“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.