Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [101]
Come on, Kimberly, he willed her. Come back to me.
She got the T-shirt wrapped around the end of the stick. Then she tucked in the cotton balls. Then she found the matches. Her trembling hand held aloft the first small wooden match. The raspy sound of the tip scratching against the box. The match flared to life, she touched it to the cotton balls, and a torch was born in the night.
Immediately, the space around her blazed with fresh light, illuminating not one, but four coiled rattlers.
“Mac,” Kimberly said clearly. “Get ready to catch.”
She thrust the torch forward. The snakes hissed, then recoiled sharply from the flames, and Kimberly bolted off the first boulder. She bounded down, one, two, three, four, as the crevices came alive with slippery shapes tumbling off the boulders as the snakes sought to escape the flame. The rocks were alive, hissing, curling, rattling. Kimberly plunged through the writhing mess.
“Mac!” she yelled. She came catapulting off the final rock and crashed against his hard frame.
“Gotcha,” he said, grabbing her shoulders and already removing the torch from her shaking hand.
For one moment, she just stood there, shell-shocked and dazed. Then, she collapsed against his chest and he held her more gratefully and desperately than he should.
“Mandy,” Kimberly murmured. She began to cry.
CHAPTER 28
Shenandoah National Park, Virginia
11:51 P.M.
Temperature: 91 degrees
PROFESSIONALS ARRIVED AND TOOK OVER THE SCENE. Lanterns were brought in, along with battery-powered lights. Then volunteers, armed with sticks, served as emergency snake wranglers, while men wearing thick boots and heavy-duty pants waded onto the rock pile and removed the victim’s body in a litter.
Kathy Levine stood by as Mac officially reported their latest find to the powers that be. As a national park, Shenandoah fell under FBI jurisdiction; Watson would have his case after all, and Mac and Kimberly would once again be relegated to the role of outsiders.
Kimberly didn’t care. She sat alone on the sidewalk in front of Big Meadows Lodge, watching the emergency vehicles pile up in the parking lot. Ambulances and EMTs with no one to save. A fire department with no blaze to extinguish. Then finally, the ME’s van, the only professional who would get to practice his trade tonight.
It was hot. Kimberly felt moisture roll down her face like tears. Or maybe she was still crying. It was hard to know. She felt empty in a way she’d never felt empty before. As if everything she had ever been had disappeared, been flushed down a drain. Without bones, her body would have no weight. Without skin, she would cease to have form. The wind would come, blow her away like a pile of burnt-out ash, and maybe it would be better that way.
More cars came and went. Exhausted search volunteers returned and headed for a makeshift canteen where they downed buckets of ice water, then sank their teeth into pulpy slices of orange. The EMTs treated them for minor cuts and slight sprains. Most people simply collapsed into the metal folding chairs, physically exhausted by the hike, and emotionally drained by a search that had ended with bitter disappointment.
Tomorrow all of this would be gone. The search-and-rescue volunteers would disperse back to their everyday lives, returning to mundane rituals and routine concerns. They would rejoin their families, hiking parties, fire departments.
And Kimberly? Would she go back to the Academy? Fire shotgun rounds at blank targets and pretend it made her tough? Or play dress-up in Hogan’s Alley, dodging paint shells and matching wits with overpaid actors? She could pass the last round of tests, graduate to become a full-fledged agent, and go through the rest of her life pretending her career made her whole. Why not? It had worked for her father.
She wanted to lay her head down on the hard sidewalk bordering the parking lot. She wanted to melt into the cement until the world ceased to exist.