Free The Incident on the Bridge by Laura McNeal Page A

“What did the Chippies say when you asked why they never saw a person? Did they run back the video?”
    “It’s not video you run back, remember? It’s just you watch, you see. You don’t watch, you don’t see.” He paused. “Or it’s busted and you don’t see.”
    “So they’re going with the busted-camera defense.”
    “Yeah.”
    Elaine couldn’t decide whether she wanted to drink more coffee or lie prone in a dark room. “Let’s go look in the car some more.”
    It was easy to miss stuff in the dark, but she didn’t think she could have missed a clicker. The car was cold now, and the grime stood out more. “I’ll do the back,” Skelly said, and Elaine kept sticking her hands in disgusting crevices until she found, pressed up against the lowest part of the console, the driver’s license of a pretty girl with long brown hair and dark brown eyes that were probably not bad at brooding. Or maybe it was her lips that made her look pensive. They looked swollen, almost.
Thisbe Jessica Locke,
the license said.
    On the floor between the brake and the gas pedal she saw again the tiny ball of paper, like a spitball, with red printing on it. She picked it up, prying an edge until she saw the word Luck printed in red, and carefully spread the thin slip of white paper on her knee: Lucky Numbers 25 29 66 on one side, I AM CLAY AND YOU ARE HANDS on the other.
    Skelly stopped what he was doing to look at the fortune. “I never get fortunes like that.”
    “Me neither,” Elaine said.
    “Kind of weird that it’s the same name.”
    “If you found your name by chance in a fortune cookie,” Elaine asked, “would you wad it up afterwards?”
    “If I found a cookie that said I AM R.P. AND YOU ARE HANDS , I’d frame it and put it on my desk. Or yours.”
    Elaine kept squatting beside the car, the girl’s driver’s license in her hand. “When do you take just your license in the car, without your wallet?”
    “When I’m going running.”
    “You run?”
    “Hypothetically. Also when I go to the beach.”
    “So when you’re going to drive a car but you don’t need money.”
    Elaine was pretty sure they both filled in the blank the same way: you wouldn’t need money if you were going to jump off a bridge, but you wouldn’t need your license, either. “Goddamn it,” Elaine said. She stood up and felt her head drain like a bottle held upside down.
    “The girl might have dropped her license in the car a long time ago,” Skelly said. “I dropped my house key between the seats once and found it a century later.” He went back to searching the rear compartment, and she watched him lift a lid that fit over a spare tire. Smashed flat over the tire was a brown Starbucks bag. Inside the bag, ten little plastic bags of weed. Priced. Little labels on them, white stickers, handwritten.
$12
in ballpoint pen.
    Jesus, her vest felt tight. That’s what happened when you took a week off from running and allowed yourself salt-and- vinegar chips at lunch.
    “Intent to distribute,” Skelly said.
    Elaine had to take off all her gear to pee, the whole gun belt, and it always felt a little like getting undressed for bed, which cleared her mind. “I have to go to the bathroom. Why don’t you take that up and log it.”
    Maybe the license had been dropped there months ago and been replaced. Maybe the driver wasn’t a seventeen-year-old girl. They just had to find the girl and see what she knew.

“N o,” Graycie said when the Coronado police officer who said she was Elaine asked whether she had seen a girl with long brown hair on the bridge.
    “I found a girl’s license in the car,” Elaine said. “Seventeen years old. Tall.”
    “I didn’t see anyone.”
    “You guys were watching the monitors the whole time, right?”
    It always felt so bad to lie. If she didn’t lie, though, what would happen to her job? What would happen to Genna? “The camera that’s really close to that spot, it’s broken. So the only view