Shadows in the Water

by Kory M. Shrum

  Lucy’s voice yanked her back to the present. “What does he have you doing?”

  Lou spoke around a mouthful of sandwich and wondered if they were moving toward the reason for this visit, or away from it. “Witness protection. We are making sure this woman’s ex-boyfriend doesn’t find her until she can testify.”

  Lou had to convince King that partial truth was better than an elaborate story. Lucy’s bullshit meter was razor sharp. Always had been. Lying to her was fruitless and only got her into deeper shit. King seemed rather horrified by this truth.

  The crinkles in Aunt Lucy’s forehead relaxed. “Do you enjoy it? Or is this too boring for you?”

  Lou sensed the trap in the question. If she claimed to love working with King, Lucy would be suspicious why. If she said she hated it, Lucy would also expect an explanation. And it wasn’t just the lengthy discussion Lou was avoiding. It was the concern. Her aunt’s worry turned her stomach and made her feel guilty. She could put down ten men in one night and not feel the guilt she felt when confronted with Lucy’s stricken face.

  Lou settled on, “I’m giving him a chance.”

  Lucy’s shoulders relaxed. “Good. That’s all I can ask.”

  Lou’s gaze slid to the gun on the table, saw her aunt looking at it too, and moved it into her lap out of sight. “King said he met you right after I went to La Loon for the first time.”

  Lucy froze, a chip halfway to her mouth fell to the paper. “You’re gossiping about me?”

  Lou laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Her aunt couldn’t hide her smirk as she licked her lips and then crumpled up the glossy newsprint, stuffing it back into the brown sack. Then she folded down the top, once, twice, three times, far too much consideration for a brown bag smeared with avocado.

  “Is it true?” Lou pressed. “How you met?”

  “Your father and I had a falling out in high school. I...took off. We hadn’t spoken for about ten years when he figured out you were...like me.”

  What was your last fight about? Lou wanted to ask. But she didn’t ask personal questions, not just as a courtesy, but because she didn’t want to open that door. If you asked questions, you had to answer them too. Lou was uncomfortable with simple questions like: What are you doing tonight? The notion she might have to respond with something as personal as It must’ve hurt when he rejected you was unfathomable.

  And truly, she didn’t need to ask. Lou could piece together much of the story herself. Somehow Dad had discovered Lucy’s ability, and his reaction wasn’t good.

  If Lucy loved her brother half as much as Lou did, of course it had hurt. The smallest admonishment from her father—Lou-blue, I’m disappointed—had wrecked her.

  She sucked in a breath. “Dad was motivated to find you because I disappeared.”

  A statement, not a question. Less emotional entanglement.

  “Yes. But he couldn’t find me. So, he sent King. The rest is history,” Lucy gathered up the trash of their lunch and began separating it for the recycling bin. Paper in one pile. Plastic in another. “How does he seem to you?”

  Lucy bent under the sink to retrieve the blue recycle bin and frowned.

  Fuck.

  Her aunt pulled out a cardboard toilet paper roll. “This is recyclable.”

  “I must have missed,” Lou said. No other response would do.

  “Well?”

  “I’ll work on my aim. It’s dark under the sink. Sometimes the trash can and the recycle bin look alike.” Not much of an apology.

  She tossed the cardboard tube into the bin with a shake of her head. “No, King. How does he seem to you? Be honest.”

  She thought of his wet ass cheeks, caterpillar brows, and yellowed toenails. “Old.”

  Lucy’s frown deepened. “He isn’t old. I think he’s very handsome.”

  Lou did not find King attractive, but she couldn’t tell her aunt that. It would be like leaning into a stroller and informing the mother it was the ugliest infant you’d ever seen.

  “He reminds me of Dad,” she said instead. And she hadn’t realized it was true until it was out of her mouth.

  Lucy straightened slowly. “How do you mean?”

  Lou felt the ice cracking beneath her and tried to ease some of her weight off the frozen lake of her mind. The wrong step and she’d be submerged. “They’re a particular breed.”

  “Thrill-seeking know-it-alls, you mean?” Lucy smiled, and the muscles in Lou’s back released. “Stubborn to a fault and prone to tunnel vision. They can overlook something obvious if they’ve got an idea in their head. And blindness can get them killed.”

  Lucy placed a hand on her hip and turned toward the large living room window. Her face was pallid in the orange light, and the dark circles exaggerated, looking puffier than usual.

  Had she been crying?

  Lou’d rather be shot than ask. But she’d try to bridge the distance anyway. “Are you...”

  “What?”

  “Are you guys fighting?” Then seeing her aunt’s confusion, Lou added, “You seem...disgruntled.”

  Lucy sighed. “You’re right. I’m being too negative. He is kind. Loyal. And very brave. He’s definitely a man worth his salt.”

  “Is that so?” Lou forced a smile. We’ll see about that.

  22

  King went to bed not long after Lou left. Only he didn’t sleep. He lay on his bed, staring at the bubbly nodules of the popcorn ceiling, and thought of the long white skeleton bone protruding from the hay. It wasn’t the bone that haunted him. It was the way Lou had rolled it under her boot like a soda can on the street.

  Her face had been unreadable. As cold and impenetrable as the creek behind his great aunt’s house in winter. When she pretended, when she smiled or adopted a lilting tone as she had with him in the alley to throw off the man following him and again at the picnic table with Paula Venetti, it had seemed as if she had thawed in these moments. But he knew now it was a lie. The real Lou was the one who’d rolled a dead woman’s bone beneath her boot and said nothing.

  And it made him uncomfortable that after hours with her and a full report from Lucy, King had discovered little more. Lou was the hardest read he’d ever encountered.

  Was she sociopathic? Maybe psychopathic?

  King couldn’t tell. Did she honestly feel nothing? Or did she have the cop face to end all cop faces?

  No wonder Lucy had been desperate enough to contact him. Though Lucy’s belief this was a phase had been a mistake. This wasn’t the kind of chip on the shoulder they could eradicate with some positive energy and hours of therapy. They should have started working on Lou when she was younger. Much younger. They’d waited too long. Whatever Lou was now, that was what she would always be. For better or worse.

  He understood it. And he had no idea how he was going to break it to Lucy.

  Lucy—a whole other box of questions. Why now? Why him?

  He could smell a secret there too but hadn’t yet figured out how to ask Lucy the truth. How to press her right. He needed a better hold on the thread if he hoped to unravel the mystery of Lucy Thorne.

  Maybe he could develop a plan if only he’d get a good night’s sleep. As he lay in his king-sized bed, staring at the ceiling, he couldn’t list a single thing he wanted more. He wanted to sleep, but the walls. The moonlight hadn’t done enough to make the room feel bigger. Too many pillows crowded his face. He shoved them away, and when this didn’t work, he turned on the bedside lamp.

  The bedroom walls seemed to move back an inch. Better.

  Maybe it was that he lay on his back. In the dark under a collapsed building, King had lain in this position unable to move. Perhaps the claustrophobia would abate if he moved his body into a different position. The act alone defied his feeling of confinement.

  With a great sigh, he turned over onto his side. His folders and papers lay in an unorganized pile beside the bed. The corners flapped in the draft caused by the fan whirling overhead, a high-pi
tched wind buzzing in his mind.

  At least the shop was closed, and the goddamn skeleton was no longer screeching downstairs. Once, a gaggle of girls must have crossed the threshold, because as soon as the bony guard screamed, a choir of wails followed. For a full five seconds, it was hysteria before the squealing was swallowed up by nervous, fretful laughter.

  It was clear Mel had decided to keep the damn thing.

  A fly trap waved in the corner of the room before the open window. The ferns lining the balcony looked like silver-headed crones from his bed. He imagined counting the leaves on each tendril and his limbs relaxed. A welcome weight settled into his arms and legs, and they softened like butter left on the table after dinner, long into the night.

  Almost, a voice thought eagerly. Almost asleep...

  His breathing had just begun to slow when the blade pressed to his throat.

  Lou resisted as along as she could, then she slipped. The pressure to do so had been mounting since she took King to the barn. Her internal compass wanted her to go somewhere, and it finally got its wish.

  She crouched behind a sofa, her shadowed entry point, and listened. Someone was in the next room. The sound of a zipper unlatching its teeth caught her attention and then heavy objects bouncing off a mattress, the coils groaning.

  Her heart sped up, and she pulled her gun. Where am I?

  Slowly, she rose from behind the couch.

  A hotel suite. The cream and rose furnishings. A window with the sliding curtains pulled aside.

  An American city, but not one she recognized immediately. A Ferris wheel burned blue beside an interstate six or seven lanes wide. The blue Ferris wheel rang a bell. Before she worked it out in her mind, a door closed and someone began taking a piss.

  She lifted her gun higher and crossed the room. On the other side of an archway was the bedroom. A suitcase was open on the bed. Suits lay on top of each other. A garment bag was unzipped, and slacks lay smoothed over the suitcase beside half a dozen shopping bags from high-end department stores. To the left of the bed the closed bathroom door drew her eye.

  A line of light traced its frame. A toilet flushed. A sink ran.

  The bathroom door flew open, and a man stood there. His hair fell into his eyes and across his cheekbones. Bright green eyes widened at the sight of her pointing a gun at him. She recognized those eyes immediately. She took him in, head to toe. The scruffy jaw. His bare chest and a tattoo snaking up one bicep. A crow and crossbones. Then again the beautiful eyes.

  He said something in Italian.

  Swore. In Italian.

  She lifted the gun and fired.

  The bullet bit the trim, tearing a chunk of wood away from the door frame and spitting it out onto the tile floor of the bathroom.

  He flinched, pinching his eyes shut as wood chips pelted his face. But he pulled his own gun and fired two shots wildly.

  Konstantine.

  She understood her compass had taken her straight to him. The last Martinelli. The last thread to burn before her revenge was complete.

  And here was her chance to finish him, while he was alone and defenseless.

  Only two things happened at once.

  First, the pull was on her again. Her inner alarm flared to life with its urgent throbbing. The same compass that had led her to Konstantine was now tugging her away.

  Time to go, it said. Time to go!

  The second thing that happened was she recognized Konstantine. She knew him.

  She hadn’t seen him in years, true. And he was a man now, his body thick and muscular, no longer the wiry limbs of a street rat. Only she hadn’t known his name when they were children, when they met long before she’d killed her first man.

  He’d grown up.

  And she wasn’t that girl anymore.

  But this sharp recognition was enough to unmoor her, throw her understood and arranged world into chaos, and send all the important pieces careening across the floor of her mind.

  She stumbled back into the dark living room into the thickest shadow coalescing in the corner of the chamber behind a sofa. Another bullet slammed into the wall beyond her head. She dove for the corner, slipping through the smallest of cracks.

  Her heart hammered in her temples, giving the world an unbearable tilt. She expected the sanctity of her own closet. Somewhere to catch her breath before rounding back and finishing the man.

  Only she wasn’t in her closet. There would be no time for a costume or weapon change or a chance to wrap her mind around why the hell her compass took her to Konstantine at all. Why it had chosen him of the seven billion souls on the planet—then or now.

  She brushed a wooden edifice six inches in front of her face. If this wasn’t one of her closet’s three walls, it was the side of King’s entertainment armoire. Cherry wood, bright in a sliver of moonbeams.

  A man cried out.

  Another voice replied in a low and unfriendly tone.

  King chuckled. “Go fuck yourself.”

  Lou tiptoed across the shadowed living room, skirting an industrial coffee table, and crept toward the bedroom door. It stood open. She pressed herself into the corner. She saw the overhead fan whirling and sheets the color of cream. King was on the floor with his hands tied behind his back. One of his eyes was swelling shut, a puffy purple bruise pinching the eyelids together.

  Blood was bright in one corner of his mouth, and King kept flicking his tongue out to lick at the swollen, split lip.

  The man with the blade stuck it under King’s chin, forcing King to look up or have his throat sliced. It was the man from the alley.

  She couldn’t approach him without being seen because King had left his goddamn lamp on. Who slept with a lamp on?

  You do, a voice teased.

  Fuck this. Lou pulled the trigger. The bullet went right through one side of the man’s head and out the other. Brains sprayed the wall and doused the white coverlet.

  King froze, eyes wide and unseeing for several heartbeats. Then he turned and looked at her. “I guess he was right about only asking one more time.”

  She didn’t laugh.

  His shock dimmed when he saw her. “Are you all right?”

  She was shaking. Not from fear like he assumed, but with anger. She’d been pulled into forced slips twice. Back to back, and then she’d put a bullet into a man’s head without thinking, without taking them to her Alaskan lake. It was her first messy kill.

  What the fuck is wrong with me?

  Konstantine. That’s what was wrong with her.

  She’d woken in his bed nearly a decade ago, from the worst dreams about her father’s death, and found him there. Cooing Italian. A face part wonder. Part desire. Part sympathy.

  Why would her compass take her to Martinelli’s son? Why would she go to him before she even decided on her path to revenge? And she didn’t know who he was, at least not consciously.

  You’re Konstantine’s bitch, Castle had said.

  “Hey, Lou. Talk to me. Are you okay?” King asked again. His hands were still tied behind his back, but he was standing in front of her, grimacing down at her through his swollen eye.

  “I fucked up.”

  He snorted. “You saved my ass.”

  “I don’t shoot them on this side,” she said through her teeth. She breathed. Focused on the floor under her feet. It wasn’t actually tilting.

  King frowned. He looked at the wall. “You couldn’t have done it from over there. There’s a wall in the way.”

  She touched her forehead, trying to find relief from the pressure building behind her eyes. Her right eye was thumping in her skull. “I don’t mean this side of the room. I mean on this side of...oh god, whatever the fuck this is. I take them to a lake. I move them, alive to another place where I can leave them. No mess. No body. No crime.”

  “You have a dumping ground,” he said. He puffed out his cheeks with an exaggerated exhale. “Of course, you do.”

  “I’ll get rid of him,” Lou said. It soun
ded pathetic to her. Like an apology. “I’ll clean it up.”

  “Untie me, and I’ll help. I know what they’ll look for,” he said as if he cleaned up crime scenes all the time.

  She didn’t refuse his help. She wanted this to be over as soon as possible so she could retreat to her St. Louis apartment and think. She needed to fucking think. There was too much bouncing around in her head as it was.

  Lou pulled a blade from a forearm sheath and sliced through the zip cord binding King’s wrists together.

  King rubbed his wrists. “Thanks. After we clean this place up, we need to move Paula.”

  Lou arched an eyebrow. It was easier to do than form words.

  King touched his swollen lip. “Because we’re in deep shit.”

  23

  Konstantine stood in the middle of the hotel with his heart racing. It was as if two hands had wrapped themselves around his neck and were squeezing. He couldn’t draw enough air. Nor could he convince himself she was gone. So he stood there, frozen between the living room and bedroom, unable to move.

  The gun trembled in his hands, the barrel jumping at the end of his sight.

  The shadows didn’t move.

  His eyes roved the room as he went from switch to switch, turning on every light he could. The room filled with bright, cheery light.

  She wasn’t here. She wasn’t.

  Sweat trailed down the side of his face. The moisture on the back of his neck began to cool, and along with the queasiness in his guts, he felt ill.

  Wood splinters from the bathroom’s door frame stuck to his damp cheek like sawdust. It reminded him of the days he spent down by the harbor while men sanded the boats and bent soft woods into place. The air around the workmen had been thick with dust. The ocean blew it back from the harbor. So even if he kept his distance, he left with a sheen on his skin and clothes.

  She’d gotten too close. And hadn’t he just been thinking about her?

  He’d been thinking about her almost nonstop for the last 24 hours. Ever since he’d arrived, he’d been playing scenarios in his mind on how such an encounter might go.