James Patterson - The 9th Judgment

I’ve seen this panorama again and again, but this was the first time I’d failed to be dazzled by the full expansive sight of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, Angel Island-and then, in a flash, I was hurtling down the steep, twisting plunge of Lombard Street.

There were more directions in my ear, commentary about how cool it felt to let me do the driving while he got to sightsee and think about his money. Meanwhile I was stopping at every cross street, hunching my shoulders, praying that no one would notice a bare-breasted woman heading down one of the most scenic drives in the nation.

I checked my mirrors and swiveled my head at intersections, looking for Jacobi, Conklin, Chi, anyone.

I’ll admit it. For an irrational blazing moment, I got mad. It’s one thing to put your life on the line for a cause you believe in. It’s another thing to be used as a robot for a killer, to be the lone sacrifice in an action you don’t believe in-in fact, one you think is insane.

The killer spoke again. He told me to double back toward the Presidio, and I did it, continuing on Richardson, taking the ramp leading to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Were we leaving town?

My anger dissipated as I came back to myself, realizing that the squad was frantic to know where I was. How could they find me when I was driving an old green Impala?

The Lipstick Killer had stopped joking and was all business as I joined the high-speed river of traffic heading across the bridge. The needle on the gas gauge was hovering over the E.

“We need to fill up the tank,” I said.

“No,” the killer told me. “We’ll be at the center of the bridge in about a minute. I’ll tell you when to pull over.”

“Pull over? There’s no stopping on the bridge.”

“There is if I tell you to,” he said.

SWEAT POURED INTO my eyes as the killer counted down from ten to one.

“Pull over now,” he said.

My turn signal had been on since I got onto the Golden Gate Bridge, but anyone who saw it would have thought I’d left it on by accident.

“Pull over!” he repeated.

There was no actual place to stop, so I slowed, then braked in the lane closest to the handrail that acted as a safety line between the road and the narrow walkway.

I put on the hazard lights, listening to their dull clicking and imagining a horrible rear-end crash that could kill the occupants of the oncoming car and crush me against the steering wheel. I reduced my odds of making it from fifty-fifty to ninety-ten against. How could it be that today was my day to die?

“Get the case from the backseat, Lindsay,” the killer told me.

I undid my seat belt, reached behind me for the long, awkward case, and hauled it into the front seat.

“Good. Now get out of the car.”

It was pure suicide to exit on the driver’s side. Cars whizzed past me at high speeds, some honking, some with drivers screaming through their windows as they passed. I angled the gun case, reached the passenger-side handle, pulled up on it, and kicked open the door.

I was almost naked, yeah, but I couldn’t wait to get out of that car. I banged my shins with the case and negotiated the handrail, then my feet touched the walkway. Oncoming traffic was still swerving and honking. Someone yelled, “Jump. Jump,” and there were more horns.

“Bridge security is tight,” I told the killer. “There will be cops here any minute.”

“Shut up,” he said. “Go to the rail.”

My head swam as I peered down into the glinting water. He was going to make me jump. Approximately thirteen hundred people had leaped to their deaths off this bridge. Only twenty-odd jumpers had survived. It had come down to the wire, literally and figuratively. I was going to die, and I would never even know if I’d saved anyone-or if the killer would take the money and keep on killing.

And how was he going to get the money anyway?

I stared down at Fort Point, just under the south end of the bridge, and my gaze drifted along the Crissy Field shoreline. Where was the killer? Where was he? And then I saw a small motorboat coming out from Fort Baker, at the foot of the north tower, on the far side of the bay.

“Time to say good-bye, Lindsay,” said the voice in my ear. “Drop the phone over the side and then send the case over. Keep up the good work, princess. Everything will be fine if you don’t screw it up now.”

The wind blew my hair across my face as I dropped the phone, then cast the gun case over the railing. I watched it fall 260 feet straight down into the bay.

THE GUN CASE hit the water, sent up plumes of spray, sank, then bobbed up again into view. As best as I could tell, there was one man in the motorboat piloting the small vessel through the chop toward the gun case.

I snapped out of my trance-I was free.

I stepped behind the rear of the Impala and put up my hand. The driver of a peacock-blue Honda sedan leaned on his horn as he flew past me, followed by a Corvette, the guy behind the wheel leering but not pulling over. What did he think? That I was a prostitute?

I held my ground out there on that highway in my panties, my hand in the stop position, every part of me prickling from the fear of being flattened by a driver with his head up his ass-and then a baby-blue BMW slowed, pulled ahead of the Impala, and braked.

I leaned into the passenger side. “I’m a cop. I need your phone now.”

There was a gawking eighteen-year-old boy at the wheel. He handed me his phone, and I pointed to a newspaper on the seat beside him. He passed it to me, and I held the front section to my chest as I called Dispatch, giving my name and shield number.

“Lindsay! Oh God. Are you all right? What do you need? Where are you?”

I knew the dispatcher, May Hess, self-described Queen of the Bat Phone. “I’m on the bridge-”

“With that naked suicide?”

I barked a laugh, then caught myself before I went into hysterics. I told May to get a chopper over the bay PDQ and why-that I needed the coast guard to pick up a boater. May said, “Gotcha, Sergeant. Bridge Patrol will be at your location in thirty seconds, tops.”

I heard the sirens. With the newspaper fluttering against my chest, I leaned over the railing and watched as the small Boston Whaler motored closer to the floating gun case. A chopper whirred overhead, and the pilot bore down on the motorboat, herding it toward the southern shore.

The Boston Whaler dodged left and right like a quarter horse at a roping competition, ducked under the bridge, and powered beneath it, the chopper following the boat under the bridge deck, crowding the vessel until it stalled off Crissy Field.

The Lipstick Killer bailed out of the boat and ran in slow motion through hip-deep water. And then a coast guard vessel closed in on him.

A bullhorn blared, telling the killer to hit the ground and keep his hands in full sight. Squad cars tore down the beach and surrounded him.

Game over, psycho.

I WATCHED HARBOR Patrol pull the Pelican case out of the water, and then there was the deafening sound of sirens all around me.

I turned and saw a fleet of cars-unmarked and black-and-whites-screeching to a halt behind the Impala, and driving those cars were just about every cop I’d ever met, now piling out and heading toward me.

My attention was drawn to a Land Rover stopping in the opposite lane, somehow making it through the perimeter before the bridge was closed off. A bearded man jumped out of the driver’s seat holding a camera with a long SLR lens. He started snapping pictures of me wearing a look of horror on my face, the Chronicle plastered to my chest, pink panties and all.