Phantom Prey

top part of the High Bridge, so cleverly named because it was high. From up there, she had a gorgeous view of downtown St. Paul, the buildings on the bluff over the river.
    Loren was standing in the middle of the roadway, in one of his nineteenth-century ruffle-neck costumes. “Look there,” Loren said, his voice coarse with stress. “Look there—the boat. The boat’s there.”
    She looked, and down the river, an all-white riverboat with a big red stern wheel.
    Loren said, “Frances is on it. I can feel her.”
    Fairy got out of the car, walked to the railing, looked over. A long way down; and the riverboat was there, coming toward her. Davenport was shouting at her—he was out of his car, walking down the bridge.
    Carefully.
    She smiled: Was he dead? He should be dead. But if he was dead, how’d the Porsche get there?
    She slipped the gun—she had the gun in her hand—into the top of her pants, and did a two-handed push-up, and clambered onto the bridge railing, hanging on tight with her hands until she got her balance.
    Then she stood up: a woman who’d spent some time on a balance beam. Now walking slightly uphill, toward Davenport, who was getting closer now, shouting, but she paid no attention.
    If she jumped, she’d die. Then she’d be on the boat, with Frances.
    Better than scrubbing floors in the women’s prison, pushed around by a bunch of hard-eyed women guards.
    Davenport was thirty feet away, and stopped, his voice clear now, and she listened for a moment. “. . . off there, Alyssa, for Christ’s sakes, you’re sick. You need medical help. They’ve got pills now, medication, get off the railing, for Christ’s sakes . . .”
    Loren had worked his way around behind Davenport, hovered there, smiling, and he shook his head and said, “Don’t believe him. Better to go now.”
    Fairy could feel the hard edges of the rail under her feet, and as she stood there, she began to slip away; and Alyssa came up, the hard-edged executive, and she looked at Davenport and listened for a few more seconds and knew it was all lies.
    Damnit, no way out. No way to explain Loren and Fairy. She’d killed Frances’s three friends, all part of the silliness of Fairy and the ghost.
    She looked down and shuddered.
    Alyssa Austin wasn’t going to jump. She wasn’t even sure she was over water—as far as she knew, she might hit a concrete abutment and be torn to pieces, or she might hit the water and be paralyzed and drown, and the water would be freezing. . . .
    She said, to Davenport, very clearly, “Fuck it.”
    Lucas stood there with his gun in his hand, heart thumping, thought he had talked her off the rail, was aware of every little thing, of the flashing red lights, of the cops running up the bridge, of the cop behind him, walking down, of more sirens, coming in, and then she said, “Fuck it,” and hopped down off the rail. He thought he had her and then she stepped toward him and pulled the pistol out of her pants and whipped the muzzle at him and pulled the trigger and there was a flash and simultaneous crack as the slug went past his face.
    Lucas shot her in the heart.
    She knew she was hit; knew she was dying; could see the rail and the starless sky and then Davenport’s face, looming above her, and she tried to smile and say to him, “Going with Frances.”
    But lucas couldn’t make out any words.
    All he heard as he crouched over her was a dying moan. Her eyes rolled away, and she breathed a final time, leaving on her full lips a thin foam of bloody bubbles.

28
    Thinking about it a week later, when he had time, Lucas realized that there had been two key moments in his life, in that one day, the day of the big Siggy shoot-out, the day that he killed Alyssa Austin.
    The first had come when he’d driven home to get his bulletproof vest, before the Siggy shoot-out. He’d jumped out of the Porsche, run into the garage, grabbed the duffel bag that contained the vest, and then had run back to the Porsche. He could have punched up the garage door, driven the Porsche inside, parked it, and taken the truck.
    But he hadn’t.
    If he had taken the truck, he would have tossed the vest in the back after the Siggy gunfight. As it was, when he came out of the BCA building, the vest was sitting on the passenger seat of the Porsche. The duffel bag was still in the apartment across the street from Heather’s. Anyway, the vest, with its armor plates, was right there.
    The second key moment came when Weather