The Ridge(19)

He’d had just enough time to turn his head before she fired. Turned and saw her…

… smiling! Absolutely delighted, she was so happy to shoot you, she was so happy…

… with the gun and couldn’t even lift his own. The bullet caught him low in the back and drove him down into her husband’s blood. Jacqueline Mathis laid her Glock down, calmly, and walked toward him, knelt, and pulled his gun out of its holster. Then, while he tried to get his mouth to work, tried to tell her not to do it, she’d leveled the muzzle at his forehead.

He remembered wishing she’d just squeeze the trigger. Just finish it, not draw it out in such a way. But the smile turned to a frown and then she’d leaned toward him. Leaned toward him and down, her hair swinging from her face and close to his own, and it had been almost as if she were going to kiss him. The motion that gentle, that intimate.

Until the muzzle touched his skin.

She’d pressed the gun directly to his forehead, and her finger was tight on the trigger, and out in the driveway the lights on his cruiser flashed on the two of them there on the floor and in the blood, and she kept blinking against the glare. When the red caught her face the blink turned to a wince, and she took a sharp, harsh inhalation, as if struck by a sudden pain. Looked back at him, and the lights flashed again, and again, and she suddenly removed the gun and crawled backward, into the darkness. Then there was another car in the driveway and Kimble got the words out.

“Put it down.”

So she did. She laid his weapon on the floor and said, in a confused voice, as if she had just stepped into the room and interrupted his attempt at a quiet death, “I’m sorry. I just don’t know—” and right then the backup deputy turned the cruiser’s spotlight on, piercing the front window with an explosion of light. Jacqueline Mathis lifted her hands and covered her face, and Kimble realized he might live, and then he fainted.

Now he looked at her photograph and felt lightheaded again.

“What were you doing up here, Wyatt?” Kimble muttered, and around him the lighthouse creaked against the force of a strengthening winter wind.





9


THE CATS ALERTED WESLEY to the blue light that was not a light at all.

When they turned out in unified fury on the night after Wyatt French died at the top of his lighthouse, it was the first time Wesley had seen anything of the kind. And Wesley Harrington had spent forty-five of his fifty-seven years around cats. He’d been born in Wyoming in a place so far out in the mountains that there would be weeks at a time when he was unable to make it to school because the roads were impassable due to snow. His father had a sixth-grade education with books and a doctorate as a woodsman. He hunted, fished, and trapped, all for two things: food and money. There was only one exception to that approach: mountain lions.

Wesley went along on his first lion hunt when he was twelve. Some folks called them cougars, some mountain lions, others pumas, but in the Wyoming mountains there were just “lions.” There was, as Wesley’s father regularly explained to him by the fire that provided the sole heat source in their cabin, nothing finer than hunting lions. They were the only animal in America that could truly outthink a man. Oh, bears and deer and wolves had their instincts, but lions were crafty.

They were also, he often said, the only American animal that would stalk a man. He’d heard that polar bears would do such a thing, but there were no polar bears in the lower forty-eight. Lions would stalk, though. He’d seen it done, and heard tell of many other occasions. They were faster, more agile, more deadly, and far smarter than any other creature, and for those reasons a lion hunt had nothing to do with food or money and everything to do with the thrill of battle.

Those hunts outlasted almost all of Wesley’s childhood memories. The frigid air, the deep snow, the howling sounds the wind made as it worked through the mountains. An expanse of wilderness completely empty except for Wesley and his dad and the three Plott hounds. They’d find a track, measure it, estimate the size of the cat, and then they’d be off, off through some of the most unforgiving terrain in the area, because the cat’s first instinct when dogs were at its heels was not, contrary to popular belief, to tree. Cats were too smart for that. So first they’d run, and they would run toward territory that favored them. A mountain lion could cover twenty miles or more in a day.

Some of the locals had calling stands, and they’d sit up in the trees and call for the big cats, and sometimes it worked. Bill Harrington had no patience for such approaches. Lion hunts were supposed to be chases.

When Wesley was fifteen, he and his father had the greatest hunt of both their lives, scrambling through crusted snow and treacherous canyons, the hounds hoarse-voiced and with torn, bloody pads on their feet. They watched the lion—a massive cat, a true trophy—swim a frigid river to escape them and then, just as twilight was settling, they treed it on a rocky ledge. Bill Harrington gave his son a chance.