The Ridge

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.

18

KIMBLE 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 deja 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