The Ridge (13 page)

And the point?

Well, that was anyone’s guess. Kimble sure as shit didn’t have one.

The only find he made wasn’t a camera but another light. When he pulled Wyatt’s cot out from the wall, he found that the man had built a shelf beneath the bed, near where his hands would have rested while he slept. The contents: an empty holster that would have once held the Taurus .45 he’d used to kill himself, a hunting knife, a leather strop for sharpening it, and a spotlight.

The spotlight had a pistol grip and a trigger, and the lens was outfitted with a cherry-red filter.
Two million candlepower rechargeable,
a label on the handle boasted.

One hell of a bright light,
Kimble thought, and then he squeezed the trigger and got nothing. He frowned, looked directly at the lens, and squeezed the trigger again. There was the faintest of crimson glows, as if the flashlight were draining away the dregs of its battery. When he touched the lens, though, he found it very hot. In fact, he could move his palm back from the light a good distance and still feel its warmth.

“An infrared flashlight,” he said aloud, turning the odd device over in his hands. Of course. If the power went out, you needed a flashlight handy. Particularly an invisible one.

He set the light back down, then inspected the knife and strop. It was a serious cutting instrument—six-inch stainless steel blade going down to a military-grip Teflon handle, and it was seriously sharp. The leather strop was worn from countless repetitions. Wyatt had spent a lot of time sharpening his knife. And, Kimble remembered from handling the suicide piece, oiling his gun. He’d wanted to be prepared, and was determined that the equipment would not let him down when the time
came. This would be why a man slept each night with a gun, a knife, and a flashlight with a two-million-candlepower invisible beam within immediate reach. He wanted to be ready. The only question was, for what?

Kimble had promised him that he pursued the truth always, but maybe there was no truth to be found here, just madness. Maybe that was the truth when it came to Wyatt French.

He hit the spotlight trigger again, felt the warmth of the lens, and recalled Nathan Shipley’s statement about his wreck. He’d talked about seeing some strange light. Kimble looked down at the two-million-candlepower light in his hand and wondered about it. Was the thing truly invisible to the naked eye? What if it hit you just right, found just the proper angle? Those ridiculous laser pointers could do some damage to the eye, couldn’t they? Well, what about a two-million-candlepower infrared spotlight? It seemed plausible that if it were beamed just right, a flash of momentary blindness could ensue.

So what are you thinking, Kimble? That Wyatt was perched on a dead-end road, hoping for some poor lost soul to wander by so he could blind him with a flashlight? Come on.

He shoved the cot back into place, then sat on the dead man’s bed and wondered what Wyatt had known about Jacqueline that Kimble didn’t. Or what he’d known that Kimble
did.

Had he known about the Bakehouse, for example?

Nobody should have. Nobody except Kimble and Jacqueline. And even between them, the coffee shop had never been remarked upon. Probably never would be.

He could remember her so well, the way she looked when she would step through the door with golden light behind her, putting a raven’s shine on her dark hair. Friday mornings. She never missed one. Once Kimble found out, neither did he.

Those encounters began after their first meeting, when Kimble was dispatched to the house after a neighbor called in a
domestic dispute between Jacqueline and her husband. When Kimble got there, Brian Mathis came out to meet him, told him everything was fine. Kimble said he’d like to talk to the man’s wife. Mathis argued. Kimble was readying to explain that it was an argument he could make to a judge if he preferred when Jacqueline stepped out of the house. Kimble sent Brian Mathis back inside so he could talk to her alone, and he’d seen the dark look the man gave his wife as he passed. Kimble stood with her in the fading sun of a cold evening and watched the way she moved, so gingerly, one arm close to her ribs, and listened as she told him the neighbors must have been confused, there was no problem.

It wasn’t the first interview of that sort he’d conducted.

When he’d asked her if she was hurt, if her husband had struck her, she gave him a wan smile and said simply that there was no problem that required his assistance, though she appreciated the offer. He was explaining that she needed to be honest with him if there’d been any violence when she interrupted to tell him that she wasn’t the sort of woman he was expecting her to be, cowed and frightened and unwilling to report a husband who’d just post bond and come back home to finish the job.

“I appreciate what you’re telling me,” she said. “But I’m fully capable of handling this situation.”

The look in her eyes then, so firm, so strong, was different indeed from what he was used to in these situations. And it had worried him.

“There is nothing about you,” he’d told her, “that suggests you are anything but capable. But something else you are, when you go back in that house? You’re alone, Mrs. Mathis. You’re alone.”

She’d put her hand on his arm, held his eyes, and said, “I’m becoming more aware of that every day, deputy.”

Then she’d turned and walked inside. That was his first trip to the Mathis house.

Two weeks later he’d seen her at the Bakehouse, a café three
blocks from the department. He liked to walk up there in the morning, clear his head, see the town. The coffee shop looked out on the courthouse where in the spring the lawn was lined with flowering trees, and sipping a coffee nice and slow at a sidewalk table could turn a potentially bad day into a good one, sometimes.

She was stepping in as he was stepping out on that particular Friday, and there had been an awkward moment of recognition. She smiled, said, “Hello, officer,” and he told her she didn’t have to call him that. She asked what she was supposed to call him then, and he said that his name was Kevin Kimble but most folks called him Kimble.

“I’ll call you Kevin, if you don’t mind,” she said.

He didn’t mind.

He sat at his table outside and she sat inside, and when she left she waved at him and softly said, “Thank you for your compassion, by the way. It helped.”

Routine took over, and he began his speech again, the one urging her to come down the street with him and make a formal complaint. She held up a hand to stop him and said, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

After a pause, he nodded and acknowledged that it was.

“Today I just want to enjoy that. Okay?”

He told her that it was okay. Told himself not to watch her walk down the street. He was full of useless advice that morning, it seemed.

It wasn’t long before he determined that her trips to the Bakehouse were consistently Friday mornings. The encounters became weekly, and they lengthened, but not by much. Five minutes, ten, maybe fifteen. Small talk. Weather and town news, mostly. He didn’t ask after her home life. Then one Friday she wore a sleeveless dress, and he saw the bruise on her upper arm. The dress, he thought, worn when the mark could have been covered
so easily by a sleeve, was defiance. Or a call for help. Or something torn between the two.

They spoke again, and he looked at the bruise pointedly, and then he asked her if she was all right. She sipped her coffee, steam rising across her face, and did not answer. That was when Kimble wrote his cell-phone number down and slid it across the table to her and said, like some foolish gunslinger in a black-and-white cowboy picture, “You need help handling anything, I’m one ring away.”

How ridiculous. How unprofessional.

How he hoped she would call.

And then one night she did.

Kimble was still sitting there on Wyatt French’s bed when his radio squawked, calling him out of the past and into the present with one of the stranger reports he’d heard in his time policing: a cougar was loose.

Shipley met him at the gates, and his face was pale.

“Son of a bitch jumped right out,” he said. “One try, right over the top. If I hadn’t been watching it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“All right,” Kimble said. “Put your damn gun away.”

Shipley looked at him, hesitated, and holstered his sidearm. He kept his palm on it, though.

“If you’d seen the way that thing could move,” he said, “you’d want yours out, too.”

Kimble moved away from him and over to Audrey Clark and a wiry, gray-haired man named Wesley Harrington, who held odd-looking weapons in each hand.

“What in the hell are those?”

“Air rifles. Shoot tranquilizer darts.”

“Can you hit him with it?”

“Sure,” Harrington said. “If he’s five feet away.”

Kimble looked at Audrey Clark and said, “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

Clark, who was tall and good-looking but too thin—she’d lost a lot of weight since her husband died, it seemed—said, “Not if it’s handled right.”

“And how would that be?”

“Quietly,” she said, and then, when he frowned, “I mean that honestly. That’s not concern for my reputation, that’s concern for getting him back. If you bring twenty people out here with guns and send them into the woods, we won’t have a chance.”

“Not the way he moves,” Shipley muttered. “Could bring a battalion out here, and they still wouldn’t get him.”

Kimble shot him a harsh look and then turned back to Audrey Clark.

“That’s a very dangerous animal,” he said. “We can’t just have it running around wild.”

“I could point out that he was running around wild to begin with,” she said, “but that’s a waste of time. I want him back, too. More than you do. But I’m telling you, the more people, and the more noise, the worse our chances. The commotion will scare him.”

“What are you suggesting, then?”

“I think he’ll come back when he’s hungry,” she said, and Kimble sighed at that, the notion of letting a two-hundred-pound cougar grow hungry not one that appealed to him as a solution. “We’re his home. He’ll come back.”

“Not here,” Harrington said, and they all looked at him in surprise. He gave an apologetic glance at Audrey Clark and then said, “It’s just… he had a pretty hostile reaction to this place. I don’t know that he’ll come back. In the old preserve, I might have agreed. But not here. Maybe he’s heading back to the old place.”

Audrey Clark looked as if she wanted to strangle him. Kimble said, “You’re proposing that we go after him, then?”

Harrington nodded. “Ought to try, at least. I doubt we’ll have much luck, but we ought to try.” He looked up at the gray sky. “And we’ve got a short window to do it. Once it gets full dark… that won’t be a good time to be in the woods with him.”

“Right,” Kimble said, thinking of a black cat moving in the darkness and suppressing a shiver. “We’ll want to hurry.”

“Make better time at it if we split up,” Harrington said. “Two by two. Work along the river, maybe, out in the open. See what we can see. I’ll take Audrey and—”

“Hang on there,” Kimble said, thinking that they had two police on hand and two civilians. “You and I will go down to the river together. Nathan, you hang fairly close, all right? You and Mrs. Clark can check the perimeter, but don’t get far.”

Having the damned cat out was bad enough; the last thing he needed was someone to be hurt by it. Harrington had the look of capability about him, and Audrey Clark appeared more shaken. He didn’t need her wandering off into the woods at dusk.

“Let’s go,” he told Harrington, and they set off down the road and for the river as the sun settled in the west, Kimble thinking that he was really beginning to hate this place.

A
UDREY’S THOUGHTS WERE NOT
even on Ira as she and Deputy Shipley walked out of the preserve and toward the abandoned, overgrown railroad tracks that formed its southern border. They were on Wes.

She couldn’t believe the way he was behaving, the things he was saying. The preserve had its share of opponents, people who didn’t understand the need and knew only fear of animals that would never harm them even if they had the chance to do so, and the county sheriff was among them. Now Wes was spouting off about the place as if it
were
dangerous, and to the sheriff’s deputies, no less.

“Hey,” Shipley said, bringing her out of her angry fog. “Why don’t we go right, not left?”

She’d instinctively started to follow the tracks to the left.

“More open view at the river,” he continued. “We’ll go have a look and then come on back. Like Kimble said, no need to get too far into these woods.”

“Fine.” She had a tranquilizer gun in her hands, and now she looked into the trees and refocused on Ira. Was he still out there?
Had he hung close by, as she predicted, or had he simply fled? And which option was preferable?

They turned around and headed toward the river, stepping over jutting timbers and stretches of iron that had once brought trains to these hills in search of fortune. With fortune never found, all that remained were the scraps of what had been laid in its pursuit, covered now by dead grass and brush and, in some cases, even trees. The legacy of the Whitman Company’s efforts at Blade Ridge was becoming obscured by the very nature that it had tried to conquer. Audrey held the air rifle in her hands and swiveled her head left to right, left to right, but something deep within her whispered that it wasn’t worth the effort—Ira was gone, and would not return.