Shipley met him at the gates, and his face was pale.
“Son of a bitch jumped right out,” he said. “One try, right over the top. If I hadn’t been watching it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“All right,” Kimble said. “Put your damn gun away.”
Shipley looked at him, hesitated, and holstered his sidearm. He kept his palm on it, though.
“If you’d seen the way that thing could move,” he said, “you’d want yours out, too.”
Kimble moved away from him and over to Audrey Clark and a wiry, gray-haired man named Wesley Harrington, who held odd-looking weapons in each hand.
“What in the hell are those?”
“Air rifles. Shoot tranquilizer darts.”
“Can you hit him with it?”
“Sure,” Harrington said. “If he’s five feet away.”
Kimble looked at Audrey Clark and said, “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”
Clark, who was tall and good-looking but too thin—she’d lost a lot of weight since her husband died, it seemed—said, “Not if it’s handled right.”
“And how would that be?”
“Quietly,” she said, and then, when he frowned, “I mean that honestly. That’s not concern for my reputation, that’s concern for getting him back. If you bring twenty people out here with guns and send them into the woods, we won’t have a chance.”
“Not the way he moves,” Shipley muttered. “Could bring a battalion out here, and they still wouldn’t get him.”
Kimble shot him a harsh look and then turned back to Audrey Clark.
“That’s a very dangerous animal,” he said. “We can’t just have it running around wild.”
“I could point out that he was running around wild to begin with,” she said, “but that’s a waste of time. I want him back, too. More than you do. But I’m telling you, the more people, and the more noise, the worse our chances. The commotion will scare him.”
“What are you suggesting, then?”
“I think he’ll come back when he’s hungry,” she said, and Kimble sighed at that, the notion of letting a two-hundred-pound cougar grow hungry not one that appealed to him as a solution. “We’re his home. He’ll come back.”
“Not here,” Harrington said, and they all looked at him in surprise. He gave an apologetic glance at Audrey Clark and then said, “It’s just… he had a pretty hostile reaction to this place. I don’t know that he’ll come back. In the old preserve, I might have agreed. But not here. Maybe he’s heading back to the old place.”
Audrey Clark looked as if she wanted to strangle him. Kimble said, “You’re proposing that we go after him, then?”
Harrington nodded. “Ought to try, at least. I doubt we’ll have much luck, but we ought to try.” He looked up at the gray sky. “And we’ve got a short window to do it. Once it gets full dark… that won’t be a good time to be in the woods with him.”
“Right,” Kimble said, thinking of a black cat moving in the darkness and suppressing a shiver. “We’ll want to hurry.”
“Make better time at it if we split up,” Harrington said. “Two by two. Work along the river, maybe, out in the open. See what we can see. I’ll take Audrey and—”
“Hang on there,” Kimble said, thinking that they had two police on hand and two civilians. “You and I will go down to the river together. Nathan, you hang fairly close, all right? You and Mrs. Clark can check the perimeter, but don’t get far.”
Having the damned cat out was bad enough; the last thing he needed was someone to be hurt by it. Harrington had the look of capability about him, and Audrey Clark appeared more shaken. He didn’t need her wandering off into the woods at dusk.
“Let’s go,” he told Harrington, and they set off down the road and for the river as the sun settled in the west, Kimble thinking that he was really beginning to hate this place.
15
AUDREY’S THOUGHTS WERE NOT even on Ira as she and Deputy Shipley walked out of the preserve and toward the abandoned, overgrown railroad tracks that formed its southern border. They were on Wes.
She couldn’t believe the way he was behaving, the things he was saying. The preserve had its share of opponents, people who didn’t understand the need and knew only fear of animals that would never harm them even if they had the chance to do so, and the county sheriff was among them. Now Wes was spouting off about the place as if it were dangerous, and to the sheriff’s deputies, no less.