The Ridge

Mathis watched him in the moonlight, and then he nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

“Truly, Kevin?”

“Truly, Jacqueline.” He reached out gently with his right hand and pushed her hair back from her face, used his thumb to clear the last traces of moisture away from beneath her eyes.

She smiled. “I’m so glad,” she said.

“I know,” Kimble said, and dropped his right hand down to the gun as he swung his left out with Wyatt French’s knife in it and buried the blade in her back.

She let out a sound of soft and terrible anguish, a moan that wanted to build into a scream but couldn’t. The knife had entered just under her left shoulder blade. Blood seeped from the wound and flowed hot across his hand. Kimble had been trying to get the gun from her as he swung the knife, or at least get it pointed away from him, but he didn’t succeed at either task. She’d anticipated that attempt; she had not anticipated the knife. She’d cleared the gun from his grasp, though, and it was pointed at his face and her finger was on the trigger and his life was a few pounds of pressure away from an end, but she did not squeeze.

The moan came again, more pain evident now, and she tried to rise. The blade slid free from her body and his hand and fell to the floor as blood streamed down his jacket and ran over the backs of her slim, bare legs. As he watched the pain rise through her he looked at the gun and said, “Go ahead,” and he meant it.

She opened her fingers and let the gun fall, looked him in the eyes with impossible sadness, and whispered, “You know what you’ve done to me.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“You know,” she began again, but she couldn’t get all the words out this time. She shuddered and fell forward, fell against him, her face against his neck, and he reached out and caught her and held her.

“I’m scared of him,” she whispered.

“You don’t belong to him, Jacqueline. You don’t.”

He felt each of her last breaths. She lay against him just as she had before, in the one moment when everything had felt perfect.

“I’m sorry,” he told her again, but there was no point to it now. Her warm breaths against his neck had ceased.

Kimble pressed his face into her hair and wept.

42

NATHAN SHIPLEY DROVE with his left hand and kept the barrel of his gun pressed into Roy’s stomach with his right. Roy looked at the gun and thought of what he could do to escape, the movements he could make. Then he thought of how fast a trigger could be pulled.

He made no movements as Shipley drove them back to his home.

“Get out,” Shipley said. His voice was unsteady. “Get out and walk inside.”

Roy climbed out of the car and went through the yard and up the creaking steps of the porch. The doorknob turned in his hand, unlocked. He pushed it open and went in and Shipley followed.

“Sit down,” Shipley barked, and Roy obeyed, sitting on an ancient and dusty couch. “Who the hell are you?”

“Roy Darmus. I worked for the newspaper.” It was absurdly formal, but one of the things Roy was finding he believed deeply was that you should keep men with guns happy.

“Why are you watching me?”

Roy considered the gain in a lie, and couldn’t find it.

“Kimble asked me to.”

“He doesn’t trust me. He came out here this morning, and it was obvious.” Shipley paced, rubbed a hand across his face, and then said, “Holy shit, what am I doing? What in the hell am I doing?”

Roy was silent. He’d been more focused on the gun than the man, but now that it wasn’t pressed against his stomach, he looked at Nathan Shipley’s face. It was haggard, weary. It was frightened.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Shipley said.

“That’s good to hear.”

“I just don’t know what’s happening. What I’m doing, what I should be doing. I don’t know anymore. I said that Kimble doesn’t trust me? Well, you know what, man? I don’t trust myself. I don’t. That’s the problem. I’m seeing things, and I can’t get them out my head. My mind isn’t right. People are dying out there, Pete died out there, and then Kimble comes out to my home and it was like he thought I did it, like he thought I was some sort of evil…”

The words were streaming from him, and he was still pacing, the gun hanging idly at his side.

“There’s a bad history to that place,” Roy said, trying to choose his words carefully. “I think Kimble is just worried for you.”

“Well, he ought to be. Because I’m telling you, I have never been more certain of anything in my life than what I saw the night of my wreck out there, but what I saw was impossible.”

“It might not be,” Roy said, keeping his tone relaxed, thinking that if he could be soothing and understanding, then maybe, just maybe, he might walk out of here alive.

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“I know that other people have had the same experience. Have received the same offer. You might not have imagined as much as you—”

“Offer?” Shipley stared at him.

“I mean, other people have seen the man in the road. Kimble’s been documenting it. I’ve been helping.”

“That kid? Somebody else saw that kid?”

“I’m talking about the man with the torch. That’s what you saw, isn’t it?”

“I saw a torch, yes. A blue flame. There are others? Other people have seen this?”

“Yes. But they describe him differently. I think most of them see a man. Most of the people who have seen him are dead now, though, and what they saw, I’m not sure. So maybe others saw a child—”

“When I say kid,” Nathan Shipley said, “I mean the one who works with those cats.”

The gun in Shipley’s hand was no longer Roy’s focus. “What?”

“That accident,” Shipley said. “I am telling you, as honest as I’ve ever spoken in my life, I hit that kid. Not somebody else, not some ghost. I hit him, and I did not imagine it. He walked right into the middle of the road. He was just staring off at something, didn’t pay any attention to my car at all, and when he moved, I swerved the wrong way. I hit him. I know that I did. I saw it, I felt it.”

Roy said, “You walked away from that wreck. Unhurt.”

“I walked away awfully damn sore, and awfully lucky. But that kid, Dustin Hall? He should have been dead.”

Roy stared at him, thinking that he’d covered a lot of bad accidents, had taken a lot of photographs of cars that did exactly what a good car was supposed to do in a wreck—absorb the beating for you. Save you.

“But you talked about the blue flame,” he said. “Kimble told me that.”

“Yeah. The way it happened… the way I know it happened, not the way I remember it, but the way I know it did, was that I hit that kid as he stood in the middle of the road staring off like somebody in a trance. You would have to be deaf and blind to just stand there like that, but he did. And I hit him. Going fast, I hit him. He popped up in the air, and I could see him going across the windshield, and then I was in the trees.”

Shipley wiped a hand over his mouth and shook his head. His eyes were wild.

“When I got my bearings back, the first thing I saw was that blue flame. It was over in the woods, just where his body should have been, just where he was flying when he went past the windshield. And then… then he was up. By the time the other people, Audrey Clark and Harrington, by the time they got there, the kid was up. I was woozy as hell, I will admit that, but I will not admit that I am capable of imagining something like that.”