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.
“
“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.”
“
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.”
“
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
