Sacred (18 page)

The road curved as we broke from a no-man’s-land of blacktop and grass and approached Tampa Bay, the water and the land that abutted it so dark behind walls of rain that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Small white shacks, some with signs on their roofs that I couldn’t read in the blurry darkness, cropped up on either side and seemed to hover effortlessly in a rainy netherworld without foundation. The Skyway’s yellow dorsal fins didn’t appear to grow any closer or any farther away for a minute or so; they hung suspended over a plain of windswept darkness, cut hard into a bruised purple sky.

As we climbed the three-mile ramp that led up to the center of the bridge, a car broke from the wall of water on the other side of the highway, coming off the bridge with its watery headlights wavering in the dark and floating past us as they headed south. I looked in the rearview, saw only a single set of headlights pocking the dark about a mile behind us. Two in the morning, the rain a wall, the darkness puddling out on all sides as we rose toward the colossal yellow fins, a night not fit to banish the most recalcitrant of sinners into.

I yawned and my body groaned internally at the
thought of being cooped up in the small Celica for another twenty-four hours. I fiddled with the radio, got nothing but “yeah, buddy” classic rock stations, a couple of dance music ones, and several “soft rock” grotesqueries. Soft rock—not too hard, not too soft, perfect for people with no sense of discrimination.

I shut the radio off as the tarmac grew steeper and all but the closest of the dorsal fins rolled away from us momentarily. Jay’s taillights looked back at me through the rain like red eyes and on our right the bay kept widening, and a cement guardrail streamed past in a current.

“This bridge is huge,” I said.

“Jinxed, too,” Angie said. “This is a replacement bridge. The original Skyway—what’s left of it anyway—is off to our left.”

She lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter as I looked off to the left, found myself unable to discern anything in the shroud of falling water.

“In the early eighties,” she said, “the original bridge was hit by a barge. The main span dropped into the sea and so did several cars.”

“How do you know this?”

“When in Rome.” She cracked her window just enough to allow the cigarette smoke to snake out. “I read a book on the area yesterday. There’s one in your suite, too. The day they opened this new bridge, a guy driving to the inauguration had a heart attack as he drove onto the ramp on the St. Pete side. His car pitched into the water and he died.”

I looked out my window as the bay dropped away from us like the floor of an elevator shaft.

“You lie,” I said nervously.

She held up her right hand. “Scout’s honor.”

“Put both hands on the wheel,” I said.

We approached the center span and the entire configuration of yellow fins enflamed the right side of the car, bathed the rubbery windows in artificial light.

The sound of tires slapping through the rain on our left suddenly hummed through the small open space in Angie’s window. I looked left and Angie said, “What the hell?”

She jerked the wheel as a gold Lexus streaked past us, crowding into our lane, doing at least seventy. The wheels on the Celica’s passenger side bit against the curb between the road and the guardrail, and the entire frame shuddered and bounced as Angie’s arm went ramrod straight against the wheel.

The Lexus hurtled past us as we jerked back into the lane. Its taillights were off. It cut halfway in front of us, straddling both lanes, and I saw the stiff, thin head of the driver for a moment in a shaft of light from the fins.

“That’s Cushing,” I said.

“Shit.” Angie honked the tinny horn of the Celica as I popped the glove compartment and pulled out my gun, then Angie’s. I tucked hers on the console against the emergency brake, jacked a bullet into the chamber of my own.

Up ahead, Jay’s head straightened as he looked in his rearview. Angie kept her hand on the horn, but the wimpy bleat it emitted was lost when the nose of Mr. Cushing’s Lexus swung into the rear quarter panel of Jay’s 3000 GT.

The right wheels of the little sports car jumped up on the curb and sparks flew off the passenger side as it careened off the barrier to Jay’s right. Jay swung his wheel hard to the left and jumped back off the curb. His sideview mirror was ripped off the car, and I turned my
head to the side as it rocketed back through the rain and crashed into our windshield, ripped a spiderweb through the glass in front of my face.

Angie bumped the back of the Lexus as the nose of Jay’s car slid to the left and his rear right wheel popped back up on the curb. Mr. Cushing kept the Lexus steady, grinding it into Jay’s car. A silver hubcap snapped off and banged off our grille, disappeared under the wheel. The 3000 GT, small and light, was no match for the Lexus, and any second it would be propelled broadside, and the Lexus would be free to push it straight off the bridge.

I could see Jay’s head as it bobbed back and forth and he fought the wheel as the Lexus ground harder against the driver’s side.

“Keep this steady,” I said to Angie and rolled down my window. I leaned my upper body out into the pelting rain and screaming wind and pointed my gun at the rear windshield of the Lexus. As the rain bit into my eyes, I fired three quick shots. The muzzle flashes exploded into the air like heat lightning, and the rear windshield of the Lexus collapsed all over the trunk. Mr. Cushing tapped his brakes and I jerked myself back inside as Angie rammed the Lexus and Jay’s car shot out ahead of it.

Jay came off the curb too fast, though, and the right wheels of the 3000 GT bounced off the ground and then rose into the air. Angie screamed, and muzzle flashes erupted from inside the Lexus.

The Celica’s windshield imploded.

The rain and wind launched a storm of glass through our hair and off our cheeks and necks. Angie swerved to the right and our tires ate curb again, the hubcaps crunching against the cement. The Toyota seemed to
buckle into itself for a moment, then swerved back into the lane.

Ahead of us, Jay’s car flipped.

It bounced on the driver’s side, then rolled over onto its roof and the Lexus accelerated and hit it hard enough to send it spinning through the rain toward the bridge barrier.

“Screw these guys,” I said and rose off my seat and extended my body over the dashboard.

I leaned so far forward my wrists passed through the shattered windshield and rested on the car hood. I steadied my hand as tiny specks of glass bit into my wrists and face and fired another three shots into the interior of the Lexus.

I must have hit someone, because the Lexus jerked away from Jay’s car and swung back across the left lane. It hit the barrier under the last of the yellow fins so hard it bounced sideways and then backward, its heavy gold body jumping trunk first into both lanes ahead of us.

“Get back in,” Angie yelled at me as she swung the Celica to the right, trying to clear the trunk of the Lexus as it jumped across our path.

The gold machine floated through the night toward us. Angie turned the wheel with both hands, and I tried to get back into my seat.

I didn’t make it, and neither did Angie.

When we smashed into the Lexus, my body shot airborne. I cleared the hood of the Celica and landed on the trunk of the Lexus like a porpoise, my chest slashing through the beads of water and pebbled glass without slowing down much. I heard something crash on my right, a cement crashing that was so loud it sounded as if the night sky had been torn in half.

I hit the tarmac with my shoulder and something
cracked by my collarbone. And I rolled. And flipped. And rolled some more. I held tight to the gun in my right hand, and it discharged twice as the sky spun and the bridge twirled and dipped.

I skidded to a stop on a bloody, howling hip. My left shoulder felt numb and flabby simultaneously, and my flesh was slick with blood.

But I could flex my right hand around the gun, and even though the hip I’d landed on felt as if it were filled with sharp stones, both legs felt solid. I looked back at the Lexus as the passenger door opened. It was about ten yards back, its trunk attached now to the crumpled hood of the Celica. A stream of hissing water shot from the Celica as I stood unsteadily, a tomato paste combination of rain and blood streaming down my face.

On my right, on the other side of the bridge, a black Jeep had skidded to a stop and the driver was shouting words at me that were lost in the wind and rain.

I ignored him and concentrated on the Lexus.

The Weeble fell to one knee as he climbed out of the Lexus, his white shirt saturated red, a meaty hole gouged across where his right eyebrow used to be. I limped toward him as he used the muzzle of his pistol to push himself off his knee. He gripped the open car door and watched me come, and I could tell by his bobbing Adam’s apple that he was swallowing hard against nausea. He looked down at the gun in his hand uncertainly, then at me.

“Don’t,” I said.

He looked down at his chest, at the blood pumping from somewhere in there, and his fingers tightened around his pistol.

“Don’t,” I said again.

Please don’t, I thought.

But he raised the gun anyway, blinking at me in the downpour, his small body wavering like a drunk’s.

I shot him twice in the center of the chest before his gun hand cleared his hip, and he flopped back against the car, his mouth forming a confused oval, as if he were about to ask me a question. He grabbed for the open door, but his arm slid down between the doorframe and the windshield pillar. His body began a cascade to his right, but his elbow got pinned between the door and the car, and he died there—half-pointed to the ground, vise-gripped to the car, the beginnings of a question lying stillborn in his eyes.

I heard a ratcheting sound, and I looked up over the roof of the car to see Mr. Cushing leveling a shiny shotgun at me. He sighted down the bore, one eye squinting shut, a bony white finger curled around the trigger. He smiled.

Then a puffy red cloud punched through the center of his throat and spit over the collar of his shirt.

He frowned. He reached a hand up toward his throat, but before it got there, he pitched forward and his face hit the car roof. The shotgun slid down the windshield, came to rest on the hood. Mr. Cushing’s tall thin body folded to its right and he disappeared on the other side of the hood, his body making a soft thump as it hit the ground.

Angie appeared in the darkness behind him, her gun still extended, the rain hissing off the hot barrel. Slivers of glass twinkled in her dark hair. Several razor-thin lacerations crisscrossed her forehead and the bridge of her nose, but otherwise she appeared to have survived the crash with a lot less damage than either the Weeble or I had.

I smiled at her, and she gave me a weary one in return.

Then she looked at something over my shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Patrick. Oh, Jesus.”

I turned, and that’s when I saw what had made the loud crashing noise when I was thrown from the Celica.

Jay’s 3000 GT sat upside down fifty feet away. Most of the car had smashed through the barrier, and I was momentarily amazed that it hadn’t dropped off the bridge entirely. The rear third of the car was perched on the bridge. The front two thirds hovered over nothing at all, the car held to the bridge by nothing more than crumbling cement and two mangled steel coils. As we watched, the front of the car dipped slightly into space, and the rear rose off the cement foundation. The steel coils creaked.

I ran over to the barrier, and got down on my knees, looked over it at Jay. He hung upside down in his seat, strapped in by the seat belt, his knees up by his chin, his head an inch from the car ceiling.

“Don’t move,” I said.

His eyes curled toward me. “Don’t worry. I won’t.”

I looked at the barrier. Slick with beads of rain, it moaned again. On the other side of it was a small strip of cement foundation, not enough to be considered a good foothold for anyone over the age of four, but I wasn’t in a position to sit back and wait for it to grow. Below the cement strip waited nothing but black space and water as hard as cliff face a hundred yards down.

Angie came up beside me as a breeze swept off the gulf. The car shifted to the right a bit, then jerked downward another inch.

“Oh, no,” Jay said. He laughed weakly. “No, no, no.”

“Jay,” Angie said. “I’m coming out.”

“
You’re
coming out?” I said. “No. I got a longer reach.”

She climbed over the barrier. “And bigger feet, and your arm looks fucked up. Can you even move it?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She gripped an intact section of the barrier and eased herself along it toward the car. I walked beside her, my right hand an inch from her arm.

Another gust of wind cut through the rain and the whole bridge seemed to sway.

Angie reached the car, and I held tight to her right arm with both hands as she lowered herself to a tenuous squatting position.

She leaned out from the barrier and extended her left arm as sirens rang in the distance.

“Jay,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t reach.” She strained against my grip, the tendons in her arms pulsing under the skin, but her fingers fell just short of the upside-down door handle. “You’re going to have to help out, Jay.”

“How?”

“Can you open your door?”

His head craned as he tried to locate the door handle. “Never been upside down in a car before. You know?”

“I’ve never hung from the side of a bridge three hundred feet over the water,” Angie said. “This makes us even.”

“Got the door handle,” he said.

“You’re going to have to push the door open and reach for my hand,” Angie said, and her body swayed slightly in the wind.

He blinked against the rain blowing into the window,
puffed up his cheeks, and exhaled. “I feel like if I move an inch, this thing’s going to tip.”

“Chance we have to take, Jay.” Her hand slipped down my arm. I squeezed, and her fingers dug into my flesh again.

“Yeah,” Jay said. “I’ll tell ya, though, I—”