Lena didn’t like how long Raycevic sat in his car.
He was still on his radio. He gripped the little black receiver to his mouth, glancing up at her periodically through the sun-tinted windshield. She saw his lips moving but couldn’t hear his words. He’d rolled up his window for privacy.
She waved. He waved back with an apologetic smile. I’m almost done.
Lena glanced back out to the smoggy horizon and tried to stay focused. She’d been building momentum. This sudden wait had jolted her off her pace.
Who is he talking to?
She didn’t like it. At all.
She held her iPhone in her right hand. No service out here, but in the wait she’d thumbed absently to her texts. To her sister’s final message. The closest thing to a suicide note Cambry Nguyen had bothered to leave the world.
Lena normally slept through her phone’s noises, but for some reason this message had thrashed her awake after midnight on June 8, as if charged with negative energy. She remembered snapping her eyes open to the chime, seeing the blue glow on her ceiling, rolling over and squinting to read her sister’s last words:
Please forgive me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic.
Lena had read it once.
Then she’d rolled over and gone back to sleep.
Suicide hadn’t occurred to her. It happens to other people, other families. In her blurry mind, she’d assumed the text was intended for someone else. Officer Raycevic was a nickname for one of Cambry’s deadbeat boyfriends, maybe, in Kansas or Florida or Sri Lanka or wherever the hell she’d floated to now. Just an out-of-context snapshot of her sister’s nomadic world. Was it an apology? An inside joke? A subtle threat? With Cambry, it was probably all three.
Lena slept in until ten that morning. Her next phone call was from her mother, choking through tears. She’d been contacted by the Montana Highway Patrol.
Lena never told a soul that she’d ignored Cambry’s text in the middle of the night. She claimed she’d found it only later.
And it didn’t matter—at the moment Lena received it, Cambry had already been dead for over twenty-four hours. She’d typed the message minutes before her death and tried to send it from within Hairpin Bridge’s cellular dead zone. The message sat in her phone’s outbox until later, when paramedics transported her body. Inside her blood-caked pocket, against her cold thigh and fighting a dying battery, her shitty little Nokia flip phone pinged a tower at 1:48 a.m. and fired it off to her sister like a twenty-byte message from the grave.
To be ignored.
As humiliating as it was, she was still glad her estranged sister thought to text her. It came as a relief, somehow, that Lena still mattered enough to warrant a final message. Even one as bizarre and suspicious as this.
The last sentence, especially: Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic.
What the hell?
What did that mean?
No one knew what to make of it. Why hijack a suicide note with a message to the random bystander who pulled you over an hour prior? Why not more for her shocked family, for the grieving blood relatives she left behind? Why not an explanation? Why not anything? At the service her parents had smiled stoically and done their best with it, but to Lena it felt like Cambry had texted her a personal insult. A middle finger from beyond the veil.
Forget the riddles. All she had to say, all Lena ever wished for, was I love y—
A metal clap jolted her thoughts.
A car door.
Raycevic was coming back. Finally. He was different now, wearing a toothy smile like a mask. “Sorry about the interruption.”
“It’s all right.” She wiped her eye.
“That radio is like my wife,” he said, forcing an abrasive laugh. “Squawking all day, all hours. Man, I would hear it in my sleep, if I ever slept anymore.”
His lips pulled back into an anglerfish grin. Like the building tension of the last few minutes had fully evaporated, and he’d reverted back to the jovial, sympathetic (if mentally ragged) man she’d first met at Magma Springs Diner.
“Who were you talking to?”
* * *
Nineteen miles away, a man cloaked in black shadow held his radio receiver for a thoughtful moment before setting it back in its cradle with a click. Beside a handwritten note.
LENA NGUYEN. HAIRPIN BRDG
He paused, then added:
UNARMED
* * *
“Dispatch,” Raycevic smoothly answered. “Fire One says the wind changed. The Briggs-Daniels fire is pushing this way now, and everything south of I-90 needs to be evacuated. We should probably call it a day. Did you get your questions answered?”
“That’s close enough.”
He stopped six feet from her and raised both hands in an exaggerated shrug. His muscles coiled under tan sleeves. “Do you have something against cops, Lena?”
“Excuse me?”
“Cops. Me. The thin blue line.” He patted his barrel chest, and it made a click, as if he were made of tungsten. His grin made her feel insects crawling on her skin. “I’m one of the good guys.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“Is this a Gen Z thing?”
“I respect cops, Ray.”
“You’re sure?”
“My uncle was a state trooper in Oregon.” She looked him in the eye. “He was the kindest, most decent person I’ve ever met. And I remember when he told me how often drivers flipped him off on the turnpike. They saw him as a storm trooper, not a human being. A lot of the public is like that. Pissed off. Distrustful. I really do believe law enforcement is the hardest job in the world.”
He smiled, bashful. “Thank you—”
“It’s you I have a problem with, Ray.”
His smile vanished.
Something about this—the way he seemed to phase his expressions in and out—reminded Lena of Cambry’s childhood Barbie collection. How, instead of playing with them, she’d used hydrogen peroxide to melt their faces into slurries of gray plastic, and then posed them on her shelves like faceless little department-store mannequins. It was eerie. Lena never knew why her sister did it.
Raycevic’s smile had flickered back. He reverted to his teleprompter: “If you need to talk to someone else in my department, or if you distrust me, Lena, that’s okay. That’s your right. You’ve been through a terrible loss. Your sister was mentally ill.” He put special emphasis on mentally ill, drawing out an extra syllable and studying her eyes for a reaction. “She was in incredible pain. Pain she never shared with anyone. And she made an unfortunate choice.”
She refused to take his bait. He’s toying with me.
Trying to rub salt in the wound.
She met Raycevic’s gaze and stared into the robotic black shades, trying to find his eyes. “We didn’t finish what we were talking about earlier. So, you pulled her over at eight o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t ask her to sit in your car?”
“No.”
“She was never physically inside your car?”
That gentle smile answered her, all teeth. “That’s correct.”
Lena glanced back to her left and made sure the Shoebox was still recording. She didn’t allow Raycevic out of her sight. She kept the armed man squarely in her foreground, her body turned ninety degrees against him for maximum mobility.
He was waiting.
She decided—yes, it was time to pull the trigger. The niceties were over. It had all been an act, anyway, from the instant she’d first met him outside the Magma Springs Diner today.
“My sister was an artist,” Lena said. “She’s brilliant. Was brilliant. She draws better than people can photograph, because any phone can copy an image, but Cambry catches the truth of it.”
Raycevic’s smile was evaporating again.
“There’s this one thing she drew. Not a sketch. More of a calling card, a tag. It’s a cartoon dinosaur, one of the smaller velociraptor-type ones, but friendly and expressive, you know? Like Garfield.”
She gave him a moment to give an affirmative nod. He didn’t.
“She’s drawn it ever since elementary school, back when she wanted to be a cartoonist. She named it Bob the Dinosaur. And later, as a teenager, she scratched and inked it into everything. So now, traveling from ocean to ocean and back again, there’s no question she must have drawn and carved Bob the Dinosaur into dozens of bar stools and tree trunks and restroom stalls all over the country.”
She let the moment hang.
“So what’s he doing carved into the back seat of your police car, Ray?”