The Night Bird (Frost Easton #1)
Brian Freeman
A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory.
—John Milton
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not;
but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.
—Mark Twain
1
Like a shiny Christmas display, red brake lights flashed to life across the five westbound lanes of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Two hundred feet above the frigid waters off Yerba Buena Island, the car horns, bangs, and skids of a chain-reaction fender bender transformed the traffic into a parking lot. Hundreds of gridlock-weary Bay Area travelers knew they were going nowhere fast. They turned off their engines, grabbed their smartphones, and settled in to wait.
Trapped in the rightmost lane, Lucy Hagen began to panic. Her fists squeezed closed; her nails dug into her palms. “Oh, damn, damn, damn,” she murmured, shutting her eyes. “Not up here.”
Her friend Brynn, who was behind the wheel of the top-down Camaro convertible, patted Lucy’s leg. “Hey, it’ll be okay.”
But it was not okay.
Lucy hated bridges. If she could have never driven across another bridge in her life, she would have happily done so, but Lucy lived in San Francisco. There was water, water everywhere, and going anywhere meant crossing a bridge. The Richmond Bridge. The Bay Bridge. The San Mateo Bridge. The Dumbarton Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge. She took BART under the bay whenever she could, but too often, she had no choice but to venture across the tall spans to get where she was going. Bridges were her enemy.
“Can you get us out of this lane?” Lucy asked Brynn.
“And go where?” Brynn sighed.
They were boxed in. The parked cars around them filled every space. Brynn switched off the motor of the Camaro, but she left the radio playing. Steely Dan sang “Do It Again,” and Brynn tapped her thumbs on the wheel with the beat of the music. She was utterly unaffected by their situation, but Lucy was living her worst nightmare—frozen on the bridge, inches away from the railing and the terrifying drop to the water.
It was night. Eleven o’clock. Tendrils of fog laced through the darkness like ghosts spiriting between the bridge cables. The giant suspender climbed above the car, outlined by white lights, with rows of taller and taller cables leaning toward the main tower. A cold, ferocious wind whirled and sang. Lucy sensed the almost-imperceptible sway of the bridge deck under the car, reminding her that she was trapped in midair. Clammy sweat bloomed on her skin. Involuntarily, her body twitched, as if she’d been shocked by electricity.
“Maintenance people have to walk up there to replace the lights,” Brynn said, pointing at the sharp slope of the suspension cable. “Now that’s freaky. Think about having a job like that.”
“Shut up, Brynn.”
Her friend giggled. “I guess this would be a bad time for the Big One to hit.”
“I said, shut up. Please. It’s not funny.”
“I’m sorry,” Brynn told her, reaching over to squeeze Lucy’s hand. “This is really bad for you, huh?”
“Awful.”
“You should talk to my shrink.”
“That won’t help. Nothing helps.”
“Hey, she’s pretty good. She helped me with my thing. What do you think is going to happen, anyway? Do you think the bridge is going to fall down or something?”
“No,” Lucy said.
“Then what?”
“Brynn, I don’t want to talk about this, okay?”
Her friend held up her hands in surrender. “Okay. Just relax. We’ll get out of here soon. I’ll turn up the music.”
Brynn did. The radio blared an Elton John song. “Bennie and the Jets.” Elton thumped through the speakers, and the music fought with the roar of the wind.
Lucy knew that bridges didn’t bother most people. Here they were, all of them imprisoned on a strip of steel and concrete high above the bay, and nobody else cared. She looked around at the other cars. A man in a Lexus beside them barked into a cell phone; he was simply annoyed by the delay. Several people texted; she saw thumbs flying. A DVD played on the dashboard screen in a minivan. She recognized the movie. Inside Out.
It was just one more California traffic jam.
Then Lucy’s mouth went dry. With her head craned to look behind her, she spotted a black Cutlass with smoked windows three lanes over and one car length behind them. The Cutlass was dented and dirty. She only noticed it because at the moment she looked, the passenger window rolled halfway down. The window was dark, the night was dark, and the car was dark. Even so, for a single moment, she saw a face behind the glass, deep inside the car.
Not a face. A mask.
The mask was bone white, with a grotesquely oversized smile, framed by cherry-red lips. The rounded eyeholes were chambered, like the eyes of a fly. The chin made a sharp V, and the white forehead had deep, exaggerated bones that stretched halfway up the skullcap. Ropes of black hair—a wig—hung down on both sides of the mask. It grinned at her.
“Holy shit!” Lucy exclaimed.
Brynn glanced at her. “What is it?”
“That guy! Look!”
Brynn peered over her shoulder. “I don’t see anything.”