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.”