He took another step.

“Let her go,” he told Rikke. “Give her to me.”

Rikke’s eyes were like blue stones. “Don’t move,” she said.

Stride put his hands up. “I’m not moving.”

One of the twin sets of vertical cables supporting the roadbed was immediately behind Rikke. She slid her left arm around the cables to brace herself and hoisted Tish bodily off the ground with her other arm. Tish’s legs kicked madly, and her blond hair twirled around her head in the back-and-forth of the wind.

“Go ahead,” Rikke told Stride with scorn. “Come get me.”

“Tish never did a thing to you,” Stride said. “Whatever happened between you and Laura has been over for years.”

“Then she should have stayed away.”

Stride saw the policewoman on the opposite side of the bridge climb 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.”