“She’s asked to speak to you,” he tells me and my entire body goes rigid with shock. “They’ve obviously told her you’re on the way so she won’t do anything until you get there.”
“You don’t know that,” I say hysterically.
“No, I don’t,” he admits in a low voice. “But she asked for you for a reason, so there’s an important conversation she clearly needs to have with you. Any idea what it is?”
I shake my head because there’s nothing inside of me that can fathom why Lida is doing this shit. Then an idea strikes. I grab my phone and dial Pepper’s mother. When she answers I ask to speak to her daughter.
“What’s happening?” Pepper asks.
“We’ve found her and we’re on the way there. She says she wants to talk to me.” I don’t dare tell Pepper she’s threatened to jump off a bridge as I don’t want her to worry.
“Oh,” Pepper murmurs and I can tell she’s digesting that.
“What did she say to you when she came into your house, Pepper? Anything that can help me get an idea of what the hell she wants besides Charlie?”
There’s no hesitation. Pepper merely says, “She wants you. She told me she was going to kill me to get me out of the way so she could have you and you could be a family with Charlie.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I growl, because that’s even more twisted than I thought. I just assumed that Pepper got caught in the crossfire of a botched kidnapping but to know she was specifically targeted makes me want to vomit.
“She was dead serious too,” Pepper tells me. “So that’s your angle with her. Promise her exactly what she wants. Make her believe it, Legend.”
“Yeah…okay,” I murmur. “Okay…thanks, baby. I’ll call when this is over. It will be fine, I promise.”
“I love you,” she says. “And I have faith in you that you’ll bring your daughter home safely.”
God, I hope she’s right.
As we travel to the bridge, I tell Nordstrom what Pepper said. He uses the time to give me some advice on how to negotiate with her. Promise a serious conversation with her if she just comes away from the railing. Tell her I can’t concentrate when Charlie’s that close.
Use words of affirmation and make her feel valued.
Let her know that I understand where she’s coming from and now that I know how serious she is about us being a family, it’s something we really need to discuss.
Keep her talking.
Make her promises.
Get her away from the railing.
Try to talk her into letting me hold Charlie while we talk.
Fuck, I’m going to puke. I’ve never been more nervous in my life because I’ve never had someone’s life hanging in the balance like this. And not just anyone’s life.
Charlie’s.
Sweet, angelic, innocent, and helpless Charlie.* * *—
The sun is hanging low in the late afternoon sky as Nordstrom parks his car among the other police vehicles at the east end of the bridge. We’re met by a highway patrol officer who gives us an assessment of the situation. I can see a silver crossover SUV parked at an angle and Lida in front of it. There’s no pedestrian walkway but only a small concrete step up to the brown rusted railing that looks to be about four feet high with two rungs. It would be no easy feat for Lida to climb it with Charlie in her arms but they’re not going to take the risk of her doing something stupid like tossing Charlie over the edge and then climbing over to follow. So everyone is keeping their distance.
“You okay?” Nordstrom asks me as he claps hands on my shoulders.
“Yeah…I got this,” I tell him.
“As a last resort, we have a sharpshooter trained on Lida. We don’t want it to go there to keep Charlie as safe as possible. Anything you can do to get that kid in your arms safely, you do it.”
“Got it,” I tell him, and I think of Pepper’s face and how she watched me cry for my kid and loved me even more.
She has faith in me.
I so totally fucking got this.
I start the walk toward Lida. She’s at least a couple hundred yards away and I feel the weight of her stare with every step I take. She has Charlie wrapped in a blanket and held up against her chest and shoulder so I can’t see any part of my daughter.
When I reach her, I come to a stop about twenty feet away, just as Nordstrom advised me to do until I could get a feel for how jittery she might be.
She gives me a relieved smile and her voice sounds like I’m the most wondrous thing she’s ever seen. “You came.”
For Charlie, not you, I think to myself.
But I smile back. “Of course, I did.”