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—”

The car lurched, and the whole bridge gave a loud creak, this one high-pitched and frantic like a scream, and the torn cement holding the car crumbled.

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Jay said.

And the car dropped off the bridge.

Angie screamed and jerked back from the car as the torn steel coil snapped into her arm. I gripped her hand tight, and pulled her over the barrier as her legs kicked at the open air.

With her face pressed against mine, and her arm wrapped tight around my neck, her heart hammering against my biceps, and my own pounding in my ear, we peered down at the place where Jay’s car had plummeted through streams of rain and disappeared into black.

25

“He going to be okay?” Inspector Jefferson asked the EMT working on my shoulder.

“He’s got a cracked scapula. Might be broken. I can’t tell without an X ray.”

“A what?” I said.

“Shoulder blade,” the EMT said. “Definitely cracked.”

Jefferson looked at him with sleepy eyes and shook his head slowly. “He’ll be fine for a while. We’ll get a doctor take a look at him soon enough.”