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.
“But you talked about the blue flame,” he said. “Kimble told me that.”
“Yeah. The way it happened… the way I know it happened, not the way I remember it, but the way I know it did, was that I hit that kid as he stood in the middle of the road staring off like somebody in a trance. You would have to be deaf and blind to just stand there like that, but he did. And I hit him. Going fast, I hit him. He popped up in the air, and I could see him going across the windshield, and then I was in the trees.”
Shipley wiped a hand over his mouth and shook his head. His eyes were wild.
“When I got my bearings back, the first thing I saw was that blue flame. It was over in the woods, just where his body should have been, just where he was flying when he went past the windshield. And then… then he was up. By the time the other people, Audrey Clark and Harrington, by the time they got there, the kid was up. I was woozy as hell, I will admit that, but I will not admit that I am capable of imagining something like that.”
Shipley turned, and the gun swung toward Roy, who winced. “Sorry, sorry. Look, you want the gun gone, it’s gone.”
He set the weapon down on the coffee table between them. “I’m going to lose my job,” he said. “I know that. But I’d rather lose that than my damn mind.”
“You hit Dustin Hall?” Roy said. “And when you saw the blue flame, it was with Dustin Hall? The flame wasn’t with you, it was with him?”
“Yeah. And I’ll tell you something else—that kid knows what happened to him. He’s the reason I can’t convince myself that it was a hallucination or a dream or whatever. Maybe I could have, if not for him. But when I went back out there, the morning Harrington died? It was just me and Dustin Hall at first. Before Pete got there, it was just the two of us, and he knew what had happened, he knew that I’d run him down. I’m sure of it. But what was I supposed to tell Kimble? Or anyone else? Say, Hey, this kid, he rose from the dead the other day, and now I think he’s lying about it. I’m supposed to say that?”
“Yes,” Roy said. “You’re going to need to say that. To Kimble.”
“I could save us both the time and put the handcuffs on myself.”