Richard Doetsch - The 13th Hour

“Great thing, those PDAs, found your home phone number along with everyone she works with, friends, neighbors. Thought I’d give her a call, tell her to come on down to the station. Maybe tell her you’ve been injured-” Dance drew back his fist and punched Nick square in the mouth, drawing blood, sending his head snapping back. “That’ll make her hurry. Of course, now we’ll have to figure out who else knows, what friends you’ve involved.”

Dance hoisted a large metal plate out of the trunk of his car, a heavy bicycle cable threaded through its center. With great difficulty he waddled forwarded, carrying it to the edge of the center span of the bridge, and dropped it with an enormous clang on the roadway.

“We were going to wait until this evening,” Dance continued talking, “kill her at home, blame it on you, but seeing you’ve chosen to stick your nose in things, we’ll just have to go kill her now.”

Nick’s heart fell. He hadn’t saved Julia, his incompetence had actually moved up her murder. “ Shannon ’s going to figure out what you’ve done.”

“Screw Shannon, he couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag.”

Dance slid the hundred-pound plate underneath the green guardrail. He reached over and grabbed hold of the bicycle cable, holding it tightly in his left hand. Standing up, he pressed the gun to the back of Nick’s head, urged him forward and, with his left hand, clipped the cable to the center chain of Nick’s handcuffs.

“Did you ever have that feeling of déjà vu? Like you’ve done something before, been somewhere before? Like time is all upside-down?” Dance asked.

Nick couldn’t believe what he was asking.

Dance pushed the plate with his foot, guiding it toward the edge, half of its iron weight hanging out over the reservoir.

And that’s when Nick saw his chest. Dance’s shirt hung wide open to his waist, the exertion of carrying the weight having popped open the three lower buttons. As dark as this man was, as much as he talked about killing Julia, he was not the man he had chased down and tackled. His neck was empty, there was no St. Christopher medal hanging against his chest.

Nick stood there, his belly pressed up against the green rail, looking out over the enormous lake, peaceful and still, in contrast to the horrific goings-on just a mile away, in contrast to the happenings on the bridge above. Dance was part of the robbery, he in fact may have been the one calling the shots, working directly with Paul Dreyfus, but he wasn’t the trigger man, he wasn’t the man who had killed Julia.

Nick turned and looked at Dance with hate-filled eyes. He might not have pulled the trigger that killed her, but he was an accomplice, someone who wanted her dead. And as Nick continued to glare, if he could have reached out, he would have ripped the man’s throat out right on the spot.

“Good-bye,” Dance said with a smile as he tapped the plate with his foot, the edge of the bridge acting like a fulcrum as it teetered a moment before slowly rising up and tipping into space.

It fell for all of two feet before it was jolted to a stop. The cuffs dug into Nick’s wrists. He tried to grab hold of the cable to alleviate the pain but found it to be too thin. It was one hundred pounds, a weight that was difficult for Dance but less than average in Nick’s workout routines. Though the pain throbbed into his constricted wrists, he easily lifted the plate upward using his shoulders and back, finally leaning back to try to pull it up and over the rail…

When all at once Dance grabbed him by the plastic ties about his ankles and lifted his legs in the air. Nick’s stomach fell upon the metal bar. Like the edge of the bridge, the green rail acted as a fulcrum. He wasn’t happy that he paid such close attention in Mr. Stout’s physics class, the disproportionate weight of the iron plate making it easy for Dance to lift Nick up and over the bridge.

And in the blink of an eye. Nick tumbled over into midair, the iron plate leading the way to a watery grave.

Fifty feet, headfirst. Nick hit the water as if hitting a concrete pavement, the water exploding out around him. The weight pulled him instantly under, his body descending into the darkness. The lake’s depth varied from twenty to three hundred feet, but at this point under the bridge it was sounded at only twenty-five. Not that the depth would have any bearing on his chances for survival.

Lungs burning, the pressure in his ears growing with every foot of his descent, Nick was pulled toward his death.

And the weight hit bottom. Nick floated upside-down like a sunken buoy. Stars danced in the periphery of his watery vision. Shafts of light glistened and broke the surface above, refracting about the depths, lighting the rocky, silt-covered lakebed.

Being a swimmer, Nick could hold his breath for far longer than most, but he had no idea of the time, nor how long his lungs could truly hold out.

But it wasn’t his pain he dwelled upon, not the suddenness of his inevitable death. It was Julia. Everything that was good in his life, everything worth living for, had been taken. He felt a crushing shame that he couldn’t save her from her fate. He had been so easily deceived, so gullibly accepting in the help of strangers, only to be thrown to his death by those who were paid to protect.

Nick was upside-down, steadily exhaling a very small amount of air to keep his nostrils from filling up and drowning him prematurely. With the glow of the surface light above, he finally caught his bearings when something bumped up against his upward-facing legs. Nick jerked his body around and stared into the vacant eyes of the dead.

There was a body, floating upright, bobbing about, his wrists cuffed together, his legs tied, with the plastic ties wrapped about a similar iron plate. And there was another body ten feet behind it. Nick couldn’t see it well, but there was no mistaking the uniform on the skinny, redheaded man. It was a police officer. And through the white shafts of light that cut down through the water, he saw the shadows of a third, dressed in a blue shirt, his long dark hair wafting in the shifting currents. He was in a graveyard, an assassin’s underwater dumping ground.

Seeing the corpses, Nick instantly understood why Dance had mentioned déjà vu.

The man immediately next to him was freshly dead, his half-mast eyes revealing rolled-back pupils, his right eye was swollen, black and blue, his mouth slack-jawed, the left side of his lower lip distended as if someone had danced on his face before killing him. He had gray hair that drifted about his face like wind-whipped grass.

Nick’s lungs began to burn, his air running low. He knew it had been a minute. Another forty-five… maybe sixty seconds and he would pass out.

He grabbed the bicycle chain that tethered him to his death anchor and pulled himself slightly deeper. He grabbed hold of the belt of the man adjacent to him, reached into his pocket with his cuffed right hand, and pulled out his wallet, holding it tight as if it would somehow save him.

But it was a useless final act. His lungs were on fire, his head throbbing with the final pulsing of his oxygen-deprived heart. It had been over two minutes, there was no doubt he would die, surrendering to the seductive call of death.

And as the last bit of oxygen fed Nick’s thoughts, he dwelled on Julia, her beauty, her kindness, and how the world would be robbed of her presence because…

Because he had failed her.

2:00 P.M.

JULIA SAT IN HER SUV in the driveway of a modest split-level colonial in the town of Pound Ridge. Like so many of the people in Byram Hills, once Julia learned of the crash, she had rushed to the site to help. But when her eyes fell on what remained of Flight 502, and she realized it was the flight she was supposed have been on, she couldn’t stop picturing the faces of the passengers she had been sitting next to and how close she had come to sharing their fate.