Shimmer

by Hilary Norman

  It was just the two of them this evening, with Sam working on the new case; and Grace had been thinking of asking David and Saul to join them – Friday evenings were often family nights in the Becket household, with Jewish Sabbath candles being lit, a custom Sam had loved ever since David and Judy Becket had plucked him, aged seven, out of tragedy and adopted him – but then she’d figured that would have given Claudia the perfect excuse not to open up, and if there was anything Grace was certain of, it was that her sister needed to do exactly that.

  They’d both showered and changed a while ago, Grace into a long pale blue cotton T-shirt, Claudia into a comfortable tan linen dress, her bare feet with pale-polished nails, exactly matching her fingernails (Grace could barely remember the last time she’d even thought of giving herself a pedicure), tucked beneath her on her chair.

  ‘We used to share things,’ Grace said. ‘Good and bad.’

  ‘We still do,’ Claudia said. ‘Just not everything.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Grace said.

  Claudia took a long sip of wine.

  ‘I can’t help,’ Grace said, ‘if you won’t talk to me.’

  ‘I can’t talk to you,’ Claudia said, ‘until I’m ready.’

  ‘OK,’ Grace said. ‘We have time.’

  Claudia set down her glass on the table, uncoiled her feet from beneath her, set them down on the floor, sat up straighter.

  ‘I’ve screwed up,’ she said. ‘Big time.’

  Grace did not speak.

  ‘My life is a mess, and it’s totally my own doing,’ Claudia went on. ‘And I know I can tell you just about anything, and I know I have no right to keep secrets when I’ve just shown up without so much as a by-your-leave on your doorstep—’

  ‘You have every right to your privacy,’ Grace said.

  ‘Spoken like a shrink,’ Claudia said dryly.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Maybe a shrink’s what I need,’ Claudia said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Grace, and was rewarded by a ghost of a smile.

  ‘But not tonight,’ Claudia said.

  9

  June 7

  At three o’clock on Saturday morning, after the storm had moved away, leaving bright sprinkles of starlight in the night sky, Cal was holed up in his room.

  All he could afford right now, these few lousy square feet in a fleabag.

  Not even a real fleabag. A room offered for cash and no complaints in return for no questions asked, by a guy who worked in a bed and breakfast on 11th Street; except this ‘room’, this lousy pit at the back of a derelict building in a dirty no-name alleyway behind Collins, with no hot water and a toilet which only flushed one out of every four times, wouldn’t have passed a health check as sleeping quarters for a goddamned rat, and Cal hated it, but he couldn’t afford to care too much so long as the guy kept his word and left him in peace.

  So far, so good, and Cal knew the sonofabitch would have no cause to complain, because Cal liked things clean, took care of himself, found it hard to bear dirt or stink around him, and he’d bet that this scuzzy room had never been this close to hygienic in its whole pitiful existence.

  He did hate it. He wanted to be on his boat, but he couldn’t risk being there, at least for now. Baby, his Baja cruiser, was old and undeniably shabby, but the motor was OK and it was all he’d been able to afford and it was, at least, his own, and he felt great, horny as hell, riding the waves on it, loved taking care of it – and it was killing him not to be able to go back right now and eradicate any lingering traces of what had gone on there early yesterday morning. But the waters around Miami Beach were patrolled at night at the best of times for drug smugglers and illegals, and now was definitely not the best of times.

  He knew he was doing the right thing, staying here for now in this pit of anonymity, and in a day or two he’d be able to go check out Baby, maybe not go too close first time, but try to gauge when it might be safe to go back. Out in the bay or on the ocean he’d be too exposed, and in the small marina where she was moored he’d feel too hemmed in and at risk if they came for him. At least on dry land he could run if he had to, blend in with the crowd, become invisible.

  Invisibility went against the grain for Cal, but right now it was what he needed.

  What he would most like to be doing this very instant was to be outside doing his thing. What he did best. Namely reeling one in and then fucking him or her before getting paid for a good job well done. And it was well done, and those who had experienced it knew it, because Cal was no ordinary hustler, Cal was the original joy-boy.

  So this was such a waste of a good night, because even if he wasn’t fucking, he could still be out just walking his walk. The one that made him feel so good. The one that made them notice him.

  It was hard work putting together his night look, took hours sometimes, but the time and effort were worth it just for the way they looked at him.

  His potential customers. His johns.

  More than just regular johns, sometimes. And then, oh Jesus, the thrill of it. Whether they were hurting him or it was the other way around, the buzz-burn of it consumed him.

  He liked it better, mind, when it was the other way around. He was no freak, he preferred hurting them.

  Bestowing pain.

  He had written a few times in his Epistle about self-hate, but he knew that was really a crock, because he enjoyed telling lies when he wrote, liked changing his style and voices and mixing up truth with artful fabrications, so that sometimes when he looked back on it, even he couldn’t quite remember what was real and what was not.

  The whole guilt thing was something Jewel had taught him, something he knew how to whip himself into, and that could almost be fun, too, drinking gin and getting so far down on yourself that you figured you were on your way to damnation.

  Cal had always liked sex. All kinds.

  It had taken him a long while to find out that there was something even better.

  He knew that now, though.

  10

  It was twenty to four when Sam got home.

  First thing he did, after letting Woody say hi to him, was go upstairs to take a look at Joshua, and the only good thing about being as bone-weary as Sam was right now was not having to fight the temptation to pick up his baby boy for a cuddle, because he was frankly afraid he might drop him.

  Not too many dads, mercifully for them, had quite so much awareness of the agonizing ramifications of fleeting carelessness around small children. His first son, Sampson Becket, had been lost to him and his first wife, Althea, after just two years of life, killed by a drunk driver, a senseless accident that had happened sixteen years ago but would go on haunting Sam forever.

  He looked down now at this beautiful new miracle given to him and Grace, and pure love buffeted him like a great wave.

  ‘Daddy’s home, son,’ he murmured, bending to touch two fingers to the soft dark hair on Joshua’s head. ‘Sleep sweetly.’

  He turned and went next door, where the other great love of his life was sleeping too. He locked away his gun and holster, then draped his jacket over the back of an armchair in one corner, dumped the rest of his clothes on the seat, padded barefoot into the bathroom to brush his teeth and barely refrained from groaning with sheer relief when he finally slipped beneath the covers.

  Grace stirred anyway, reached for him, and Sam dragged his head off the pillow to kiss her. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Did you see Claudia?’ she asked.

  ‘Gracie, it’s almost four,’ he said.

  ‘I tried getting her to talk.’

  ‘No go?’ Sam said with an effort, but already on the way down.

  ‘Not yet,’ Grace said. ‘Any luck with the new case?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ he said.

  ‘Sleep then,’ she said.

  He was there before her.

  11

  Cal could not sleep.

  He could not get past the need
to be out there again on the street, making out like he was a part of the late-night freak show. He didn’t mind them thinking he was one of them – unless it was someone like that old bagwoman he’d seen on the promenade a couple of nights back.

  He’d felt her checking him out with her snoopy old eyes, which had made him mad because she was nothing but an old bottle-baby-bum with no right looking at him and judging. But that was what they did, the lowest of the low; they looked at other people like they thought they were superior, like they had special dispensation, special rights . . .

  She was probably out there again right now, free as a stinky, mangy bird, while he was on lockdown in this damned cell of a room.

  Not near as bad as a real jail cell.

  Few things as bad as prison or even juvey.

  Jail had been a break from Jewel, but that was all that had been good about it. All that wickedness stealing around corners, oozing at you out of the night, flicking like snakes’ tongues through cell doors; and sometimes the awareness of that had turned Cal on, but mostly being locked away with the chicken hawks and baby rapers and them had scared the bones of him.

  He’d got his tattoo in jail, had written about it later in the Epistle.

  Turned out to be one of the things that made me their target.

  Them. The ones Jewel taught me to hate.

  The screwy irony of the tattoo is that I only paid for the goddamned thing because I thought it would be a nice gift for her. White cross in a red circle with a blood drop in the middle, all nice and neat, just over my heart. But Jewel went ape-shit when I showed her, said that what that symbol stood for on my white skin was not only that I was a racist, but a horse’s backside too, because now I’d turned myself into target practice for them.

  ‘Might as well hold up an invitation over your dolt head,’ she said. ‘Ask those egg plants to come and beat those shit-for-brains out of you.’

  Jewel has a nice turn of phrase on occasions, knows just how to make a man feel real good about himself.

  One day, I expect one of them may do what she said.

  It’s hard to know how much I’ll care.

  Maybe I’ll even welcome it.

  My life, after all, being a little less than a fine thing.

  The thing he had done just over twenty-four hours ago was still singing in his blood.

  If he were to share that feeling with anyone, they’d probably think him some kind of fiend, which he was not.

  Though he had done it once before.

  Caused a death.

  He hadn’t meant to that time, not at all. But he had been picked up by a woman in Wilmington, North Carolina – not too far from where he’d bought Baby, as a matter of fact, and his other pal, too, Daisy, his sweet tandem bicycle and the best trick-tease machine – and they’d been fucking, and she’d gotten so excited that her heart had friggin stopped. And that had freaked him out some, because sure she’d been older, but she was still a woman, and if he’d been with some old guy he’d have known it was a risk, but this had been a tribulation he hadn’t bargained for at all.

  It had happened at her town house, and lucky for him there’d been no niceties before the sex. Not even a drink offered, just straight in through her elegant front door and into her fancy bedroom, so that the only things Cal had touched – other than her – had been her sheets and pillows. So after it happened he went and found himself a pair of rubber gloves in her kitchen and changed the bed linen – Pratesi, they’d been labelled, he remembered the name along with how good the sheets had felt against his skin, megabucks without a doubt, though Christ knew that hadn’t helped her at the end, had it? He’d been careful as hell about removing his condom and wiping over her body with a damp towel, and he was still thankful, long after, that she hadn’t wanted to kiss him and had turned down any kind of oral sex. She’d paid him generously in advance, so he hadn’t had to risk taking cash from her Louis Vuitton wallet – and he might, of course, have robbed her blind at that stage, but he was no common thief, and the only thing he had taken away from that house, aside from the gloves and stained bed linen, had been a bottle of Rest-Ezee tablets he’d found in the back of her bathroom cabinet, because he’d been having trouble sleeping, and this woman wasn’t going to be needing them any more, that was for sure.

  He’d only begun stressing after he’d left Wilmington about how he was bound to have left behind some microscopic traces of himself, because that was when it came back to him that the cops probably had his DNA on their files, so even though it hadn’t been his fault that the woman had died, it had made him paranoid for a long time after. But no one had come looking for him either on Baby or in any of the places he’d moored her, so after a while he’d stopped fretting and had decided that maybe she’d had a husband who hadn’t liked the idea of other people knowing that his wife went out looking to pay for her jollies.

  And Cal figured that he had, at least, given her a happy exit.

  It had changed him, though.

  Cal had come to believe that people who’d never actually presided over the death of another human being could not begin to understand how it felt. And that was how it had felt to him – as if he’d been somehow in charge – because even though it had been her body’s fault, not his, he had still been inside her when it had happened, so he was, in a sense, responsible for it, which was, when all was said and done, pretty damned impressive.

  Not as impressive as what had happened early Friday morning.

  His heart hadn’t stopped until after the cord had choked off his breath and finished his life. But after that part was over, something entirely different had overcome Cal. A rage totally unprecedented for him, part of it directed at the dead man for being what he was to begin with – one of them – part at himself for wanting him, for allowing himself to share physical contact with such a person, physical pleasure, for fuck’s sake.

  Mostly, though, Cal knew, the rage had been directed at Jewel, who’d taught him so well about racism and hate and fury – wanton fury, he guessed it was, and he thought that ‘wanton’ was a word he remembered from the Bible, and he’d liked it enough to include it once in his Epistle.

  He hadn’t planned any of it, though, neither the killing nor the destruction that had come after, but it had seemed to him at the time that he’d had no choice, that he just had to do it.

  And then after the rage, after the outrage, once his rational mind had begun functioning again, he’d been surprised by how well he’d been able to go on thinking and planning.

  But now the cops were out there looking for him – at least they were looking for someone, for an unknown killer – and he was shut away in this hole, and he knew he was going to have to be damned careful for a while, stay here for about as long as he could stand it, before he could risk going out again.

  Being a joy-boy again.

  12

  His sister-in-law was in the kitchen when Sam came down in the morning.

  Two-and-a-half hours’ sleep before going back to work on a weekend morning – and that scrap of rest had been disturbed at around four thirty by Joshua’s crying, though Sam had a fuzzy recollection of Grace waking instantly and saying she’d take care of him – but now his wife and son were still sleeping, which was good, and Sam had showered and shaved and was feeling at last half human, and he, like most of his colleagues, had been known to go to work on less rest than this.

  ‘Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?’ he said as he walked in and saw Claudia, in a black satin robe, standing watching the kettle reach boiling point.

  ‘You, too,’ she said.

  Their hug was warm, their fondness real, though they’d seldom spent more than a matter of days together in the seven years or so that they’d known one another. But Claudia was Grace’s beloved sister, which was all that mattered to Sam, and pulling back now to check her out, he saw what his wife had meant yesterday.

  Strained was how she looked to him, and he’d like to have stayed home, caught up w
ith her, spent time with his family, but there was a brutal killer to be caught and the usual stresses of his overdue paperwork mountain – and Sam had woken up worrying about Mildred Bleeker, even though he had given a cell phone to one of the night patrol guys to pass on to her. He and Martinez had agreed that it might be as well to put out a BOLO (police shorthand for ‘be on the lookout for’) on her silver stranger, and even though that man had probably had zilch to do with the killing, it was still troubling Sam that he might have seen Mildred watching him.

  ‘Tea?’ Claudia offered, aware of his antipathy to coffee.

  ‘No, thanks.’ Sam opened the refrigerator, took out the jug of squeezed orange juice, poured himself a glass and went to take Woody’s leash from its hook, creating a wag-fest and eager cries at floor level.

  ‘I know you got in late,’ Claudia said, pouring water on a teabag. ‘I could take Woody for his walk, if it would help.’

  ‘It would more than help.’ Sam put the leash back, and the dog subsided in disappointment. ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’d enjoy it.’

  He downed his juice, rinsed the glass, kissed the top of her head. ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘I promise we’ll have some time.’

  ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep,’ Claudia told him.

  ‘I can promise to try,’ Sam said.

  It was comfortable, affluent suburbia. Lovely houses, lush palms, thick bladed lawns, colourful flowers and shrubs, well-maintained sidewalks.

  The kind of road people could feel safe in.