The Ridge (23 page)

“Some other people have died out there,” Kimble said. “Bad accidents. Like yours.”

O’Patrick reached out and clicked off the radio, the sports talk vanishing.

“I’m investigating them,” Kimble said. “And I’d like to know what you remember about your own.”

“Wrecked a car. Shit happens. I was young, I liked to drive fast. Burned a Camaro along the road and it got away from me.”

He looked at his boots while he told this story. Kimble nodded, leaned against the garage door frame, and said, “Figured as much. Long stretch of gravel road like that, isolated place? You were dragging, weren’t you? Seeing just what the car could handle, just what
you
could handle.”

“Sure. That’s what I was doing.”

Kimble waited for him to look up. When he finally did, Kimble said, “So when did Wyatt French come by? Last few weeks, or longer?”

O’Patrick’s face tightened. “Who?”

There was a moment of silence, and then Kimble said, “He’s dead now. We found his body up at the top of his lighthouse.”

When Ryan O’Patrick sighed, he seemed to lose something more than air.

“Fuck,” he said.

“So you knew him.”

“Yeah, I knew him. Or he knew
me,
more like it. Kept coming around, trying to get me to talk about something that… that just shouldn’t be spoken of.”

“It needs to be spoken of,” Kimble said.

“You and Wyatt should have gotten together, then.”

“A little late for that. I’ve got you, though. Tell me about the wreck.”

Ryan O’Patrick stared out of the garage and over at the football field across the street, where a group of boys in Hefron High Wrestling shirts were running the bleachers, their feet pounding off the aluminum as they sprinted beneath the harsh lights. They were bright lights, glaring, and most people wouldn’t have wanted to live so close. Kimble noticed that Ryan O’Patrick didn’t have curtains in his trailer. Every window was exposed to the stadium lights.

“The gauges went,” he said, and his voice was soft. “Speedometer, tach, everything. Just went flat. Don’t know why it happened. Electrical short of some kind. I got to staring at them and took my eyes off the road, that’s all. Poor driving, nothing else.”

Kimble said, “Really?”

“Yeah,
really.
Sorry you wasted the trip, bud. Might have just picked up a phone instead, saved yourself the—”

“You’ve told two versions of it now,” Kimble said, “and neither one is the truth.”

“You know what I find interesting?” O’Patrick said.

“What’s that?”

“You know who I am. I can see it all over your face. You know that I did twenty years for killing a man.”

Kimble nodded.

“And you know what else? The questions you’re asking? They’re about a lot more than a car wreck. Tell me if I’m lying.”

Kimble was silent. Ryan O’Patrick gave a dark smile and then bent to a mini-fridge tucked under a nearby shelf. He pulled out another tall-boy and extended it to Kimble with a question in his eyes. Kimble accepted it.

“You want to hear it?” O’Patrick said. “I’ll tell it this once. Never again.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

O’Patrick nodded, moved to a stool, and popped the top on his beer. He took a long pull and said, “I was always a bit of a hell-raiser. I’ve got a temper like a damned light switch. People used to call me that, in fact.”

Kimble raised an eyebrow, and O’Patrick said, “Well, if they didn’t, they should have. Because I could snap pretty fast. Had my share of fights. So when I killed Joe, everyone said,
Ah, Ryan’s temper got away from him.
But that’s bullshit. Or maybe it isn’t. The point is that I don’t
remember
killing Joe. I stuck to that story all the way through trial and rode it on into prison. It wasn’t a lie. That moment? It’s nothing but blackness.”

Every time Kimble had seen her, Jacqueline had offered the same line:
I’m sorry, I don’t remember.
She never wavered.

Kimble said, “Tell me about the ridge, please. About your accident. Describe it as best as you can remember it.”

“Brother, I can describe it fine. I just don’t like to. Now, the accident itself? Simple. I was watching the blue light. Watching so close I couldn’t have hit the brakes if I wanted to.”

“The blue light?”

“You heard me. Thing was floating through the trees, glowing.
A blue flame. I couldn’t mix you a paint to match, not even a pearl coat. You ever heard of Saint Elmo’s fire? Shit that shows up on a ship’s mast out in the middle of the ocean?”

Kimble nodded, thinking of Jacqueline’s recollections of her suicide attempt and feeling sick.

“I expect that’s the closest thing to it,” O’Patrick said.

“The sight of it was enough to make you wreck?”

“You say that like it’s hard to believe! Let’s get you out driving in the dark, pal. Let’s give you the wheel, take it up to fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, and then let that light float your way. I’d like to see how good your reflexes are then.”

Kimble held up his hands. “All right,” he said. “I’m not arguing. I’m asking. What happened after you crashed?”

O’Patrick paused, and Kimble let him.

“What I remember,” he said eventually, his voice the most unsteady it had been, “was the man who came for me.”

It was clear he wasn’t talking about paramedics.

“He came down off the ridge and out of the woods. A blue torch in his hand. Cold flame. I was hurt bad, and at first I was glad to see him, because I knew I needed help. But then he came on down the road and I didn’t even call out for help, because, well… he wasn’t the sort of man you called out to. I could sense that much. So he kind of circled, studying me. And I remember being afraid that he would…” His voice broke and he covered it up with a long pull on the beer. “That he would take me,” he finished.

Kimble was quiet. Ryan O’Patrick fumbled a cigar out of his shirt pocket, then put it back without lighting it.

“I could see my face in the mirror,” he said. “Could see how busted up I was. My nose was laid over to one side, and the skin was torn right off my jaw. I could see my teeth and my jawbone, and blood was just pouring out.”

He reached up and touched unmarked skin with his fingertips.

“I saw that and I knew that I was dying,” he said, and his voice was one Kimble had heard before, when he had talked to witnesses of terrible crimes. Or, more often, survivors of them. There was always weight behind the words of someone who’d passed near the mortal precipice.

“The man with the torch, he knelt down, taking his time, relaxed as could be. I can’t remember much of his face, just that firelight. He was shadows and cold flame to me, nothing else. He asked if I wanted help. And I had the sense that… even if he could help, it wasn’t the sort of help you wanted to accept. You know? That it came with a price.”

Kimble’s breathing and heart rate had slowed in the way they always did in high-pressure interviews, times when he had to will himself not to press. He was listening to O’Patrick but hearing Jacqueline Mathis.

“You asked for his help?” he said finally, after he realized O’Patrick was staring at him, waiting for a response.

“I did. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to die out there, either.”

“And what did he do for you?”

O’Patrick gave him a long stare, then said, “The EMT who put me in the ambulance took a look at my car and called me the luckiest son of a bitch he’d ever seen.”

Kimble was thinking of Shipley’s car, the way he’d walked into the department the next day and announced that he was a little sore, that was all.

“In that moment, though,” Kimble said, “what did he do?”

O’Patrick breathed in until his chest swelled, then steadied himself and said, “He said he could heal me, but only if I was willing. He said that he couldn’t reach me if I wasn’t, and that I needed to understand that he was bound by balance. That was
the phrase, I’ll never forget it. Bound by balance. And I knew what he meant by it, I won’t lie about that. But I still said yes. Then he dipped that torch down to me. That’s the last of it I remember until the EMT was there.”

For a long time it was silent in the garage. Out at the high school the bleachers rattled, rattled, rattled.

“This happened in ’82,” Kimble said. “This happened before Wyatt put up his lighthouse.”

“Yeah.”

Something that had been absent fell into place in Kimble’s brain, and he said, “Wyatt had an accident out there, too, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“When?”

“I’m not certain. Not long before he set to building the lighthouse. And before you ask, yes, he saw the man with the torch, and he made his bargain. Only difference is, when I shook it off like it was a bad dream, Wyatt believed in it. I guess because he was out there all the time. You go back to that place once you’ve made your bargain, you can see them. That’s what he told me.”

“So he lived with that every night?”

O’Patrick shuddered. “I can’t imagine, man. I can’t imagine.”

“Why didn’t he leave?”

“I suppose because he knew you can’t run from something that’s in you. So he set to work fighting against what was in him, but once you’ve made that bargain, it ain’t something you can fight. By the time he found me, Wyatt was understanding that much.”

“What was the lighthouse supposed to do?”

“The question, deputy, is what
does
it do? Everyone laughed at that thing. When I heard about it, you better believe I wasn’t laughing, just because of where it stood. Anything that went on
at that place… well, I’d just as soon have nothing to do with it. But I damn sure knew better than to find it funny. Now, you ask me what it was supposed to do? I’ll tell you what it did—kept people from going my way.”

“You mean murder?” Kimble said. “That’s what you’re telling me? That some ghost light in the woods out there made you commit murder?”

“You don’t like the sound of it, huh? Well, maybe you understand why I’d rather not tell the tale. Maybe you understand
that.
And if you’re so damned brave, buddy, so sure that I’m wrong, then you go on and enjoy yourself at Blade Ridge. Pitch a tent and spend the night.”

“Easy,” Kimble said. “I’m not trying to offend, I’m just telling you that—”

“That it sounds foolish as a campfire story.”

Kimble didn’t answer.

“You wanted to know what the point of the lighthouse was,” O’Patrick said, the heat in his voice fading to dull embers. “Well, I’ll let you answer that yourself. You consider how many problems there’s been at the ridge since that light went up. You chew on that.”

There had been some problems at the ridge since it went up. David Clark died. Jacqueline Mathis survived. But of course the light had been out for Jacqueline. Wyatt had come to apologize to her for that reason. And then there was Shipley… whose accident came after Darmus broke the light and shut off the power.

“You thought it was a dream,” Kimble said. “A hallucination.”

“Hell, yes. Most vivid dream I’ve ever had, but once they got me away from there… well, it was easier to push it to the corner of my mind then. I remembered what had happened, but away from the ridge, out in the real world and daylight, it seemed
impossible. So I told myself that it was. Then along comes that night with Joe, and I wake out of a damned trance with a wrench in my hand and his blood all over me, and you’d better believe I remembered it then.”

“You’re saying it’s a trade. You got your life back but promised to take another one?”

“That’s what I’m saying. When he told me he was bound by balance, I knew what was being offered, and I accepted. Days would pass when I’d think about it and get the cold shivers, but I’d tell myself two things. The first was that I’d imagined it. The second was that I could always be in control. Well, I bet wrong on both counts.”

Kimble sat down on an overturned bucket by the door. The strength had left his legs. Left his mind. He leaned back against the wall and stared at Ryan O’Patrick.

“You believe me,” O’Patrick said. “That’s a mighty surprising thing. I wasn’t one for telling the tale, and I surely never expected to have anyone believe me. Not unless they’d gone the same way.”

“I’ve already heard it once today,” Kimble said. “I didn’t do such a good job of believing it then. Now it’s getting easier.”

O’Patrick nodded and lifted the beer to his lips, then realized the can was already empty and tossed it. They both watched it roll across the concrete floor.

“What are you trying to do?” he asked.

“Fix the problem,” Kimble said.

O’Patrick laughed.
“Fix the problem?”

Kimble set the beer down, unable even to go through the motions of drinking it anymore. His stomach was unsettled, and his hands weren’t all that steady either. He said, “I want you to go out there with me. I want you to tell me what you see.”

O’Patrick shook his head. “No.”

“Please,” Kimble said. “I’m just asking for—”

“Not a chance, deputy. I’m not going back to that place. You’ll need a warrant and a strong pair of cuffs to get that.”