Sanchez smiled. “They like us to identify ourselves,” he said, his Mexican accent wrapping delicately around the consonants. “So the citizens don’t mistake us for the assholes at the CIA.” He stepped up beside Archie. Behind them, a parking lot’s worth of emergency vehicles sat on the now-closed bridge, their lights flashing red, white, blue, and orange.
“Look at that,” Sanchez said, pushing his chin out toward the blinking red lights on the cell phone towers that looked like birthday candles rising out of the west hills, and the tall construction cranes that marked the current boom of condo projects and mixed-use developments. “It’ll look like L.A. in ten years.” He gave Archie a wicked grin. “Californians streaming over our borders. You know they’re lazy. Don’t even mow their own lawns.”
“I’ve heard that,” said Archie.
Sanchez stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on the heels of his cowboy boots. “Been a while since we had a car go over a bridge,” he said. The colored light from the emergency vehicles refracted on the cement behind him, so it looked like he was standing on a disco floor.
“Two in ten years,” Archie said. “One suicide off the Mar-quam. One hydroplane off the Morrison.”
Sanchez looked up at the clear morning sky. “Well, it wasn’t hydroplaning,” he said.
Archie looked up, too. A swarm of news helicopters hovered overhead, like ravens circling something dying in the woods. “Yeah,” he said. He knew what Sanchez was thinking. It was harder than it looked to drive a car off a bridge. You had to defeat the efforts of several dozen engineering safety gaps: a three-foot cement bumper, a chain-link fence. You had to be profoundly unlucky. Or trying.
Claire appeared beside him. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a bulldog on the chest. Her short hair was tucked into a Greek fisherman’s cap. “Susan Ward’s here,” she said. “She said she called you.”
Archie turned and squinted over at the east side of the bridge where the growing legion of press was kept at bay with crime tape and a phalanx of motorcycle cops.
“They pull the car up yet?” Archie asked Claire.
“Soon,” she said. “There’s like a hundred years of shit down there the divers have to clear it from first.”
“Ah, the pristine Willamette,” Sanchez said.
It was a zoo. Susan hadn’t seen anything like it, except maybe the Oregon Country Fair outside Eugene. The fair was two hundred eighty acres of hippies and fire dancers and falafel stands, and this was a crush of cops, media, and onlookers. But people had the same excited looks on their faces. Like they were somewhere special.
Susan had parked seven blocks from the Kerby Street exit off the bridge and walked. She wore her Herald badge on a lanyard around her neck and talked her way through three separate police checkpoints. It was disconcerting to be on foot on the bridge. Unlike most of the other bridges in Portland, the Fremont was closed to pedestrians except for once a year when the city let a few thousand Portlanders pedal over it on bicycles. Susan, who inevitably forgot when the Bridge Pedal was coming and always found herself stuck in traffic, now saw the appeal. There was something otherworldly about being that far up above the city. And then she thought of the long seconds that the senator’s car was in freefall and her fists tightened. Parker was dead. Now she had to step up. She had to do something that countered every reporter instinct she had: risk her exclusive.
She had to tell Archie Sheridan what she knew.
She had elbowed her way past the TV crews, each wanting a live shot with the impressive fleet of emergency vehicles in the background. Claire had spotted her and said she’d track down Archie for her. But there were so many people that once Claire had disappeared into the crowd of uniforms, Susan immediately lost track of her. So she waited, watching the cops, eavesdropping on the other reporters, gathering as much information as she could. She couldn’t hear much. There was too much going on. And then it hit her: no skid marks. There were too many people, too many cars; if there had been skid marks, they would have taped them off. They’d have the crime scene unit all over them. No skid marks. No brakes.
She saw Archie then, and straightened up. He appeared from behind a police van, hands in the pockets of his sport coat, shoulders hunched against the vague morning chill. His hair was a thick mop of brown, but as he got close Susan could see a few strands of gray that had not been there the last time she’d seen him, two months before.
“I’m sorry,” Archie said when he reached her. “I know that you and Parker were close.”