The Ridge (17 page)

Wesley looked at the pole in his hand and back at the cat inside, now far from the fence. He’d have to go in. It was that or return for the dart rifle, but that would waste more time and—

Kino tried to rise again, and this time he let out an agonized cry, and that made Wesley’s decision. There was no time. He opened the combination lock on the gate—every lock in the facility had the same combination, set to Audrey and David’s wedding anniversary date—and removed the chain. Kino, thankfully, was so antisocial that he had his own enclosure, leaving no other cats to deal with.

“Easy, buddy,” he called, and then he removed the cap from the syringe, opened the gate, and stepped inside, his breath fogging in the cold night air.

The tiger roared. Tried to roar. The powerful sound died into a rasp and blood ran out of his mouth and onto his muzzle. Wesley Harrington, more than four decades devoted to these beautiful cats, felt the black rage again.

I will find whoever did this and tear his heart from his chest, kill him with my hands…

“Easy, Kino,” he murmured. “Easy.”

He was close now, about five feet away. Within range of the pole, but it would be a stretch, and he didn’t want to be off-balance. Another step, then. Two more. He needed to get this in where it would count, and he knew this cat and the cat knew him and there would be no problem with this, no problem at—

He’d just pressed the syringe to Kino’s rib cage when the tiger lunged. It was difficult for the cat—obscenely difficult, considering that Wesley had carefully approached from his left side, his wounded side, knowing that if the tiger did make aggressive movements, it would be harder for him to go left than right.

It was hard. His left foreleg twisted uselessly, shattered bone rolling in the shoulder socket, fresh blood pouring free, as he pushed off the ground entirely with his hind legs. For one second they were facing each other, the tiger’s lips peeled back to expose massive, bloodstained teeth and enraged eyes that glittered in the flashlight glow. Wesley saw the right paw rising, saw it coming, and even in the second before it hit him he was more dazzled than terrified. What an incredible show of power. This cat was dying, but he had risen up one last time, risen bold and brave and—

The impact caught him in the chest and threw him back toward the fence. The pole syringe and flashlight fell from his hands and he felt searing warmth and then he was down on his back and the dark trees wove overhead in the endless breeze, tendrils of fog drifting through the fences and out into the woods.

It had not been a full-strength blow. Far from it. A tiger did not need to use full strength, or even half strength, to kill a man.

Wesley got his chin onto his chest and looked down and saw the source of the terrible warmth that engulfed him. Kino had torn him open. In one swift strike, the cat had laid Wesley open from midchest to abdomen. The blood pulsed and pooled around him and he was glad that it was dark and he couldn’t see the wound any better.

Should’ve used the gun,
he thought stupidly.
Not even the dart gun—the real one. Should’ve just ended his misery. Because that cat is dying, and he is scared, and he knows that it was a human that did it.

Kino was up again, moving again. Coming toward Wesley. He let out a bellow, and Wesley, who knew more about cats than he did about people, understood. The cat was not coming to finish the job. The cat was sorry.

“I know,” Wesley said, or tried to say, but his tongue was
leaden in his mouth and his jaw seemed locked. “Not you, Kino. Not your fault. You were scared. We were both scared.”

The cat’s noise had changed, shifting from the roars of agony and fear to the softer chuffing, the sound of friendship, of love, and Wesley could see that Kino was trying to reach him. Not to strike again, not to do harm. The tiger didn’t want to kill him, never had. It was scared, that was all, and an animal of such tremendous size and strength could kill quite accidentally when it was scared.

Kino fell again. The white on his muzzle was stained dark with blood. He tried to stand and couldn’t. Wesley said, “Not your fault, Kino. Not your fault.”

Still the cat tried to rise. Wesley dug his fingers into the grass and the dirt and dragged himself. Parts of him seemed to be trailing behind, but he did not look back. The tiger had gotten so close; all Wesley had to do was close the gap.

He reached him and got his hand up, laid it on the side of the cat’s massive head. The tiger chuffed again, softer, and nuzzled against the hand. Wesley tried to scratch his ears, but it was hard to make his fingers work.

The tiger turned from him then, faced the woods, and growled. Wesley looked in the same direction, and that was when he saw the blue light. It flickered through the darkness, a thin blue flame that seemed to move on its own, a dancing orb in the black night.

“Who’s there?” Wesley tried to call, but he didn’t have much voice anymore.

The blue light came on toward him, and Kino growled again, and now he had support, every cat in the preserve joining the chorus, standing at attention. Across from Kino’s cage, illuminated in the moonlight, Wesley could see that two of the white tigers were on their hind legs, forepaws resting against the fence,
snarling into the night. The blue light retreated, flickering in and out of the trees.

That’s him,
Wesley thought.
That’s the bastard who did this. If I had the rifle right now I could get him. I could hit him from here, so long as he kept holding that light.

But the rifle was outside the cage, and Wesley wasn’t going anywhere. The man with the light wasn’t coming on, though, and after a time Wesley realized that he was scared of the cats.

Kino seemed to know it, too, and though he growled again, he lowered his head, dropped his chin onto Wesley’s thigh. His large eyes regarded Wesley sorrowfully.

“Not your fault, Kino,” Wesley said. “He did it to me, not you. It was his fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The cat’s head lolled down onto the ground but his eyes were still open, his breath coming in anguished gasps.

“I’ll be fine,” Wesley told him. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

Take him first,
he prayed silently,
take this cat first, because he will understand when I am gone, and I do not want him to know that he killed me, because that will hurt him. So take him first, and Lord, take him soon.

“You’re a good cat,” he said from deep in his throat, his lips thick, impossible to move. “You’re a good boy.”

Then he couldn’t even try to talk anymore, and they lay there together in the dirt, Wesley keeping his hand against the tiger’s fur and leaning his head against the same deadly paw that had struck him in the darkness. Out in the woods, the blue light continued to glow, but it came no closer. The wind blew cold and constant, but Wesley was warm there in his own blood and against the tiger’s fur. He was warm enough.

Kino died first. Wesley Harrington’s final thoughts were of thanks.

K
IMBLE HAD BEEN POLICING IN
Sawyer County for twenty-one years now, and in that time he thought he’d seen about every manner of death. Homicides, suicides, car wrecks, electrocutions, fires—you name it, he’d seen it.

Except for a man killed by a tiger.

Somehow, he blamed Wyatt French. He’d been on the highway for ten minutes, headed for the women’s prison, when the call came. There was an uneasy moment when the ring of the phone inside the darkened car as the countryside slid soundlessly past created a sense of déjà vu so strong he was certain that he’d look down and find the call was coming from Wyatt again.

Instead, it was his dispatcher, but as she detailed the scene and its location it felt as if it had all developed at Wyatt’s hand anyhow. Kimble found out that two deputies were already en route. Pete Wolverton, a veteran, always a good man in a messy situation, and Nathan Shipley, who’d been close to the preserve already, making his own morning drive to go back out and see if they’d had any luck trapping the black cat. Apparently they had not.

Kimble said that he’d be there as soon as he could, and then
he turned around and put on his lights and drove back toward the mountains.

You can put another one on the board,
Kimble thought.
One more dead man at Blade Ridge, Wyatt. I’ll add him to your maps.

The glass at the top of the lighthouse glittered in early-morning sun when he arrived. The wind was still and there were birds singing in the trees and one ambitious woodpecker at work somewhere up the hill. Cold, with that December chill, but beautiful. It seemed like a spot where you’d want to stop and spend some time, right up until you noticed the crime-scene tape.

When Kimble arrived, he learned that he’d beaten Audrey Clark to the scene, and he was glad of that. The fewer civilians around, the better, for his first look, and right now he had only one: the kid who’d discovered the body. His name was Dustin Hall, and though he said he was twenty-four, he looked about fourteen. With thick dark hair that needed a cut and glasses with bent frames, he had the appearance of someone likely to need rescue from the inside of a gym locker. The kid was still worked up, crying and blubbering, and though Pete Wolverton was hardly known for his soothing qualities, Kimble asked him to calm the witness down so he could look over the death scene without distraction.

“I’ll show it to you, chief,” Nathan Shipley said. They’d just gone far enough to fall out of earshot of Wolverton and Hall when Shipley looked at Kimble and added, under his breath, “Do you believe this? I was worried about the one who got out. Harrington was killed by one who stayed
in,
though.”

“I wish I’d posted someone out here last night,” Kimble said. “I should have.”

Shipley fell silent then, probably remembering the way he’d turned down Kimble’s request.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” he said. “I really think that—”

“Just show me the scene, Shipley.”

The way Shipley told it, the kid, Dustin Hall, had arrived for the morning feedings, found himself alone on the property, and gone in search of Harrington, who was always up and at work by the time Hall arrived. He first checked the trailer, found it empty but with the door open, and then ventured into the preserve. He found Harrington inside one of the cages, torn damn near in half, with a dead tiger at his side.

It was an ugly scene. The first thing Kimble thought of was a corpse from a pit-bull killing many years ago. That dog had to put in some time and effort to finish the job. The tiger, it appeared, had needed one swipe.

He went into the cage and crouched down and looked at both bodies. The tiger had been shot just behind the shoulder. There was a high-caliber rifle in the dead man’s hand, his stiff fingers still on the trigger guard.

“That thing on the pole, it’s a syringe,” Shipley was saying. “Looks like he was trying to drug the cat when he came in, but he had the rifle with him just in case, you know?”

Kimble didn’t say anything, his eyes following the blood trail back from the dead man. It seemed he’d dragged himself about ten feet after suffering the wound. Toward the cat instead of toward the gate. That was damned curious. Why would he have tried to close the gap?

“Tell you something, these damned cats are killing machines,” Shipley said. “When we were out here last night, I thought,
Someone is going to get hurt.
That’s just what I thought. And then this poor bastard gets killed. I don’t understand why anyone is allowed to have animals like this outside a zoo. It’s a dangerous place, and that’s not even counting the—”

“Shipley?” Kimble said. “Shut up for a minute, all right? Just shut up.”

He was looking at the dead man’s eyes as if they might tell
him something. It was odd, the way the victim had fallen. Curled up against the cat, almost, but there was no way the killing wound could have been inflicted from that angle. So had the cat tried to come over and finish the job and then fallen dead almost exactly as he reached the man? It didn’t make sense. Unless the poor son of a bitch had been coming
toward
the cat in the end.

“I’m guessing Mr. Harrington didn’t have any luck with the missing cougar before he found his way here,” Kimble said.

“No. It appears he set up a trap out by the old railroad tracks, but it hasn’t been touched. That’s not good, because this guy was the only person who was able to get him in a cage to begin with.”

“No,” Kimble said, looking back down at the body. “Not good.”

Audrey was usually at the preserve no later than eight, but today she’d been delayed by a call from her sister, who’d awoken at three in the morning from a terrible nightmare, one that was hard to recall in detail but somehow left the overwhelming sense that it was time for Audrey to give up the preserve.

This wasn’t a new sentiment, but it was a new delivery, and one that incensed Audrey. Her older sister had been campaigning for her to abandon the rescue center from nearly the moment the minister had finished David’s eulogy. While Audrey understood and appreciated her concern, she didn’t need any hysterical talk of prophetic nightmares. Not now, not the way things had been going the past few days. It was too much, and she told Ellen that in no uncertain terms. She was committed to the preserve, and if Ellen would shut the hell up about it and support her instead of arguing with her, it would be great.