Jumper

I’d never lost one before.

But, I usually didn’t work this shift.

A couple months back, I did pull one back. Skinny kid. Seventeen, maybe. I tackled him a foot from the rail and he screamed like a kicked dog. Cried so hard he puked on my jacket. I still have that jacket. Never washed it. Not on purpose, it just fell into the back of my closet like a forgotten relic. The kid’s parents sent a thank-you letter. Typed. No signature. Three weeks later, I got a call from a cop in Pacifica. The kid had jumped off a parking garage. Landed on a Buick. It was parked illegally. Life’s funny like that.

Mary, my regular shift partner, was aggressive when it came to jumpers. At first, I thought it was because she cared. She’d tell me these personal, bleeding-heart stories; family traumas, high school scars, the whole emotional war chest. And I imagined, in the early days, getting close to her. Thought maybe there was something righteous under all that fire.

But no. It wasn’t about compassion. It was about overtime. Tackling a body before it hit the rail meant no death, no report, no three hours of filling out statements in the shitty little office with fluorescent lights that made you feel like a dead fish in a supermarket tank. Once I realized that, I also realized Mary wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to kill time with.

But Mary wasn’t on this shift.

Tonight, it was Carly. Quieter. Thoughtful. One of those think-before-you-act types they don’t make anymore.

When the call came through, she just looked at me and said, “Ready?”

“Of course,” I muttered, already grabbing the kit.

It took us three minutes and nineteen seconds to get to the parked vehicle on the bridge. Usually, that’s enough time. Jumpers tend to hesitate. They gaze out at the lights, feel the wind, maybe reconsider. But this guy was on a mission. He was already airborne by the time we pulled up. We didn’t even get a glimpse.

There are never witnesses, not really. The people stuck behind the stalled car get pissed, honking, checking their phones, weaving around it with that same look of smug inconvenience they’d give a pothole or a fender-bender. They never seem to take much notice as they grumble in their own troubled world inside their cars, not realizing what’s happening. And why would they?

Jumpers don’t show up on GoogleMaps alerts. Of course, the traffic reports don’t say “jumper.” Bad for publicity. You can’t spend billions building a gleaming artery of civic pride and then admit it doubles as a launchpad for despair. So it gets coded as “traffic slowdown due to stalled vehicle.”

The city doesn’t want ghosts on its bridges.

Especially not expensive ones.

Usually, nobody sees the driver slipping out, walking to the edge, disappearing. That kind of death doesn’t register unless it's filmed.

And even then,