Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 111860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
“What’s up with you, Brymer?” Lennon asked.
“Sore as hell. I’ve been directing traffic for six hours. A woman jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge this morning.” He resumed stretching for a moment. “Shit. Who wakes up and decides to jump off a fuckin’ bridge?” He ran his hand over his buzz cut. “I’ll tell you who. Someone fucked in the head. You agree with that, Mars?”
Ambrose’s eyes moved slowly to Brymer. The guy was hoping to rile him or annoy him or test him or whatever he was doing, for some reason that Ambrose wasn’t even going to try to figure out. Maybe the guy was bored. Maybe he was annoyed that he’d had to do a job he thought beneath him because someone had decided to end their life on his watch. “Fucked in the head seems like as good a diagnosis as any,” Ambrose said.
Brymer huffed out a laugh, assuming incorrectly that Ambrose agreed with him. “It’s gotta be attention, right? To wanna go that way? You can’t just off yourself in your bathroom, you gotta jam up traffic for hours, make a spectacle. A big, grand exit where a dozen people have a ringside seat.”
Ambrose glanced at Lennon to see her staring at Brymer. “Yeah, attention whores are the worst, aren’t they, Brymer?”
“Sure are,” Brymer said, either ignoring her sarcasm or missing it completely. “Gotta make everyone else suffer for your issues.”
“Shut up, dude,” the other cop snapped. The name on his name tag said C. KENNEDY. “Those people are suffering. My take? It’s not about attention so much as certainty. You down a buncha pills or, hell, even cut your wrists and it might not work. Someone could find you, pump your stomach, bandage you up. But jumping off a bridge? You’re guaranteed to die, and quick.”
“Not true.” Several heads turned toward Ambrose, including Lennon’s. “Thirty-five people have survived that particular jump,” he said, his gaze meeting Lennon’s. “In 2000, there was a nineteen-year-old kid who attempted to commit suicide there.” He leaned back in his chair. “The second he went over that rail, he realized he’d made a horrible mistake.” Ambrose paused, looking at each of them in turn. “He hit the water headfirst at seventy-five miles per hour, four seconds later, shattering three sections of his vertebrae. He was alive, but he couldn’t move his legs. And in those four seconds, as he’d plunged toward the water, he’d realized he wanted to live.”
Lennon stared, lips parted as though she was semimesmerized. He liked that look on her face. Soft. It was soft. She’d lowered her guard completely, and all it had taken was a story. She cares. Her empathy is so obvious. And he liked that about her. It was rare. “What happened then?” she asked softly.
“He felt a bump beneath him,” Ambrose said. He bounced on his chair as though something were headbutting him from the seat, and Lennon gave a minuscule start. “Something was in the water.”
“Holy shit, a shark,” he heard Kennedy say.
Ambrose shook his head. “No. At first that’s what he thought, too, but it wasn’t a shark. It was a sea lion, and that sea lion bumped him again, and then again. It kept him afloat—kept him alive—by bumping him repeatedly so he didn’t go under, until a rescue boat showed up.”
Lennon tipped her head, her eyes still holding a vague sense of wonder. “Is that a true story?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you hear it?”
Ambrose shrugged. “I don’t remember. But it stayed with me. It reminds me that some things can’t be explained.”
Her eyes hung on his. “And you like that? For a man whose job it is to find answers, that’s somewhat surprising.”
“I think it’s important to be able to determine when answers are necessary and when they’re not.”
She appeared to think about that for a moment. “Anyway, it’s a good story.”
He gave her a half tilt of his lips. “In the end, all we have are stories.”
She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she regarded him. “Tough ending on that bridge today,” she said after a moment.
“Yes,” he agreed, looking over at Brymer, who yawned and stood up. “It was.”
“Well,” Brymer said, “if story time is over, I’m gonna get back to work. See ya.”
The cops left the room, and Ambrose turned in his chair and pulled the case files toward him. He needed to find a moment when he could make copies of everything, so if he had to leave in a hurry, he’d have what the cops had. Those files were why he was here. The cops didn’t know to look for certain things. He did. The specifics about the pills. The swollen eyes. The silent screams.
“You’re a good storyteller,” Lennon said. He looked up to see her smiling at him.
“Thanks.”
Their gazes caught for a beat longer than he would have allowed his eyes to remain held to someone else’s, and he felt a small internal hiccup of concern. He was attracted to her, this homicide inspector who didn’t strike him as a cop of any rank. He’d told himself he wasn’t interested in romantic or even sexual relationships—simpler that way, fewer entanglements—but apparently his biology hadn’t quite gotten the memo. But it didn’t matter if he found her attractive. Nothing could happen between them. He broke eye contact and opened the files on his desk. From his peripheral vision, he saw her begin shuffling through her paperwork, too, the moment between them over.