The Ridge(114)

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.