“I loved her!” Tish screamed. She beat her hands ferociously on Rikke’s chest, driving her back toward the edge of the bridge. “You goddamned bitch, how could you!”
Rikke recovered and stumbled forward on her knees. She bunched the lapels of Tish’s jacket in her fists. Their faces were an inch apart. “What about you? I spent my whole life looking over my shoulder because of you. You ruined my life. You ruined Finn’s life.”
Tish slapped her hard. “You took Laura away!”
Rikke pushed herself to her feet, swaying and towering over Tish. “Get up.”
Tish wrapped her hands around Rikke’s ankles and pulled violently. Rikke shouted and tumbled like a tree, landing in the gravel. Tish crawled away toward the speeding cars on the highway, but Rikke threw herself onto Tish’s back and drove her to the asphalt. Rikke rolled her over. Sharp rocks sliced into Tish’s skin. The older woman’s face was blood red and twisted with fury.
Rikke’s fingers curled like talons and seized Tish’s neck. Her thumbs drove into Tish’s windpipe, making her gag and choke. She couldn’t breathe. Her body spasmed. She tore at Rikke’s hands, but they were two blocks of granite.
“Rikke!”
They both heard the voice.
Rikke let go of Tish’s neck and peered through the fog on the bridge deck. Tish gasped for breath and twisted away. Behind her, she saw Stride, his gun out, sprinting toward them. Tish tried to wriggle free, but Rikke came off her knees and stood up, wrapping another choke hold around her neck and dragging Tish to her feet. Tish struggled and kicked, her eyes growing white and wide as Rikke inched toward the edge of the bridge. Tish clawed for the safety of the car, but Rikke held her tight, forcing her to stare into the black abyss below them.
Tish could see it clearly. In her head, she was already falling. Her breath left her chest, and she thought her heart would burst.
“Stop!” Rikke shouted at Stride. “I’ll kill us both.”
Stride stopped. He holstered his gun and held up his hands. “Let her go, Rikke.”
Tish squirmed like a frightened animal in Rikke’s arms. Her fingers tore at Rikke’s clothes.
“If I let her go, she’ll jump,” Rikke said. “She’s out of her head.”
“Put her back in the car.”
Rikke’s legs nudged against the concrete barrier on the edge of the bridge deck. The height of the barrier barely came up past her knees. She leaned into the wind, carrying Tish’s torso with her. Tish wailed, a noise so primal and terrified that it made Stride flinch.
“I’ll do it,” Rikke said. “I’ll take her with me. I don’t care.”
Stride’s mind shut out the world. Distractions fell away. He didn’t notice the wind or the height or the thumping of the highway under his feet. He took two steps closer to Rikke. She was six feet away.
“Stay back,” she warned him.
He was conscious of the fact that Serena was behind him, stopping the flow of cars heading west. On the opposite side of the bridge, he heard the siren of a squad car speeding from Duluth. The squad car stopped twenty yards away at an angle across both eastbound lanes, and a young policewoman bolted out of the car, her gun drawn. He slowly brought up his hand, keeping her where she was. The cop held her ground, and traffic from the Duluth side bled away to nothing as cars backed up behind her car.
They were alone up here.
“I want you both to get back in the car,” he told Rikke.
Wisps of fog floated lazily between them. The bridge was in and out of the flow of clouds. Far below, Stride heard a boat whistle. He recognized it as the call of a Coast Guard rescue cutter, churning toward the span of the bridge and positioning itself in the bay. He had been on that boat many times. Most jumpers didn’t come out of the water alive.
He took another step.
“Let her go,” he told Rikke. “Give her to me.”
Rikke’s eyes were like blue stones. “Don’t move,” she said.
Stride put his hands up. “I’m not moving.”
One of the twin sets of vertical cables supporting the roadbed was immediately behind Rikke. She slid her left arm around the cables to brace herself and hoisted Tish bodily off the ground with her other arm. Tish’s legs kicked madly, and her blond hair twirled around her head in the back-and-forth of the wind.
“Go ahead,” Rikke told Stride with scorn. “Come get me.”
“Tish never did a thing to you,” Stride said. “Whatever happened between you and Laura has been over for years.”
“Then she should have stayed away.”
Stride saw the policewoman on the opposite side of the bridge climb silently over the barrier between the lanes and sidle into his line of vision. She was thirty feet behind Rikke. She signaled Stride with her left hand, then pointed at herself and aimed her gun where it would fire harmlessly over the water. She looked at him with a question in her eyes.
Fire or not fire. Create a diversion.
Almost imperceptibly, Stride nodded.
The policewoman held up her left hand and lifted one finger into the air. Then two. As she lifted the third, her finger depressed the trigger on her gun, and a sharp report cracked on the bridge.
Rikke flinched, and at the same instant, Stride dove. He wasn’t fast enough. Rikke launched Tish violently against the concrete guardrail, where she lost her balance and toppled forward. Rikke turned and ran. Stride clawed for Tish and nearly had her, but her torso slipped through his grasp, and she kept falling. His right hand grazed her thigh, and his left hand caught behind her knee, but she stripped past him, picking up speed on her drop toward the bay. She was sliding, falling, and wailing, until his hands locked around her thin calf and her right foot caught on his clenched fingers, and she finally jerked to a stop.
Tish hung suspended over one hundred and twenty feet of air between the bridge and the water.
Her weight pinned Stride against the concrete barrier. He felt her squirming, fighting him, almost as if she wanted to fall. His upper body was bent over the bridge; he was being pulled, dragged down. He couldn’t lift her up. All he could do was hold on to her ankle, but the muscles in his arms groaned and weakened.
“Serena!” he shouted. He could hear her running behind him.
“Hold on!”
Stride tried to make time stop. He tried to clear his mind of everything except the lock-hold of his hands around Tish’s ankle. They were like handcuffs. Tight. Not giving up.
“Hold on, Jonny, I’m here.” Serena leaned over the edge, stared down at the dark water, and cursed. “Oh, son of a bitch, I don’t know if I can do this.”