Maddox gimped along the slick stones. No chance of crossing the Cold: too wide, too deep, too fast. He heard the unsuspecting water, which had coursed so proudly out of the highlands and down the broad river basin, howl with betrayal as it launched over the precipice into the brink. Wading any deeper than knee-high would mean getting sucked in by the current and whisked over the edge.
He had no strength for another run into the trees. This was where it had to happen. Maddox searched the ground for good- sized stones to throw, removing his hand from his sagging face, waiting for Ripsbaugh with his back to the river.
Ripsbaugh came up to the bank of stones. Branches had ripped open his black-cotton sleeves and shoulders, revealing shiny skin; Ripsbaugh wearing full latex coating underneath. The wig had shifted back from his forehead, steaming body heat escaping from the cap, giving his peeling face the effect of a smoking skull.
Ripsbaugh eased off his shovel, gripping it like a weapon now, turning it over and over in his hands. Rocks versus shovel. Ripsbaugh had the advantage, but not at that distance.
Maddox hurled stones at him. One after another, any he could get his hands on, but baseball-sized rocks if he had a choice. He couldn't get as much speed on them as he wanted, throwing almost one-leggedly. But they went fast enough that Ripsbaugh could not protect himself or bat them away with the shovel, taking blows in the gut and arms, one sharp-edged rock opening the side of his neck.
Ripsbaugh had to overcommit. Shielding his face with his arm, he came staggering at Maddox over the wet stones. Maddox closed him up with a rock to the midsection, then lunged as hard as his bad leg permitted, shoving Ripsbaugh off balance.
Ripsbaugh went over sideways, holding on to the shovel with one hand. Maddox started kicking that hand with his boot heel, from a squatting position so that the thrusting strength came from his arms braced against the stones behind him, not his other leg.
Ripsbaugh, unable to rise, could not protect his shovel hand. Maddox battered and crushed his knuckles until his fingers gave up the grip. The shovel clacked off a few stones, the blade dipping into the water, tasting it like a steel tongue. Ripsbaugh grabbed after it, but too late. The current seized the tool by the blade, snatching it away from his reach, rushing it out to the edge and over.
Maddox got one more good kick in, to Ripsbaugh's ribs, before Ripsbaugh caught his boot, twisting his leg and throwing Maddox backward against submerged river rocks. Maddox tried to right himself but could not get any traction on the slippery stones. So he crabbed backward, dragging his own bad leg as Ripsbaugh pursued him on his, hunched over, furious and determined.
Maddox felt something through the ground. A thumping, a vibration. Like the pounding bass beat of distant music.
A helicopter crested over the precipice of the falls. The State Police Air Wing search-and-rescue unit. Ripsbaugh stiffened, hearing the bird but not daring to turn around. Wet wig hair hung over the latex peeling off his face, his eyes flaring.
He knew. There was no getting away now.
'Give up, Kane,' yelled Maddox over the noise.
Ripsbaugh stared at his empty, shredded hands, hope gone like the shovel over the edge of the falls. He had nothing left to lose.
He curled his tattered hands into fists and came hard after Maddox. Maddox kicked, but Ripsbaugh caught him by the ankle and, with great strength, began dragging him over the lumpy stones, into the river.
Maddox felt the current start to pull. Delirious pain as his bad leg bumped over the stones, water whipping into his face from the approaching Air Wing's rotor wash.
He saw land behind Ripsbaugh brighten as the helicopter swung around, its searchlight a cone of immaculate brightness.
Thirty-million candlepower. That was what Cullen had said. Chased the coyotes out of the Borderlands.
Maddox grabbed the last stone before the open water and held on, hugging it close. Ripsbaugh kept hauling on him, lashed by river spray as the spinning helicopter righted itself overhead.
Maddox shut his eyes, turning away just as the searchlight hit.
69
RIPSBAUGH
RIPSBAUGH WAS ABOUT TO pull him loose when Maddox closed his eyes.
Closed them like he understood. Like he accepted his fate. Like he would let go of that last rock and they would both wash away together.
The thought of leaving Val alone in this world emptied him.
Then the searchlight hit, and everything went white.
Ripsbaugh blinked. He blinked again but there was no black to go with it, no alteration in the white. The searchlight had burned right through his eyes. He raised his hurt hand to cover his face, but much too late.
Maddox kicked hard, shaking loose of Ripsbaugh's grip. Ripsbaugh started to fall, the river already pulling on his legs. The bad one gave way, and he grabbed blindly after Maddox, at where Maddox had been.
He caught hold of something. Something smooth. The toe of Maddox's boot.
The current sucked at his lower half. The river wanted him. It wanted them both. Hungrily, the water whisked away Sinclair's sneakers from Ripsbaugh's feet. With his other, busted hand he made a lunge for Maddox's ankle, getting a two-handed grip. It was Maddox's bad leg. He could feel Maddox's agony.
Ripsbaugh lifted his face out of the water, blindly trying to see how close he was to pulling Maddox in with him. That was when the blow struck. A boot tread, crushing him full in the face. His hands released at once, and the water took him fast, sweeping him along like he was nothing, running him out to the edge and over, flushing him away.
70
MADDOX
CLINGING TO THE RIVER ROCK, Maddox remembered what Dill Sinclair had once said at this same overlook, about people staying back from the edge, not because they were afraid of falling, but because they were afraid of the temptation to leap.
Ripsbaugh screamed all the way down the falls until the clash and spray pulled him into the pit churning below, the mashing vortex devouring him whole.
71
HESS
THE CRAMPED OFFICE-GARAGE of Cold River Septic was a small, cluttered building set on the edge of Ripsbaugh's property, fed by a dirt lane off the driveway, carved away from the house and yard by a short chain-link fence.
Searing heat inside at midday, but they couldn't open the windows because of the flies. It wasn't that the place smelled bad inside, it actually smelled too good. The disinfectant Ripsbaugh used on his equipment had a flavored scent, sticky and sweet like cough syrup, drawing the swarming bugs.
Hess didn't like getting beat. But if he was going to get beat, at least it was by somebody with a real serious fucking game plan and not just some blunderbuss. This guy Ripsbaugh was playing a game no one else could see. Getting arrested in order to clear himself? Psycho balls. And Ripsbaugh hadn't just beat Hess. He'd beat CSS, he'd beat the crime lab in Sudbury. And he'd beat Maddox.
'So this liquid latex,' said Hess, silence killing him like the heat. 'That's a new one.'
Maddox, forthcoming on every other aspect of the murders and the man who had committed them, remained stubbornly circumspect regarding Ripsbaugh's character. Crazy people have crazy motives, but Ripsbaugh's rationale?cleaning up his beloved town by creating this bogeyman killer to mobilize the residents and bring down the corrupt cops?seemed ambitious in the extreme. Maddox might have been holding something back. Because of some lingering sense of trauma, after all he had been through, the beating he'd given and taken. Or, and this was Hess's gut, maybe it was something a little more personal. Something between him and Ripsbaugh, like pity for the guy. Or, God forbid, something like respect.
They had found Ripsbaugh's tanker truck pulled in behind trees around the corner from Maddox's street. On the plastic-lined front seat lay the garment bag Ripsbaugh used to keep Sinclair's clothes and wig pristine. Fucking diabolical.
'TV teaches,' said Hess. 'Millions of people watch, but all it takes is one who's not only listening but
Maddox nodded, watching Ripsbaugh's video diagnostic contraption through his unbandaged eye, the whirring cable snake feeding slowly into a toilet bowl inside a folding-door utility bathroom. A technician from SwiftFlow Environmental Systems, Ripsbaugh's former regional competitor, operated the controls, watching the pipe camera's progress on a three-by-three monitor.
Hess stood with Maddox before a wired-in laptop, the search being recorded by CSS. To Hess's eye, the perspective was that of a coal miner, a green helmet light illuminating a foot or two of dark tunnel
