Our side of the bridge was blocked by the Lexus and the Celica, six or seven green and white patrol cars, several unmarked cars, two fire trucks, three ambulances, and a black van bearing the yellow words PINELLAS COUNTY MARITIME INVESTIGATIONS. The van had dropped four divers at the St. Pete side of the bridge just a few minutes before, and they were somewhere in the water now, searching for Jay.

Jefferson looked at the hole Jay’s car had left behind in the barrier. Bathed in the red of the fire engine’s lights, it looked like an open wound.

“Fucked up my bridge pretty good, didn’t you, Mr. Kenzie?”

“That wasn’t me,” I said. “It was those two dead assholes over there.”

“So you say,” he said. “So you say.”

The EMT used a pair of tweezers to remove pebbles and slivers of glass from my face, and I winced as I stared off past the flashing lights and dark drizzle at the crowd forming on the other side of the barricade. They’d walked up the bridge in the rain at three in the morning, just so they could get a firsthand look at violence. TV, I guess, wasn’t enough for them. Their own lives weren’t enough for them. Nothing was enough.

The EMT pulled a good-sized chunk of something from the center of my forehead and blood immediately poured from the opening and split at the bridge of the nose and found my eyes. I blinked several times as he grabbed some gauze, and as my eyelids fluttered and the lights of the various sirens flickered like strobes, I saw a glimpse of rich honey hair and skin in the crowd.

I leaned forward into the drizzle and peered into the lights, and saw her again, just for a moment, and I decided my fall from the car must have given me a concussion, because it wasn’t possible.

But maybe it was.

For one second, through the rain and lights and blood in my eyes, I locked eyes with Desiree Stone.

And then she was gone.

26

The skyway bridged two counties. Manatee County, on the southern side, consisted of Bradenton, Palmetto, Longboat Key, and Anna Maria Island. Pinellas County, on the northern side, was made up of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Beach, Gulfport, and Pinellas Park. St. Petersburg police had been the first on the scene, as had their divers and their fire trucks, so after some arguing with the Bradenton PD, we were transported off the bridge by the St. Pete cops, and driven north.

As we came off the bottom of the bridge—Angie locked up in the backseat of one cruiser, and me in the back of another—the four divers, dressed in black rubber from head to toe, carried Jay’s body from Tampa Bay, up onto a grassy embankment.