The Ridge

by Michael Koryta

  “Kevin?” Her voice was soft.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing to do about him. The ghost at the fire. There’s nothing to do.”

  “There will be something. I’ll find it.”

  She did not respond to that. They lay in the dark and he found himself counting her breaths against his neck.

  Have to leave, he thought, have to take her back, this has to end, and you know nothing more than before.

  “Do you believe that taking the trestle down would help?” he asked.

  “In this spot,” she said. “But Vesey? He was there before the trestle, Kevin. He’ll be there after it’s gone.”

  The wind buffeted the lighthouse, and up the stairs there was the whisper of sleet striking the glass, the night’s snowfall beginning in earnest.

  “I’m cold,” Jacqueline said. “I want your jacket.”

  “Right. Sure.” Kimble wasn’t cold at all, not here with her.

  When she spoke again, her voice was muffled as she turned away from him, found the jacket, and slipped her arms into it.

  “I understand how I can stay away from that fire.”

  “How?”

  She zipped the jacket up, and then the old bed creaked as she leaned forward, searching for the rest of her clothes.

  “It won’t be something you’ll like,” she said, turning back to him, leaning down, and kissing his throat. Her lips were so warm. “And I’m sorry.”

  “What do you mean, Jacqueline?”

  The gun, when she pressed it to his throat where her lips had been a heartbeat earlier, was very cold.

  “Just what I said, Kevin. That I’m sorry.”

  40

  TWO THINGS BECAME READILY APPARENT to Roy as he woke with a jerk and a muffled shout, rising as if from a nightmare: he was no detective, and he was getting old.

  His task had been so damn simple. Watch the road and call Kimble if he saw Nathan Shipley’s truck leave. It required two eyeballs and consciousness. He hadn’t been able to offer both.

  The clock said he’d dozed for only ten minutes, but ten minutes was more than enough time for someone to have driven past.

  “Shit,” he whispered, looking up the dark road and seeing no glimmer of taillights, wondering what had woken him other than the uncomfortable sense that something bad was happening, something was going very wrong, very fast.

  Guilt, nothing more. His body had wanted sleep; his mind had been lecturing him for taking it. That was all.

  Still, the bad feeling lingered.

  Go check, he told himself. Just take a drive down there and make sure his truck is still in the driveway.

  It was. The same lights were on in the same rooms, and the truck was parked in the same place and at the same angle. Fog hung in the trees that ringed the yard, and beyond it the mountains were no longer visible and the moon hung mostly obscured by cloud.

  All was as it should be.

  Except for that feeling.

  Call him, Roy thought. Call Kimble and just check in, let him know that everything is good out here, and make sure that it’s good out there, too.

  But Kimble had told him not to call unless Shipley was on the move.

  Back to the old Esso station he went. He’d just pulled in, backing up so that he had a clear view of the road, when he saw headlights approaching from the direction of Nathan Shipley’s home.

  It couldn’t be him. Just someone else passing by in the night, nothing to worry about.

  The headlights were set high, though, and as they came near he saw the squared-off grille of a truck not unlike Shipley’s at all. It came closer, moving fast, and Roy reached to turn off his own headlights, had just flicked them off when he realized how stupid that was, because they’d surely been visible already, and then he did the only possible thing that was stupider still, and turned them back on.

  Brilliant, Darmus. Your only job is to sit here and not be noticed and you flash your damned headlights? Should have asked Kimble for a siren or an air horn to help you sneak around. Quick, set off the car alarm!

  The truck blew by him then, as he sat there in the empty gas station parking lot with his headlights aimed directly ahead, and he saw the blue side of Nathan Shipley’s pickup truck and caught a glimpse of the deputy’s face as he turned a curious eye toward Roy’s car. Then the truck was gone, and not slowing.

  Nathan Shipley was on the move.

  Roy reached for his phone and couldn’t find it, felt momentary panic as he patted empty pockets before remembering that he’d carefully placed it in the center console to be reached quickly.

  How do people do this every day? he thought as he dialed. It sounds so simple. And I’m not even required to follow the guy…

  Kimble’s phone rang. And rang. And went to voicemail.

  “Damn it!” Roy shouted, and then he called back and got the same response, and now he was faced with a decision. Did he just sit there and let time pass? Or did he follow? The road ahead was a long, winding path toward the highway or town. Shipley wouldn’t turn off it for a while. Roy could catch up.

  “Go for it,” he decided, and he dropped the phone into the console and put the car into gear, pulling out of the lot and onto the road. If he drove hard and fast he could catch up, and then, if Kimble would just answer the damn phone, he’d be able to tell him—

  He’d made it a quarter of a mile down the road when he saw the truck pulled off on the shoulder, its lights off, sitting in shadows. He registered that first, and then he saw the man standing in the middle of the road, holding a badge up with one hand and a gun with the other.

  Roy put on the brakes and rolled to a stop. For one wild moment he considered pounding the gas instead, driving around the deputy or, hell, right over him. Anything seemed preferable. But he was a rational man even on an irrational night, and he trusted in his ability to bullshit. Shipley didn’t know him. Roy would give him some song and dance about car trouble and then be on his way.

  As Shipley approached, though, there was something in his face that suggested bullshit might not work. The gun was not being held casually. His finger was on the trigger.

  Roy slipped his hand down to the console, punched redial on his phone, and then turned it over so the illuminated screen was hidden. If Kimble picked up, great. If he didn’t, at least he’d get to hear a voicemail preserving whatever was about to happen.

  Shipley rapped on the window with his knuckles, and Roy slid it down.

  “Why are you standing in the road?” Roy said, trying to look indignant, the concerned citizen, the intrepid reporter, the man who was not scared of police because he trusted police.

  Shipley leaned in, his face lit by the glow from the instrument panel, and said, “I would like to know why you’re watching my house.”

  “What? Who are you?”

  Shipley smiled. His face was very pale in the glow, and his eyes were hooded. He brought the gun up and laid it on the doorframe, pointed right at Roy’s head.

  “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.

  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.

  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 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.