There was a flourish of motion to her left, and she turned to see Jafar cross the enclosure in rapid bounds, pulling directly up to her. The terror she might have felt just minutes before was gone, though. She had lain with him in the dark and emerged unscathed on the other side, and now her fear had turned to faith. She rose to one knee, took the leopard’s head in both hands, and kissed his nose.
“Thank you, baby. Thank you.”
Then she got to her feet, went to the gate, and stepped through. In the distance, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, she could see one of her tigers stepping hesitantly through a yawning gate and into freedom.
Hurry, Audrey, she told herself as she began to run.
If she’d ever moved faster, she could not remember the occasion. She ran expecting blows or bullets, but none came, and she neither saw Dustin nor heard him. The trailer door was cracked open; he had not bothered to close it behind him as he came out with the flashlight. She hit the door at full speed, slammed it shut, locked it, and turned to the small closet where they had kept the tranquilizer rifle since Wesley’s death.
The door was open, and the closet was empty.
Of course, she thought stupidly. Even Dustin wouldn’t have been setting them loose if he didn’t have some sort of weapon.
She turned to the window, and that was when she saw Kevin Kimble in the road near the gates and, moving just behind him, a silhouette that looked like a man.
Roy said, “He’s going to shoot the lion,” as Kimble walked slowly forward, a shotgun in his hands.
“No, he’s not,” Shipley said. “He just wants to know who the hell we are.”
He picked up his own gun then, a semiautomatic handgun, and reached for the door handle.
“Wait,” Roy said. “He doesn’t trust you. Not yet.”
Shipley stopped, looked back at him, and nodded. “Right. You tell him.”
Roy opened the passenger door and climbed out as a gust of wind blew snow and ice pellets against him.
“Kimble!” he shouted. “I’m with Shipley. He’s safe.”
Kimble hesitated, didn’t answer. The lion had pivoted to face them when Roy yelled, and the wind gusted again, harder this time, and swung the door shut.
Shit, Roy thought as the lion started forward at a trot. Roy fumbled frantically for the door handle, jerked it open, and slammed himself back into the seat. By the time he’d turned around, the big cat was at a stop again, watching them like an uncertain security guard trying to assess their credentials from a distance.
“Drive,” he told Shipley. “I’m not getting out again. Not with the cats loose.”
Shipley proceeded forward, and the lion roared again, the sound so furious that Roy actually lifted his hands as if he might ward it off. Shipley kept his speed steady, though, and as they approached, the lion moved away, distrusting the vehicle. It circled behind them and stepped into the shadows, and then it was just Kimble in the beam of the headlights. Roy looked to his right, saw no sign of any of the cats, and put down the window. He leaned his head out.
“Kimble! Shipley is safe! You don’t need to worry about—”
Beside him, Shipley said, “Son of a bitch, there he is,” and banged open the door. When Dustin Hall rushed out of the trees and into the road, armed with a strange-looking rifle, he was behind Kimble and very close. Kimble spun to meet him, but Shipley had already fired. The sound of the gunshot echoed, and Roy watched as Dustin Hall crumpled at the road’s edge.
Standing beside the open door, gun still extended, Shipley said, “Let’s see if we can keep him down this time.”
49
KIMBLE APPROACHED THE BODY slowly, the shotgun cold in his hands, and he hoped for some sign of life. One last gasp, something. He had to be the one to end it.
He had to be.
There were no last gasps coming from Dustin Hall. Shipley’s shot had caught him just behind his left eye and the bullet had blown through his brain, and Kimble knew with one look that he’d been dead before he’d fallen into the snow. All the same he knelt and put his hand in front of Hall’s mouth, waited for breath, found none. Touched his neck and then his wrist, searching for a pulse.
Nothing.
Shipley and Darmus were standing above him now, and Kimble looked up to see Audrey Clark approaching. A lion, out of its cage, free, moved beside her in the night, and she saw it but did not stop.
“I got him,” Shipley said.
“Yes,” Kimble answered softly. “You got him.”
They were all together then, everyone understanding a piece and no one the whole, and they looked at each other in silence before Audrey Clark said, “You were dead. He pushed you… you were dead.”
Kimble looked up and met her eyes. “Yes.”
Silence again, but only momentarily, because Audrey Clark said, “Ira.”
Roy Darmus murmured an oath and moved for the truck but then decided it was too late, and Kimble turned his head and saw the black cougar advancing through the blowing snow, slinking along without making a sound. The cat stopped not five paces from him, and Kimble moved slowly to turn the shotgun toward him.
“No,” Audrey said. “Don’t. He wants to see the body.”
Kimble couldn’t process that, had shifted his finger to the trigger, when she said, “Just as he did with your deputy.”
He thought about that, thought about the way she’d described her last sighting of the cougar, the black cat standing atop Wolverton as the life bled out of him and the blue torch stayed at bay, and he finally understood.
“Like the lighthouse,” he said. “The cats are like the lighthouse.”
Except this one, which may have been something more than the lighthouse. Kimble rose and moved backward. They all did. The cougar waited until they had cleared enough room, and then he slunk forward, his head swaying side to side, his green eyes impossibly bright. He reached the body and paused, then circled it. He paid the living no mind at all now; his focus was on the dead.
The cat studied the corpse, and then he raised his head and looked toward the ridge.
“There won’t be anyone coming for him,” Kimble told the cat. “The lights are on.”
The black cat watched the ridge for a long time, and then he moved on through the snow and into the night.
Nathan Shipley said, “Did I just see that?”
“Yeah,” Kimble said. “You saw it.” He turned to Audrey Clark. “You were right.”
“Dustin knew it,” she said. “And Dustin could—”
Darmus said, “The cats are out, Kimble. The cats are out. There is a lion right behind us. Look.”
“That’s just Woodrow,” Audrey Clark said. “He won’t hurt you.”
“There are others.”
“Not many. He didn’t manage to let many of them out. I can get them back in.”
There was no waver to her voice. Kimble looked at her and he believed her.
“Well, let’s do that,” he said. “Quickly.”
She didn’t move. “I saw you fall,” she said. “Now here you are.”
“Yes,” Kimble said, and he saw from their faces that they all understood. He pointed at Dustin Hall’s body. “I came back for him.”
Shipley said, “But I got him.”
Kimble worked his tongue around his mouth, which had suddenly gone very dry, and drew in a breath that didn’t come easy.
“I know.”
50
SHE MOVED WITH AN astounding grace and confidence, talking to the cats, coaxing, at times touching them. She had Shipley follow with the tranquilizer rifle, but he did not need to use it. Kimble took Darmus to check the rest of the gates and secure the ones Hall had opened before being disturbed. In four of the enclosures, the gates were open, inviting the cats to freedom, but they had remained inside.
“It’s home,” Darmus said. “I guess they trust it more than they do these woods.”
They were right to do that, Kimble knew.
It took
her twenty minutes to escort back inside the five cats—one lion, three tigers, and an ocelot—that had left their enclosures. There was something different in the way she moved with them from what Kimble had seen in her before. Something had changed, but he did not know what. They spoke little until it was done. The three men were afraid of the cats; the one woman, who was not afraid, was focused on them, worried for the safety of the animals.
“I’m not going to leave you,” she told the enormous lion, the one she’d called Woodrow, as she guided him toward the open gate. “If you leave, I’ll go, too. I promise you that.”
The lion wandered along with that on-my-own-time pace exhibited by cats everywhere from the jungle to apartment living rooms, and finally stepped within the fence, and Audrey Clark shut and locked the gate behind him.
With the preserve secured again, the cats behind their fences and Wyatt’s lighthouse casting its beams into the shadows, they walked together to the trailer and went inside, and then it was just the four of them, the four of them and the impossible truths of the night.
“We should hear it,” Kimble said. “From each other first.”
They told it. Inside the trailer, huddled in the living room, as the night pushed on toward dawn and the snow continued to fall, three accounts were shared, three accounts believed. They were well beyond the point of doubt with one another.
Kimble listened, and waited. He stood in front of the window, where the infrared beams would be working on him. He could not see them, of course, but he knew that they were there and he took comfort in that. Took comfort in the work they could do both for him and for the others, operating unseen but also unrelenting.
Roy Darmus was the one who finally turned to him and said, “Where is Jacqueline Mathis?”
“Dead,” Kimble said. “I killed her.”
He realized there were tears in his eyes then. No one spoke as he pushed them away with the back of his hand, and no one spoke as he told them his own account.
“Now it’s in me,” he said. “Just as it was with all the others. I won’t be able to control it. To hold it at bay. That’s been proven for so long. Too long.”
“There will be a way,” Darmus said.
Kimble held his eyes and didn’t speak, and after a time the reporter looked away.
“I just saw him coming at you,” Shipley said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I didn’t know, I just shot, and—”
“Of course, Shipley. You did the right thing. I might not have gotten him anyhow, and then where would we be?”
But he would have gotten him.
“You were going to burn the trestle,” Audrey Clark said. “You said it would work. You were sure of it.”
“I wasn’t sure of anything,” Kimble said. “But it was the only thing she told me that seemed to have a chance.”
They were quiet again, and Kimble cleared his throat and said, “We’ve got to call it in, you know. I killed a woman. I can’t stand here forever.”
“Your debt is settled,” Darmus said. “You already took a life. Jacqueline’s.”
“I don’t think Silas Vesey is one for crediting accounts,” Kimble said.
Audrey Clark looked at him and said, “You told me you weren’t worried about adding a few more years for burning that trestle down. Are you now?”
“No.”
“There’s a way,” Darmus said again. “We’ll find it. We were getting close. Wyatt was getting close. What did you tell me? He kept himself away from others in the dark. Kept himself alone with his lights. You could—”
“Sure,” Kimble said. “There might be a way. But you’ll have to find it, because I’ll be in prison. The rest of you should not be. As it stands now, you won’t be. Grant me this much, though—I don’t want to go to prison knowing that I left that trestle standing. I won’t.”
They made their way to the trestle as a group, Kimble walking out front. He’d already told Shipley not to hesitate to fire.
“I might feel something,” he said. “And if I do…”
Shipley nodded.
They hung back while Kimble walked out onto the bridge. Dawn was close but hadn’t broken yet, and the snow still fell from a black sky. The moon was behind the clouds now, out of sight as it receded to make way for the sun.
Kimble stepped onto the boards, his boots echoing hollowly against them, the smell of gasoline strong in the air. He stopped when he saw the fire.
It was tucked just beneath the easternmost upright of the trestle, and the base had to be fifteen feet in diameter. The flames were blue. They rose up and flapped at the trestle like waves on an angry sea, and milling around it were all those familiar faces. They’d stared at Kimble from ancient photographs, most of them.
Not all of them.
He looked down at Wyatt French, the old man’s face painted with flickering blue light, and then at Jacqueline, and he dropped to his knees on the bridge. She was watching him, though the blue flames would wave across her face and hide her from sight at times, only to ebb back and reveal her again.
Nathan Shipley said, “Chief?”
Kimble tore his eyes away from Jacqueline Mathis, looked back at the three who waited for him among the living, and got to his feet.
“See anything?” Darmus asked uneasily.
Kimble nodded. He couldn’t speak, not right then. He walked off the bridge and back to them, and then he asked Audrey Clark for the matches. She looked at Darmus, and then at Shipley, and neither of them spoke.
“I’ve got to try it,” Kimble said. “Anybody want to argue that?”
No one did. She passed him a book of matches, and Kimble thanked her.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll give it a shot, huh?”
“It will work,” Audrey Clark said. Roy Darmus nodded, and Shipley didn’t say anything at all. His face was pale.
“I’m sorry, chief,” he said.
“Shipley, that’s why you were there. Why you will always need to be there, in moments like that—to hear the right call and make the right shot. I’m sorry I doubted you. It was… it was a difficult thing, getting an understanding of this place.”
He put out his hand, and Shipley shook it. Then Kimble turned to Audrey Clark and said, “You’re something special, you know. The way you handled those cats…”
“I love them,” she said.
“I know it.”
Darmus said, “It may work, Kimble. It may work. And if it doesn’t? We can find something that will.”
“I know that,” Kimble said.
There was a pause, and then he said, “All right. I’d like you all to go up the hill a bit, get higher than I am. I don’t know what these flames will do.”
They listened, starting uphill, and Kimble turned from them at first, then looked back.
“Darmus?”
The reporter turned back to him, waiting.
“When you tell it,” Kimble said, “tell it right, okay? Tell it the way it happened, not the way people will want to hear it. Tell it the way it happened.”
Roy Darmus stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “I will, Kimble,” he said.
Kimble left them then and went back out onto the bridge. Crossed the length of it, not daring to look back at the fire, where faces of his own kind gathered over more than a century waited and watched. He got to the place on the western side of the trestle where he had emptied the gasoline, and then he removed the pack of matches from his pocket, folded it backward, tore a match free, and struck it.
The glow was small but warm and bright, and he cupped one hand to shield it from the wind and then he passed it to the planks that had once been handled by fevered men who were fading fast. It sparked, hesitated, then absorbed the glow. Began to burn, and he blew on it gently, and that fanned the small flame out and grew it and then it caught the first of the gasoline and went up fast and hot. He stepped away, backpedaling, heading toward the safety of the eastern shore, where the living waited for him with hopes, however faint
.
“It’s going,” Audrey Clark said, and Roy nodded, watching as Kimble backed slowly toward the darkness, the fire riding the lines of fuel toward the rocky cliffs on the opposite shore, the crackle of flames audible now, the smell of smoke in the air.
“It will work,” Shipley said. “It will work.”
Roy didn’t answer.
Kimble got to the center of the bridge, still moving backward slowly, and then he turned and faced them. Held up a hand and waved, and Audrey and Shipley matched the gesture.
Roy held up his own hand and whispered, “Good luck, Kimble. Good luck, and God bless.”
When Kimble knelt on the eastern side of the bridge and struck another match, Shipley said, “What’s he doing? He’s going to trap himself. He’s going to—”
Shipley started forward then, and Roy grabbed his arm and held. The deputy was young and strong, but Roy knew that this hold mattered, and he did not let go, not even when Shipley had dragged them both to the ground and they lay in the snow and watched as the flames rose high at the eastern edge of the bridge and roared toward Kimble, who was backing up again, into the middle of the trestle, fire coming at him from both ends now, whipped by the wind and strengthening quickly.
“Why’s he doing that?” Audrey cried. “Why isn’t he trying to run?”
“Because,” Roy said, “this may work, but he’s not sure. He wants to be sure. He needs to be.”
Kimble retreated to the center of the bridge and watched his fire. Only when he was satisfied that it was going well enough did he chance a look back down to Vesey’s blaze, where the cold blue flames licked at the darkness, waiting for him.
You’ll get me, he thought, but you will not get anyone else. I’ll hand myself over before I hand you anyone else.
The ghost with the torch left the blue fire. He walked away from his blaze and stood looking up at Kimble, and there was abject disappointment to his posture, but no resignation. Then he turned and headed north along the river.
He’s leaving, Kimble realized with amazement. He is not done, but he is leaving. There will be another spot for him, and another fire. But not here.
The Ridge Page 30