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?”