Page 107

ONE HUNDRED THREE

BLAIR DRIVES TO THE top of the bluff overlooking the Cotton River. He pops the trunk and gets out of his car, the wind smacking him, blowing open his coat until he zips it up to his neck. He pulls a pair of binoculars out of his trunk and walks over to the edge of the bluff, raising the binoculars to his eyes.

Marcie is standing in the middle of the bridge. Behind her is a sizable gap in the bridge, a missing piece of the roadway. Right — it’s the spot where the motorist busted through the side and went into the river below. The truss bridge, a series of interconnected triangular steel beams forming the sides, is missing one of the triangles where the vehicle blasted through it, and they’ve removed a portion of the road at that juncture, leaving only the underlying zigzagging structural supports of the roadway.

Marcie is standing just in front of that gap, right at the precipice. Beneath her, the roiling, raging waters of the Cotton River.

And next to her, lined up in a row, one after the other, right beside her — the duffel bags. He does a quick count. Eleven. That’s what Silas said — Marcie had eleven duffel bags. Eleven bags, meaning … eleven million dollars? Who knows how much of the twenty million has already been spent. But even if it’s down to eleven — that’s a lot of retirement money.

But why so close to the edge of the bridge, Marcie?

He focuses on her again. Her eyes are down, looking at her phone, cradled in her hands, as the wind tosses her hair in all directions.

What is this?

He pulls out his phone and dials Marcie’s number while watching her through the binoculars. She recognizes the number and punches a button, raises the phone to her right ear while covering her left ear with her other hand.

“Where are you?” she shouts, the wind rippling through the phone connection.

“I’m on the bluff above you.”

She looks up, finds him. “I want this to be over!” she cries.

“What are you doing, Marcie?”

“What am I doing? I’m doing what I should have done the moment I realized we had all this money! I just wanted you to witness me doing it, so you’ll know.”

He doesn’t understand. “Witness you doing what?”

“You can’t put me in prison for money I don’t have,” she says. “You can’t kill me for money I can’t give you!”

Huh?

Oh. Oh, shit —

“Marcie, wait!” he shouts, but the line goes dead.

He keeps his binoculars trained on her. Marcie walks to the far end of the row of duffel bags, squats down, and with both hands shoves a duffel bag forward until —

“No! No!”

— until it disappears off the edge, through the gap in the bridge, tumbling end over end into the tumultuous waters of the Cotton River, where it smacks the surface and bobs along the waves, the current carrying it downstream.

And then she pushes the next one over the edge, another splat as it hits the river water.

He races to his car and jumps in, moving down the sloping road too fast, nearly losing control as he navigates around one of the ROAD CLOSED barriers, knocking the other one away. With the bridge in sight, he sees another bag tumble into the waters below, bobbing for a moment before the current carries it downstream.

He looks across the river and sees Silas’s car on the opposite bluff, beginning its winding descent toward the bridge.

He dials Silas’s number as he drives. “She’s dumping the money!” he yells into the phone. “She’s dumping all of it!”