Dragons & Dwarves Read Free

photographer out here. Looking at the traffic, I decided that waiting for the guy was an exercise in masochism. I doubted that he would have any trouble finding carnage to digitize without my help.
    So I walked up to where the cops had set up a perimeter, a few hundred feet from the bridge itself. A pair of black-and-whites lorded it over a forest of red cones that blocked all four lanes of Carnegie, diverting everyone onto Ontario or I-90. No cops immediately in evidence, so I just walked past the roadblock.
    Once I passed the perimeter, I heard a car door slam, and a slightly strangled voice say, “Hey . . .”
    I turned around and saw a uniformed cop coming out of one of the black-and-whites. The cop was a kid, less than half my age. It was probably some detective’s idea of a joke setting the guy up here.
    “You,” he coughed, “can’t go up t-there.”
    I was impressed that the guy wasn’t falling to his knees from the smell. He was sweating. The druggist’s eyes had been watering, but this guy’s eyes were leaking down the sides of his face.
    “Kline Maxwell, Cleveland Press .” Instead of reaching for ID, I reached for the Vicks. I did it slowly, because one should never make sudden moves in front of cops in obvious physical and emotional distress. “You need some of this.”
    He made eyes at me as if I’d just turned into a two-headed dwarf. I could tell he was a rookie who’d never had my dubious pleasure of being too close to an overripe corpse. I gestured with my other hand, over my upper lip. It took a moment before the light dawned and he followed my lead. The few ragged breaths he took made me feel like the Good Samaritan.
    “Oh, God, that’s better.”
    I pocketed the Vicks. “New on the force?”
    He nodded. “Two days.”
    “Tell whoever set you on that duty that they’re an asshole.” I said as I turned around.
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Maxwell, I still need to see an ID.”
    I fished out my wallet and hand him a press card and my driver’s license. Once we were both satisfied about who I was, he said, “I’m not supposed to let anyone up on the bridge.”
    “We all got our jobs to do.”
    “It’s a crime scene, sir.” The kid took my arm and steered me back toward Carnegie. I was about to make the obligatory noises about hassling the press and the public’s right to know, when he said, “You know it’s just luck I noticed you.” He coughed. “I have to hide the car from this damn smell. If you’d just walked around the other side . . . The other car’s empty.” He coughed again and shook his head. “Just lucky I caught you, right?”
    He gave me a pat on the shoulder as he escorted me past the nose of his car. After which he opened the door and slid back into the driver’s seat.
    The kid would have had to taken an ad out in the Press for his hint to be any broader. I walked around the back. True to his word, the rookie cop didn’t notice me.
    I walked down the center line, toward the knot of cop cars blocking the westbound lanes of the bridge. The sound of the traffic jam was distant, overwhelmed by the sense of stillness. First impression: the only movement was from the flashers on the cop cars, and a circling mass of black birds that were doing lazy circles over the Cuyahoga River in imitation of the dragons much farther up in the sky.
    Two massive stone pylons flanked the entrance to the main span of the bridge. Built in 1932 in a style that might be called art-deco-classical-Babylonian, the godlike humanoid statues loomed impassively over the tiny human inhabitants of the bridge. Their gaze fixed on the distant eastern horizon, as if everything here was beneath their notice.
    Glancing up at the northeast pylon, towering over the cops, I saw something man-sized, leathery and reptilian perched on the statue’s left shoulder. I might have caught sight of a gargoylelike wing and a skull-like face, but then it skittered around the pylon, out of sight.
    Whatever it was, I