one. She sat still with her back to the metal trunk and waited, the noise and sun and gritty discomforts dissolving away, last night’s dream slipping back to clarity. The way Cambry had refused to even look at her. The piercing heartbreak in her eyes when she finally did. Her cold sidelong whisper: Just go.
She waited.
Lena, go.
No. Not yet.
Please, go.
Still, she waited. No second chances. Her timing needed to be exact. Her sister’s eyes watering with tears now, Cambry shoving her with an open palm, her voice twisting with frustration.
Go. You’re running out of time—
Now.
She whirled left, rolling away from the Corolla and into open space—another concussive crack as a bullet punched through the trunk, ripping through her sister’s folded clothes and tent inside and exploding out through the panel she’d crouched behind a half second before—and as she hit the concrete, she brought the Beretta up in knuckled hands and aimed straight across Hairpin Bridge’s lanes, at the semitruck’s cab. This time Lena didn’t aim through the truck’s shattered window, at the glint of a rifle barrel and a few half-glimpsed inches of scalp.
She aimed lower.
Lower. Directly at the truck’s door. Squarely at the Kenworth logo on the red paint. Exactly where she estimated a human occupant would be crouched.
She fired three shots.
They came out like three heartbeats, as controlled as a Tuesday afternoon at Sharp Shooters into a fresh deck of fifty-two: Crack. Crack. Crack.
Three silver holes pocked the door’s red paint. Exactly where she’d aimed.
Her third shot had felt different—if you spend enough time at the range, your muscles can identify the abridged recoil when the slide locks empty—and she knew this was it. She was out. But she stayed frozen there on her stomach, her empty Beretta’s sights still pin-sharp, aimed in a suspended moment on that truck, at the tight grouping of holes in its door.
Silence. The world seemed to catch its breath.
She waited for the man’s rifle to reappear over the door. For the next fiery muzzle blast.
She waited.
And waited.
She was sorely aware of Raycevic somewhere to her right. Aware that she was now vulnerable, that she should scramble back to her dropped purse, reload, and reengage—but strangely she sensed Raycevic was waiting, too, on a lungful of breath. A realization was building, coalescing in the air. She resisted it. She wouldn’t, couldn’t allow herself to believe it.
I got him.
* * *
Three pinpricks of daylight had appeared in the truck’s door, right before his eyes.
The old man slumped back, the cowboy rifle falling crookedly in his lap. He blinked in the sudden silence, the air still thick with scorched powder and smoke. He realized he was splashed with a warm liquid he couldn’t identify. It drenched his hair. Droplets cooling on his cheeks.
He stared stupidly at those three holes.
Then, with glacial dread, he rotated his neck and inspected the cab’s interior around him—trying to trace the three bullets’ paths, if any had hit him—as more liquid dribbled down his eyebrow, gumming his eyelashes. It was sticky. Body temperature.
Blood, he realized. My skull is blown open.
He fought a scream. He’d always wondered why women screamed when he smothered them in his plastic. There was never anyone nearby to hear. It was a waste of remaining oxygen. It was a strange and helpless animal thing that puzzled him, like why they moan during sex. But now he had a scream swelling inside his own chest, so maybe he finally got it. It gnashed against his ribs, threatening to burst.
I’m dying. Oh, Christ, I’m dying.
He tried to focus on straight lines. He thought in lines, vectors, angles. He’d been an A-plus geometry student. He never used Google Maps or Waze like the other drivers. No, sir—give him a map and a graphing calculator, and he’d find his way to Eureka, California, like a homing pigeon. And now, reconstructing the three bullets’ paths was how he processed his shock. Like a computer rebooting.
Bullet number one? It had entered the door just below the handle and pierced a folded map before skimming his belly just above the pelvis. His white T-shirt was soaked with blood. It didn’t hurt, exactly—more of an uncomfortable, hernia-like tightness. But it wasn’t fatal. It was a purple heart.
More warm blood dribbled down his forehead and into his eyes. Too much to blink away. That panicked scream thrashed inside his chest again.
I’m dying. That bitch domed me through the door, and oh, God, I’m dying.
Don’t scream. Bullet number two?
My brain is runny egg yolk, leaking out of my skull.
Bullet number two—he tried to focus—was farther forward. The 9-millimeter slug must have nicked the steering wheel, passed under his armpit, and then hissed over the dashboard and—presumably—out the window like the others. Bullet two had missed him. A small relief.
This left bullet number three.
The one that killed me . . .
Bullet three had penetrated the door six inches higher, to his left, and ripped a cottony gouge out of the driver’s seat. He followed its path to the cup holder, where it had struck his sweet tea bottle. Glass blades glimmered. The seat was sticky with running droplets of tea, warmed by the sun—
Wait.
Tea?
He ran his tongue over his upper lip. Tasted it.
I’m splashed with sweet tea. Not blood. Thank Christ, it wasn’t blood and cerebrospinal fluid and chips of skull running down his face. He was okay.
He’d still taken a ricochet to the hip, of course, and it hurt royally. Blood bloomed over the belly of his shirt, livid red in the sunlight. But short of sepsis it wouldn’t be fatal, and he knew a veterinarian who’d fixed him up with some quality painkillers for his eye back in June. No, Lena’s three bullets through the door weren’t half as awful as he’d feared. He was down but not out, and he still had his Winchester cradled in his lap, and yes, even immobilized in his cab, he was still in this fight.
He twisted, feeling knives of pain above his crotch. From the floor space, he couldn’t see over the door. But sounds carried. If Lena approached his truck, maybe hoping to grab his rifle to fire at Ray-Ray, he’d hear her footsteps. He certainly wasn’t in much shape to run or duck or properly gunfight. His ass was planted here, in the sun-cooked nest where he spent sixteen hours a day anyway.
This didn’t bother him, but something else lingered at the edge of his thoughts. He feared he was missing something. Forgetting something.
Where did the second bullet go?
Didn’t matter. It missed him. Just like the one that had exploded the bottle of sweet tea in his face, and the five or six she’d fired through the windows that snapped harmlessly over his head.
It was lower than the others, his mind whispered.
It went somewhere.
Fine. He looked again, wincing through another stab of pain, and retraced the bullet’s trajectory as it punched through the door, gouged through the steering wheel, passed by his shoulder, and continued above his Quadratec CB radio, directly into—
He froze.
Kitty.
She wasn’t coiled into her familiar ball shape. Her pose was strange, arched. Her neck cocked backward, her jaw grimaced to show pink gums and needle teeth. A rivulet of blood ran down the dashboard. Kitty and him—they’d seen thousands of miles of highway together, from the white peaks of Colorado to the muggy wetlands of Louisiana. Sometimes she rode on his shoulders like a cold, clammy scarf. She’d seen him through three trucks, a divorce, a prostate cancer diagnosis, and the suicide of his son. Next week would have been Kitty’s twenty-third birthday.
Now, finally, Theo Raycevic screamed.