Read The Ridge for Free Online

faintly like gunpowder. Pinned between the steering wheel and the remains of the passenger seat, which had been shoved toward him, was the deputy’s crumpled body. Audrey was just about to speak into the phone again, just about to say that the man looked to be dead, when he moved his head and focused his eyes on hers.
    She almost screamed. It was stunning to see him move. She jerked upright and stumbled backward as the operator said, “Ma’am, what do you see?”
    “He’s… um… he’s moving,” Audrey said, watching in astonishment as the deputy blinked, narrowed his eyes, and frowned at her and Wes as if he didn’t know what they were doing there and didn’t like seeing them. “He’s alive. I don’t know how, but he’s alive.”
    The operator was busy telling her not to try to move him until the paramedics arrived when the deputy reached out of the broken window and placed one white palm on the gravel, dug his fingers in, and tried to pull himself clear.
    “Tell him not to move,” Audrey said, but Wes was already leaning forward to help.
    “Give a hand,” he shouted to Dustin, who had been one of David’s favorite students and was always capable around the preserve but now stood pale-faced and motionless. Dustin responded to the order, though, leaned down and helped support the deputy’s weight while Wes pulled a pocket knife free, opened the blade, and hacked through the seatbelt, whispering to the deputy to take it easy, not to rush. The whole time the guy was reaching from the wreckage with that one free arm, pulling at the mud and gravel, as if determined to claw out from within the car that should have been his coffin. Wes and Dustin caught him by the shoulders and lifted and then, somehow, he was out of the police car and on his back, breathing and alert.
    Audrey hung up the phone. “What happened?” she asked Dustin.
    “I think he missed the turn or something. All I know is one second I heard the siren and then the next he was in the trees.”
    Dustin’s face looked bloodless, and he was weaving on his feet. She said, “Do you need to sit down?”
    “Maybe, yeah.” He fell heavily on his ass in the road, pushing thick dark hair back from his forehead, his chest heaving. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
    “Help’s coming,” she said, patting Dustin’s shoulder. “And it looks as if he’s okay. I can’t believe he’s moving. How is he moving?”
    There was blood on the deputy’s face, coming from his nose and his lips, and a crisscrossing of scratches over his forehead and left cheek, but those were the only evident injuries. He was a young, fit man, lean and long, with sandy hair and blue eyes. Being young and fit didn’t allow for escaping an accident like that unscathed, though. He was charmed by unnatural good luck, too, it seemed.
    “Lucky,” Audrey said softly, thinking that her husband had died out here in a fall. One misplaced step, one slip, one lifeextinguished. This deputy had driven into the trees at top speed, demolished the car all around him, and survived.
    Don’t think about it like that,
she told herself.
Stop that. Be grateful.
    There was a murmur from the deputy. Audrey looked down again, then saw that his eyes were open and locked on hers.
    “You okay?” she said. “You with us? You with us?”
    Water dripped out of Wes’s short gray beard and off the brim of his baseball cap as he knelt over the wounded man. Beyond, in the preserve, no more than a hundred feet away, the cats had pressed close to the fences, intrigued. One of the lions gave a low roar, and that got the deputy’s attention. He swung his head up and around to face the cats, and Audrey winced when he moved his neck, sure that his spine had to be at risk. They’d been telling her to keep him still, that he would need a backboard.
    “Please don’t move,” she said, and then, seeing how intently he was looking at her cats, she added, “They’re locked up. They won’t hurt