Chapter Thirty-Two
Nineteen months ago
Crouched behind the dumpster, Helen’s heart was beating wildly as she switched from her green winter coat to a charcoal-gray
hooded jacket. One hundred and sixty beats per minute at least. Maybe one seventy. She used to wear a heart monitor watch
when she went jogging with Tyler. She never got above one fifty, even on the hills.
Anticipating murder was more taxing to the heart than the steepest inclines of Queen Anne Hill.
The afternoon was perfect. Drizzly and overcast. A hood over the head didn’t stand out among the crowd. A neck gaiter covering
her mouth and nose—not so weird on such a chilly day. Sunglasses—a bit odd, but not that remarkable.
Helen left the alley from the opposite side that she’d entered, right hand resting in her coat pocket against the Glock 9mm.
Helen got to the courthouse early and waited outside for exactly twenty-seven minutes and forty-four seconds before the masked
man arrived in the back of a cop car.
Her hand itched against the handle of the gun, still in her coat pocket.
She was a very good shot from all her practice at the shooting range, but she needed to get closer because there would be
two cops walking next to him, and she didn’t want to risk hitting the wrong person. She crossed the grass in front of the
courthouse.
The cop who emerged from the driver’s side of the car was a portly, middle-aged man. Someone she could easily outrun. She
pushed aside the other thought: You can’t outrun a bullet.
The portly cop opened the back door of the car, and the masked man unloaded himself onto the curb.
Helen didn’t look at his bare face. She didn’t want to see eyes and nose and lips and chin and ears. She looked at his stomach,
because that’s where he’d stabbed Tyler. Then her gaze moved up to his chest. He’d shattered her heart so maybe it would be
most fitting to shatter his.
In her pocket, she turned the gun’s safety off.
The cop said something to his partner, who was walking around the front of the car. The space between the cops and the masked
man was sufficient.
Helen stepped forward. She was now only fifteen feet from the masked man.
She pulled the gun from her pocket and pointed it at his heart. She’d practiced this movement inside her apartment.
Finger on the trigger.
The masked man said, “Oh, shit,” and she looked up into his eyes. The same eyes she’d seen through the holes of his ski mask
on that terrible night. But now they weren’t fever crazed. Now they looked almost human.
Helen froze. Her finger didn’t press against the trigger.
The portly cop turned then, saw her pointing the gun. He brought his hand to his waist. He was going to pull his own gun.
She’d missed her chance.
Helen whipped around and sprinted away, down the length of the sidewalk. Her own footsteps were pounding, her breath loud, so she couldn’t hear if they were chasing her, but she couldn’t imagine they weren’t.
She ran and ran. Into traffic, through alleys, crisscrossing the blocks of downtown Seattle until she was finally brave enough
to look behind her.
No one was there. She had no idea if she’d outrun them or if they’d never taken pursuit in the first place.
Her knee, the one that she used to get tendonitis in, was throbbing.
The masked man was still alive. She’d failed.
Helen parked her car at a restaurant on the south side of the Aurora Bridge. She stumbled toward the bridge, pummeled by the
roar of traffic on Highway 99 as the cars whipped past. The pedestrian sidewalk on the bridge was only a few feet wide, with
waist-high railings on both sides. On the water side, there was a second, taller railing, with tiny little vertical bars that
shook violently in the wind.
People rarely walked the pedestrian sidewalk because the bridge itself was a terrifying piece of historical Seattle architecture.
Cars were forced to cross in lanes so narrow that buses turned on their hazards and took up two lanes. There was no median
divider between north and south traffic, and there were no shoulders either. So no one was on the sidewalk that afternoon
to say to Helen, “Ma’am, please don’t!” Or “Ma’am, are you okay?”
She reached the part of the bridge that was directly over Lake Union and she stopped, staring down at the cool blue water
167 feet below.
After a moment, she grasped the lower railing and climbed onto it. With her feet on the lower railing, she could now reach
the top of the taller railing. The bars were sticking through the top, but if she didn’t care about scraping herself, she
could hoist herself over it.
There were plenty of cars tearing past, but most drivers were concentrating on staying in their lane, so only a few even noticed the woman on the bridge.
A college student looked up from texting and thought she saw someone standing on the railing, but then she almost sideswiped the car next to her and refocused on staying between the white lines.
A wife turned to her husband and said, “Oh my God, I think a woman is about to jump. Should we call 911?” An eight-year-old boy saw her too, but he said nothing to his parents because he didn’t yet understand about tragedy.
In the end, a handful of people saw Helen standing on the railing, but not a single person saw her throw the Glock 9mm into
the bottom of the lake.
Calhoun called Helen’s cell phone as she was driving to Wade’s house that evening.
“Were you at the courthouse this afternoon?” Calhoun asked in an urgent tone.
“No,” Helen said, surprised by how level her own voice was. “I didn’t want to see his face. Is the sentencing over?”
There was a long pause, then Calhoun said, “Helen, someone pointed a gun at Franklin outside the courthouse today.”
Helen pulled her car to the curb and parked it. She needed to concentrate so she didn’t say the wrong thing. “What do you
mean?”
“A person with sunglasses and a scarf or something obscuring their face pointed a gun at Jack Franklin.”
“Did they shoot him?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad.”
There was another pause, then Calhoun said, “Helen, he’s been sentenced. Twenty-five years to life.”
“When is he eligible for parole?” Helen already knew the answer, but she wanted to make Calhoun say it.
“Twenty-five.”
“Congratulations,” Helen said in a tight voice.
“I’m sorry, Helen.” Calhoun sighed. “I know it’s not the outcome you wanted. But I’m glad you didn’t do anything stupid today. Anything too stupid, that is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Helen said.
All she could think about was how she was going to have to wait another twenty-five years to get a chance to kill the masked
man.
In the end, Helen just needed to get out of Seattle. The city had failed both her and Tyler, and she wanted to be in a place
where his memory wasn’t the imprint on every sidewalk table, the sound in every shop’s door chime, and the light cast from
every streetlamp. Seattle had once belonged to them, and now it was empty concrete without him. It was a sad place full of
so many uncertainties and unknown dangers.
Deep down, she knew running away wasn’t the answer. But there was a faint fluttering in her chest when she looked into Wade’s
hazel eyes and a little voice in her head that said, But maybe it could be.