“Hands on the dash,” Dance yelled.

“What’s the matter?” Nick said as he climbed up from the floor back onto the seat and complied, his hands shaking from the sudden change of events and the cold barrel pressing into his flesh.

Dance held the gun in his right hand as he used his left to pull out his cuffs and snap them over Nick’s wrists, binding them together.

“What the-?”

Dance pushed Nick forward and snatched Nick’s Sig-Sauer from the waistband under the rear of his jacket, throwing it in the back of his car.

“Why are you carrying a concealed weapon?” Dance yelled. “

Relax-”

“Open your door, slowly. Step from the vehicle. And don’t be an idiot.”

“Relax.” Nick gave a relieved smile. “I have a license for it. God, you scared me.”

“Out now!” Dance flipped on his police lights, the overly bright red strobes disorienting as they flashed.

“Come on, I have a license for it,” Nick said as he awkwardly opened the door with his bound hands and stepped from the car. Dance slid out right behind him.

“Hands on the bridge rail,” Dance yelled as he walked to the rear of his car, popping open the trunk.

“Dance, please. What’s the matter? I was carrying it for my wife’s protection.”

Nick couldn’t see what Dance was doing but suddenly felt something wrap his lower legs as two large plastic ties were secured around his ankles.

“Come on, don’t you think you’re overreacting?” Nick said as he looked at his now-secured legs.

Dance spun him around, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out Julia’s PDA.

“Dance, now you’re pissing me off. What the fuck are you doing?” Nick tilted his body to the left and looked into the open trunk and everything made sense.

The trunk was filled with duffel bags, one of them half open, and protruding from it, gleaming in the afternoon sun, was the gold pommel of a sword.

“You’ve got to be kidding me? You?”

Dance opened the rear door of his car, grabbed Nick’s gun off the seat, took him by his collar, and shoved him in. Slamming the door, leaving Nick alone, locked inside.

Nick sat there staring over the seat at the ticking clock on the dashboard, the LED reading 3:50.

Everything began to make sense. Why he had been arrested, why Dance was running the investigation: He was controlling it all, involved in the robbery, Julia’s murder, the cover up, his frame-up.

As bad as the situation had just gotten, Nick now knew the man responsible for Julia’s death. He knew now who he had to stop.

For the next few minutes, it was all about staying alive. He needed to survive until the top of the hour.

The clock read 3:52. Nick had never felt time move so fast and so slowly at once.

Dance opened the rear door and, with his gun, motioned Nick to get out.

“You stay the hell away from my wife or so help me God-”

Nick fell instantly silent as Dance rested the barrel of the loaded gun against his lips to quiet him.

“Great thing, those PDAs, found your home phone number along with everyone she works with, friends, neighbors. Thought I’d give her a call, tell her to come on down to the station. Maybe tell her you’ve been injured-” Dance drew back his fist and punched Nick square in the mouth, drawing blood, sending his head snapping back. “That’ll make her hurry. Of course, now we’ll have to figure out who else knows, what friends you’ve involved.”

Dance hoisted a large metal plate out of the trunk of his car, a heavy bicycle cable threaded through its center. With great difficulty he waddled forwarded, carrying it to the edge of the center span of the bridge, and dropped it with an enormous clang on the roadway.

“We were going to wait until this evening,” Dance continued talking, “kill her at home, blame it on you, but seeing you’ve chosen to stick your nose in things, we’ll just have to go kill her now.”

Nick’s heart fell. He hadn’t saved Julia, his incompetence had actually moved up her murder. “ Shannon ’s going to figure out what you’ve done.”

“Screw Shannon, he couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag.”

Dance slid the hundred-pound plate underneath the green guardrail. He reached over and grabbed hold of the bicycle cable, holding it tightly in his left hand. Standing up, he pressed the gun to the back of Nick’s head, urged him forward and, with his left hand, clipped the cable to the center chain of Nick’s handcuffs.

“Did you ever have that feeling of déjà vu? Like you’ve done something before, been somewhere before? Like time is all upside-down?” Dance asked.

Nick couldn’t believe what he was asking.

Dance pushed the plate with his foot, guiding it toward the edge, half of its iron weight hanging out over the reservoir.

And that’s when Nick saw his chest. Dance’s shirt hung wide open to his waist, the exertion of carrying the weight having popped open the three lower buttons. As dark as this man was, as much as he talked about killing Julia, he was not the man he had chased down and tackled. His neck was empty, there was no St. Christopher medal hanging against his chest.

Nick stood there, his belly pressed up against the green rail, looking out over the enormous lake, peaceful and still, in contrast to the horrific goings-on just a mile away, in contrast to the happenings on the bridge above. Dance was part of the robbery, he in fact may have been the one calling the shots, working directly with Paul Dreyfus, but he wasn’t the trigger man, he wasn’t the man who had killed Julia.

Nick turned and looked at Dance with hate-filled eyes. He might not have pulled the trigger that killed her, but he was an accomplice, someone who wanted her dead. And as Nick continued to glare, if he could have reached out, he would have ripped the man’s throat out right on the spot.

“Good-bye,” Dance said with a smile as he tapped the plate with his foot, the edge of the bridge acting like a fulcrum as it teetered a moment before slowly rising up and tipping into space.

It fell for all of two feet before it was jolted to a stop. The cuffs dug into Nick’s wrists. He tried to grab hold of the cable to alleviate the pain but found it to be too thin. It was one hundred pounds, a weight that was difficult for Dance but less than average in Nick’s workout routines. Though the pain throbbed into his constricted wrists, he easily lifted the plate upward using his shoulders and back, finally leaning back to try to pull it up and over the rail…

When all at once Dance grabbed him by the plastic ties about his ankles and lifted his legs in the air. Nick’s stomach fell upon the metal bar. Like the edge of the bridge, the green rail acted as a fulcrum. He wasn’t happy that he paid such close attention in Mr. Stout’s physics class, the disproportionate weight of the iron plate making it easy for Dance to lift Nick up and over the bridge.

And in the blink of an eye. Nick tumbled over into midair, the iron plate leading the way to a watery grave.

Fifty feet, headfirst. Nick hit the water as if hitting a concrete pavement, the water exploding out around him. The weight pulled him instantly under, his body descending into the darkness. The lake’s depth varied from twenty to three hundred feet, but at this point under the bridge it was sounded at only twenty-five. Not that the depth would have any bearing on his chances for survival.

Lungs burning, the pressure in his ears growing with every foot of his descent, Nick was pulled toward his death.

And the weight hit bottom. Nick floated upside-down like a sunken buoy. Stars danced in the periphery of his watery vision. Shafts of light glistened and broke the surface above, refracting about the depths, lighting the rocky, silt-covered lakebed.

Being a swimmer, Nick could hold his breath for far longer than most, but he had no idea of the time, nor how long his lungs could truly hold out.