Over Tumbled Graves Read Free Page B

the river and ran deeper into the park.
    Caroline chased them across a parking lot, through an empty daycare playground and down a grass embankment, toward the thundering falls. Caroline knew this part of the park, and she cut behind them through a stand of trees, bursting down the hill as they did, now just a few steps behind. She dropped to a crouch and had her nine-millimeter out smoothly and quickly.
    “Stop! Police!”
    They were on the narrow, cable-suspended footbridge, the falls on their right—water blasting over and around boulders—and the dam downstream on their left. The two men stood smack in the middle of the bridge, too far to make a run to the other shore. They turned slowly. Mist from the waterfall lapped up against their legs as they stood before her, their shoulders heaving from the run. Caroline looked from one to the other and began edging toward them. Her eyes locked with the older man’s sly face and dead eyes. Without moving his head, the man’s eyes shifted to Burn.
    “Lie down! On your stomachs!” Her voice sounded tinny in the crash of the falls and, two hundred yards downstream, the deep rumble of the dam and power plant that marked the end of the upper falls.
    Slowly, Burn lifted his hands in the air. But the older man didn’t budge, didn’t even acknowledge her gun, just stood with his arms at his sides, his jaw set forward, his black eyes boring into hers.
    Caroline stopped walking toward them. There was something eerily familiar in this man’s stare, like some desperate question she remembered hearing before: Is this where we are, you and me? She had the sense that something here was beyond her understanding, that there was more to this situation than these three figures on this narrow bridge. The air was heavy with mist and potential, and Caroline was surprised to hear her own chopped breathing within the roar of the falls.
    “Get! Down!” she yelled again, gesturing at the ground with the gun. Burn nodded and began to lean forward.
    That’s when the older man turned and, without changing his flat expression, put two hands on Burn’s shoulder, and Caroline realized what he was going to do just before he pushed Burn, which he didswiftly and seemingly without thought. Caroline cried out, the sound lost in the howling water as the young man tumbled, arms cartwheeling, over the bridge railing and into the river.
    Caroline ran to the railing. The water beneath the falls was deep and churned with currents and undertows from the white roiling foam. Caroline found herself holding her breath while Burn was under, and when, finally, he surfaced in the darker water, she let out a gasping sigh. In the river, Burn was immediately pulled by the current toward the Monroe Street Dam. The man in khaki began to edge sideways, casually, without hurrying, like someone leaving a picnic. He watched her, his eyes placid and cold. She stared at him in horror and he stopped, turned slowly to the river, seeming to know that her eyes would follow his. He seemed curious to see what she would do with the terrible choice he’d just given her: Arrest the suspect on the bridge or try to save the one in the water.
    There are moments as a cop, Dupree always said, that are sheer paradox, the world upside down. It was one of his many “theories,” the job punctuated by moments that are ludicrous on their face and to which any response is wrong; any reaction to an irrational event is bound to be irrational. Laughing at funerals. Crying at weddings. If you’d been a cop for long, you were always mixing up your laughing and your crying.
    Caroline looked once more at the man in khaki and then went after Burn. She jumped the bridge railing and landed on the high bank, but it was too steep and rocky to negotiate. She watched Burn struggle against the surging flow and tried to gauge the angle he was swimming and the distance to the concrete spillway. He might make it if he didn’t panic. The trick would be to pull