Yesterday's News

lapped me earlier. Facing out, its lavish grille gave me a sharklike smile as I went by. The imagination is a bad creature to unleash.
    The bridge itself was two lanes, all I-beams and bolts, rusted here and reinforced there. It looked about a hundred yards long, spanning the shallow river maybe a hundred feet below. There was a steel vertical barrier on the outside walkway of each lane to keep vehicles from sliding off into space. No traffic in sight front or back. I decided to lope along the pedestrian curb anyway.
    I was maybe twenty strides onto the bridge when I heard the Buick’s engine cough and catch, the driver gunning it to life. I didn’t remember hearing the car door open or close, though the morning air was still enough that I should have.
    I broke into a sprint for the other side of the river.
    The Buick roared up behind me, spitting and choking. I risked a glance. The sun was behind the car, silhouetting the driver as he or she wrenched the wheel to the right, climbing the curb. I was like a bug in a rifle barrel, with the Buick as bullet coming up after me.
    Looking forward again, I had at least another fifty yards to the land on the other side of the bridge. Six to seven seconds minimum at the maximum spurt I could manage.
    I heard the Buick sand some paint off the side of the bridge. Real close.
    Using the barrier part of the bridge as a gymnast’s horse, I vaulted up and over. There was six inches of I-beam extruding from the outboard side. My right foot landed and held. The Buick struck the barrier just as my left foot hit, causing me to slide off. The beam barked the skin off my left shin and knee.
    Falling, I grabbed for a cross-rung abutment of some kind with my right hand. I couldn’t hold on, but it slowed me enough to let me grab and hold the next. Some rarely used muscles popped in my upper arm, but I was able to swing, chimplike, onto another crosspiece with my left hand, getting a purchase with both feet a second later.
    The Buick sounded as though it kept going, the wheezing of its engine replaced by the gutty rasp of the other car I’d seen, charging hard, horn blaring. The Camaro came to a screeching halt something short of where I was.
    After a car door opened, I heard running steps. Leaning out, I saw a familiar face peering moonlike over the top edge of the barrier.
    Duckie Teevens said, “Shit, Cuddy, you look just like Spiderman there.”

    “You make the driver?”
    Duckie shook his head. “I saw the car start up just after you left the motel, but I didn’t pay him any attention till I saw him jump the fuckin curb on the bridge.” Duckie swiveled toward me and smiled. “I figured he had you sure.”
    “It was a man, then?”
    “Huh?”
    “You keep saying ‘him’ and ‘he.’ Could you tell it was a man behind the wheel?”
    “No way. I think whoever it was had one of those commando hats on, you know?”
    “Commando hat. You mean a watch cap?”
    “Yeah, those little black things like the kids wear in the snow. Probably was a guy, though.”
    “Why?”
    “Can’t see no broad cold-blooded enough to go after you with a car like that.”
    “Why didn’t you chase after him, then?”
    Teevens laughed. “I thought you were feeding the minnows. The boss told me, keep an eye on you. Can’t keep no eye on you if you’re in the water and I’m going after some hit-and-runner, making some kind of citizen’s arrest for crissake.”
    “You peg the Buick as a hit-and-run?”
    Duckie slowed for a car turning left, then went around it slowly, using his signal both swerving right and coming back left. He waved to a police car parked in the shadow of a variety store just past the intersection.
    “I knew the fucker was there! Thursday morning, he’s always there by now. Thinks he was gonna get me, hot car like this. I tell you, I drive them nuts, I do. I got this jet engine under me, I drive like a fuckin grandma. Never got a ticket for nothing, moving violation, equipment, nothing. Fuckers.”
    “Duckie, you peg the Buick as a hit-and-run?”
    He looked over at me. “No. I don’t see it that way.” | “How do you see it?”
    “Seems kinda strange, him lying for you like that, then setting himself up so he could get you on the bridge. Takes a lot of thought, seems to me. Cold mother.”
    “Also seems kind of strange that Coyne gets himself stabbed, Jane Rust takes an overdose, and the Buick sets up to nail me like that, and they’re not