In the Dark (46 page)

silently over the barrier between the lanes and sidle into his line of vision. She was thirty feet behind Rikke. She signaled Stride with her left hand, then pointed at herself and aimed her gun where it would fire harmlessly over the water. She looked at him with a question in her eyes.

 

Fire or not fire. Create a diversion.

 

Almost imperceptibly, Stride nodded.

 

The policewoman held up her left hand and lifted one finger into the air. Then two. As she lifted the third, her finger depressed the trigger on her gun, and a sharp report cracked on the bridge.

 

Rikke flinched, and at the same instant, Stride dove. He wasn’t fast enough. Rikke launched Tish violently against the concrete guardrail, where she lost her balance and toppled forward. Rikke turned and ran. Stride clawed for Tish and nearly had her, but her torso slipped through his grasp, and she kept falling. His right hand grazed her thigh, and his left hand caught behind her knee, but she stripped past him, picking up speed on her drop toward the bay. She was sliding, falling, and wailing, until his hands locked around her thin calf and her right foot caught on his clenched fingers, and she finally jerked to a stop.

 

Tish hung suspended over one hundred and twenty feet of air between the bridge and the water.

 

Her weight pinned Stride against the concrete barrier. He felt her squirming, fighting him, almost as if she wanted to fall. His upper body was bent over the bridge; he was being pulled, dragged down. He couldn’t lift her up. All he could do was hold on to her ankle, but the muscles in his arms groaned and weakened.

 

“
Serena!
” he shouted. He could hear her running behind him.

 

“Hold on!”

 

Stride tried to make time stop. He tried to clear his mind of everything except the lock-hold of his hands around Tish’s ankle. They were like handcuffs. Tight. Not giving up.

 

“Hold on, Jonny, I’m here.” Serena leaned over the edge, stared down at the dark water, and cursed. “Oh, son of a bitch, I don’t know if I can do this.”

 

“You have to. I’m losing my grip.”

 

Serena bent over and hunted for a hold on Tish’s body. She bunched Tish’s blouse between her fingers, but the fabric tore away when she pulled,
and Serena gasped and fell against Stride. He staggered, and the vise he kept around Tish’s ankle nearly broke apart.

 

“Your hand, give me your hand!” Serena shouted at Tish, whose arms made a Y below her head, reaching toward the bay.

 

“No, no, no, I can’t!”

 

“Reach back, Tish, you can do it.”

 

“
No!
”

 

Stride’s fingers grew numb and sweaty, and pain screamed along the nerve ends in his shoulders and neck.

 

“See if you can get her other ankle,” he said. They were running out of time.

 

Tish’s leg spun along with her body. The wind played with her like a toy, pushing her back and forth in circles. Serena grasped for her flying ankle, missed it, and tried again, and finally she shouted, “Got it! Pull! Pull!”

 

Stride yanked upward with a shout, scraping backward from the edge of the bridge. Serena was beside him, doing the same thing. Inch by inch, they fought their way from the concrete barrier, and Tish came with them. They saw her knees, then her thighs, and when they saw her waist clear the bridge, Serena took one hand, grabbed Tish’s belt, and spilled her back onto the highway, where she twitched like a fish pulled from the water.

 

Stride let go and fell backward against the Impala. His chest heaved. Pins and needles assailed his arms.

 

Tish was incoherent, moaning and crying.

 

“Get her in the back of the Impala, make her lie down,” he mumbled to Serena. “She’s going to need to be sedated before we can move her to our truck.”

 

“
Lieutenant!
”

 

Stride’s head snapped up.

 

Thirty feet away, the policewoman who had fired the warning shot lay on her back on the asphalt, entwined in a violent struggle with Rikke. The two bodies rolled and fought, and as he watched, the gun skidded away across the lane, out of reach. Rikke reared back and chopped the officer’s face with a crack of her elbow. The cop’s head snapped against the pavement, and she went limp.

 

Stride swore, pushed himself off the car, and ran. His legs felt like
gelatin. Beside him, he was stunned to see cars whipping down the slope of the bridge deck toward the Duluth side as if it were a racetrack. The fog made him almost invisible, and he dodged cars that began to merge into the right lane before they saw him. He charged down the shoulder, gaining ground on Rikke, who staggered to her feet. When he thrust out his tired arms to stop her, she swung wildly at him with both fists. She connected with his jaw, and there was surprising strength in the blow. He grabbed for her wrists, but she shoved his chest, and he skidded backward, losing his balance.

 

Rikke bolted away.

 

Stride heard horns and saw dazzling white lights. Cars stampeded like blind elephants. He sprinted after Rikke, but she weaved away from him and darted to his left out into traffic. He shouted a warning, but she didn’t stop. Like a cannon barrel coming out of the fog, a huge black Escalade rocketed down the highway in the left lane, and Rikke stumbled directly into its path. Stride saw the red flash of brake lights. Tires screeched and burned. Rikke screamed, but her cry was chopped short as the SUV hammered her torso and nearly cut her in two.

 

Rikke’s crushed body spun off the grill of the truck and rolled to a stop twenty yards away. She didn’t move.

 

Before Stride could react, he felt the presence of something giant and dangerous behind him. He turned to see a white sedan sail like a pirate ship out of the fog. When the driver saw the Escalade stopped in the left lane, he swerved right, coming directly at Stride, who leaped and rolled onto the hood as the sedan struck him. His body bounced on the metal. The windshield hit his chest. He felt air burst from his lungs. He hung on to the hood with his fingertips as the car slammed into the concrete barrier on the side of the bridge, and then his hold gave way.

 

Stride flew.

 

He was a bird in the air, shot from the hood of the sedan, launched out over the side of the bridge into nothingness.

 

Then he was falling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50
___________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time stretches out on a long fall.

 

In Stride’s brain, he knew that it was one hundred and twenty feet to the black water and that he would plummet through that distance in about three seconds. Even so, his thoughts accelerated like shooting stars, giving him enough time to watch himself fall and be acutely aware of his sensations. He had no time at all to be afraid.

 

As he was thrown into midair, he thought he heard Serena cry, but her voice was gone instantaneously, and the only noise around him was the deafening roar of the wind. Air hurtled against his body, cold and fierce, as fast as a bullet. Its wail sounded like a scream, shouting out from his chest. He hoped it wasn’t. He didn’t want to die screaming.

 

He caught a last glimpse of the bridge as it disappeared above him. Its lights were a half-moon of blurry white, and then the lights blinked out, and he was enveloped in blackness. He saw nothing below him, no water, no light, and he realized he had squeezed his eyes shut. He forced himself to open his eyes, to take advantage of the strange elongated sensation of time to orient himself. When he did, he could see the lights of the Point,
where he lived, and something about that glimmer on the narrow strip of land made him want to see it again.

 

He tried to breathe, but he couldn’t. His lungs had been hammered by the impact of the hood of the car, and they refused to swell to take in the speeding oxygen around him. He felt light-headed, swimming, dreaming, as if he were already underwater.

 

Three seconds.

 

He had time to think about the fact that he wasn’t seeing his life pass before his eyes. No clickety roll of images like film on an old movie projector. No recollections of Cindy, Maggie, or Serena. No voices, sounds, memories. No angel caressing his arm and showing him the loved ones who had gone before him. He was in a vacuum filled with air, about to hit water that was not soft like a knife cutting through butter but was solid like concrete and would savage his bones and tissue and kill him instantly, the flicking of a switch from alive to dead.

 

That was the first conscious thought to penetrate his mind in that first long second.

 

He was about to die.

 

He thought about people jumping from towers. People in planes about to crash. They must have had that same brilliant moment of clarity. You are alive now, and in another moment, you will be dead. He was almost curious about what it would be like, and he realized that death had a strange seduction to it.

 

But he had time enough to realize that he didn’t want to die, not now, not for a long time, and he had time enough to remember that the Golden Gate Bridge was a lot taller than the Blatnik Bridge, and people had been known to survive the big drop into San Francisco Bay, even when they didn’t want to. Not a lot. But a few.

 

And those that did went in feet first.

 

Feet first.

 

His brain began screaming at him. Feet first.

 

If he hit the water with his head or his shoulder or his chest, he would die hitting the water as if it were made of brick. His only hope was to cut a little tear in the liquid concrete and slip through. With his eyes open, and that odd, elastic time stretching out like a pink roll of taffy, Stride uncurled his body into the straightest line he could make it, pointed his toes
toward the water, lifted his arms straight over his head, and tilted his chin toward the sky. In the lightning span of less than a second, he twisted himself into an arrow heading for a bull’s-eye.

 

Don’t tense. Let it happen.

 

You’re going to die.

 

No, you’re not.

 

He exhaled the last gasp of breath that was left in his chest and let his muscles go soft. He closed his eyes again, and just as he did, time finally caught up with him. His toes parted the seas. His body fired through the water like a rocket. He was conscious of pain, bones breaking, clothes ripped from his skin, water flooding his lungs. He saw the lights of the world wink out into night. He felt hot agony turn cold, felt himself descending and descending and descending, as if he could travel right through the earth and wind up in hell.

 

Except the deep channel was not bottomless, and after he had gone down as far as he could go, he hung suspended, a moth enrobed in a cocoon, before his body began to coil and climb. The bay that sucked him in found him hard to swallow and decided to spit him out.

 

Later, he would remember none of it. His last memory would be of running toward Rikke Mathisen on the bridge. There, the film ended. He would have no recollection of the car that hit him and drove him from the bridge, of falling, of time stretching out, of the impact that broke his left leg and collapsed both lungs, of bobbing to the surface on his back, of the searchlight of the Coast Guard boat bathing like a warm glow over his body. No recollection of ever thinking to himself that if he had made it this far, he was going to live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

51
___________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Stride saw the glass door open, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the restaurant patio was his late wife, Cindy.

 

For an instant, he felt as if he were falling again, long and hard toward the water. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant.

 

It wasn’t her, of course. It was Tish.

 

She joined them at the same table where she had met them for the first time three months earlier. Stride sat with Serena and Maggie on either side of him. The heat of summer had yielded to September evenings, when darkness ate away the daylight. As he watched, the last sliver of sun dipped below the western hillside, and the lake grew gray and unsettled. Tish shivered as she sat down.

 

“How are you?” Stride asked her.

 

Tish sized up his condition. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

 

Stride’s right leg was encased in a cast. His crutches were balanced against the railing of the patio. He fingered the brace on his neck. “Physical wounds heal,” he said. “Yours may be a little harder to deal with.”

 

Tish put on a brave face and smiled. “You know how they say you have to face your fears to overcome them? That’s a load of crap. I never want to cross a bridge again in my entire life.” She reached out and took Stride’s and Serena’s hands. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you both properly. I should be dead now. You saved me.”

 

“It’s over,” Stride said. “Try not to think about it anymore.”

 

It wasn’t really over, though, not for any of them. Serena had nightmares where she relived his fall from the bridge. She would wake up in a sweat and hold on to him. For himself, he was surprised and a little anxious that he had felt no emotional response to his own near-death experience. He felt strangely empty, as if the fall had happened to someone else. He feared that the emotions would build silently like an avalanche and someday overtake him with a roar.

 

“Seriously, how are you?” Tish asked him.