The bridge
The deputy glanced up from twiddling with his radio's volume control, and his face went hot, for the side of a semi filled his headlights. He slammed on the brakes, spinning the steering wheel as he did to carry his cruiser away the truck, his cruiser skidding on the rain-slicked pavement. He held on as a rear tire hit the shoulder. It whipped the cruiser around, throwing the front end into the ditch, into a world of silence except for the rhythmic whish-whish-whish . . .
"Car Eight, Car Eight, you out there, Ted?"
Rain and the sweeping of the wipers . . .
"Car Eight, Car Eight . . ."
* * *
In the glow from the instrument panel, the deputy studied his hands gripped tight to the steering wheel as if it were a life ring. He willed his fingers to release themselves, but they would not.
A pounding came to the glass next to his shoulder, and a beam of light flashed through the window. It struck the side of his face, and he squinted as he twisted toward the light, and this time his hand followed. It went to the door handle, jerked up, and the door swung open.
"You all right, buddy?" someone asked. The air that swept into the stuffy interior smelled of spring and rain and grass.
The deputy fumbled for his own magnum light. He found it and aimed it into the face of a man in a Humphrey's jacket, a scar on his right cheek, Big Lenny stitched over his breast pocket. "Good God, where'd you come from, man?"
"Highway Twenty-Four. Bridge out about a mile down there."
"Nobody's called it in," the deputy said.
"I tried, but my cell's dead. I was coming back, to find a ranch where I could get to a phone. You all right?"
"Guess so, I'm alive. You?"
"Yeah."
"Mister, you look like you're soaked."
"Aw, just a little damp. Think you can get your car out of the ditch if I push on the front?"
The deputy twisted further around. He glanced back along the side of his cruiser. "If my rear's still on the gravel—"
"It is. Let me get down there in front."
The deputy pulled the door closed. He watched the Humphrey's driver work his way through the pelting rain, around the fender to the front of his cruiser and crouch, as if grabbing a hold of the bumper.
The deputy dropped the transmission into reverse. He rocked the cruiser back once, twice, exhaust seeping inside as he did, then he stepped the gas pedal to the floor.
The engine howled. It set the rear tires spinning, and the cruiser shot back, up and out of the ditch amid a shower of wet gravel. He braked to a stop in the middle of the pavement, a semi to the side, idling, its hazard lights flashing, illuminating the night for moments, as if the lights were strings of fireflies.
Again the Humphrey's driver stood in the rain, rapping on the cruiser's glass. The deputy ran the window down, and the man, wetter than ever, leaned in, a faint smell of diesel about him. "Maybe you should call it in. That bridge is in a mighty bad place. Anybody comes booming over that little hill, they're not gonna see it's out 'til it's too late."
"Yeah, yeah." The deputy groped for his microphone. He recovered it from the floor and squeezed the transmitter button. "Dottie, Car Eight."
"Car Eight. Ted, I've been trying to reach you."
"Been in the ditch."
"What happened?"
"Long story. Humphrey's driver says the bridge is out on Twenty-Four, a mile west of Seventy-Seven. I'm gonna go down there, put out flares. Call Tubbs, wouldja, at the highway department? Tell 'im to send out barricades."
"I'm on it."
The deputy turned to the Humphrey's driver, but no one was there. He twisted toward the semi, heard the snorting of a diesel and two blasts on an air horn as the big truck trundled away.
Alone, the deputy drove on. He slowed and flipped on his light bar when he came to the hill on this side of the bridge. When he topped the rise, not high by Kansas standards, he saw in his headlights, where the bridge should have been, the rear of a truck at an odd angle, its running lights burning. And the lettering on the rear doors a shocker—Humphrey's.
The deputy grabbed his magnum light as he scrambled from his cruiser. In the rain—pelting at a slant that almost paralleled the roadway—holding one hand tight to his cattlemen's hat he plunged over the side and hop-stepped down along the trailer, slipped, slid, and splashed into the rushing waters of the creek greasy with diesel fuel, chilling, swirling around the cab half submerged. The deputy grabbed for the truck's exhaust stack, caught it to keep from being washed away. He hauled himself up to the driver's door. There he flashed his light in on a man sprawled forward on the steering wheel.
The deputy yanked at the door handle, yanked again, and when it didn't give, he hammered at the glass, bashed it in. He pressed his fingertips to the artery in the man's neck.
No pulse. Nothing but the smell of blood.
He horsed the man back. Something about that face, a mess from having slammed into the windshield. His light went to the stitching above the breast pocket.
"Can't be," the deputy said to the rain. "Then who?"
© Jerry Peterson.
