The Ridge (36 page)

Connected,
the display said.
Kimble,
the display said.

“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.

J
ACQUELINE,” 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 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.

N
ATHAN 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.