Dead Waters - Anton Strout [61]
“That’s where my problem is,” she said. The rest of the group all stopped what they were doing and began working their way over to me. “If you claim to be so familiar with his work, then how do you not know a damn thing about this documentary?”
Crap. Maybe I did need to enroll at NYU for acting. I felt myself tensing up, but I tried to keep my cool. “As you said, it was his latest project, and as I told you, I graduated a few years back.”
Elyse snapped, darkness filling her eyes. “He’d been obsessing over Hell Gate for decades,” she said, advancing on me. “Who are you?”
Discretion was still my priority here. The girl was small in size compared to me, but there was a lot of power in her eyes. Years of acting training were to thank for that, no doubt. Still, I wasn’t about to pull my bat on someone nonparanormal. I resisted the urge to back off and held my ground. “How about you tell me what you know?” I asked.
“How about you leave?” Elyse said with a sweet smile over her bitter words.
“Or what?” I said. “You’ll stage-combat me to death? I’m not worried. After all, don’t they train you actors how to miss?”
“Funny,” Elyse said.
“Just tell me what you know,” I said again.
Elyse crossed her arms in defiance. “Or?”
“Just tell me,” I said.
Movement caught my eye from around the room. Darryl and Heavy Mike were walking over. Mike had his video camera out as he came, but it was Darryl I was worried about. He towered over me and stood protectively just over Elyse’s shoulder.
“Everything okay here, Elyse?” Darryl asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Simon was just leaving.”
Darryl looked at me, a bit of menace in his eyes as he stared me down. “Good,” he said.
“I was?” I asked, starting to get angry.
“Yes,” she said. “You were. I don’t know who you are, but you were no friend of the professor. That’s for sure.”
“Aw, come on . . . fight for the camera,” Mike said from behind his video camera. “This would make excellent footage. A nice scuffle . . . I bet it would even look good in court.”
Trent and George moved to stand with their friends, a unified front of five against one single Simon.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go, but consider this. Someone killed the good professor and nobody seems to be as interested in that as much as I am.”
“Wait,” Elyse said, grabbing me by the arm. “How do you know he was killed? Who are you?”
“I can be secretive, too,” I said. I pushed open the door, hoping to get out while the getting was good. To my relief, no one moved to stop me, and I was glad to get away from them. I had what I needed from them—a lead. The Hell Gate Bridge. Mason Redfield’s decades-long obsession. Perhaps it would hold some answers to his death, especially with the dark, rich histories of death that bridges seemed to have.
I let the door slam shut behind me and walked away, which was probably best. If I left now, I could at least keep with my general rule about not using my bat on normal people. Not that film and theater people really counted for normal, as I was slowly learning.
17
Connor had spent his day catching up on paperwork, still nursing a hangover from last night at Eccentric Circles, and I put in a couple of hours killing some of my own paperwork after I told him about the documentary. By the time either of us had a second free and could get our asses up to the Hell Gate Bridge, it was already dark out. The best approach seemed to be coming at it from Queens through Astoria Park, but once we got there, there was still the daunting task of working our way up to the crossing. As we started up the understructure of it, I was impressed by the sheer size of it.
The Hell Gate Bridge stood against the night sky, traversing the East River where it spanned over to Wards Island. In the dark, its two stone towers rose up at either end of it and the red steel of the bridge itself stretched in a low arch across the expanse, two sets of train