“Granted.” She downshifted into neutral as the Celica hit a puddle the size of Peru and the back wheels slid out and to the left for a moment. Angie turned into the skid and the car righted itself as we passed beyond the puddle. She shifted back into fourth, and then quickly into fifth, stepped on the gas, and caught back up with Jay.
“Granted,” she repeated. “But he’s going to assassinate a virtual cripple, Patrick.”
“An evil cripple,” I said.
“How do we know that?” she said.
“Because Jay told us and Desiree confirmed it.”
“No,” she said as the yellow dorsal fins of the Skyway Bridge climbed into the night sky about ten miles ahead. “Desiree didn’t confirm it. Jay said she did. All we have to go on is what Jay’s told us. We can’t confirm it with Desiree. She’s dead. We can’t confirm it with Trevor, because he’d deny it in either case.”
“Everett Hamlyn,” I said.
She nodded. “I say we call him when we get to Jay’s place. From a pay phone out of Jay’s earshot. I want to hear it from Everett’s mouth that this is all as Jay said it is.”
The rain, as it drummed the canvas hood of the Celica, sounded like ice cubes.
“I trust Jay,” I said.
“I don’t.” She looked at me for a moment. “It’s nothing personal. But he’s a wreck. And I don’t trust anyone right now.”
“Anyone,” I said.
“Except you,” she said. “And that goes without saying. Otherwise, everyone is suspect.”
I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes.
Everyone is suspect.
Even Jay.
Hell of a weird world in which fathers give orders to assassinate their daughters and therapeutic organizations offer no real therapy and a man I would have once easily trusted with my life suddenly couldn’t be trusted.
Maybe Everett Hamlyn had been right. Maybe honor was in its twilight. Maybe it had always been heading that way. Or worse, maybe it had always been an illusion.
Everyone is suspect. Everyone is suspect.
It was starting to become my mantra.
24
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.”
I looked out my window as the bay dropped away from us like the floor of an elevator shaft.
“You lie,” I said nervously.
She held up her right hand. “Scout’s honor.”
“Put both hands on the wheel,” I said.
We approached the center span and the entire configuration of yellow fins enflamed the right side of the car, bathed the rubbery windows in artificial light.
The sound of tires slapping through the rain on our left suddenly hummed through the small open space in Angie’s window. I looked left and Angie said, “What the hell?”
She jerked the wheel as a gold Lexus streaked past us, crowding into our lane, doing at least seventy. The wheels on the Celica’s passenger side bit against the curb between the road and the guardrail, and the entire frame shuddered and bounced as Angie’s arm went ramrod straight against the wheel.
The Lexus hurtled past us as we jerked back into the lane. Its taillights were off. It cut halfway in front of us, straddling both lanes, and I saw the stiff, thin head of the driver for a moment in a shaft of light from the fins.
“That’s Cushing,” I said.
“Shit.” Angie honked the tinny horn of the Celica as I popped the glove compartment and pulled out my gun, then Angie’s. I tucked hers on the console against the emergency brake, jacked a bullet into the chamber of my own.
Up ahead, Jay’s head straightened as he looked in his rearview. Angie kept her hand on the horn, but the wimpy bleat it emitted was lost when the nose of Mr. Cushing’s Lexus swung into the rear quarter panel of Jay’s 3000 GT.
The right wheels of the little sports car jumped up on the curb and sparks flew off the passenger side as it careened off the barrier to Jay’s right. Jay swung his wheel hard to the left and jumped back off the curb. His sideview mirror was ripped off the car, and I turned my head to the side as it rocketed back through the rain and crashed into our windshield, ripped a spiderweb through the glass in front of my face.