The Ridge (32 page)

Just get the hell out of here, Ira,
she thought.
Hit those hills running and don’t stop. This isn’t the place for you. For anyone.

“Get your dogs out of sight of my cats quick,” she said. “I’ve got enough headaches today without this.”

“Plott hounds,” Dick Mitchell announced proudly, opening the first of the kennel doors. “They’ve yet to run a mountain lion, but they’ll catch on quick. They’ll catch on.”

“If you want to take them back home tonight,” Audrey said, “you’d better hope they don’t catch on.”

He gave her an odd look. “That nasty of a boy, is he?”

“He was fine until he came here,” she said, realizing that she sounded more like Wes with each passing day, and then she left and returned to her cats.

Kimble had once been a churchgoing man, and though he was no longer, he found himself in the parking lot of the one he’d once attended, detouring in there instead of heading for the highway and all that waited down the road. He sat alone in the parking lot with the engine running and thought about what Roy Darmus had said.

You must be able to believe in a great evil
.

Yes, he was able to do that. He’d seen lesser evils—greed, anger, lust—too often and for too long not to believe there could
be something beyond the crimes for which his department had specific names and charges. He was part of a justice system that was designed to quantify evil. There was something missing in that, to be sure.

He’d seen true evil in his time—mothers who killed their own babies, sons who killed their own mothers. The years in this job could erode your faith in good people just as the wind and water eroded the mountains. He fought it every day, but he wondered if there was a breaking point. How many child abuse cases could a man work, how many murders, how many rapes and assaults? How long could you go until you folded up under it? It was a question he thought most police considered on the bad nights. He remembered Diane Mooney asking it of him once, when they’d arrested a man who’d fractured his stepdaughter’s skull with a wine bottle because she was using up the minutes on his cell phone. Diane had asked him as they’d walked out of the jail and into a spring evening so beautiful it hurt, the air alive with fragrant blooms and driven by a gentle, kind breeze, and he remembered what he’d told her:
You keep your head down, and you remember that people need you and that it’s a privilege to answer the call.

He thought he’d believed it back then. On that night? Yes, he’d believed it. That was a vivid memory. Such a beautiful night. He could still remember the smell of the flowers and the feel of the wind. He could still remember the way blood had filled that girl’s eye socket.

Kimble wasn’t certain what he thought of God. He knew that he should be certain—everyone of his years was supposed to have their beliefs in order by now.
I’m a Baptist, I’m a Catholic, I’m an atheist, I’m an agnostic, I’m a believer in the Church of the Weeping Willow Tree, Fourth Circle, Second Cabinet.
You were supposed to know where you lined up.

Kimble did not.

He knew this: there were times when he’d prayed to God and
times when he’d cursed Him. On the latter occasions, he chastised whatever higher power there might be for having blind eyes and deaf ears.

You have bound us,
Kimble imagined saying,
to an evil world. Where’s the love in that?

And in that scenario, God always answered,
Temporarily bound you, yes. Now, during your time in that evil world, did you do anything to help?

For that, Kevin Kimble would have an answer, firm as steel:
Yes.

It was the only thing he would ever be able to answer firmly about this world. He’d tried to help it. He had fought evil, and how many people could say that?

He thought now of Jacqueline Mathis, behind razor-wire fencing and concrete blocks and iron bars and countless locks. Did she belong there? Was she good, or was she evil?

Kimble touched his forehead with the back of his hand. Sweat. Thirty degrees outside, and he was sweating.

If you do this,
he thought,
it will be just the two of you in this car. You don’t have to put her in the back; she could sit right at your side, where you could reach out and touch her. Or she could reach out and touch you.

Why was he doing this? The answer lay both through the windshield ahead of him and in the mirror behind him. It was in the people who made up the place he called home. Whitman was a beautiful town, and, thanks to its distance from any interstate, a well-kept secret. Nestled among the Appalachian foothills and surrounded by deep forests and surging rivers, it drew people who wanted to get away. Kimble, born and raised here, often considered turning into one of those very people but heading in the opposite direction, packing his things and getting out.

But to where? And to what?

He’d never been an extrovert, but there was a time when he’d
been at least somewhat social. That time had ended with the shooting. A version of Kevin Kimble had died with Jacqueline’s bullet. The one left behind valued privacy above all else. He’d spent his career walking into the dark shadows of private lives to help prevent harm, or to correct harm already done. Then suddenly people were walking into the dark shadows of his own life. There was the arrest, the trial, the sentencing. Kimble was a popular media target during that time—the committed cop who nearly died in the line of duty, then rose to defend the very woman who’d put the bullet in him. Lots of attention had come his way in those days.

He’d never stopped retreating from it.

He had attended this church until the shooting. His mother had raised him there, and he kept going long after her death. Then came Jacqueline’s bullet, and the next time Kimble entered the building, they prayed for him during the service. Aloud and before the entire congregation, they prayed for him.

He never went back. Sometimes he ran into some people from church and felt a need to explain but couldn’t. Communication was a strength for him, until it came to communicating something about himself. Then he was utterly inept. He could not tell them how uneasy it had made him to be the personal target of pleas to God. He understood that it had been meant with the best intentions.

All the same, he’d never been back.

He hadn’t been much of anywhere in the past few years. Not in a way that mattered. He’d been the work, and the work had been him, and all the rest was detached and hidden and married to something he couldn’t explain and deeply feared. Something that, it seemed, began at Blade Ridge.

He was tired of letting it own him, and tired of letting it take its slow, steady blood toll from his town.

He would stand for it no longer.

He said a silent prayer then, first for himself and then,
spontaneously, another one for his mother, many years departed. Then he started the car and drove off to get Jacqueline Mathis.

Roy had the address for Nathan Shipley’s house and clear instructions from Kimble: do not engage, do not so much as turn your headlights on if he passes. Just call.

He’d driven past the house, a sprawling but dilapidated place nestled in a high valley with a stunning view of the mountains beyond, and then he’d circled back and found the ancient gas station that Kimble had told him about.

Shipley’s truck was still in the driveway of his home, and there were lights on inside. So far he was following the chief deputy’s instructions and not wandering.

Roy settled into his car, looked at the fading sun, and hoped that Kimble knew what in the hell he was doing.

At sundown the sheriff’s deputies came by to tell Audrey they’d had no luck with the cougar hunt.

“He hasn’t touched the bait,” said the cold female officer named Diane, who seemed to hold Audrey personally responsible for her colleague’s death. She was the most intimidating of all of them, harsher even than the sheriff. Audrey couldn’t help but be impressed by her. She certainly had the look of a woman who did not take any shit from her male colleagues. Or, for that matter, from anyone.

“I didn’t think he would,” Audrey said. Technically, Ira should have been interested. He should be hungry by now, having grown accustomed to a steady diet that required no hunting, and the presence of massive pieces of bloody, butchered meat scattered along the river should have appealed to him. She just knew somehow that he would not fall for the trick.

The watcher,
David had said, and then named him Ira.

He would be watching now, she was certain. Maybe from the rocks, maybe from the upper branches of a tree, maybe from some unremembered crevice of the old mines themselves, over on the other side of the river. Wherever he was, he would be watching, and he would not easily be fooled.

“I’m guessing the man with the dogs didn’t have any better luck,” she said.

“He hasn’t yet. The dogs can’t seem to pick up his scent.”

Again Audrey felt no surprise.

“You’ll try again tomorrow, I assume,” she said.

“Oh, yes. We’ll keep at it until we get him. Tomorrow the folks from the USDA will be down, too. They’re going to inspect—”

“They just did inspect. Right before we began to move. They said it was one of the highest-quality facilities in the country.”

“They want to inspect and see exactly how the cat escaped,” Diane Mooney said, as if Audrey hadn’t spoken. “So we will deal with all of that tomorrow. But I don’t want any of my people out here at night. Not after what’s been happening.” For the first time, the woman’s coldness seemed to abate, and she said, “I don’t think you should be here either.”

Audrey took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t particularly want to be, to tell you the truth. But I have to be. You see all of them?”

She waved her hand back at the cats.

“They can’t be left alone,” Diane Mooney said.

“No, they can’t. So Dustin and I, we’ll be here.”

“Call for help if you need it,” Diane said. “If you see him, or hear him, or just if anything seems wrong, call us, Mrs. Clark. Don’t try to handle things on your own. You got very lucky last night. I don’t want to see you press that again.”

Audrey nodded. “I don’t intend to.”

I
T WAS NOT YET DARK
when Kimble got stiffly out of his car—his back had been killing him all day—and walked into the prison with his order-on-jailer paperwork. They’d already gotten a call from the judge, so they were aware of the order and prepared to see him, but all the same he could feel the curiosity as he spoke with the supervising CO, a guy named John who’d seen Kimble come and go on many visits.

“There were supposed to be two of you. A female, correct?”

There were always supposed to be two, and you always tried to avoid pairing a female inmate alone with a single male officer. Kimble said, “We’re good,” meeting the man’s gaze with a flat stare and eventually receiving the shrug he knew he would receive. The procedural burden was on his department. If anything went wrong, Sawyer County would pay the price.

It took about ten minutes for them to bring her out, and she showed no trace of surprise. That was expected; she always gave off the air of having fully anticipated all developments. It had worked against her during the trial. One juror admitted that they had found her calm reactions to testimony disturbing.

The CO nodded at the handcuffs on Kimble’s belt.

“You want to use those?”

“She’s fine,” Kimble said.

The CO shrugged again. Jacqueline was a minimum-security inmate and Kimble was police. They expected he could handle her. He hoped they were right.

“Let’s go,” he told her, voice cool, indifferent. This was for the benefit of the CO. Let them see nothing but professionalism. Jacqueline Mathis stepped forward—physically free, technically still in custody. Kimble’s custody. As of this moment, she was his and his alone. He led the way to the door, held it open as Jacqueline stepped through. She walked at his side out to the car—he was in the cruiser now, this being official sheriff’s department business, though the sheriff knew nothing about it—and he felt an absurd desire to go around and open the passenger door for her, chivalrous, as if they were on a date. Instead, he opened the rear driver’s side door and she slid into the backseat, separated from him by a metal grate. Fences had held her from him for a while now.

She said, “We’re going to Blade Ridge, aren’t we?”

They were through the gates now and driving toward the highway. Kimble said, “They tell you that?” even though he knew they couldn’t have, because they didn’t know.

“I made a guess.” Her voice was so soft, so gentle. “It’s the right one, though, isn’t it?”

Kimble flicked his eyes at the mirror, then back to the road. “Yeah. A lot of people have died out there, Jacqueline. A whole hell of a lot. And the people who didn’t die…”

“What?”

“They’ve had problems,” he said.

He drove them up the ramp and onto the highway, pulling in behind a semi that was headed westbound.

“Problems like mine?”

“Problems like yours.”

“What are you hoping for from me, Kevin? What am I supposed to provide?”