“Maybe, yeah.” He fell heavily on his ass in the road, pushing thick dark hair back from his forehead, his chest heaving. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Help’s coming,” she said, patting Dustin’s shoulder. “And it looks as if he’s okay. I can’t believe he’s moving. How is he moving?”
There was blood on the deputy’s face, coming from his nose and his lips, and a crisscrossing of scratches over his forehead and left cheek, but those were the only evident injuries. He was a young, fit man, lean and long, with sandy hair and blue eyes. Being young and fit didn’t allow for escaping an accident like that unscathed, though. He was charmed by unnatural good luck, too, it seemed.
“Lucky,” Audrey said softly, thinking that her husband had died out here in a fall. One misplaced step, one slip, one life extinguished. This deputy had driven into the trees at top speed, demolished the car all around him, and survived.
Don’t think about it like that, she told herself. Stop that. Be grateful.
There was a murmur from the deputy. Audrey looked down again, then saw that his eyes were open and locked on hers.
“You okay?” she said. “You with us? You with us?”
Water dripped out of Wes’s short gray beard and off the brim of his baseball cap as he knelt over the wounded man. Beyond, in the preserve, no more than a hundred feet away, the cats had pressed close to the fences, intrigued. One of the lions gave a low roar, and that got the deputy’s attention. He swung his head up and around to face the cats, and Audrey winced when he moved his neck, sure that his spine had to be at risk. They’d been telling her to keep him still, that he would need a backboard.
“Please don’t move,” she said, and then, seeing how intently he was looking at her cats, she added, “They’re locked up. They won’t hurt you.”
She turned to Dustin. “Go try to calm them, please. The last thing we need is the cats going crazy right now.”
He went off to try to make peace with animals who were already restless from new surroundings and unnatural activity, and Audrey knelt beside Wes, watching the deputy.
“I hit him,” the deputy said.
“What?”
“Tried to miss, but he was right there, and I was going so fast… I tried to miss, I promise you that I did.”
“You didn’t hit anyone. Everyone is fine.”
That seemed distressing to him. He moved his head again, searching the dark woods, and this time his face split into an odd smile, blood on his teeth.
“He made it?”
“You didn’t hit anyone,” Audrey repeated, feeling ill at ease now. Maybe he hadn’t been so unscathed after all. A concussion was likely. Maybe something worse, bleeding on the brain, who knew?
“Light’s out,” the deputy said, staring over her shoulder. Audrey turned and looked up to the hilltop where the lighthouse stood against the weaving bare branches. It was dark, for the first time all day.
“We’ve got an ambulance on the way,” she said. “Just stay down. Please don’t move around. They’ll be here soon.”
“Where were you headed, bud?” Wes asked. “Is something wrong with the cats? Did you get a call about them?”
Blood was dribbling down the deputy’s chin as he shook his head.
“There’s a dead man in the lighthouse,” he said.
6
TEN MINUTES ON DUTY, running on frayed nerves and no sleep, and Kimble had a corpse call. He’d poured a cup of coffee but hadn’t taken a sip yet when he heard the news. Gunshot victim, they said.
“Active shooter?” he asked.
Probable suicide, he was told.
“We know the vic’s name?”
French, they said. Wyatt French. Maybe he remembered—
“Yes,” Kimble said. “I remember Wyatt French.”
He felt cold guilt in the pit of his stomach. All those questions, all that talk about suicide. Why hadn’t he sent someone to check? He’d hoped Wyatt was just drunk, the way he usually was. That last joke, too, the threat that he might just decide to live forever—it had suggested that he wasn’t in too dismal a state of mind. Hadn’t it?
Kimble swallowed some coffee for warmth, kept his face impassive, and, after a moment’s pause, asked that they send Nathan Shipley. He didn’t want to go out there himself, not after the morning call, and Shipley, though young, was one of Kimble’s favorite deputies, quiet and calm and tough. He’d seen worse than a suicide, and he’d be fine out there in charge of the scene.
They dispatched Shipley, only to come back for Kimble a moment later, just as he’d settled behind his desk.