“I don’t think so. Your last meeting there with Lester didn’t end well for him. We’ll meet on the High Bridge,” I said. “I get the money, you get her panties.”
“The panties I can verify. What about your silence?”
“I talk and I’m guilty of extortion. Jail doesn’t appeal to me any more than it does to you. The truth is, though, you have no choice but to trust me.”
“When?”
“Let’s make the exchange this evening just after sunset. Say, nine o’clock.”
I wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the money so quickly, but he didn’t object.
“How will we know each other?” he asked.
We’ll have no trouble, I thought. We’ll be the only cockroaches on the bridge.
The High Bridge is built at a downward angle connecting the bluffs of Cherokee Heights with the river flats below Summit Avenue. Although it was after dark, the sodium vapor lamps on the bridge made everything garishly bright. I waited on the high end. Coming from the other side of the river, the rich man would have to walk uphill to meet me. I found that appealing.
The lights of downtown St. Paul spread out below me. At the edge of all that glitter lay the Mississippi, curling like a long black snake into the night. The air coming over the bridge smelled of the river below, of silt and slow water and something else, it seemed to me.
The evening was warm and humid. Cars came across the bridge at irregular intervals. There wasn’t any foot traffic. I thought for a while that he’d decided I was bluffing and had blown me off. Which was a relief in a way. That meant I had to do the right thing, take the evidence to the cops, let them deal with it. Kid might yet get his justice.
Then I saw someone step onto the bridge at the far end and start toward me. I was a good quarter-mile away and at first I couldn’t tell if it was him. When the figure was nearly halfway across, I realized it wasn’t the rich man. It was the personal assistant. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and waited, looking up at the Heights, then down toward the flats, uncertain which way I would come.
What the hell was this all about? There was only one way to find out. I walked out to meet her.
I wasn’t wearing the gray suit, but she recognized me anyway.
“You were at the house this morning,” she said in that accent I decided was, indeed, French Canadian. Her hair hung to her ass and rippled like a velvet curtain. She wore an airy summer dress. The high hem lifted on the breeze, showing off her legs all the way to mid-thigh. Killer legs. Against this, Kid hadn’t stood a chance.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Who cares, as long as I have your money.” Her lips were thick and red around teeth white as sugar. I smelled her delicate perfume, the same scent that had washed over me that morning. It seemed to overpower the scent of the river.
“Show me,” I said.
“Where are my panties?”
I reached into my pocket and dangled them in front of her. “Where’s my money?”
From the purse she carried over her shoulder, she pulled a thick manila envelope. “The panties,” she said.
“The envelope first.”
She thought about it a moment, then handed it over. I looked inside. Four bundles of hundreds bound with rubber bands.
“Want to count it?” she said.
All I wanted was for the transaction to be over with and to be rid of this business. “I’ll trust you,” I said.
She took the panties and threw them over the bridge railing. I watched them drop, catch the breeze, and cut toward the middle of the river, swift as a little black bat.
“Gone forever.” She smiled.
“You didn’t even check to make sure they were the ones. For all you know, I could have bought a pair just like them at Marshall Field’s.”
“They would never let a bum like you into Marshall Field’s.” She turned with a swish of her long, scented hair and walked away, her dress lifting on the breeze.
I watched until she’d grown small in the glare, then turned and headed back toward the Heights.
I was ten feet from a new life when he spoke to me out of the shadow of the squat pines at the end of the bridge.
“I’ll take the money.”
He’d probably come across in one of the cars during my meeting with the woman. I couldn’t see his face, but he thrust a gun at me from the shadows and it glowed in the streetlights as if the metal were hot.
“I give it to you, I’m dead,” I said.
His voice spat from the dark. “You were dead from the beginning.”
I sailed the envelope at him like a frisbee. It caught him in the chest. The gun muzzle flashed. I felt a punch in my belly. I spun and stumbled into the street in front of an MTC bus, which swerved, its horn blaring. I fled toward the dark, away from the streetlights.
