The Ridge (40 page)

He was passing through the fences close to her, and he began dragging the handle of the flashlight across them, metal on metal, a loud rattling sound. Jafar heard it and growled in Audrey’s face.
Peeled his lips back and even in the dark they were so close that she could see those teeth, the ones that tore through meat so easily.

“Calm down, honey,” she whispered, barely audible. “Calm down.”

Dustin banged against another fence, this one closer, and the leopard growled again. The next fence he hit belonged to the leopard’s enclosure. He was at the gate.

“Were you brave enough to go in with your favorite?” he said, voice lower and musing, as if he found the idea plausible. She was glad she’d fastened the lock.

But the snow,
she realized,
my tracks are in the snow, he will see those.

She’d been crawling, though. Not leaving footprints. Just a messy trail through the very same snow that Jafar had trampled over himself.

The flashlight beam caught the corner of the cat’s shelter. Dustin was trying to angle it so that he could see inside. The light caught the back half of the cat, illuminating the long tail and spotted hindquarters, but not finding Audrey. She’d gone far enough back that it could not reach her.

Dustin banged on the fence again, and Jafar let out the loudest and angriest growl yet. Audrey lifted her hand to her mouth and bit down on the side of it.

“Where are you, Jafar? Come out here. Come out and see me.”

The shelter was too narrow to allow the cat to turn around, but he was angry about the noise, and Audrey could sense that he wanted out. When he moved toward her, she felt a rush of fear, his massive paws and their deadly claws brushing over her thighs. He was pressed against her for a moment, the length of him sliding by, and then he slunk around the corner and emerged through the other end of the little house, outside again, snarling.

“Hiding out?” Dustin said. “Scared, big boy?”

There was another rattle against the fence, but this one was different from the others. Not done just to make noise. He was, Audrey realized with rising panic, working with the lock. Opening the gate.

Coming in,
she thought wildly.
How does he know I’m here? How does he know?

Then Dustin spoke again, and she realized that he was not coming in at all. He had a very different idea, one that reduced her temporary terror but replaced it swiftly with another one.

“Come on out,” Dustin said. “I’ll tell you something—they don’t like you down at that fire. They don’t like any of you. So step on out, Jafar, and get the hell away from our ridge.”

Our ridge.

“You need to go,” Dustin said, “and the lighthouse needs to go. Then things will be back to the way he prefers them.”

Audrey heard the sound of the gate being pushed open, and then the flashlight moved away and Dustin was at another gate, another lock.

He was opening them all. He was releasing the cats.

T
HEY BANGED OFF THE PAVED
county road and onto the gravel of Blade Ridge so hard and fast that the back end of the truck jitterbugged to the left, and Roy reached out and put a hand on Shipley’s arm.

“Slow down, damn it. You forget what happened to you out here before?”

“All right.”

Shipley let off the accelerator and they slowed to what, after the pace of their wild ride, seemed like a tractor’s crawl. Roy stared ahead, thinking of blue torches dancing through the woods, thinking of his parents out here on a wintry night just like this. He wondered how soon they realized they’d missed the turn. Early, he suspected. His father would have realized it early. And he would have continued on down the road because he was looking for a safe place to turn his beloved small-block V-8 Chevy around. Or because he’d been following the blue light, enraptured, as so many seemed to be.

“If we don’t see Kimble’s car,” Roy asked, “do we still go in? Do we try to talk to Audrey Clark?”

“I want her away from that kid,” Shipley said, and then he pounded the brake all the way to the floor, the truck sliding to a stop in the snow and the gravel, and said, “Holy shit.”

There was a lion standing in the road. Majestic and with a full mane, his enormous head swung toward them, studying them, eyes aglitter in the headlight beams.

“They’re out,” Shipley whispered. “Why are they out?”

Roy had no answer. It couldn’t be good, though.

A shadow moved ahead and to the left, and they both turned toward it. Visible for an instant, then receding, was the orange-and-black-striped side of a tiger.

“Mr. Darmus,” Shipley said, “you want to tell me what in the hell we’re supposed to do about this?”

“Call for help,” Roy said. “It’s too late to be worried about protecting Kimble. Maybe too late to worry about Audrey Clark. We’re going to need a lot of people out here.”

“Yeah,” Shipley said softly, foot still on the brake, his eyes still locked onto those of the lion, which had not turned away. The animal lifted its head and roared then, a sustained bellow that made the steel and fiberglass shell around them seem suddenly insubstantial.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Roy said. “I’m afraid it’s too late for them. It’s not for us.”

Before Shipley could agree or disagree, a figure appeared at the far end of the road, walking out of the trees near Wyatt’s lighthouse, down toward the gates of the preserve. For a moment, Roy thought of Vesey, and wondered where his torch was.

Then he recognized him, almost simultaneously with Shipley.

It was Kevin Kimble.

He’d remained in the water for a few moments, until he was certain that what he was most aware of was the cold and not the
pain. There was no pain. The ghost was gone and the blue light was gone but he knew that they were not really departed, that they remained very close.

At the top of the ridge, it occurred to him that he had not been aware that he had started to climb. Had not been aware of leaving the water. His body was whole and healed; he felt stronger, in fact, than he had in many years, stronger than he had since the day his back was pierced by a nine-millimeter bullet.

It’s true,
he thought numbly,
it is all true, every word I have been told about this place is true.

He was bothered by the way he had been compelled to move, the way he had emerged from the rocks and climbed to the top without decision or conscious thought, a man on the move with destination and motivation unknown.

He needs you gone,
Kimble realized.
It’s just as Jacqueline said—his evil is bound to the ridge. He doesn’t want to hold you here, not until you’ve done your work. You have to carry his torch for him into the places where he cannot go.

And the torch was in him now. It would travel with him for all of his days.

That was just fine. Kimble would not feel the weight of the burden long. He had promised balance, he had promised to take a life, and he intended to very soon.

He’d returned to kill Dustin Hall.

There was a shotgun in his cruiser, and his cruiser remained at the lighthouse. He walked through the trees, staying well to the north of the road, away from the preserve, reminding himself to walk in the path that was illuminated by the invisible beams from the lighthouse, reminding himself that if he recalled the lessons of the dead, he could see this night through to dawn. Down below, he could see a flashlight beam and hear Hall shouting, and he thought of Audrey Clark and knew that he had to hurry. He was able to hurry now; running was not a problem
for Kimble, not now, not after that single whispered word of consent.

You’ll make the right decision?
Jacqueline had asked.

Yes, he had. It would be the right decision, because he would kill Hall, his debt immediately satisfied, and then he would retreat from this place for many years—the courts would see to that—and when it was all done, when his days were passed, he would of course have to return here. Bound to the fire. He knew that and it saddened him but he could not think of it now, because there was work to be done, because he had to focus on running up that slippery, snow-covered slope and toward the beacon that Wyatt French had built so many years ago.

The rest of his days were not a concern, it was the rest of this night that mattered. He would use evil against itself, and in that was some level of victory, the most Kimble could yet be granted. If he was damned to that fire, so be it. Because he would be damned with her, and that felt right, that felt a long time coming. He could still remember the feel of her lips, he could still remember her blood, so hot, cascading over his hand as he worked the blade into her, seeking the heart. They’d damned one another, indeed. He’d returned her here, to the one place to which she could not be returned, and then he’d killed her. Now he would never leave.

Bound by balance.

He reached the cruiser, pulled open the door, and found the shotgun clipped in its customary position. Removed it and swung the door shut and turned back to where the flashlight beam was passing through the trees below.

Debts to be settled.

He ran down the driveway, which was too steep for running in the ice and the snow and the dark, but he did not stumble, he did not fall. When he reached the base of the hill he paused, isolating the position of the flashlight and knowing that he had to go quietly now.

Then, suddenly, the flashlight was gone. For an instant Kimble was puzzled, and then he, too, heard the engine and saw the headlights.

Someone was coming.

When the vehicle came to a stop, Kimble stepped out of the trees and began to move toward it, his finger resting on the shotgun’s trigger, and what he saw painted against the headlights brought him to an abrupt halt.

The lions were loose.

Audrey heard the engine and then Dustin fell silent and his flashlight was extinguished. When he spoke again, his voice was low and soft.

“Visitors. I should probably greet them, don’t you think, Lily, old girl? Wouldn’t do to be impolite.”

He’d been talking to the cats consistently as he tried to urge them from their cages. He seemed to have given up on his pursuit of Audrey or the idea that she could even hear his voice; his attention had gone instead to the cats and their release. She knew from his words of approval and their sounds that a few of them had accepted the coaxing and ventured into the night. Now she heard his footsteps crunch through the snow and understood that he was moving toward the road.

She could stay here, secure in her dark hole, hiding and waiting, but whoever had come down the road did not know what those approaching footsteps carried with them. There was a tranquilizer rifle in the trailer, and while you had to be close to use it, it would be better to try than to stay here cowering in the darkness and let him destroy whatever help had arrived, let him take more blood for the ridge.

Audrey had facilitated enough blood for the ridge.

She waited until his footsteps were inaudible, and then she
slipped out of the shelter, bits of straw hanging in her hair, and peered into the night. Across from her, in the silent snow, Lily, the blind white tiger, sat on her haunches, staring at nothing.

Only Audrey knew better than to think that. The cat’s other senses more than compensated for the lack of vision; so long as Lily was watching the road, that meant Dustin was in that direction.

The trailer was not far off. She could make it. He would be occupied with the car, which appeared to be stopped in the middle of the road, and even if he heard her or saw her, he would have to make a decision. Whatever choice he made, someone would have a chance to adjust to it. She needed to force him toward that moment of decision.

There was a flourish of motion to her left, and she turned to see Jafar cross the enclosure in rapid bounds, pulling directly up to her. The terror she might have felt just minutes before was gone, though. She had lain with him in the dark and emerged unscathed on the other side, and now her fear had turned to faith. She rose to one knee, took the leopard’s head in both hands, and kissed his nose.

“Thank you, baby. Thank you.”

Then she got to her feet, went to the gate, and stepped through. In the distance, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, she could see one of her tigers stepping hesitantly through a yawning gate and into freedom.

Hurry, Audrey,
she told herself as she began to run.

If she’d ever moved faster, she could not remember the occasion. She ran expecting blows or bullets, but none came, and she neither saw Dustin nor heard him. The trailer door was cracked open; he had not bothered to close it behind him as he came out with the flashlight. She hit the door at full speed, slammed it shut, locked it, and turned to the small closet where they had kept the tranquilizer rifle since Wesley’s death.

The door was open, and the closet was empty.

Of course,
she thought stupidly.
Even Dustin wouldn’t have been setting them loose if he didn’t have some sort of weapon.

She turned to the window, and that was when she saw Kevin Kimble in the road near the gates and, moving just behind him, a silhouette that looked like a man.