Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

“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.

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.

As we passed, I looked out the window. They laid his wet corpse down in the grass, and his flesh was the white of a fish’s underbelly. His dark hair plastered his face, and his eyes were closed tight, his forehead dented.

If you didn’t notice the dent in his forehead, he looked like he was sleeping. He looked at peace. He looked about fourteen years old.

“Well,” Jefferson said as he came back into the interrogation room, “we have some bad news for you, Mr. Kenzie.”

My head was throbbing so hard I was sure a band of majorettes had taken up residence in my skull and the inside of my mouth felt like sunbaked leather. I couldn’t move my left arm, wouldn’t have been able to even if the bandages had permitted it, and the cuts on my face and head had caked and swelled.

“How’s that?” I managed.

Jefferson dropped a manila folder on the table between us and removed his suit jacket and placed it over the back of his chair before he took a seat.

“This Mr. Graham Clifton—what’d you call him back on the bridge—the Weeble?”

I nodded.

He smiled. “I like that. Well, the Weeble had three bullets in him. All from your gun. The first entered his back and came out through his right breast.”

I said, “I told you I fired into the car while it was moving. I thought I hit something.”

“And you did,” he said. “Then you shot him twice as he came out of the car, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s not the bad news. The bad news is you told me this Weeble guy, he worked for a Trevor Stone of Marblehead, Massachusetts?”

I nodded.

He looked at me and shook his head slowly.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

“Mr. Clifton was employed by Bullock Industries, a research and development consulting firm located in Buckhead.”

“Buckhead?” I said.

He nodded. “Atlanta. Georgia. Mr. Clifton, as far as we know, never set foot in Boston.”