What kind of friends, he wondered, would let a friend drive all the way back to Standish on a night like this?
He chuckled softly to himself as he used the back of his gloved hand to clear away the glazing of frost on the inside of the windshield. Tom—or maybe Blaine—what the fuck . . .
someone
should have asked him to sleep it off at their house. He could have called Gail and told her that he was delayed because of the storm. Shit, one missed birthday wasn’t going to be the end of the world, was it?
But no.
The ever-faithful husband that he was, he was risking his life to drive the twenty-three miles from South Portland to his home. Twenty-three point seven miles, to be exact. Lord knew he had calculated that distance enough times to make him puke!
Blizzard be damned!
he thought, glancing at the speedometer even though its dull green-lit numerals turned into needles that jabbed his eyes. He couldn’t look at it for long. The numbers on the speedometer would start to swim as through he was looking at them through the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam.
Jim Beam . . . high beam
. . . after a while, it all started to blur.
It happened just as he was crossing the Running Hill Road bridge near the Westbrook town line. He sensed more than saw the iron bridge span overhead—heavy and black. Both to his left and right was an impenetrable wall of swirling gray as dense as soot. He had to take it on faith that somewhere below on either side was the frozen Stroudwater River. The person—he had looked large, darting out of the storm like that—was suddenly, simply . . .
there
. . . right in front of him, appearing like an apparition.
David’s first reaction was to hit the brakes, but as soon as he felt the ass-end of the car start to shoosh around, he took his foot off the brake pedal, trusting that he was going slow enough so the man would see the headlights and get the fuck out of the way.
But—
damn it!
—he didn’t!
Either he truly never saw what hit him, or else he tried to get out of the car’s path and failed.
Or maybe
, David thought, maybe,
if he was nuts enough to be out walking in a storm like this in the first place, maybe he wanted to get hit.
It didn’t matter how David looked at it. Within a fraction of a second, before he could even blink, the man was there. The soft
thump
shook the steering wheel, and then he was . . . gone . . . like a puff of smoke, or a sudden, dark mirage that was quickly swallowed by the solid wall of gray.
There was such a sense of unreality to it all that David wasn’t even sure it had really happened as he gently pumped the brakes and played the steering wheel loosely in his hands to avoid going into a skid. He strained his eyes, looking into the rearview mirror, more than half-expecting to see a dark shape sprawled on the road behind him; but in the hazy red glow of the taillights, the road looked clear, except for the twin tire tracks he’d just made.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” David muttered as the car went into a sickening slow slide and then came to a stop. He slammed the shift into park and, resting his arm on the back of the seat, turned around to look. Through the shifting curtain of snow, the girders of the bridge overhead looked like a gigantic spider web. Low-throated wind howled around the car, the only sound other than the steady
slap-slap-crunch
of the wiper blades on the icy windshield.
“Hmm . . . nothing there,” David whispered. His brain was still swimming with booze. He sighed heavily and ran the back of his glove over his forehead, surprised by the slick, sweaty feel.
Why the hell was he sweating?
If there had been someone there . . . but no—the longer he looked back along the desolate stretch of bridge, the more convinced he became that there couldn’t have been anyone there. He had imagined seeing that person . . . And even if he hadn’t. . . .
“Well, only an idiot would be out on a night like this,” David whispered as he groggily shook his head. “One less pimple on the ass of this poor planet.” He chuckled softly at his alcohol-honed wit.
But what if he
had
knocked someone off the bridge?
Craning to see over the side, David guessed there had to be at least a couple of feet of snow down there—probably more in the hollow. If anyone fell down there, he’d probably land neck-deep in a cushion of snow. Probably right now, he was looking up at the underside of the bridge and wondering how the hell he got down there so fast. In a minute or two, after he got his bearings, he’d climb back up the embankment and continue on his way to . . . wherever he was walking on a night like this.
Whatever!
David figured it wasn’t his problem this jerk got in front of him. He should have seen the headlights coming and gotten the Christ out of the way!
But as drunk as he was, David knew he should at least get out and take a look. If the guy did need help, he should do whatever he could.
Pulling his gloves up tightly over his wrists, David opened the car door. Leaving the car running to keep it warm, he braced himself and stepped out into the howling storm. Stinging pellets of snow hit his face like bullets. The frigid wind buffeted him like unseen punches. Even in the short time since he’d left The Bull’s Eye, the weather had worsened. David tucked his neck deeply into his coat collar. Feeling like a silly-ass turtle, he trudged back along the swerving tracks his car had made in the snow, all the while wondering, if the good citizens of Westbrook paid their taxes, where the hell were the snowplows and sanders?
As soon as he stepped beneath the bridge girders, though, his give-a-shit attitude wavered. Something much colder than the wind, more biting than the snow blowing into his face tugged at him. He jerked to a stop, his eyes opening wide as he looked all around, trying to locate what could possibly have been making him feel so . . . so damned jumpy.
The storm was howling. Wind-driven snow hissed along the road. High overhead in the racing, twisting clouds, lost to sight, deeper voices moaned, sounding like people . . . dozens of people, moaning in agony.
It didn’t take long for the cold to bite through David’s thin jacket, which he had bought more for style than protection from the weather. His eyes were watering from the cold, and his teeth were chattering as he took two—three—four tentative steps onto the bridge.
As much as he tried to push it aside, he couldn’t deny the tension that was building up inside him. With each step he took—slow and trudging through the knee-deep snow—his nervousness jacked up another notch; David grew fearful that his rising panic was like an electrical charge generated, somehow, by the storm that would be transformed by the iron structure of the bridge. Any second now, if he wasn’t careful, the charge would arc out and ground out through him.
As his fear increased steadily, David faltered and stopped. He cast a fearful look over his shoulder at his car. It seemed strangely diminished as it sat there, its taillights glowing like baleful eyes in the wind-swept snow. The tornado-shaped cloud of exhaust swirling up into the night was quickly whisked away by the strong wind.
What David wanted to do—right now!—was get back into his car, slam it into gear, and drive the hell away from this bridge. Get home before Gail got too worried . . . or too pissed because he’d gone out drinking on her birthday.
Fuck it! Let the poor bastard fend for himself!
He might have gone over the bridge railing even if David hadn’t driven by just then . . . or maybe he
wanted
to go over! Maybe he wanted to die!
But in his heart, David knew that he had to check it out. If someone was down there needing help, maybe stuck hip-deep in the snow, and he just walked away . . . well, he knew he’d never be able to live with himself. Maybe, David thought, he would even go the extra distance and offer the poor bastard a ride home, just to assuage his guilty conscience.
He wasn’t ready for what he saw when he reached the side of the bridge and looked down. There were marks in the snow, all right. Definite evidence that someone had been walking by here recently. The man’s dragging footprints marred the otherwise unbroken snow. And there, not six feet from where David stood, the tracks led right up to the edge of the bridge to one place where the accumulated snow on the railing had been knocked clean off. David held his breath as he leaned over the railing and peered down into the darkness below. He was expecting to see someone looking up at him, his arms held out in silent supplication.
But that’s not what David saw.
He felt a sudden blast of horror as his eyes were drawn to the jagged, black hole in the snow that covered the frozen river. Below the hissing whistle of the storm, he could hear the throaty gurgle of running water.
“Aww, Christ! Aww, Jesus, you poor bastard!” David mumbled as he stared down at the black water lapping up onto the snow. Cold terror and a hollow sadness filled him as he imagined what it must have felt like to see headlights suddenly appear from out of the night, and then to feel the rock-hard impact and to find yourself falling backwards . . . backwards and down into the darkness.
What thoughts would have filled that person’s mind, David wondered, when he hit the ice, then felt it crack open beneath his weight as the frigid water reached up, quickly soaked through his clothes, and then dragged him down with cold, leaden hands?
“Jesus Christ!” David shouted as the impact of the sudden realization hit him.
“I just killed a man!”
He took a lurching step back from the railing. His hands ached as he clenched them into fists and pressed them hard against his head.
“I can’t believe it! I just
killed
someone!”
His words were whisked away on the storm, disappearing like the slow, rolling echo of thunder.
Frantic with fear, David whimpered softly as he scanned the road in both directions. At least right now, there were no other cars in sight. Although he knew—all too well—how suddenly one can come up on you from out of the storm, at least for right now, he was safe—no one had seen what had happened.
“Okay! . . . All right!” David muttered as he stared down at the gaping hole in the river ice. “I’m sorry about this, you poor bastard, but there was nothing I could do about it, all right? I didn’t see you . . . not until it was too late. And now there sure as shit ain’t
nothing
I can do for you!”
The tension churning inside him suddenly unleashed. Spinning on his heel. David started running back to his car. His feet skidded on the slick road, and the deep snow tripped him up, pulling him back as he staggered forward. The only thought in his mind was—he had to get the hell away from the bridge.
Let the poor bastard be!
He was dead and gone!
It made no sense to ruin his own life just because of a simple, stupid accident. There was nothing he could have done . . . especially on a night like this!
It could have happened to anybody!
But it happened to me!
He tried to run fast, but the harder he pushed, the more the snow seemed to drag him back. He knew it had to be an illusion from the falling snow, but it looked as though the road was pitching crazily down at a sharp angle, and that his car was gently, silently slipping away from him. The bridge appeared to telescope outward, expanding to compensate double for every trudging step he took. Sudden powerful gusts of wind whistled in the iron girders overhead, making the whole bridge vibrate and hum. Again, David was convinced that the bridge was thrumming with a steadily building electrical charge.
Can there be lightning in a blizzard?
he wondered.
All he could picture was a forked bolt of blue light, ripping down from the storm clouds and striking the bridge, instantly frying him. He could almost feel the black hole in the ice below the bridge, and in his terror-filled imagination, that hole was growing steadily larger, spreading out below him and creating a hungry vortex that would eagerly suck him down . . . down into a long, spiraling fall that would end the instant he plunged into the freezing, black water.
But then—suddenly—he realized he was getting closer to his car. It seemed to leap out at him just as he tripped and fell, pitching forward as though a rug had been pulled out from under his feet. David slammed onto the back of the car with enough impact to knock the breath out of him. He was dimly aware that he must have left a dent in the trunk, but he didn’t pause to look as he scrambled to open the driver’s door and jump inside the car.
Once he was safely behind the wheel, he just sat there, dazed and panting heavily as he tried to stop imagining the hole in the river ice growing and pulsating as it seeped out of the storm . . . coming toward him. He wrenched the gear shift into drive and stepped down hard on the gas.
The tires whined as they spun in the deep snow, searching for traction on the asphalt below. The car started moving forward with infuriating slowness. David’s breath felt like fire in his chest as he hunched over the steering wheel and jockeyed it back and forth, trying to make the car move faster. The rear end of the car kept swinging around toward the front, but he adjusted for it, turning into the skids and telling himself that the last thing he needed was to be stranded out here on a night like this . . . especially with a man he had just killed less than a hundred yards down the road.