“What about those lamps below? Do they work?”
Kimble looked down at the infrared lights, doing their invisible toil, and said, “No, they don’t.” The lie came without much thought, but he knew why he’d said it, the same reason he had drawn his gun: he still couldn’t trust her completely. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.
Or shouldn’t.
“Turn the light back on,” he said.
The flashlight clicked on, and he could see her again, and he thought that if she’d left the light on when she’d asked him about the infrared lamps, he might not have lied. When he could see her, he could trust her. When they were alone in the dark, though?
Then it wasn’t so easy.
“He apologized to me,” she said, and shook her head in amazement. “Wyatt French. He came all the way to the prison and apologized as if everything could have been stopped if he’d gotten back here and turned on the light.”
“Maybe it could have,” Kimble said, and they looked at each other in silence, considering just what that might have been like.
“Can we go back down? I don’t like to see them, Kevin.”
“We can go back down.”
He followed her down the steps and out into the living quarters. She panned the flashlight beam around the bare walls, lined with their thumbtacks, and said, “This is where he had my picture?”
“Yes. Yours and the others.”
She crossed the small room, sat down on Wyatt French’s bed, and began to cry.
“Jacqueline,” Kimble said, walking toward her, gun in hand. “What—”
“They’re all there with him now. Everyone who accepted his help is trapped with him now, and I will be, too.”
No, he wanted to tell her, of course you won’t be, but what did he know about this? He saw no ghosts in the dark, he’d made no pact in the light of a cold blue flame, he’d killed no one in a black trance.
He reached out to her with his left hand, the one that did not have the gun in it, and wiped tears from her cheek. She reached up and took his hand and held it against her face.
“I’ll be there,” she said softly. “I don’t know when, but I’ll be there. You’re going to take me back to jail now, and in time I’ll get out, but where I’m headed, Kevin? It’s no better. It’s worse.”
He knelt in front of her, looked into her eyes, and said, “There’s got to be something, Jacqueline. We’ll find it. I will find it.”
She gave him a sad smile, tears in her eyes, and said, “Sure, Kevin.”
It was quiet again then, and she tilted her head and kissed his hand. He tried to reach for her, tried to embrace her, but the hand she did not have hold of was occupied with the gun. She looked up at him.
“Put it down, Kevin.”
He hesitated.
“You’re going to take me back,” she said. “I know that you will. It’s the right thing, and you always do the right things. But does it have to be now?”
She slid her hand up the inside of his leg. “Does it have to be now?”
“No,” he whispered. It did not have to be. And even if it did, he didn’t want it to be.
He set the gun on the floor, leaned forward, and met her lips with his. She grasped the back of his head with both hands and pulled him down onto the bed. It was a small bed, narrow, and he rolled awkwardly onto his back, while she moved with total grace until she was on top of him and astride him, their lips still together. She broke the kiss and sat upright, looking down at him. Then, slowly, she unzipped his department-issue jacket and slipped out of it. Beneath that was the prison shirt. She pulled that off, too, and now he couldn’t just lie there and watch her anymore. He pulled her down to him and kissed her face, her throat, her breasts, thinking that it was nothing like he’d imagined it would be.
It was better.
His phone began to ring. Jacqueline moved her lips to his ear and her hand to his belt buckle and said, “Let’s not take any calls for a few minutes, all right? Haven’t the two of us earned at least a few minutes by now?”
He thought that they had.
They took more than a few minutes. When it was done, Kimble lay in the dark with Jacqueline Mathis pressed against him, her skin warm on his, and he thought that he had never been crazy—this was where he belonged. With her. He’d known it when he saw her, somehow, as if the universe had whispered a secret truth in his ear, and now he could feel the confirmation of it in every breath she took, her breasts pressed to his side, swelling warm against him with each inhalation. He reached out and laid a hand gently against the back of her head, stroked her hair as she twisted, nestling against him, and thought, It will not be that long. Her parole is not far away. She will be back with me if I am patient, and I have been patient for so long, I certainly can be again. For this feeling, this moment, I can be as patient as any man alive.