The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  How do you hunt a killer who can go back in time and make sure you’re never born?

  A police pursuit kicks Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his trainee, Julie Karras, into a shoot-out that ends with one girl dead and another in cuffs, and the driver of the SUV fleeing into the Intracoastal Waterway. Redding stays on the hunt, driven by the trace memory that he knows that running woman—and he does, because his grandfather, a cop in Jacksonville, was hunting the same woman in 1957.

  Redding and his partner, Pandora Jansson, chase a seductive serial killer who can ride The Shimmer across decades. The pursuit cuts from modern-day Jacksonville to Mafia-ruled St. Augustine in 1957, then to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1914. The stakes turn brutal when Jack, whose wife and child died in a crash the previous Christmas Eve, faces a terrible choice: help his grandfather catch the killer, or change time itself and try to save his wife and child.

  The Shimmer is a unique time-shifting thriller that will stay with you long after its utterly unforeseen and yet perfectly diabolical ending.

  THE SHIMMER

  Carsten Stroud

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  For The Love Of My Life

  Contents

  go down to the river and prey

  seventeen days ago

  the lady in the lake

  karen walker reaches a vital conclusion

  selena contemplates the past and the past contemplates selena

  things get antediluvian

  selena consults the crocodile

  the last walker breathing

  nostalgia...from the greek nostos (to return home) and algos (the pain)

  selena finds a curved space in the air

  objects in the mirror are closer than they appear

  selena dreams of home

  the truth about truth

  the death and life and death of mary alice

  you’re not from around here are you

  never send to know for whom the phone rings

  time lockets

  death in the afternoon

  though hell should bar the way

  feral is as feral does

  you know what, tony, I believe you

  event horizon

  september first nineteen fifty-seven

  the beach house

  departures

  author’s note

  go down to the river and prey

  An afternoon in late August, a Thursday, four hours and sixteen minutes left on Day watch, cruising down the A1A twenty miles south of St. Augustine in an unmarked shark-gray Crown Vic, Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his rookie trainee were watching a black Suburban with heavily tinted windows and Missouri plates. They were watching the black Suburban because it was lurching across two lanes of heavy traffic like a wounded rhino.

  Far out over the Atlantic a tsunami of storm clouds was filling the horizon. An onshore gale gritty with beach sand was lashing at the rusted flagpoles over the tired old lime-green and pink stucco motels—Crystal Shores, Pelican Beach, Emerald Seas—the gale fluttering their faded awnings. The air smelled of ozone and sea salt and fading magnolias.

  Redding looked over at his trainee, a compact sport-model blonde by the name of Julie Karras. Since she was fresh out of the Academy and this was her first day on the job, she was on fire to pull the truck over and carpet bomb the driver’s ass.

  “What do you think, boss? Can I hit the lights?”

  Redding went back to the truck. It had eased up on the lurching. It was now more of a wobble. Maybe the driver had been fumbling around in the glove compartment or checking his iPhone and had finally stopped doing that. Or maybe he was totally cranked out of his mind and had just now noticed a cop car riding his ass. Whatever it was, the guy was slowing down, doing a little less than the 60 per allowed.

  “Grounds, Julie?”

  He could see her mentally running the Traffic Infractions List through her mind. She was too proud to check the sheet on her clipboard. Although he’d only met her at 0800 hours, when Day watch started, Redding liked her. She had...something.

  Style was the wrong word.

  No. She had bounce.

  “I Five,” she said, after a moment, “Improper Change of Lanes.”

  Julie Karras was in Redding’s unmarked cruiser because her regular training officer—who had been born in Chicago, the frozen attic of the nation—had confused Canadian ice hockey with a real American sport, such as football, and had gotten all of his upper front incisors duly redeployed. So the CO had handed her off to Redding for the week.

  “Try not to get her killed on her first shift,” said the CO, whose name was Bart Dixon but everybody called him, inevitably, Mason, often shortened to Mace. “It’s bad for recruitment.”

  Dixon, a bullet-shaped black guy with a shaved head and bullet scar on his left cheek, had grinned at him around an Old Port cheroot that smelled like burning bats. The part about not getting her killed wasn’t entirely irrelevant because Redding’s main job wasn’t Patrol.

  He worked Serious Crimes Liaison with the State Bureau of Investigations. He’d killed five men and one woman while doing that because, while he didn’t go looking for gun fights, he didn’t do a whole lot to avoid them either. And in a hellhole city like Jacksonville, gun fights were always on the menu.

  Redding didn’t mind taking on Julie Karras. She was crazy pretty, it was a fine summer day—or had been up until just now—and late August was slack time for the SBI, with most of them off on vacation. So if you were a career criminal and you desperately wanted to get your ass busted you were going to have to wait until after the end of the month.

  Karras was from up North he remembered her saying. Charleston or Savannah so she had that sweet Tidewater lilt in her voice. She had the infraction number wrong though.

  “I Six, you mean,” he said, but gently.

  I Five was Improper Backing. Both infractions, but when he’d been in Patrol that’s where you started off, with a possible infraction. It hardly ever stayed there, but you had to have probable cause before you could make a stop. Otherwise everything that flowed from the stop—drugs, guns, illegal transportation of underage gerbils across state lines—would get thrown out of court.

  “How about you run those plates first? Let’s see what we’re getting into here.”

  Karras swiveled the MDT display around on its base, punched in 407 XZT, hit the search tab.

  The Suburban had steadied and was now doing the speed limit. Exactly the speed limit. Redding’s unmarked was several cars back, in heavy traffic. Maybe they’d been seen and maybe not. But something was going ping in Redding’s cop brain.

  He didn’t like big black SUVs with dark-tinted windows. Most cops felt exactly the same way. Big Black Boxes packed with Explosive Situations.

  A gust of wind blew a cloud of beach sand across all four lanes of A1A and everybody’s brake lights flared as the drivers reacted. Grains of sand were peppering the glass at his shoulder and he could feel the car rocking. He looked east past the roofs of the beach houses that lined the coast, and there it was, heading their way, a white squall.

  Karras looked up from the computer screen.

  “Comes back with a Gerald Jeffrey Walker. DOB November 10, 1971. Address of 1922 Halls Ferry Road, Florissant, Missouri. No Wants No Warrants.”

  Redding started to back off, letting his ping fade. Not every black Suburban was full of—

  “Now this,” said Karras, giving him a puzzled look. “It just popped up on the screen. A ten-thirty-five? What’s a
ten-thirty-five?”

  Redding kept his eyes on that black Suburban. It had suddenly become much more interesting.

  “That’s the code for Confidential Information.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “You’ll see in a moment,” he said, letting the Suburban drift farther ahead, falling back out of the guy’s rearview, if he was watching the cruiser at all. Which he sure as hell was because everyone did. A cop car in your rearview was like a scorpion in your martini. People noticed. He heard the MDT chirp, and Karras read off the radio code.

  “It says ten-seventy-six?”

  Redding was expecting that.

  “It means switch radio channels,” he said, leaning over to click the channels controller to Tactical and picking up the hand mike.

  “Central, this is Jax 180. Come back.”

  “Jax 180, this is Six Actual.”

  Six Actual was Mace Dixon.

  “On that Suburban you just posted, St. Louis PD is asking for a ten-seventeen on that. Can you give us your twenty?”

  Karras was getting a little bug-eyed but Redding didn’t have time for that right now. A 10-17 code meant maintain surveillance but do not stop the vehicle.

  “Roger that, Central. Our twenty right now is southbound on A1A at Cedar Point Road. What’s up, Six? Plates come back No Wants No Warrants.”

  “Roger that, Jax 180, wait one.”

  Silence on the radio, and outside the windshield the weather was building up fast, the way squalls do along this coast. The traffic had thinned out, people looking at the skies and running for cover. In this part of the North Coast the A1A ran right along the shoreline, the ocean maybe a hundred yards away, booming and roaring.

  On the west side, sprawling residential blocks, a few gated but mostly not, and beyond them, scrub forest, swamp and wetlands and then the Intracoastal Waterway, the inland canal that ran all the way from the Chesapeake to the Florida Keys.

  The Suburban was speeding up, starting to pull away, which was okay with Redding. There was nowhere for it to go but south on the highway or turn off onto a side road, and they were all dead ends, either into the swamps to the west, or turn east and drive into the ocean.

  “What’s going on, Sergeant Redding?” Karras asked in a tight voice.

  “Call me Jack, okay? Dispatch is asking us to monitor that truck but not to spook them. St. Louis cops are following up for some reason we don’t know yet.”

  Redding could feel Karras’s adrenaline rising. She had her hand on her sidearm and her skin was getting a tad pink.

  “Are we stopping it later? I mean, what’s—”

  “Not sure yet, let’s—”

  “Jax 180, this is Six.”

  “Six.”

  “Yeah, look, Jack, what we have here is that the St. Louis PD is listing Gerald Walker and his wife and their three daughters as Whereabouts Unknown. Relatives up in Florissant have been trying to contact them for over ten days now. They were staying in their condo on Amelia Island. Management checked the condo and there’s nobody there. Signs that the departure was sudden. Clothes all over, dishes in the sink. Security logged the truck out of the north gate at 2013 hours ten days ago. Guard couldn’t confirm the occupants of the vehicle because of the tinted windows. Gate camera’s no help either, wrong angle. Family is not answering their cells. Can’t GPS them because their phones are turned off.”

  “Roger that, Mace. Not getting the urgency. So they went for a shore drive, didn’t call the relatives. Maybe the relatives are all pains in the ass. I know mine are. Are they using their cards?”

  “St. Louis says yes. Gas and motels along the coast. They were in the Monteleone in New Orleans seven nights ago. Then east along Ten... Ruby Tuesday and Holiday Inn and Denny’s along the way.”

  “Any security video at the check-ins?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So we’re ten-seventeen on it until when?”

  Dixon respected Redding’s gut feelings. He thought it over.

  “Okay. Take your point, Jack. Just watch the truck for a while, see what develops.”

  “Well, we maybe had an I Six on him. But he’s stopped doing that.”

  Silence from Dixon. The CO was telling him to use his own judgment. Redding put the mike down, keyed it off. Thought it over. Stop or not.

  Decided.

  “Okay, Julie. Got an assignment for you.”

  She came on point.

  “Survey that truck. Gimme a plausible reason for making a stop.”

  They were now in much thinner traffic. In this part of the coast, A1A ran on a kind of elevated levee. The palms and scrub brush along the shore were bending and whipping in the wind. The sky was closing down like a lid.

  The Suburban was running straight and steady at 65 per. Staying in the curb lane. They were now about fifty feet back, and holding, with no other cars in the way. Karras was staring hard at the truck’s tailgate. She went on staring. Redding felt her pain, because she was about to say...

  “I got nothing.”

  Redding gave her a grin.

  “Me neither. Maybe you could shoot out a taillight. That would give us an E twenty-one.”

  She gave him back a look and a fake-perky tone.

  “I think you should be the one doing that, you being, like, the responsible adult and all.”

  Redding smiled.

  “Hell, I probably couldn’t hit it from here,” said Redding. “I suck at rolling fire. Why don’t—”

  And then the Suburban went full jackrabbit, a sudden growling roar from the engine, the rear end dropping, a burst of smoke from the exhaust as the driver just jammed it, accelerating, racing away up the highway, going away fast.

  “Hit the lights,” Redding said, checking his side mirrors as he jammed the accelerator down, “and tighten your belt!”

  “Fuck yes,” said Karras, as the roof rack lit up and the siren started to wail. “And on my first day too. Fuck yes! Thank you, Jesus!”

  “Call it in.”

  She snatched up the mike.

  “Central, this is Jax 180—we are ten thirty-one in pursuit southbound on A1A at Flagler Beach of a black Suburban, Missouri marker four zero seven x-ray zulu tango. We have just crossed Eighteenth Street—”

  She glanced at the speedometer.

  “Speed ninety, Central.”

  “Roger that, Jax 180, we have a unit northbound on A1A at Ocean Palm. Jax 250, come in.”

  “This is Jax 250. Ten-four lighting up now.”

  “Jax 180, we have County units available too.”

  “Tell him no thanks,” said Redding.

  Karras clicked the button, said, “Negative on County, Central.”

  “Roger that.”

  Karras wanted to know why they didn’t call in some Flagler County Sheriff cars on this pursuit.

  “Because so far this is containable, and highway pursuit is our thing, not County’s. They’re good folks, but in a car chase they go all squirrelly because they don’t train for it. We do.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  What little traffic there was veered right and left out of the way as Redding closed in on the Suburban, which was whipsawing as the heavy truck lurched in and around other vehicles.

  A pickup truck popped out of a side road, almost T-boning the Suburban before the driver wrangled his ride into a ditch, the guy getting out to shout something at Redding as the cruiser flashed by. Karras stayed on the mike, calling the cross streets—Nineteen, Twenty-One, Twenty-Three—as the Crown Vic’s Interceptor motor rapidly overtook the Suburban, the siren howling.

  Gusts of wind were lashing the highway, and now the white squall hit, sideways rain and clouds of sand, shredded palm fronds and scrub branches tumbling across the highway, flying through the air.

  Redding put
the wipers on full but they could hardly see the truck through the rain. The truck was not slowing down, although visibility had dropped down to twenty yards. Karras strained to read a street sign as they powered past it, keyed the mike again.

  “Central, this is Jax 180. We are southbound A1A at Twenty-Seventh still in pursuit—”

  The Suburban’s brake lights flared on, bright red smears in the driving rain, the truck tilting wildly to the left as the driver bulled it into a right-hand turn. The right side wheels of the truck actually lifted off the road for a second, and Redding tapped the brakes, falling back, waiting for it to roll, but it didn’t.

  The wheels came back down with a thudding impact, the truck wobbled and weaved as the driver fought for control, got it back, and now the Suburban was accelerating down a residential street lined with ranch-style summer homes and palm-shaded yards.

  “Central, vehicle made a right turn onto Twenty-Eight.”

  “Roger that. Copy that, Jax 250?”

  “Jax 250. Ten-four copy we are a half mile out.”

  The Suburban almost took out three kids in wetsuits walking in the street, carrying surfboards, shoulders hunched, heading home to beat the storm. They dropped the boards and dodged as the Suburban blew by them. It struck one of the boards, smashing it into shards, and one of the larger pieces flew up and smacked into their windshield, making them both flinch away. The truck reached an intersection—South Dayton—veered hard right again, accelerated away, now headed back north.

  “Shit,” said Karras. “He’s going to kill somebody. Should we back off?”

  Redding flashed a sideways look at her.

  “You wanna?” he said. “Remember we have a dash cam. This goes south we might be in the barrel.”

  “We? Or just you?”

  Made him smile.

  “Me. I’m the one in charge.”

  “Then fuck no,” she said, looking back at the truck, her right hand braced on the dashboard.

  She keyed the mike again.

  “Central, target is now northbound on South Dayton—we have just crossed Twenty-Seven.”

  “Copy that.”