Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,7

laughter, and when Mandy’s eyes met Jeff’s in the rearview mirror, she stuck out her tongue at him.

“Real mature, Amanda,” he muttered.

“Whatever,” she said, and continued laughing.

Jeff clenched the steering wheel tighter. Mandy could be a real pain in the ass sometimes. He wondered why he put up with her. He was a securities trader clearing a hundred grand a year, for Christ’s sake. He could have any woman he wanted. Didn’t she realize that?

He needed someone smarter, someone more on his level, someone, well, like Jenny. She wasn’t only a long-legged blonde bombshell; she was a medical school student to boot. He visualized the two of them on paper: Wall Street Trader and Cardiovascular Surgeon. It was certainly more impressive than Wall Street Trader and Makeup Artist. And was that all Mandy was going to aspire to in life? Really, how much difference was there between a makeup artist and a carny face painter? He chuckled to himself, considered mentioning this comparison out loud, but decided not to sink to her childish level.

Jeff focused on the road ahead. The occluding fog was as thick as pea soup, as his grandmother had been fond of saying, and he needed to pay attention. Last thing he wanted was to run into a deer or a bear. The 1987 BMW M5 was less than a month old, in pristine condition, and he would like to keep it that way. Did he need the car? No. He took cabs to work every day and rarely left the city. Same went for the prewar Tribeca co-op he’d been renting since last July. It was far too big for just him, he rarely set foot in the two spare bedrooms, but they were good to have to show off when people came over. Success, he had learned, was more than earning a six-figure salary. It was cultivating an image that people envied and respected.

And Mandy wasn’t jiving with that image, was she? They’d been together for four years now, and she was still as clueless to business and politics and world events as when he’d met her. What was it she’d said to Congressman Franzen the other week while he’d been discussing with Jeff the recent armistice reached in the Iran-Iraq war? Why don’t they call it the Middle West? Good God, she was becoming an embarrassment.

Jeff’s thoughts turned to Jenny again. He visualized her wearing a white doctor’s coat, a stethoscope around her neck, and nothing else. What a fantasy that would be! Of course, that’s all it was: a fantasy. Steve was his good friend. He wasn’t about to hijack his girlfriend, even though he was sure he could if he wanted to. No, there were plenty of other smart, successful women out there.

Through the mist, a bridge appeared ahead of them.

“Hell yeah!” Jeff cried out. “There she is!” He crunched onto the gravel shoulder just before the bridge and killed the engine.

“What’s going on?” Steve asked, looking up from the map and removing his glasses.

“Crybaby bridge!” Jeff announced.

“Are you for real?” Steve said.

“Crybaby bridge?” Mandy said, poking her head up between the seats once more. “Why have I heard of that?”

“It’s an urban legend,” Steve told her. “A baby gets thrown off a bridge, it dies, you can hear its ghost crying in the middle of the night. Crybaby bridges are all over the country.”

“Yeah, but this one’s different,” Jeff said.

Steve looked at him. “How so?”

He grinned wickedly. “’Cause this crybaby’s genuinely haunted.”

Steve undid his seatbelt, stuffed the map back into the glove compartment, and got out of the car. The night air was cool and fresh and damp, the way it is after a storm. It accentuated the raw scent of pine and hemlock. Fog swirled around his legs, sinuous, amorphous, reminding him of the dry ice used in horror movies to turn a mundane graveyard into a hellish nightmare crammed full of the shuffling dead. He titled his head, looking up. Directly above the bridge the canopy had receded to reveal a patch of black sky framing a full moon.

Steve howled. It was a mournful, lupine sound, the effect of which turned out to be surprisingly eerie and realistic.

“Nice one, Wolfman!” Jeff said, tossing his head back and joining in gleefully.

“Boys will be boys,” Jenny said, sighing with put-upon melodrama.

Mandy said, “You know they’re going to be trying to scare us all night?”

“Let them,” Jenny said. “I can handle a werewolf, or vampire. I have a black belt in judo.”

Steve’s