“We haven’t lost a man in the line of duty since your father,” Kimble said. He was standing on the porch, just past the front steps, hadn’t closed the distance or approached the door. His hand hung close to his hip.
“I know it. And if we made that shift change a couple hours later?” Shipley ran a hand over his face, had his eyes screened from sight when he said, “Then it’s like father, like son, chief. And you know the damned thing about it? Would’ve both been due to cats.”
It took Kimble a moment to understand that, but then he realized it was true. Ed Shipley had run into that fire looking for a cat that he misunderstood to be a person. He’d never run back out.
“Mind if we have a seat?” Kimble said.
“Come on in.”
“If it’s all the same, let’s sit outside. I like to watch the fog come off those hills. You have one hell of a view for it.”
Shipley gave him a curious look, it being a chill December morning with the threat of snow in the air, but he nodded. “Aren’t many better views in the county,” he said. “Maybe Wyatt’s lighthouse.”
The reference froze Kimble up. When Shipley said, “Come on in, best view is from the back porch,” Kimble couldn’t say a word, just followed him into the house, which was clean enough but smelled of trapped grime and the ancient sweat of people long departed, the sort of odors you could never clear out of an old home with a mop and Lysol. The place was outfitted the way you’d expect an eighty-year-old’s home to be, but as far as Kimble understood, Shipley had been alone in it for nearly a decade now. The television set in the living room was one of those bulky things mounted into a heavy wooden cabinet, had to be twenty years old at least, and the screen was covered with a thick film of dust.
They went out to the back porch, which did indeed offer a fine view of the distant mountaintops covered in their trademark smoky fog.
“Sun’s hardly up,” Shipley said. “But it’s never too early to toast a comrade, is it?”
“I suppose it never is.”
Shipley nodded, went inside, and returned with a bottle of Jim Beam. “To Pete Wolverton,” he said, and took a pull. His hand was trembling. His face was pale and his blue eyes rimmed with dark circles. Kimble thought, He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but then realized that he himself couldn’t look much better. Hell, Shipley hadn’t slept much in days.
Shipley passed the bottle to Kimble.
“To Pete,” Kimble said, and then he tasted the bourbon and found it an unsatisfactory substitute for the morning’s coffee. His stomach roiled, but maybe that wasn’t because of the whiskey. Maybe that was because of what he was thinking of Shipley, who stood there in his jeans and sweatshirt with somber face, looking every bit the same young man in whom Kimble would have once entrusted the future of the entire department. Now he was looking at him as a murder suspect.
Bound by balance, Ryan O’Patrick had said. Anyone who bargained at Blade Ridge was required to take a life. And Wesley Harrington would have settled no debts for Nathan Shipley. In the end the cat got him, not the bullets. If Shipley had fired the bullets, they had cleared no debts for him. The ghost with the torch, Kimble believed, was not interested in the blood of animals.
They sat on cold plastic chairs as the breeze blew down off the peaks with frosty teeth, and Kimble said, “Tell me about last night, would you?”
Shipley blew out a long breath and said, “It wasn’t a fun one.”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t like it out there, chief. Don’t hardly feel like myself.”
“Explain that.”
“Ever since the accident,” Shipley said. “I just don’t care to be back out there. Get odd memories. You were right about things getting stuck in my head. So I just don’t care much for the place. As for the cougar? If he was out there, I didn’t know it.”
“Why don’t you care for the place?”
“Same things I told you before. What I remember compared to what I was told happened, you know? What I remember, it—”
“Feels vivid?” Kimble said. “Real clear, but you still know it couldn’t have happened that way? Don’t trust your own memory, your own mind?”
“Exactly,” Shipley said, and he jutted his chin, looking at Kimble with a hard, thoughtful stare. “Pretty good summary, chief.”
He couldn’t have killed one of our own, Kimble thought. There’s no way he could have put a knife to Pete Wolverton’s throat.
But so many of the ridge survivors had killed one of their own. Friends, husbands, business partners, bosses. When that blackness rose up, it seemed decision-making and control were not possible. Shipley wouldn’t have known what he was doing. If O’Patrick and Jacqueline were to be believed, he wouldn’t have recalled a thing but blackness until he was done, like some sort of eclipse of the soul. He would know that he’d done it, though. He would know that by now.