weight of the current, and then they were waterborne. Mary swam with an awkward breaststroke, the clothes and shoes making her movements slow. Walker imitated her, holding the shotgun above the water with his right hand and stroking with the left. He was tired, and his arms were heavy, but he kept himself moving by telling himself lies about resting as soon as he made it to the other side.
His toe hit mud and he kicked again, and this time it held. He reached out for Mary, grasped her wrist, and pulled her toward the bank until he could tell that her feet were on the bottom too. Together they began to walk toward the bank. There was an eye-searing flash of light from his left as a flashlight beam passed over them, then a glare as it came back and held on them.
Mary ducked under the water, and a gun went off across the river. The splash of the bullet rose in a thin vertical column four feet up, and before it came down, Walker felt Stillman snatch the shotgun out of his hand. Stillman aimed quickly and fired, a report that slapped Walker’s eardrums and made his diaphragm vibrate in his rib cage. The flashlight fell to the ground, bounced, and lay in the grass, its beam on the twitching hand and wrist of the man who had been holding it.
The silence returned, a much deeper quiet than there had been before. The frogs’ chirping had been replaced by the silence of many beings stopping in place and listening. It lasted for five seconds, and then the woods seemed to erupt with sound. There were shouts, branches breaking, heavy footsteps. Beams from flashlights appeared and swept back and forth, then danced crazily on bushes and trees as men ran with them.
Stillman and Walker both turned at once. Mary was already sixty feet downriver from them. She waved to beckon them toward her. It was not a strategy, just the simple need to go in the direction the sounds weren’t coming from, and to move away from lights into darkness. Both men went after her, trying to reach the bend in the river, the next spot where there might be something to hide them.
Mary disappeared beyond the turn, then Stillman. When Walker was about to slip past the end of the curve, he took a last look. The lights were converging. He could see a few of them playing about the mudflats, then finding something and staying on it. They had found the body of the man he had drowned. In a moment their eyes would pass across the deep footprints in the mud, and follow them into the river.
43
When Walker swam around the curve, Stillman and Mary were still ahead of him, floating downstream. Looming above them was the dark rectangle of the covered bridge. Mary was the first to be swept under it. She grasped one of the bridge’s new concrete supports and held on. Walker took a couple of strokes to bring himself into line with it and stopped himself beside her. He looked around for Stillman and saw him clinging to the one beside theirs. Stillman pushed off, holding the shotgun above the water, caught their support, clung to it with one hand, carefully set the shotgun on top of the block of concrete, and lowered himself deeper into the water.
The tumult was growing. There was the sharp, hollow sound of men running across the bridge above their heads, shouts and footsteps from around the bend where the bodies had been found. From somewhere above them, they could hear a police radio. The female dispatcher’s voice was unperturbed and unchanging. “Unit Ten, please proceed to Main and Washington to assist in clearing the bridge. Unit Three and Unit Six, please return to the station . . . ” The answers were gruff and so muffled as to be incomprehensible from here.
Stillman moved closer to the others and whispered, “They’re all going upstream to the bodies.”
Mary said, “We left tracks in the mud. They’ll know we’re here.”
“By the time they see tracks we can’t be here,” said Stillman. “Give the rest of them a couple of minutes to reach the bodies, and then we’ll go up by the bridge.”
Walker looked in the direction Stillman was indicating, and saw that the spot where the bridge rested on solid ground formed a wedge-shaped space that was protected a bit on each side by the steel girders that lay under the original structure. “All right,” said Walker. “This time I’ll go first. I’ll try to get a car. Then you come behind me with the shotgun in case—”
“I know,” Stillman interrupted.
Mary said, “We’ll all go at once. It’s harder to shoot three people before one of them gets to you.”
Walker hesitated, but she said, “You know I’m right.”
“Move into the shallows now and up onto dry land,” said Stillman. “We’ve got to get some of the water out of our clothes, because the dripping makes noise.”
The three drifted quietly to the shore under the bridge, then crawled higher into the low space at the end. The water ran off them, and Walker noticed that Stillman had been right about the noise. While they were lying on the ground the water streamed off them in small rivulets and soaked in without a sound. The night air felt cool on their wet bodies.
Walker waited for a shiver to pass, then pointed upward, and the others nodded. Walker turned and slowly, quietly made his way out along the bank until he could stand, then climbed the bank to the grassy, level space beside the outer wall of the covered bridge, and stopped to listen. The shouts of the searchers were rarer and farther off now, and the flashlights threw a dim glow in the trees beyond the bend in the river.
Walker stepped around the wall and looked into the bridge. There was a police car parked in the middle of the bridge facing the town. There was a man behind the wheel with the door beside him open.
Walker went down on his hands and knees and began to crawl toward the rear of the car, trying to stay in the blind spot to the right along the wall. The dispatcher’s cool voice said, “The Main Street bridge is now clear. Units Five, Four, Twelve, Nine, and One, please proceed to New Mill Systems. All other units please stand by at your present locations and wait for instructions. We are now in a Code One Hundred situation. I repeat. Code One Hundred is now in effect.”
The driver of the car seemed to be affected by the news. He straightened in his seat and flicked a switch on the dashboard as Walker reached the rear bumper of the car. The siren made a loud, shrill scream, then went lower and up again.
Walker rose to a crouch, dashed around the car to the door, and reached inside. He hooked his arm around the man’s neck and dragged him from the seat onto the rough wooden planks of the bridge. The man groped at his side for his pistol, but Stillman came from behind, grabbed it out of its holster, and held it to the man’s forehead, where he could see it.
Stillman held the shotgun out to Walker, and Walker released the man and took it. He peered into the interior of the car, then stood. “The key’s in it.”
Mary slipped by him, sat in the driver’s seat, and started the engine, but there were other sounds now. Men were calling to one another in the woods. “Come on,” she said. “That siren was to call them in.”
Stillman dragged the man to the opening at the side of the bridge, the gun still at his head. He growled, “One chance. Jump or I kill you.”
The man rolled over the sill of the opening and disappeared into the darkness, and a second later there was a splash. Walker got inside with Mary and rolled down the window. Stillman got into the back seat and said, “Go!”
Mary had backed up almost to the end of the covered bridge when Walker said, “Wait.” She stopped.
They looked out through the opening at the far end of the bridge. Across the field, there were lights. The whole stretch of highway from the woods to the Main Street bridge and beyond looked like a river of white headlights, coming their way.
Mary said, “Maybe we can outrun them,” but there was no conviction in her voice.
“We’ve got to do something to the bridge,” said Stillman. “Give me the keys.”
She handed them to him. He ran to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and stared inside. There were three kinds of fire extinguishers, a first-aid kit, a road-emergency kit. He opened them all as Walker came up beside him.
Stillman took a pair of scissors from the first-aid kit, then cut the hose from one of the fire extinguishers and stepped to the side of the car and handed the hose to Walker. “Siphon some gasoline onto the bridge.”
Walker stuck the end of the hose down into the gas tank, sucked hard on it until he tasted the gasoline coming into his mouth, then lowered the hose as far as he could and tried to spit the poisonous taste out. There was a clear, steady stream of gasoline dribbling out and soaking into the boards of the bridge.
Stillman appeared at his side holding a highway flare. “That’s enough gas. Get in.”
