He looked behind him at Angie. She sat in an ambulance across from the one where I sat as an EMT wiped at the scratches on her face, legs, and neck with an alcohol swab and Jefferson’s partner, Detective Lyle Vandemaker, interrogated her.

“Man,” Jefferson said and whistled, “she’s a first-class mega-babe and she can pump a round through the throat of an asshole from ten yards out in the pouring rain? That’s one special woman.”

“Yeah,” I said, “she is.”

He stroked his chin and nodded to himself. “I’ll tell you what my problem is here, Mr. Kenzie. It’s a matter of discerning who the real assholes are. You see what I’m saying? You say those two corpses over there—they’re the assholes. And I’d like to believe you. I would. Hell, I’d love to just say, ‘Okay,’ and shake your hand and let you go on back to Beantown. I mean, really. But if, oh let’s just say, you were lying to me, and you and your partner are the real assholes here, well, I’d look awful stupid just letting you go. And seeing how we don’t have any witnesses as yet, well, all we got is your word against the words of two guys who can’t really give us their words because you, well, shot them a few times and they died. You follow?”

“Just barely,” I said.

Across the median divider of the bridge, traffic seemed heavier than it probably was normally at three in the morning because the police had turned the two lanes of normally southbound traffic into one southern and one northern lane. Every car that passed on that side of the bridge slowed to a crawl to get a glimpse of the commotion on this side.

In the breakdown lane, a black Jeep with two bright green surfboards strapped to its roof was stopped completely, its hazards flashing. The owner I recognized as the guy who’d shouted something at me just before I shot the Weeble.

He was a sunburnt rail of a guy with long, bleached-blond hair and no shirt. He stood at the rear of the Jeep and seemed in heated conversation with two cops. He pointed in my direction several times.

His companion, a young woman as skinny and blond as he was, leaned against the hood of the Jeep. When she caught my eye, she waved brightly, as if we were old friends.

I managed a half wave back at her, because it seemed the polite thing to do, then turned back to my immediate surroundings.