standing very still, as if he were approaching a bird he was afraid to startle. And I was ready to fly.
“I know everything,” I said, pulling my shoulders back and looking him right in the eye.
“No,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “You don’t.”
In that second he became every person in my life who had lied to me. And I wanted to rage at him, pummel him, break a hole in the universe by the sheer force of my anger and grief and throw him through it. But incredibly I held my temper for a few more seconds, which felt like holding on to a Rottweiler with a piece of dental floss.
“I know that your moving into my building wasn’t an accident. I know that you followed a long trail that eventually, somehow, led you to me. I know that you wrote that second note.”
“Ridley.” It sounded like a prayer.
“Stay away from me,” I said. Meltdown. The tremors in my voice and hands spread to the rest of my body and I was shaking uncontrollably. “Don’t come any closer.”
“I would never hurt you.”
I laughed a short, hard laugh that sounded a little unstable even to my own ears. “You know,” I said, my voice starting to raise a couple octaves. “I keep hearing that tonight. Seems to me like when people feel the need to assert that, there might be a problem.”
Some of the color had drained from his face and he looked tired, black circles shadowing his eyes.
That crazy laugh rocked me again. It didn’t feel like me. Sounded hard and strange. “You’re such a fucking liar. You almost killed us both yesterday. What were you trying to do?” I was yelling and looking around me. In New York City, you can never be alone, there’s always someone around. Except when you’re scared; then the city has a way of being the most deserted place on earth. There was no one else on the bridge.
“What are you talking about?” He was convincing, I’ll give him that. He’d perfected the look of innocent confusion.
“The car!” I screamed, my throat going sore from it. “The fucking Firebird. Were you driving it when it almost forced me into a head-on collision?”
“What?” He shook his head, his eyes glistening. “No. God, Ridley. Are you okay?” He moved a step closer and I moved back again, as if we were dancing.
I had never been sure it was him, you remember. In fact, on an emotional level, I had been nearly sure it wasn’t. But in that moment on the Brooklyn Bridge with the sun rising on a new day, I couldn’t trust what I had felt, what I had seen, or what I had been told five minutes ago, a day ago, thirty years ago. I could operate only in the present tense. I was afraid and angry in equal measure, and that was literally the only thing I knew for sure.
“Listen to me,” he said slowly. “The Firebird is gone. It’s been stolen.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Do you think I’m an idiot, Jake? You told me yourself it was impounded and I know for a fact that it wasn’t.” A hard, cold wind gusted off the water, blowing my coat open. I pulled it tight around myself.
“Okay,” he said, raising a hand. “I know what I told you. I was wrong. I assumed it had been impounded, but I have since learned that it wasn’t.”
I thought about that for a second, weighed the likelihood of what he’d said and found it pretty weak. “How could you learn that? You couldn’t exactly call up and ask. You’re a fugitive, wanted for the murder of Christian Luna.”
He nodded as if he understood my skepticism. “I still have friends with connections.”
“Who would do that? Who would steal your car and then try to kill me with it?”
“The same people who would leave a rifle registered to me in Fort Tryon Park for the police to find.”
I looked at him hard, as if I was expecting to squeeze the truth from him with the very force of my gaze. “Oh, so now it’s some kind of conspiracy?”
“What do you want to call it?”
There was too much information for me to process about too many different people and circumstances. I started to feel that fog fall over my brain again, everything suddenly nebulous, dark forms moving behind a veil of smoke.
“I need to know everything that’s happening, Jake. No more lies. Are you prepared to tell me everything? No omissions.”
“I’ll tell you everything I know. There’s no more reason to hide anything from you,” he said softly. I was quiet a minute, thinking of all my million questions as they jammed up against one another on the way to my mouth. I could come up with only one.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” I said as the sadness finally pushed its way past the anger and showed its face. The tears came then, too. Silent, heavy, sent directly from my bruised and mangled heart. “After all of this? Murder and lies and manipulation. Did you at least get what you were looking for?”
He sighed and turned his eyes from me, cast them down to his feet, and his body seemed to sag a little beneath the weight of my words. “I haven’t found what I was looking for, no.” His voice was quiet and he raised his eyes back to me as he moved toward me. “But I found something I never even knew existed.”
“Oh, please,” I said, hating him for saying what I wanted to hear. “Don’t even pretend you ever cared about me. You know what? Fuck you, Jake.” I turned my back and started moving away from him.
“Ridley, please.”
He moved quickly, too quickly for me to get away. He held me hard while I fought harder. I’m not talking about little girlie slaps and halfhearted punches. I kicked him in the shin. Pounded on his back. He didn’t release me.
“Let go of me. You’re a liar. I fucking hate you.” Screaming like a maniac. Between blows to his back, which by the way felt like granite, he said, “I’ll let you go when you promise to
I tried to bring my knee up into his groin, but he deftly blocked me with his leg. Finally I just leaned against him in exhaustion, like boxers seem to do in the ring, holding each other, delivering painful blows to the kidneys. I released a long breath and rested my head against his neck. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
He kept his word. But I didn’t. The minute he released me, I took off like a shot heading to Brooklyn. “Ridley, Jesus!” he yelled. I was running with every ounce of strength and speed I had left in me, but he was on me in a heartbeat. I told you I wasn’t very fast. Now he had me from behind, my arms locked to my side. I tried to kick back at him; I thrashed and screamed like a kid throwing a tantrum.
“You’re right, Ridley!” he yelled over my screaming. “I lied to you. Let me explain.”
I don’t know how long this went on, but eventually exhaustion, coupled with the knowledge of Jake’s physical strength, led me to just collapse against him. “Okay,” I said finally. “Let me go. I won’t run. I’m too tired.”
“Please,” he said, his breathing heavy. “Don’t. I’m too tired to chase you.” After another second, he released his hold on me and I moved away from him. I walked over and leaned on the railing. The morning was almost pretty, a moody gray-blue sky, whitecaps on the gray water below us.
“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I said, looking off into the distance. “Tell me you didn’t kill Christian Luna. Tell me it wasn’t you driving that car.”
To be honest with you, as far as what was between Jake and me, even with all the lies and manipulations, those were the only deal breakers, the things for which there could be no forgiveness, no explanation. He moved in next to me, slipped an arm around my shoulder, and lifted my chin with his hand until I had to look into those eyes.
“It wasn’t me.”
I think if he had tried to say more, I might not have believed him. But he let me look into his eyes and I could see it was the truth. I nodded.
“How did you find me?”
“What do you mean? Right now?”
“No. I mean, I know how you found out that my father was Jessie Stone’s physician. But how did you find me?”
He laughed a little. “The same way Christian Luna did. Thank that
I sighed. “God, I hate that guy.”
He hung his head a bit at that and I could see that I had hurt him a little. I didn’t say anything to make it better.
“You’re sorry you met me,” he said after a while.
