The Ridge (31 page)

“If I’m crazy,” Kimble said, watching him carefully, “at least I’ve got company. I appreciate that.”

Then Kimble told him his intention to take Jacqueline Mathis to the ridge, and Roy found himself shaking his head.

“Too dangerous for you, Kimble. Even if Grayling approved it, if something goes wrong out there and you’re left with
this
explanation, you’re done.”

“I know it,” Kimble said simply. “I’ve thought on that a great deal, trust me. But let me show you the other side of that coin. If I don’t take her out there, and I don’t do anything about it, and a hundred years from now someone is still adding names to that list Wyatt started… well, which would you rather have? Your parents died out there.”

Yes, they had. And if Kimble was to be believed, they had
died by making the right choice. Roy thought back to Wyatt’s words in that final phone call, those that had incensed him so deeply:
The decisions that they both made. Very brave. Very strong. And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult.

He’d thought Wyatt was suggesting that they’d killed themselves. Instead, he was suggesting that they hadn’t been willing to preserve their own lives at the cost of another’s.

“That’s why Wyatt killed himself,” Roy said. “He had to take a life. He chose his own.”

“It seems that way.”

“When he got his diagnosis, he would have known that just waiting to die wasn’t an option for him. Maybe he could feel that? I think that he could.” Roy recalled the man’s panicked breathing on that final phone call, recalled how he’d said that he was becoming afraid of what he could do in the dark, and nodded. “Whatever was pulling on him, it was tugging harder at the end.”

“You see what I’m saying?” Kimble said, his voice mournful but determined. “Which is worse, Darmus?”

“The second option,” Roy said, and then, just as Kimble started to nod, he said, “But that’s assuming you could
do
something about whatever is out there. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that you can.”

“Jacqueline thought she could help.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But she can see them, Darmus. She can see them, and I can’t. I can’t fight something I can’t see.”

“I don’t know that you can fight dead men, either,” Roy said. “Maybe you can fight them, but win? How do you defeat the dead, Kimble?”

The chief deputy was silent for a very long time, and then he said, “I need to know what she sees. If there’s nothing that can
be done, she’ll know it. If there is something… maybe she’ll know that, too.”

“Why would
she
if Wyatt didn’t? He figured out that the light helped, and he figured out the history of the place. He did everything that could be done and still nothing worked.”

“He also called on us,” Kimble said, “and I don’t think he did that just for his legacy. The man had hope.”

“Again I’ll ask—what suggests that Jacqueline can understand them any better than Wyatt did?”

“Because,” Kimble said, “she’s already settled her debt. He hadn’t.”

Roy pushed back from the table and let out a deep breath.

“It’s one hell of a risk,” he said.

“I understand that. I also think the time has come to be willing to take one. Something needs to be done. We can’t allow it to continue. For more than a century now, good people have lost their lives to that place or because of it. That has to end. It has to.”

Roy said, “You must be capable of believing in great evil to push it this far, Kimble.”

“I suspect,” Kimble said, “I’ve already brushed closer to it than most.”

Roy took a sip of his coffee before remembering that it had already chilled, then pushed it aside.

“Tell me the part about Jacqueline, please. The part you don’t want to tell. I can ride with you either way. I already am. But I’d like to know. Not judge. Just
know
.”

“You already know all of that.”

“I don’t mean the details of what she did,” Roy said. “I mean the reason you can’t treat it like a cop.”

He’d expected an argument. Resistance, defensiveness, even outright anger like the man had shown before. The walls Kimble had built and guarded so carefully, though, seemed to have deteriorated rapidly in the past few days.

Kimble turned his eyes back to that empty patio, where the wind was swirling snow.

“I had feelings for her,” he said. “In a way I never had for a woman before, never will again. Used to daydream about the day she would leave that son of a bitch. A part of me was living for it. I didn’t count on the
way
she’d leave him, right? Didn’t count on that.”

“You were in love with her before she shot you?”

Kimble nodded.

“Was there… were you having an affair?”

“No. I was just waiting. I knew the day would come, had to come. Even that was bad enough, though. I was waiting out the end of an abusive marriage. When I think about it like that, I hate myself, Darmus. This morning I was thinking about Audrey Clark. You’ve seen her, right?”

“Yes.”

“She’s everything you could possibly desire in a woman,” Kimble said. “Bright, beautiful, and brave as hell. As strong as anyone I’ve ever seen. I think about her, and I ask myself, why can’t I be in love with
her?
Why can’t I sit in this coffee shop and hope that
she
walks in?”

He sighed, and his voice softened. “I just can’t. I think about a woman in a cell instead. I’d like to fix that about myself, but it is beyond me.”

“You really don’t think Jacqueline belongs in prison?” Roy asked.

“The night she shot me, she was not herself. Okay? That’s the clearest I can say it. You should have seen her that night. Because she was evil. Then the life went out of her husband, just as she put the gun to my forehead, and… and she was back. So now I’d say, you should have seen her that night. Because she was worthy of love, worthy of dying for, worthy of anything I could give.”
He spread his hands. “They’re both true. Now you try living with that. Try treating that like you’re a cop.”

“You can’t decide which she is?”

“I couldn’t reconcile how she was
both.
I went to see the woman every month, and I always left thinking how damned egregious it is that she’s in that prison. But then I remembered the way she was that night, I remembered the fact that she
smiled
while she put a gun to my forehead, and I… I just didn’t know.”

Roy had covered the trial of Jacqueline Mathis. He had listened to Kimble’s testimony, he had read every document. There had never been a mention of a gun put to his forehead. Only a bullet in the back, supposedly fired in error, supposedly aimed at her abusive husband. He knew that Kimble had not made a mistake in what he’d just said, though. You didn’t forget something like that. So that meant he’d chosen to forget it on the witness stand.

“She wasn’t herself,” Kimble said. “When I say that, I don’t mean that her mood changed. I don’t mean that she was in shock. I mean that for a while there, the woman who is Jacqueline Mathis became something else. Then that woman came back. Put down the gun and apologized as I lay there on the floor in the blood—mine and her husband’s—and it was like watching a… a soul slip back where it belonged.”

He coughed, shook his head. “I know how that sounds. I know what you probably think of it.”

Roy said, “Don’t worry about how it sounds. I just needed to hear it.”

“I could never come to peace with that night, and she couldn’t help me. Claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. But now I hear the stories from O’Patrick, and I see all the work you’ve done, and I can believe her. For the first time, I can explain it. When I walked through that door, she was just… blackness. Evil. But
her husband was still breathing at that time. And when he was gone? She came back. I can believe all these stories now, because I
saw
it.”

They sat together in silence, and eventually Roy nodded.

“Thank you,” he said. “I wanted to know. And hearing it helps me believe a little more, myself. I’d still say you’re taking one hell of a risk taking her out there by yourself.”

“I know it.” Kimble met Roy’s eyes and said, “Do you ever wonder why you’re along on this ride?”

“Because it’s a hard story to sell, and I was already involved.”

“Exactly. Wyatt called you out there, and you were willing to consider it longer than most, to follow it into stranger places and darker corners than most, and that’s because it’s
personal
to you. Well, it’s surely personal to me, too. He didn’t pick us by mistake.”

“No. I don’t think the man’s approach was anything close to haphazard.”

“All right. We’re agreed on that. You asked me to tell you the truth, and I’ve done it. I’ve told you what I intend to do, and what really happened with her that night. You’ve heard my soul emptied out, and you’ve got the chance to walk away. I won’t blame you.”

Roy waited. Kimble watched him for a while, then gave a short nod, satisfied.

“I’ve got something else to ask of you,” he said. “And please, Darmus, be careful. This one is riskier than reading old papers.”

“What is it?”

“I’m worried about Shipley.”

“I know that.”

“Well, I can’t very well put a surveillance detail on him. I start asking for that on one of my own deputies, say that he’s suspected in the murder of another, and I’m going to have to defend my
reasoning in ways that I simply can’t right now. I can’t do it. But I also can’t have him showing up at the ridge when I’m there with Jacqueline. I want you to watch his house and call me if he leaves. That’s it. Don’t move, don’t engage him, don’t do a damn thing but call me. If he leaves his house tonight, I will need to know.”

“All right.”

“I don’t want to ask that of you,” Kimble said. “Bringing a civilian into a murder investigation… well, you can add that to the pile of reasons I might lose my badge. But there’s no one else I can ask.”

“I’ll do it, Kimble. Not a problem.”

“There’s an old gas station just up the road from his house. Empty for years, old Esso station. He’ll have to come by it to head into town, or toward the ridge. The only way he wouldn’t pass by is if he’s headed north, and I’m not worried about him heading north. If you see him pass by, he’ll be doing forty miles an hour, and he won’t notice you. If that happens, just pick up the phone and dial.
Nothing
else.”

“Okay. But Kimble? If you believe what you told me about Jacqueline and O’Patrick and all the others… he’s not going to kill again. If he did kill, he’s satisfied his debt. None of the others in the Blade Ridge history have killed again. Bound by balance, that’s what you told me. Shipley is balanced now.”

“Right,” Kimble said. “The difference? If he did kill Pete, right now he’s getting away with it. The others were all arrested at the scene when they came back around from their trances. Shipley came back around alone in the dark woods. That means he might not understand
why
he killed, but he understands that he did.”

Kimble put his arms on the table and leaned close. “If all that is true, Darmus, then he might want to keep improving his
chances of getting away with it. Why wouldn’t he? And the only evidence and witnesses are at Blade Ridge. Audrey Clark is at Blade Ridge. If Shipley did this, and he’s thinking about ways to clean it up… well, I just worry that he might head that way.”

“But you’re getting ready to drive in the opposite direction.”

“Yeah,” Kimble said. “Because I can’t see in the dark. But I think I know someone who can. At least out there.”

T
HE DAY WORE ON
, snow fell in scattered flurries, and police came and went steadily.

No one found any trace of Ira.

At noon, while Audrey and Dustin took their first break of the day, with not even a third of the cats fed yet and many of them growing annoyed with the delay, a pickup truck rolled up with four dogs in cages.

“I’d better see about this,” Audrey said.

The dogs belonged to a man named Dick Mitchell, a wiry old-timer with a Mark Twain mustache, a scoped rifle, and a large pistol on his belt.

“I’ve come to catch the cat,” he said. “I reckon you’re not too happy about it, but when the police call, I’ve found it wise to pick up the phone. Got me out of a speeding ticket or two along the way.”

She watched the dogs ranging about in the kennels, pressing their noses to the gates and staring out at her cats. Jafar emerged from his long, dark quarters, where he’d spent most of the day tucked back in the straw, bothered by the constant stream of
traffic, and began to pace restlessly. Immediately one of the dogs let out a baying howl, and that triggered a response of roars.

“I thought the sheriff was trying traps,” Audrey said.

“He’s doing that, too. Somewhere along the way, he heard the best bet was Big Dick Mitchell. He heard right.”

Big Dick Mitchell hefted his rifle and took an experimental sighting, aiming it down the road. Audrey thought of Ira’s beautiful, sleek body, and somehow, even after the terror she’d felt only hours earlier, she was sad for him.