The Ridge (35 page)

“I don’t understand why he would have broken it,” she said. “It seemed to matter so much to him that he’d leave a light on.”

“He didn’t break it. The person who found the body did.”

“What about those lamps below? Do they work?”

Kimble looked down at the infrared lights, doing their invisible toil, and said, “No, they don’t.” The lie came without much thought, but he knew why he’d said it, the same reason he had drawn his gun: he still couldn’t trust her completely. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.

Or shouldn’t.

“Turn the light back on,” he said.

The flashlight clicked on, and he could see her again, and he thought that if she’d left the light on when she’d asked him about the infrared lamps, he might not have lied. When he could see her, he could trust her. When they were alone in the dark, though?

Then it wasn’t so easy.

“He apologized to me,” she said, and shook her head in amazement. “Wyatt French. He came all the way to the prison and apologized as if everything could have been stopped if he’d gotten back here and turned on the light.”

“Maybe it could have,” Kimble said, and they looked at each other in silence, considering just what that might have been like.

“Can we go back down? I don’t like to see them, Kevin.”

“We can go back down.”

He followed her down the steps and out into the living quarters. She panned the flashlight beam around the bare walls, lined with their thumbtacks, and said, “This is where he had my picture?”

“Yes. Yours and the others.”

She crossed the small room, sat down on Wyatt French’s bed, and began to cry.

“Jacqueline,” Kimble said, walking toward her, gun in hand. “What—”

“They’re all there with him now. Everyone who accepted his help is trapped with him now, and I will be, too.”

No,
he wanted to tell her,
of course you won’t be,
but what did he know about this? He saw no ghosts in the dark, he’d made no pact in the light of a cold blue flame, he’d killed no one in a black trance.

He reached out to her with his left hand, the one that did not have the gun in it, and wiped tears from her cheek. She reached up and took his hand and held it against her face.

“I’ll be there,” she said softly. “I don’t know when, but I’ll be there. You’re going to take me back to jail now, and in time I’ll get out, but where I’m headed, Kevin? It’s no better. It’s worse.”

He knelt in front of her, looked into her eyes, and said, “There’s got to be something, Jacqueline. We’ll find it. I will find it.”

She gave him a sad smile, tears in her eyes, and said, “Sure, Kevin.”

It was quiet again then, and she tilted her head and kissed his hand. He tried to reach for her, tried to embrace her, but the hand she did not have hold of was occupied with the gun. She looked up at him.

“Put it down, Kevin.”

He hesitated.

“You’re going to take me back,” she said. “I know that you will. It’s the right thing, and you always do the right things. But does it have to be now?”

She slid her hand up the inside of his leg. “Does it have to be
now?
”

“No,” he whispered. It did not have to be. And even if it did, he didn’t want it to be.

He set the gun on the floor, leaned forward, and met her lips with his. She grasped the back of his head with both hands and pulled him down onto the bed. It was a small bed, narrow, and he rolled awkwardly onto his back, while she moved with total grace until she was on top of him and astride him, their lips still together. She broke the kiss and sat upright, looking down at him. Then, slowly, she unzipped his department-issue jacket and slipped out of it. Beneath that was the prison shirt. She pulled that off, too, and now he couldn’t just lie there and watch her anymore. He pulled her down to him and kissed her face, her throat, her breasts, thinking that it was nothing like he’d imagined it would be.

It was better.

His phone began to ring. Jacqueline moved her lips to his ear and her hand to his belt buckle and said, “Let’s not take any calls for a few minutes, all right? Haven’t the two of us earned at least a few minutes by now?”

He thought that they had.

They took more than a few minutes. When it was done, Kimble lay in the dark with Jacqueline Mathis pressed against him, her skin warm on his, and he thought that he had never been crazy—this was where he belonged. With her. He’d known it when he saw her, somehow, as if the universe had whispered a
secret truth in his ear, and now he could feel the confirmation of it in every breath she took, her breasts pressed to his side, swelling warm against him with each inhalation. He reached out and laid a hand gently against the back of her head, stroked her hair as she twisted, nestling against him, and thought,
It will not be that long. Her parole is not far away. She will be back with me if I am patient, and I have been patient for so long, I certainly can be again. For this feeling, this moment, I can be as patient as any man alive.

“Kevin?” Her voice was soft.

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing to do about him. The ghost at the fire. There’s nothing to do.”

“There will be something. I’ll find it.”

She did not respond to that. They lay in the dark and he found himself counting her breaths against his neck.

Have to leave,
he thought,
have to take her back, this has to end, and you know nothing more than before.

“Do you believe that taking the trestle down would help?” he asked.

“In this spot,” she said. “But Vesey? He was there before the trestle, Kevin. He’ll be there after it’s gone.”

The wind buffeted the lighthouse, and up the stairs there was the whisper of sleet striking the glass, the night’s snowfall beginning in earnest.

“I’m cold,” Jacqueline said. “I want your jacket.”

“Right. Sure.” Kimble wasn’t cold at all, not here with her.

When she spoke again, her voice was muffled as she turned away from him, found the jacket, and slipped her arms into it.

“I understand how I can stay away from that fire.”

“How?”

She zipped the jacket up, and then the old bed creaked as she leaned forward, searching for the rest of her clothes.

“It won’t be something you’ll like,” she said, turning back to him, leaning down, and kissing his throat. Her lips were so warm. “And I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean, Jacqueline?”

The gun, when she pressed it to his throat where her lips had been a heartbeat earlier, was very cold.

“Just what I said, Kevin. That I’m sorry.”

T
WO THINGS BECAME READILY APPARENT
to Roy as he woke with a jerk and a muffled shout, rising as if from a nightmare: he was no detective, and he was getting old.

His task had been so damn simple. Watch the road and call Kimble if he saw Nathan Shipley’s truck leave. It required two eyeballs and consciousness. He hadn’t been able to offer both.

The clock said he’d dozed for only ten minutes, but ten minutes was more than enough time for someone to have driven past.

“Shit,” he whispered, looking up the dark road and seeing no glimmer of taillights, wondering what had woken him other than the uncomfortable sense that something bad was happening, something was going very wrong, very fast.

Guilt, nothing more. His body had wanted sleep; his mind had been lecturing him for taking it. That was all.

Still, the bad feeling lingered.

Go check,
he told himself.
Just take a drive down there and make sure his truck is still in the driveway.

It was. The same lights were on in the same rooms, and the
truck was parked in the same place and at the same angle. Fog hung in the trees that ringed the yard, and beyond it the mountains were no longer visible and the moon hung mostly obscured by cloud.

All was as it should be.

Except for that feeling.

Call him,
Roy thought.
Call Kimble and just check in, let him know that everything is good out here, and make sure that it’s good out there, too.

But Kimble had told him not to call unless Shipley was on the move.

Back to the old Esso station he went. He’d just pulled in, backing up so that he had a clear view of the road, when he saw headlights approaching from the direction of Nathan Shipley’s home.

It couldn’t be him. Just someone else passing by in the night, nothing to worry about.

The headlights were set high, though, and as they came near he saw the squared-off grille of a truck not unlike Shipley’s at all. It came closer, moving fast, and Roy reached to turn off his own headlights, had just flicked them off when he realized how stupid
that
was, because they’d surely been visible already, and then he did the only possible thing that was stupider still, and turned them back on.

Brilliant, Darmus. Your only job is to sit here and not be noticed and you
flash
your damned headlights? Should have asked Kimble for a siren or an air horn to help you sneak around. Quick, set off the car alarm!

The truck blew by him then, as he sat there in the empty gas station parking lot with his headlights aimed directly ahead, and he saw the blue side of Nathan Shipley’s pickup truck and caught a glimpse of the deputy’s face as he turned a curious eye toward Roy’s car. Then the truck was gone, and not slowing.

Nathan Shipley was on the move.

Roy reached for his phone and couldn’t find it, felt momentary panic as he patted empty pockets before remembering that he’d carefully placed it in the center console to be reached quickly.

How do people do this every day?
he thought as he dialed.
It sounds so simple. And I’m not even required to follow the guy…

Kimble’s phone rang. And rang. And went to voicemail.

“Damn it!” Roy shouted, and then he called back and got the same response, and now he was faced with a decision. Did he just sit there and let time pass? Or did he follow? The road ahead was a long, winding path toward the highway or town. Shipley wouldn’t turn off it for a while. Roy could catch up.

“Go for it,” he decided, and he dropped the phone into the console and put the car into gear, pulling out of the lot and onto the road. If he drove hard and fast he could catch up, and then, if Kimble would just answer the damn phone, he’d be able to tell him—

He’d made it a quarter of a mile down the road when he saw the truck pulled off on the shoulder, its lights off, sitting in shadows. He registered that first, and then he saw the man standing in the middle of the road, holding a badge up with one hand and a gun with the other.

Roy put on the brakes and rolled to a stop. For one wild moment he considered pounding the gas instead, driving around the deputy or, hell, right over him. Anything seemed preferable. But he was a rational man even on an irrational night, and he trusted in his ability to bullshit. Shipley didn’t know him. Roy would give him some song and dance about car trouble and then be on his way.

As Shipley approached, though, there was something in his face that suggested bullshit might not work. The gun was not being held casually. His finger was on the trigger.

Roy slipped his hand down to the console, punched redial on his phone, and then turned it over so the illuminated screen was
hidden. If Kimble picked up, great. If he didn’t, at least he’d get to hear a voicemail preserving whatever was about to happen.

Shipley rapped on the window with his knuckles, and Roy slid it down.

“Why are you standing in the road?” Roy said, trying to look indignant, the concerned citizen, the intrepid reporter, the man who was not scared of police because he trusted police.

Shipley leaned in, his face lit by the glow from the instrument panel, and said, “I would like to know why you’re watching my house.”

“What? Who are you?”

Shipley smiled. His face was very pale in the glow, and his eyes were hooded. He brought the gun up and laid it on the doorframe, pointed right at Roy’s head.

“Slide over,” he said.

“I’m not doing that. I have no idea what you’re—”

“You’ve driven past three times,” Shipley said. “And you’re parked at an empty gas station. You’re not out here to look at the stars, pal. You’re watching me, and not very well.”

He tilted the gun so that Roy could see how tightly he had his index finger wrapped around the trigger.

“Slide over,” he said again.

Roy looked into the barrel of that gun, and then he unfastened his seatbelt and climbed over to the passenger seat. He was very careful not to hit the cell phone.

Shipley popped opened the door and got behind the wheel. There were no other cars on the road.

“We’re going to take a ride back to my house and talk,” Shipley said, and then he lowered his gaze, just for a moment, and looked at the phone. It lay upside down on the console, but there was a thin band of light around it. Shipley kept the gun pointed at Roy’s head while he reached for the phone with his free hand, picked it up, and turned it over.