Shadows in the Water

by Kory M. Shrum

  Lou paced her apartment. She felt the weight of her father’s vest in one hand. She opened and closed it, mashing the Velcro together only to rip it apart again. The angry tearing sound soothed her. It soothed her the way the smell of beer on a man’s breath soothed her. Remnants of her father’s life still alive in the world.

  Once when she was a child, her father had taken her to the zoo. She hated it. The large-eyed lemurs, the great wildebeests, and even the capybaras looked depressed to her. All the animals, which had once been free in the world, now confined to cages.

  One animal had cut her deep.

  Inside an exhibit, a black panther paced back and forth in front of the glass. It looked utterly exposed and vulnerable in the bright sunlight. Its big eyes followed her from beyond the glass as it walked up and down in front of people.

  As she watched her pace back and forth in her cage, Lou had begun to cry.

  She was grateful for the full sunlight of the day. Her sympathy for the animal was so great she would have slipped into the enclosure.

  That night as she lay in bed, the only thing keeping her from visiting the beast was the fear she’d be eaten alive. And she was too small to move the animal back to the South American jungle and keep all her limbs attached to her body as well.

  But her heart hurt no less.

  Now, as she walked back and forth in her apartment, opening and closing the vest, she knew exactly how the panther had felt.

  Prudence her mind whispered. She knew she was being hunted, and the way the hunted survived was by hunkering down until the hunter walked past, unaware. Then when his back was to her—pounce. That was the moment to sink one’s teeth and crush the skull.

  Threat eliminated.

  Hide her inner wisdom counseled, the part of her that had saved her skin so many times in the past few months. Hide and emerge only to cover her tracks. Because that was another consideration. If this Konstantine were half as smart as his predecessor—because of course the other Martinellis had tried to find her—he would try to learn of her identity. She had no driver’s license or government ID. She did not vote. She had no medical or dental records to speak of, if only because hospitals scared her. Too much bright light and not nearly enough shadows to hide in.

  She had no phone number and no friends. The apartment was in her aunt’s name with her aunt’s billing information. All her bills were paid for automatically from the trust established by her father before his death. The fact that her father had life insurance and a trust established the moment Louie was born, told her he had doubted he would see his daughter grow to adulthood.

  This thought alone broke her heart—or it would have if she’d had much heart left.

  With only minimal public documents, would he make the connection between the murder of Jack Thorne and his wife and their surviving daughter?

  And that was the problem, wasn’t it? She couldn’t predict how much this Konstantine knew and how accessible she was to him. He had pictures but perhaps not a name.

  She knew he would be heavily guarded, like his brothers. So the idea of jumping right into his dark bedroom some night and killing him was suicidal.

  Maybe she could see him.

  She looked up at the lit skyline and smiled. She laid her father’s vest down gently on her bed. Then she ducked into her closet and closed the door.

  Her body softened in the darkness. The thin veil between this side of the world and Konstantine’s thinned even more. It began to give, sliding out from under her. Her hand shot out and touched the grainy wood of the closet’s opposite wall. She held this space, keeping her body rooted in place.

  She heard sounds. A car honked. A bicycle horn blared in response. A dog was barking, and the bells of a church began to chime. She counted the toll—seven. She quickly did the math. Not America then. He was somewhere in Europe, in an industrialized city with a church old enough that the hour was kept by bell tolls—which hardly narrowed it.

  He could be in Sweden, Poland or Algeria. Italy seemed the most obvious guess, given what she knew about his family, but it was dangerous to make assumptions when working with such a man. Only one thing was for sure.

  Wherever he was, the sun had already risen over the horizon, and the shadows would be thinning. Tracking him openly in the daylight would be more dangerous than overtaking him beneath the cover of night.

  Of course, if he was a world away, it meant Lou had more room to breathe than she thought. There was an ocean between them. And while Castle might have been heavily guarded and maybe most of the dealers holding the Texan line were off limits, for now, the world was a big place. The list of dealers she wanted deported to La Loon was fifty. At least.

  He had mules in Chicago, Orlando, New York. And it was only one o’clock in the morning.

  She grinned and placed her other hand against the closet wall, relieved to find a reasonable way to burn off steam.

  She could accomplish a lot before dawn.

  AT 1:07, SHE GRABBED Yorkie Hankerton off Michigan Ave where he’d been trying to finalize the deal between two sex workers and a tourist from Albuquerque.

  Yorkie, with his chest swelled up and a hairy navel protruding from beneath a tight shirt postulated like a gorilla at the zoo. His back grazed the giant reflective bean in the Millennium Park and his mirror image mimicked his movements, mocking him behind his back. A shadow from the enlarged bean stretched out behind him, darkening the walk. The girls stood ten yards away on the corner, smiling, giggling provocatively until the tourist pulled out his calfskin wallet and began counting out bills in the chilly Chicago night. He looked up, money ready, and found the pimp gone.

  The tourist circled the bean twice, $300 still clutched in his hand, but Yorkie was gone. The girls were clever, though. Before the man had the good sense to put his money away and slink off into the night for easier prey, the girls descended on him. One took the money. The other looped her arm in his, and the trio shuffled toward the river. Only one of the girls looked over her shoulder with a frown on her face.

  AT 1:47, ANTHONY BORTELLO stood on a pier in Baltimore. He was shaking with cold. With a cigarette balanced between his lips, he waved an arm in the air in a grand sweeping gesture, much the way a bullfighter waved his red flag in the face of El Bullo. A man driving a forklift carefully slipped the forklift’s prongs into the two-way pallet. With a clank, it lifted over three hundred kilos of cocaine off the loading dock. With a great beep beep beep, the machine reversed and the pallet was carried toward the warehouse, toward the light emitting from the raised door.

  Anthony heard the whiz of the next forklift accelerating toward him. He took this moment to lean against an empty transport container and relight his cigarette. He barely felt the hand on his shoulder before the dock and machinery disappeared.

  AT 2:23, HANK KENNEDY was busy beating his wife. He’d come home to a dirty house and no dinner. Instead of finding her working hard on putting things right, he’d found her in bed, pretending to sleep. He’d yanked her from the bed by her hair, still wet from a shower, and proceeded to slap her across the face until she awoke screaming. She hit him back, slapping wildly until she saw who it was.

  He’d cracked two of her ribs with a swift kick to her side as she tried to crawl away. She braced herself for a second kick, but it didn’t come.

  When Janie Kennedy looked up, only a woman stood there, bending down with Janie’s cell phone in her hand. She pressed it to Janie’s ear, and held it until the woman took the phone.

  Then the bedroom was empty again, the silence pressing in on her.

  “911,” the voice in her ear said. “What is your emergency?”

  AT 4:11, TYLER PINKERTON was in the shower, scrubbing at his eyes and hair with the dry soap provided by the hotel. It was dark out, and it would still be by the time he reached the opium farm in Gostan. But the workers started at dawn, and he wanted to be there when they did and get a proper count and gross product projection. Rinsing the soap out of his h
air and eyes, he optimistically figured he could have the numbers run by lunch and spend the rest of the night in a little bar he’d come to favor. The waitress had big tits and made a habit of pressing those breasts to his arm as she leaned across the table to collect his empty bottles.

  It was a bonus they didn’t water down his drinks like some of the other bars in the most touristy districts.

  He was smiling when he stepped naked out of the shower, thinking about the hard nub of a nipple trailing across his forearm.

  He stopped smiling when a young woman clad in black, blood smeared across her cheeks and caked under her nails, stepped into the bathroom with him. And turned off the lights.

  LOU STEPPED OUT OF the closet into the pink dawn light saturating her apartment. She was naked and dripping wet. I should hang a towel in here, she thought as she crossed the hall to her bathroom. She flipped the switch, flooding the small room with artificial light.

  She preferred the dark, without question. But she was exhausted and didn’t want to struggle to keep her body on this plane, in this room with no windows.

  She turned on the shower and climbed into the cold stream even before the water heater had a chance to kick on. Her limbs were beginning to stiffen and she would have to rely on the heat to loosen the overworked cords of her flesh again.

  She wasn’t worried about evidence.

  Her cleanup process was more thorough than any on Earth.

  She took them whole and unharmed to La Loon. The beast disposed of the body. And then Lou stripped and returned naked. The Alaskan Lake, her entry point, was always freezing, but never more than a stone’s throw from a shadow leading home.

  No clothes to wash.

  No bullets to test.

  No blood splatters to examine.

  No body or weapon to find.

  It was perfect.

  If a witness saw a brief glimpse of a woman, how would they find her? And even if they did, they’d find evidence she was also a thousand miles away on the same night. How would they reconcile this discrepancy?

  Reason would seal tight the small gaps in her dealings. After all, she had been in New Orleans earlier. There were witnesses to this. How could she also have visited Chicago? New York? Afghanistan? And Baltimore?

  Impossible.

  With her hair wrapped in a towel, so as to not dampen her pillow, Lou fell into her bed beneath the window. The sunlight was orange now, the color of the sherbet coated ice-cream she’d loved as a child. Summers all heat, sunlight, and the taste of Creamsicles in her memory.

  A memory surfaced from its depths.

  Her mother was bitching about dinner, something Lou hated. Cranberry dressing? And she’d heard the front door open. She heard the rattling box even before he called out to her.

  She ran to him and found him grinning ear to ear, a box of Creamsicles pressed between his two great palms.

  “It’s cranberry surprise for dinner,” Lou had said, or something like it. She remembered how her stomach turned on itself greedily at the sight of her favorite treat.

  Her father had wrinkled his nose in sympathy and handed her the box. He gave her his customary welcome hug and whispered in her ear, clean your plate, and I’ll let you eat two.

  He put her on her feet and pretended to lock up his lips with a key.

  A whistle blasted for the 606 Eastbound train, dragging her to the present. A steam engine honked on the river. And Lou’s heart wobbled with heartache in her loft above the pool.

  She knew peace only with another man’s blood on her hands.

  15

  Paula Venetti rented a room in the basement of a record store in San Diego. During the day, she worked at a drive-thru. Burgers, milkshakes, and fries with banana ketchup, fast food for the eco-conscious consumer who dabbled in animal rights activism.

  She and King gained two hours slipping from New Orleans to San Diego, and found themselves beneath an enormous tree on the edge of a parking lot. The streetlights overhead flickered on, marking the end of twilight. The drive-thru was spotlighted by these street lamps and it gave the impression a show was about to start and they’d arrived just in time to see it.

  “Vegan fast food,” Lou mused aloud, nodding at the sign. “Lucy would love this.”

  King remembered the first time he’d taken Lucy on a date to a steakhouse and had been affronted when she’d only eaten a few iceberg leaves with olive oil. Before that, he’d never even heard the word vegan.

  “There she is,” Lou said, giving a slight nod toward a woman framed in the drive-thru window.

  Venetti was handing over a basket of fries to a kid with dreads, one of his feet balanced on a skateboard as he asked for ketchup.

  “So she is alive,” King said, his stomach settling.

  Venetti was younger than King expected, or at least she looked younger than the age listed on her testimony. Of course, these men liked to run with younger women, didn’t they? So why should it matter that Venetti was thirty years younger than the senator who’d courted her?

  They approached Venetti with casual strides. Her strawberry blond hair was tied up in a Rosie the Riveter handkerchief. A black Marilyn Monroe mole had been penciled onto her face near her upturned nose. Her eyes were coated in thick green eyeshadow which made King think of mermaid scales shimmering beneath the surface of an ocean tide.

  “What’ll it be?” the woman asked, a pen gripped in her fist. Her Texan accent was strong.

  “The facon-bacon cheezeburger and almond-vanilla shake, please,” Lou said.

  King looked at her, surprised. “You eat this shit?”

  Venetti looked up from the order pad and arched an eyebrow. She said nothing, as if waiting for King to dig his own grave.

  “You don’t grow up with a Buddhist yogi and not develop a taste for vegetarian food,” Lou said. “And I’m hungry.”

  “It comes with fries,” Venetti said. “You can upgrade to sweet potato fries for $1.00.”

  “Regular fries. Add avocado to the burger, too,” Lou added. “Thanks.”

  “And for you?” Venetti arched her perfect eyebrow at King. The flannel shirt rolled up to her elbows was a faded yellow with brown stripes. “Any of this shit for you?”

  Lou snorted.

  “Fries,” King said. His eyes were roving over her exposed skin, looking for bruises. He saw none. “I’d love an order of fries, thank you. And a Coke.”

  “Organic cola okay?”

  Lou’s grin widened. “Lucy would love this place.”

  King’s voice caught in his throat. “The cola is fine.”

  Venetti scribbled something on the notepad, tore off the sheet, and then clipped it to a string overhead. The paper whirled out of sight, pulled down the line by some imaginary force.

  “That’ll be $16.92,” she said, and King fished a twenty out of his worn leather billfold.

  “I can bring it out to you,” Venetti offered and pointed at a picnic table on the grass beside the parking lot.

  King sat first and Lou took her place opposite him. She was scoping the area. King could tell. She was doing a good job of looking like she was doing nothing at all. But when she leaned down to scratch an ankle, her eyes swept the perimeter. When she stretched her arms and then rolled her neck, she managed a full 360. Her eyes gathered intel in quick, nearly imperceptible glances. If King hadn’t been less than a foot from her, he’d have never noticed her do it.

  “So are you going to eat your fries and organic cola or are you going to ask her some questions?” Lou taunted. The bulb overhead grew brighter as the world darkened.

  “The place closes in twenty minutes,” King said. He couldn’t stop staring at her. She stared right back with flat, black shark eyes. “When she brings the food, we’ll tell her our intentions and then hope she sticks around after her shift.”

  “Is that the official protocol for interviewing witnesses?” Lou asked.

  King found it difficult to gauge her emotions. Her face was expressionles
s. No happiness. No sadness. A perfectly serene face. And her tone lacked proper inflection. No hints of interest or boredom. Fatigue or curiosity. What was he supposed to do with that?

  All the charm and normal effusiveness she’d shown toward Venetti was gone. He didn’t like how she could turn it on and off again. Apparently, she viewed emotion only as a tool, to wield when necessary.

  He tried to remember if Courtney had been like that. Cold. Unreadable. If her voice came out in a perfect uninflected tone...yes. He thought she was.

  “You’re staring,” Lou told him, in the same steady voice.

  “Sorry,” King said. “I’m trying to read your emotions. It isn’t working.”

  He hoped his honesty would throw her off guard.

  She didn’t even blink.

  “I did a lot of interrogations for the DEA, I’m pretty good with body language but I’m getting nothing from you. Even the involuntary stuff, what a famed psychologist called mini expressions. I thought I caught some excitement earlier but it’s gone.”

  “I’m excited about my bacon cheeseburger,” she said. With about as much excitement as someone who says, “I’m getting a kidney out next week.”

  “That’s a lie.” King glanced over his shoulder to the drive-thru, making sure Venetti wasn’t walking up on him this very second. “All of it. The bacon. The burger. The enjoyment. Lies.”

  “I’m beginning to see why Lucy dumped you,” Lou said.

  “I’ll have you know I ate all the tofu she cooked without a single complaint,” he said.

  Lou arched an eyebrow.

  “Maybe one complaint,” he said.

  Venetti appeared with a milkshake in a to-go cup.

  “Can I get a straw?” Lou asked. The normal cadence had returned, as well as the apologetic smile women often softened their requests with.

  “Sorry, no straws. We have to think about the sea turtles.”

  King forgot all about Lou’s body language. “Sea turtles?”