From his vantage point high above the tangled foliage of the riverbank, sitting on the gravel shoulder of Illinois 96, the Great River Road, in his Crown Victoria Prowler, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, gobbling a sugar-glazed pastry, Illinois State Trooper Wayne Ganz marvels at the vastness of his beat. Today it seems he can see all the way to Kentucky.

  Days like these, Trooper Ganz—a tall drink of water in his late twenties with a smart razor-cut under his gigantic Stetson—sometimes likes to sit up here and take stock. He likes to take stock with a nice cruller in one hand and a hot cup of joe in the other. He likes to gaze out across the mighty Mississippi, the squawk box turned down so he can think in peace, think about how he made the right decision getting out of the limestone business.

  His father had worked himself to a slow death down in the Quincy carbonate quarry. Died with a lungful of dust. Same story with his grandpa. Not Wayne. Young Wayne Ganz had different ideas. He had dreams and schemes that took him all the way to the Academy.

  And the Highway Patrol.

  And here, today, high atop this scenic slice of God’s real estate.

  To his immediate west, on the Iowa side of the river, about a mile away, Ganz can see the massive gray cake layers of the Carbonate Amalgamated Quarryworks. Every time the young trooper lays eyes on that gouge in the earth, he inwardly shudders. He could have easily ended up there, working in that godforsaken quarry, down in the bone-white misty nether regions, on the conveyor, or up on the loader in the baking sun.

  Ganz looks away, shaking off the melancholy thoughts, gobbling the rest of his fried dough.

  About a quarter of a mile to the south, he can see the old August Derleth suspension bridge reaching across the great muddy Old Man. A century old, its rickety spans weathered by river rot to a moldy black, the bridge is an offense to the eye, a black scar on the sleepy little postcard villages on either side. For years, Ganz has been hearing rumors that hamlet elders are tearing it down in favor of a new turret job for the barges, but the thing just stubbornly remains, year after year, swaying in the winds, the stone-haulers taking chance after chance across its creaking ties.

  Ganz freezes in his seat, his Styrofoam cup halfway to his mouth.

  He stares at the bridge.

  At first it looks as though a hapless motorist has pulled over halfway across the bridge with car trouble. From this distance, the green minivan looks like a species of Matchbox car, the sun glinting off its tinted windows. But something about the sight makes Ganz’s gut tighten. The driver is just sitting there behind the wheel, not doing anything, maybe talking on a cell phone, maybe consulting a map. But why stop halfway across the bridge?

  Ganz has heard stories about the Derleth bridge. Local folklore. Whispers of a curse. Suicide Bridge, some of the yocals call it. And indeed there have been more than an inordinate number of incidents over the years. One poor soul tried to jump last March and got hung up on the lower cables like a trussed-up Thanksgiving turkey. Back in the mid-nineties a pair of kids went off it in a suicide pact, hitting the rocks below.

  Sheriff’s police found pieces of them as far south as the Festus locks.

  The trooper puts his coffee down and starts up the prowler. Something about this guy is wrong. In the distance Ganz can see the dark-green minivan sitting there in the sun, midway across the Derleth, the driver’s door opening.

  Ganz puts the prowler in gear. The engine growls, and the rear wheels chew gravel.

  Something is definitely not right about this guy: nobody stops on the Derleth if they don’t have to.

  Andrew Kornblum turns the ignition off and summons all his strength. It takes a massive amount of will just to slide out from behind the steering wheel and push himself outside.

  He plants his feet on the bridge-walk—a narrow ribbon of planks running along the ramshackle deck—and he takes a tentative step away from the car. The bridge is deserted. No traffic whatsoever. He leaves the door open. The wind, redolent with fish stink, whistles in his face. The span pitches gently beneath him.

  Looking down through the gaps, he can see the churning whitecaps a hundred feet below the span, the ceaseless waves smacking ancient stone slabs.

  It all seems hyperreal, his senses on overdrive, every odor, every sensation excruciatingly vivid. And maybe that’s a sign he will complete the task this time. The first time, in the garage, with the vacuum cleaner attachment duct-taped to the exhaust pipe, there was a whiff of reluctance to it, a sense of theatrics.

  He moves slowly around the front of the Caravan, like a sleepwalker, never taking his eyes off the gunmetal currents beneath him.

  His heart hammers in his chest. He can smell the river, and he can hear the tattletale call of shorebirds, and he can taste the bitter copper on the back of his tongue. This is real. This is going to happen this time.

  This is going to be the end of Andrew Kornblum.

  He strides along the bridge-walk, looking for an access point.

  The guardrail is high and fringed with concertina wire. But there has to be a place of egress somewhere, maybe near a guide wire, a spot from which the workmen climb up to repair the aging towers.

  Kornblum feels the anguish dragging him down like a black stone in his chest as he hobbles along in the wind. He feels the weight of his estranged family, the absence of his little girls, the life he will leave in tatters. He feels the shame and the despair, and he tells himself, It won’t be long now, relief is coming, soon, soon...

  He sees a space about fifty feet away—the nadir of the giant cable as it loops down from the far tower—and he heads toward it. There is a steel gate affixed to the bottom edge of the cable, padlocked and congealed with moss, apparently providing, at one time, a service portal to the joists and beams along the bottom to the bridge.

  The closer he gets, the heavier the anguish. He finds his mind casting back on his three earlier attempts.

  If the one in the garage was mere prelude, the second one, in his wife’s bathroom, with the Seconals, while she was in Connecticut, was a full-blown stunt. He had no intention of offing himself at that point, he simply wanted drama. The most recent attempt, of course, with the .38 Special he bought from the sporting goods store in Rockford, was stillborn. He didn’t want to leave a mess.

  He wants to go out cleanly this time, decisively, dramatically, his body washing away on the currents like a myth, all the evidence left behind perfectly calibrated to elicit maximum sorrow, the maximum number of down-turned heads and guilt-ridden bewilderment. This is important to Kornblum. If only we had done more, talked to him, helped him, loved him, understood him.

  He reaches the gate and climbs over the threshold of sun-baked iron.

  There is a precipice there, an eight-inch ledge of wind-swept timber overhanging the bridge. He stands on it stoically, holding onto the cable for purchase, the river breeze nudging him left and right, flapping the legs of his freshly pressed Dockers.

  He looks down and blinks back a wave of vertigo. This is it.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he hears an incongruous noise behind him: heavy footsteps, coming toward him, fast and loud. Kornblum instantly passes the footsteps off as his adrenaline-charged imagination playing tricks on him again, and he proceeds toward his final plunge.

  Closing his eyes, coiling his legs for the big leap, he hears the sound of a nearby voice blurting out—“NOT SO FAST, ASSHOLE!”—which is accompanied by a tremendous and sudden pressure around Kornblum’s neck.

  11.

  By this point Oswald is so wired and hyped up with anger and aggravation that he nearly tears the Izod shirt off Kornblum’s back as he yanks the butthole back over the threshold and onto the bridge.

  Kornblum lands hard on the small of his back, expelling a mucousy gasp, stunned and pop-eyed, like a freshly caught fish flopping on a boat deck. “Wha—? Whahhh—?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Oswald reaches down and grabs a handful of Kornblum’s collar. Exhausted and winded, his big chambray denim shirt soaked under the armpits, Oswald kneels down in the man’s face. “I’m gonna need you to shut up and listen.”

  “I don’t—” The asshole wriggles in Oswald’s grasp. “I don’t—”

  “SHUT UP AND LISTEN!”

  Oswald slams the back of Kornblum’s skull against the boardwalk, and Kornblum stiffens and lets out another breathless gasp.

  The fishy wind tosses Oswald’s greasy black locks into his eyes as he digs in his pocket for the speech. He’s got a Bluetooth in his ear, crackling with static. “Hold on a second, hold on—”

  “I don’t—”

  “Shut your fucking piehole and listen to me.” Oswald pulls the wrinkled notebook page from his back pocket with one hand, clutching the moron’s shirt with the other. “Gonna need you to hear something.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’m here to save your life, Mister, um…” Oswald looks at his notes. “Kornbluth. Mister Kornbluth.”

  The asshole stares up at him, shaking, licking his dry lips. “It’s—it’s um—it’s Kornblum.”

  Oswald blinks. “What?”

  “Kornblum with an ‘m.’”

  “Sorry... sorry... must have... it’s a typo.” Oswald wipes sweat from his brow and looks at his notes. The distant sound of tires squealing off to the east nags at him. “You live at 2345 Waring Place in Dekalb, right? Got two daughters? Is that correct?” Oswald tightens his grip, shakes Kornblum a little. “IS THAT CORRECT?!”

  Kornblum swallows hard. “My... my address?”

  “NO, YOU IDIOT!!—YOUR DAUGHTERS!! YOUR TWO LITTLE GIRLS!!”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes—I have two daughters—that’s correct!”

  Oswald looks at the imbecile. “You want them to die, too?! You want a little piece of your children to die with you?!”

  This is the only part of the speech Oswald has memorized, but now he’s starting to think that maybe he should have memorized all of it. Lord knows, he had enough time to memorize it.

  Getting the list out of the suicide specialist at Humana Health Care had taken forever. Shrinks are notoriously tight-lipped, and Oswald had ultimately been forced to stick a gun barrel in the ear of the stubborn psychiatric worker to get the names and addresses out of him. But the waiting was the worst part. Oswald had waited around for almost two weeks for one of these high-risk clowns to make an attempt. Twelve days and three separate PIs tailing these pussies had burned through most of Oswald’s mad money.

  “ANSWER THE QUESTION!” Oswald shoves the bonehead to the deck, then reaches around to the back of his belt, where the Bulldog is holstered in a quick-draw sheathe. He pulls the .44 out and presses the barrel against the cowering Kornblum’s damp forehead. “ANSWER ME!”

  “No, absolutely not, no, I don’t want them to die, I don’t want my daughters to die.” Kornblum trembles and whimpers as he slams his eyes closed. The crotch of his Dockers is soaked through with his piss, the pungent aroma mingling with the river breezes.

  “That’s good, because that’s how we’re gonna save your life,” Oswald tells him, keeping the muzzle against the man’s forehead. “It has to do with your little girls... um.” Oswald glances back at his notes. “... Courtney and Tiffany? And your lovely ex-wife... um.” Another glance at the notes. “... Jane. Jane and Courtney and Tiffany. These are your victims. These are the casualties of your selfish—”

  Oswald stops, lets out an irritated sigh, then crumples the note and tosses it into the wind. “Fuck this shit!” He looks at Kornblum. “What the fuck took you so long?!”

  Kornblum is convulsing with tremors, staring wide-eyed. “Wha... what?”

  Oswald rises and starts pacing back and forth, waving the gun for punctuation. “Twelve fucking days I’ve waited for one of you shitheads to try to blow your brains out so I can start racking up the saves, but no, no, not a single one of you suicidal wussies has the balls to go for it! For almost two weeks I’m waiting, and I’m waiting, and meanwhile the moon is halfway to full—”

  The Bluetooth in Oswald’s ear crackles, a high-pitched voice: “Hey, Tonto, you there?”

  Oswald sighs. “One second, don’t move”. He reaches up and absently taps the Bluetooth while pointing the gun at Kornblum. “Gerbil?—What is it?—I’m the middle of the speech.”

  “How far into it are you?”

  Oswald shrugs. “Actually, I’ve gone off-script a little bit, I’m improvising a little. It’s going well. Why do you ask?”

  “We got company.”

  Trooper Wayne Ganz is going at a pretty good clip down the dirt access road, which runs along the boat docks and bait shops of Nauvoo’s downscale pier, when he sees the big guy with the gun on the bridge.

  Ganz sees the guy out of his right front wing, the sun glinting harshly off the Crown Victoria’s right quarter panel. The glare plays havoc with the trooper’s line of vision, and the bridge is still a football field away, but the young trooper knows a handgun when he sees one—even from a hundred-yards-and-change away, rumbling over a herringbone of ruts, raising a storm head of dust.

  Alarms go off in the trooper’s brain, adrenaline singing down his spinal column. He has yet to see any violence in his short career—a little over three years with the patrol and not much more than a few whiny motorists protesting yellow violation slips.

  He reaches under his dash and flips on the chaser lights, then grips the wheel tighter and stomps on the accelerator. The Crown Victoria growls.

  The access road runs along water level, past dilapidated shacks with tin roofs and boarded windows, past rotten docks and pilings long sunken into unforgiving marsh. Ganz blurs past them, keeping his gaze fixed on the concrete gateway three hundred feet away, baking in sun, engulfed in cattails.

  The entrance to the Derleth doesn’t see much tourist or commuter traffic—most civilians use the Keokuk Causeway ten miles to the south—and this time of day, in the middle of the quarry’s first shift, the only vehicles using the bridge belong to either employees of Carbonate Amalgamated or local merchants and farmers.

  As he draws up on the entrance, Trooper Ganz considers calling in for backup, but something stops him—a series of lightning-quick judgment calls crossing his mind with the speed of a synapse firing. Back at HQ, they make fun of his youth sometimes, and it eats at Ganz. What if this is nothing, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if the big guy is merely waving a stick?

  Plus Ganz needs his hands. He’s got a hairpin turn coming up fast, and besides, he’s got his .357 Colt Desert Eagle on his hip and the 12-gauge on the rack, and nobody argues with a Mossman 12-gauge loaded with deer-shot. The radio will have to wait.

  He bears down on the gateway, goosing the breaks and yanking the wheel.

  Oswald is so distracted by the action unfolding at either end of the bridge that he loses track of the wimp for a fraction of a second—hardly more time than it takes Oswald to glance to the east and then to the west—but it’s enough time for Kornblum to run.

  At first, Oswald is too busy to do anything about it, gaping at the battered old poultry truck coming toward him from the west, a stake job, loaded to the gills with crates full of chickens. He glances back over his shoulder at the opposite end of the bridge, where a state trooper is screeching around the corner of the bridge road, rumbling onto the precarious span in a swirl of dust and spinning lights.

  And this is when Oswald catches a glimpse, in his peripheral vision, of the shithead scurrying away.

  “HEY!”

  Oswald instinctively calls out at the fleeing Kornblum, who is racing full bore along the boardwalk toward the oncoming poultry truck. The man is flailing along with a weird limp, his piss-damp Dockers flapping in the wind, his hot gaze searching the bridge cables for an opening. Oswald spits and curses and jacks a round into Bulldog.

  The Bluetooth in his ear crackles again: “I don’t want to intrude, Tonto, but your guy’s getting away.”

  Oswald starts racing after the asshole, grumbling into his earpiece: “No shit!”

  “And in case you haven’t noticed, you got Barney Fife coming up fast on your left flank.”

  From her vantage point on the Iowa side, near the quarry, perched at the very top of a derelict crane, Gerbil sounds like she’s actually enjoying this. Oswald doesn’t have time to yell at her.

  “Tell me something I don’t know!” he bellows into the Bluetooth.

  Fifty feet away, Kornblum finds another ragged opening in the cable-stringers. He stumbles to a stop and quickly latches one hand onto the cable, and then he pulls himself up and over the guardrail. Trembling convulsively, he blubbers while he climbs, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over!”

  “KORNBLUTH, DON’T!” Oswald quickens his pace, breaking out in a full run, his finger on the trigger pad.

  A mewling sound comes out of Kornblum as he climbs onto the ledge: “It’s Kornblum.”

  “GODDAMNIT, DON’T!”

  From the west, the poultry truck rattles toward them, an olive-skinned old man in a tattered straw hat and greasy glasses behind the wheel, oblivious to the little mini-apocalypse going on a hundred feet ahead of him.

  “STOP RIGHT THERE!”

  Oswald makes a mad dash for the pussy, only half aware of the prowler’s looming presence behind him, the Crown Victoria all lit up, pedal down to the metal, engine screaming. The trooper behind the wheel is fresh-scrubbed and earnest and glaring under the brim of a Stetson.

  “NO!”

  Oswald makes a lurching dive for the shithead right as the man is leaping off the ledge. At the last possible instant, Oswald’s meat-hook hand grabs the back of the guy’s belt and holds on with the strength of a grappling hook.

  Kornblum screams a tormented yawp and hangs there for a single awkward moment, kicking and wriggling like a pig at slaughter, staring down at the blessed relief of the Mississippi.