“Sorry,” he said. “That’s just what you don’t need to hear, I’m sure. All I’m saying is… there’s something strange in this place. And I think the cats feel it. I’m pretty sure about that.”
He left her then, walked back into the night woods, his hand tapping along the stock of his gun.
25
KIMBLE SAT WITH HIS FOOT on the brake, staring at the mailbox—O’Patrick, R.—and the trailer and five-bay garage beyond. A man was standing in one of the open garage bays, smoking a cigar, and Kimble pulled into the drive, parked, and stepped out of the cruiser. Ryan O’Patrick had been paroled after serving twenty years for murder, and he’d returned to Sawyer County, moving to Modesto, which was home to the county’s consolidated rural high school. O’Patrick lived in a trailer directly across the street from Hefron High, and according to Roy Darmus ran a cash-only mechanic’s shop and was apparently capable of fixing anything that ailed a car, boat, tractor, or other engine-reliant item. He’d always been handy with a wrench, it seemed. Just got a little too handy one day, upside his boss’s skull.
Kimble got out of the car and walked up to the garage. A radio was on, tuned to a sports talk station, and beside it a small space heater blew warm air over the concrete floor.
“You Ryan O’Patrick?”
“I got a feeling,” O’Patrick said, studying the police car, “that I’m not going to enjoy this visit.”
He had the look of someone who’d been jailed for a long time. A posture that made him seem bigger than he was, eyes that were somehow both challenging and resigned. He was heavier than in his old booking photographs, with an extra layer of chin partially obscured by a short graying beard. Kimble saw an open tall-boy of Old Style sitting on top of a toolbox at his side.
“Well,” O’Patrick said, blowing smoke at Kimble’s face, “what do you need, deputy? If anything in these cars is stolen, I don’t know about it, and I don’t care to know. I just fix them.”
“Not here about a car. Here to ask you about Blade Ridge.”
Ryan O’Patrick drew smoke in and never released it. After a long silence, he said, “Say that again?”
“Blade Ridge. You had an accident out there back in—”
“I know damn well when I had my accident and where it was. What I’d like to know is why you’re interested.”
“Some other people have died out there,” Kimble said. “Bad accidents. Like yours.”
O’Patrick reached out and clicked off the radio, the sports talk vanishing.
“I’m investigating them,” Kimble said. “And I’d like to know what you remember about your own.”
“Wrecked a car. Shit happens. I was young, I liked to drive fast. Burned a Camaro along the road and it got away from me.”
He looked at his boots while he told this story. Kimble nodded, leaned against the garage door frame, and said, “Figured as much. Long stretch of gravel road like that, isolated place? You were dragging, weren’t you? Seeing just what the car could handle, just what you could handle.”
“Sure. That’s what I was doing.”
Kimble waited for him to look up. When he finally did, Kimble said, “So when did Wyatt French come by? Last few weeks, or longer?”
O’Patrick’s face tightened. “Who?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Kimble said, “He’s dead now. We found his body up at the top of his lighthouse.”
When Ryan O’Patrick sighed, he seemed to lose something more than air.
“Fuck,” he said.
“So you knew him.”
“Yeah, I knew him. Or he knew me, more like it. Kept coming around, trying to get me to talk about something that… that just shouldn’t be spoken of.”
“It needs to be spoken of,” Kimble said.
“You and Wyatt should have gotten together, then.”
“A little late for that. I’ve got you, though. Tell me about the wreck.”
Ryan O’Patrick stared out of the garage and over at the football field across the street, where a group of boys in Hefron High Wrestling shirts were running the bleachers, their feet pounding off the aluminum as they sprinted beneath the harsh lights. They were bright lights, glaring, and most people wouldn’t have wanted to live so close. Kimble noticed that Ryan O’Patrick didn’t have curtains in his trailer. Every window was exposed to the stadium lights.
“The gauges went,” he said, and his voice was soft. “Speedometer, tach, everything. Just went flat. Don’t know why it happened. Electrical short of some kind. I got to staring at them and took my eyes off the road, that’s all. Poor driving, nothing else.”