Kimble noticed that Ryan O’Patrick didn’t have curtains in his trailer. Every window was exposed to the stadium lights.
“The gauges went,” he said, and his voice was soft. “Speedometer, tach, everything. Just went flat. Don’t know why it happened. Electrical short of some kind. I got to staring at them and took my eyes off the road, that’s all. Poor driving, nothing else.”
Kimble said, “Really?”
“Yeah,
“You’ve told two versions of it now,” Kimble said, “and neither one is the truth.”
“You know what I find interesting?” O’Patrick said.
“What’s that?”
“You know who I am. I can see it all over your face. You know that I did twenty years for killing a man.”
Kimble nodded.
“And you know what else? The questions you’re asking? They’re about a lot more than a car wreck. Tell me if I’m lying.”
Kimble was silent. Ryan O’Patrick gave a dark smile and then bent to a mini-fridge tucked under a nearby shelf. He pulled out another tall-boy and extended it to Kimble with a question in his eyes. Kimble accepted it.
“You want to hear it?” O’Patrick said. “I’ll tell it this once. Never again.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
O’Patrick nodded, moved to a stool, and popped the top on his beer. He took a long pull and said, “I was always a bit of a hell-raiser. I’ve got a temper like a damned light switch. People used to call me that, in fact.”
Kimble raised an eyebrow, and O’Patrick said, “Well, if they didn’t, they should have. Because I could snap pretty fast. Had my share of fights. So when I killed Joe, everyone said,
Every time Kimble had seen her, Jacqueline had offered the same line:
Kimble said, “Tell me about the ridge, please. About your accident. Describe it as best as you can remember it.”
“Brother, I can describe it fine. I just don’t like to. Now, the accident itself? Simple. I was watching the blue light. Watching so close I couldn’t have hit the brakes if I wanted to.”
“The blue light?”
“You heard me. Thing was floating through the trees, glowing. A blue flame. I couldn’t mix you a paint to match, not even a pearl coat. You ever heard of Saint Elmo’s fire? Shit that shows up on a ship’s mast out in the middle of the ocean?”
Kimble nodded, thinking of Jacqueline’s recollections of her suicide attempt and feeling sick.
“I expect that’s the closest thing to it,” O’Patrick said.
“The sight of it was enough to make you wreck?”
“You say that like it’s hard to believe! Let’s get you out driving in the dark, pal. Let’s give you the wheel, take it up to fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, and then let that light float your way. I’d like to see how good your reflexes are then.”
Kimble held up his hands. “All right,” he said. “I’m not arguing. I’m asking. What happened after you crashed?”
O’Patrick paused, and Kimble let him.
“What I remember,” he said eventually, his voice the most unsteady it had been, “was the man who came for me.”
It was clear he wasn’t talking about paramedics.
“He came down off the ridge and out of the woods. A blue torch in his hand. Cold flame. I was hurt bad, and at first I was glad to see him, because I knew I needed help. But then he came on down the road and I didn’t even call out for help, because, well… he wasn’t the sort of man you called out to. I could sense that much. So he kind of circled, studying me. And I remember being afraid that he would…” His voice broke and he covered it up with a long pull on the beer. “That he would take me,” he finished.
Kimble was quiet. Ryan O’Patrick fumbled a cigar out of his shirt pocket, then put it back without lighting it.
“I could see my face in the mirror,” he said. “Could see how busted up I was. My nose was laid over to one side, and the skin was torn right off my jaw. I could see my teeth and my jawbone, and blood was just pouring out.”
He reached up and touched unmarked skin with his fingertips.
“I saw that and I knew that I was dying,” he said, and his voice was one Kimble had heard before, when he had talked to witnesses of terrible crimes. Or, more often, survivors of them. There was always weight behind the words of someone who’d passed near the mortal precipice.
“The man with the torch, he knelt down, taking his time, relaxed as could be. I can’t remember much of his face, just that firelight. He was shadows and cold flame to me, nothing else. He asked if I wanted help. And I had the sense that… even if he could help, it wasn’t the sort of help you wanted to accept. You know? That it came with a price.”
Kimble’s breathing and heart rate had slowed in the way they always did in high-pressure interviews, times when he had to will himself not to press. He was listening to O’Patrick but hearing Jacqueline Mathis.
“You asked for his help?” he said finally, after he realized O’Patrick was staring at him, waiting for a response.
“I did. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to die out there, either.”
“And what did he do for you?”
O’Patrick gave him a long stare, then said, “The EMT who put me in the ambulance took a look at my car and called me the luckiest son of a bitch he’d ever seen.”
Kimble was thinking of Shipley’s car, the way he’d walked into the department the next day and announced that he was a little sore, that was all.
“In that moment, though,” Kimble said, “what did he do?”
O’Patrick breathed in until his chest swelled, then steadied himself and said, “He said he could heal me, but only if I was willing. He said that he couldn’t reach me if I wasn’t, and that I needed to understand that he was bound by balance. That was the phrase, I’ll never forget it. Bound by balance. And I knew what he meant by it, I won’t lie about that. But I still said yes. Then he dipped that torch down to me. That’s the last of it I remember until the EMT was there.”
For a long time it was silent in the garage. Out at the high school the bleachers rattled, rattled, rattled.
“This happened in ’82,” Kimble said. “This happened before Wyatt put up his lighthouse.”
“Yeah.”
Something that had been absent fell into place in Kimble’s brain, and he said, “Wyatt had an accident out there, too, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
“When?”
“I’m not certain. Not long before he set to building the lighthouse. And before you ask, yes, he saw the man with the torch, and he made his bargain. Only difference is, when I shook it off like it was a bad dream, Wyatt believed in it. I guess because he was out there all the time. You go back to that place once you’ve made your bargain, you can see them. That’s what he told me.”
“So he lived with that every night?”
O’Patrick shuddered. “I can’t imagine, man. I can’t imagine.”
“Why didn’t he leave?”
“I suppose because he knew you can’t run from something that’s in you. So he set to work fighting against what was in him, but once you’ve made that bargain, it ain’t something you can fight. By the time he found me, Wyatt was understanding that much.”
