“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.
“Kevin Kimble,” Shipley said. “I’ll be damned.” He put the phone to his ear, listened for a moment, and smiled.
“Voicemail. That’s what you’re leaving? Not a bad try. Not bad at all.” He pressed the pound key, and now Roy could hear the faint, tinny voice giving a series of options.
“To delete your message and record again, press seven.”
Shipley pressed seven, then disconnected the call.
41
JACQUELINE,” KIMBLE SAID, the muzzle of his own gun sliding over his Adam’s apple, “don’t do this. Whatever it is you’re thinking, don’t do it.”
She slid off him carefully, her thighs gliding over his, the gun never wavering. She knelt, fumbled along the floor in the darkness, and then Kimble heard a metallic clatter and knew what she was after. Handcuffs.
“No,” he said, and he started to sit up, but she rose swiftly and pressed the gun to his heart.
“Kevin,” she said, “I shot you once before. Do you really think I won’t do it now?”
He was more frightened by the emptiness in her voice than he was by the gun. More defeated by the realization that those few moments in which she’d lain silent and warm against his side had been a lie, a fantasy. A dead dream.
“You can stop now,” he said. “You can put that gun down and this can go away. You’ve seen me put things like this away before.”
She shook her head. “I can’t let that happen. Not now that I’ve seen that fire, Kevin. You don’t understand, because you can’t see it. You don’t belong to it. That’s my future.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“Yes, it does,” she said, and when she straightened, his handcuffs and cell phone were in her hand. “I’ve seen them. Wyatt French and everyone whose picture you showed me. I don’t have to join them, though.”
“Exactly. We will find a—”
“He was telling me to kill you,” she said.
She stood in the dark, and the faint shaft of moonlight that bled through the glass dome of the lighthouse and down the stairs pooled at her feet but climbed no higher. The rest of her, every line and every curve, existed only in silhouette, like a false promise.
“He wanted you,” she said. “He wanted me to kill you. Do you know what that tells me, Kevin?”
He didn’t answer.
“I was given a lifetime back,” she said, “but I had to trade for it, didn’t I? What he wants, it’s not so simple as a soul. He wants workers, Kevin. He said that he’s bound by balance. A life for a life. Once you agree to it, you can’t run from it. Everyone’s learned that. But balance doesn’t vanish. You can keep adjusting the scales to maintain it. If I take another life for him, I’ll buy more time before I have to join him. And another still. If I continue to? Well, I think then I could be like him. Eternal.”
Kimble remembered what Wyatt French had told Roy Darmus on his final phone call. He wanted people to know that if he’d wanted to go on, he could have. That he didn’t have to die.
“You can’t kill more people,” he told Jacqueline. “It’s not in you. What happened before… I was there. I saw it. You were lost that night, Jacqueline, there was nothing left of the woman you are. Then you came back.”
She ignored him, walked to Wyatt French’s desk, laid Kimble’s phone down on it, and then smashed it repeatedly with the gun. While she was breaking his phone he moved, and she spun immediately, but he’d not come closer, only gone farther away. He slid back from her in the bed, bumped into the wall.
“Stop moving, please.”
He stopped, now pinned against the wall, but he could get his hand down to the other side of the bed, to the place where Wyatt French had built his strange emergency shelf to hold a gun, a knife, and a two-million- candlepower infrared spotlight.
The gun was gone. The knife wasn’t.
“I will take you away from here,” he said. “From him.”
“You can’t take me far enough. I’ll be returned to him in the end.”
Her voice was empty, but he saw that she was crying. Tears traced the lines of her face, shadow on shadow, before falling to the floor, plinking down like drops of blood.
“It’s just like the story you told me of how it all started. He was not lying. It’s easier for him to work on desperate people. After what I’ve seen tonight? They don’t come any more desperate.”
She swept the broken pieces of his cell phone off the desk and onto the floor, then said, “You didn’t bring a radio, did you? I can’t find one. Just in the car?”
“What are you going to do, Jacqueline?”
She stepped closer, and now he could see her better, her face a sculpted white glow in the blackness, her body slim and small beneath the bulk of his jacket. She said, “What did you feel, when we were together?”
“Home,” he said.
“You could join me.”
“Join you? Jacqueline, you’ve got to stop talking, you’ve got to stop, please, just—”
“If I shoot you now,” she said, “he will come for you. You’ll have a choice. And if you make the same one I did… we can leave here together. In a way that does not need to end.”
Kimble dropped his hand down to the shelf. His fingers crawled over the wood—there was the flashlight and there was the strop for the knife and there was, yes, there was the blade. He followed it down to the Teflon handle.
“You can’t see them,” Jacqueline said. “If you could, you would understand what I have to do. He gave me life back once in exchange for taking another. He’ll do it again. He wanted you tonight, Kevin. He’ll want others. That’s the idea, you know. He’s bound to the ridge, and he can’t carry his evil into the world. We have to do that for him.”
She knelt beside the bed, leaned forward, and touched his bare chest with the muzzle of the gun.
“Tell me I can do it,” she said. “Then he will come for you, just as he did for me, and you can make the same choice, and we can go on. Together.”
“Killing people.”
“You could help me with that. You know how to get away with it. And we could pick the right ones. We could kill the people who deserve to die, we could turn it into something good, and there would be no end to us, there would be no—”
“Stop,” he said. “Please, Jacqueline, I can’t hear it.”
The stream of words came to an abrupt end, and when she spoke again her voice was low and measured.
“I need you to make the right choice,” she said. “Will you do that?”
For a moment he was silent as the snow pattered on the glass of the lighthouse above them and Jacqueline
