The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  South Dayton was a long residential street that ran along the edge of a shallow slope covered with trees, a few large summer homes on the east side, no one on the streets now that the storm had hit and hit hard, the branches on the trees thrashing in the gale, the undersides of their leaves showing silvery white. A palm frond struck their windshield, got jammed into their wipers.

  Redding swore, jammed the car to a stop, jumped out and tore the frond away, leaped back into the vehicle before it stopped rocking, accelerated hard, the tail end sliding on the slick tarmac.

  “Ask Jax 250 where they are,” said Redding, fighting the wheel as they hit a pothole in the road and the Crown Vic slammed through it, bouncing crazily, the rear end coming loose.

  Karras keyed the mike again.

  “Jax 250.”

  “Roger, Jax 180.”

  “What’s your twenty?”

  “A1A northbound crossing Twenty-Eight.”

  In this section South Dayton was a straight run, and the truck pushed it to a flat 100 miles an hour. Jesus, thought Redding, this is not good.

  “Ask Jax 250 to go to afterburners, get north of us and turn left. If they really punch it, they might be able to block the guy off there.”

  “Roger, Jax 250, can you shoot up to block at Nineteen and South Dayton?”

  “Ten-four, Jax 180.”

  “Roger that.”

  The truck blew through stop signs, almost nailed a van pulling out of a driveway, braked crazily and spooled it right back up to 60...70...

  The Suburban’s brake lights flared up and beyond it they could see the flicker of red and blue lights and the glare of headlights as Jax 250 squealed to a skidding halt that blocked the intersection. The truck slid to a stop, sat there for a brief moment, wavering.

  They were almost on it.

  The brake lights flicked off, the truck swung a hard left and punched it, racing west toward the swamplands and the Intracoastal.

  “There’s nothing down there but South Palmetto,” said Redding. “It’s a crescent, no way out. Nothing west of that but swamplands. Guy’s trapped.”

  “Unless he breaks into a house along here, takes a whole bunch of hostages.”

  Redding shot her a look. She was having the time of her life. Hell, so was he. Who didn’t love a totally batshit car chase? Was this a great country or what?

  “Jeez, Julie. Don’t even say that.”

  “But wouldn’t it be, like, a teachable moment?”

  In the middle of all this vehicular insanity the kid still had her bounce. He was still grinning when the truck powered away down a short block, wheeled crazily right around the curve onto South Palmetto, big ranch homes, maybe a dozen of them, spread out on the east side, and on the left, dense forest, broken ground down a slight slope—the only kind of slope Florida had—and then the driver hit the brakes.

  Hard, the truck slewing around crazily, correcting and then skidding to a stop in the middle of the road. The driver’s door popped open and a woman—not young, but lean and solid-looking in tight jeans and hiking boots and a black leather jacket—hopped out, nothing in her hands, which were the first thing you looked at.

  She sent them one quick glance. They got a glimpse of a tight hard face, no fear at all, even a fleeting defiance, strong cheekbones and wide eyes, maybe green, black hair flying in the wind as she ran. Something in Redding’s memory flickered like a goldfish in a pond. He knew that face. Then she was gone, racing across the street, running like a wolf. She vanished into the trees, a flash of blue, and then the forest folded her in.

  Redding slammed the brakes hard as Karras got onto the radio, telling Jax 250 what had just happened. Then they were both out of the cruiser, doors still open, running toward the truck, which was idling in the street, engine rocking the frame, windshield wipers still ticking, rain steaming off the overheated engine hood.

  As they reached it, Jax 250 came rushing up and stopped on the far side of the truck. Two troopers got out with their guns drawn, LaQuan Marsh and Jim Halliday.

  “A runner, LQ,” Redding shouted to them. “White female, black hair, black jacket, blue jeans, no visible weapons. She went into the trees.”

  Marsh and Halliday broke right like a pair of pulling guards and went flying into the forest after her. People were popping out of their houses, standing on porches, on lawns. Redding shouted at them, warning them off, gave a go sign to Karras, and she moved in, her gun up and trained on the passenger-side doors of the Suburban. The windows were closed, dark as black ice.

  The truck engine was running hot and loud, the rain hammering on its roof. Water was running down Julie’s face and she blinked it away, wishing she had put on her Stetson.

  Redding was going left, and he came to a stop about ten feet off the left rear wheel, his gun up. Karras had taken the same position on the right rear side. They could smell scorched rubber and overheated metal steaming in the rain.

  The driver’s door hung wide-open, the seat belt dangling. From the interior of the truck, someone crying, a woman’s voice.

  “In the truck,” said Redding in a voice of brass, “show me your hands. Do it now!”

  Faint, from deep inside the truck, a shaky female voice, young. “Don’t shoot us. Please.”

  Karras moved up a yard, reached for the rear door. Redding told her to stop. He stepped up to the left-side rear door, leveled his gun and jerked the rear door open.

  Two teenage girls were lying on the rear bench seat. They were cord cuffed to the front-seat floor struts. They were crying, beyond hysterical.

  “Help us,” said one of them, dark haired, possibly the older one.

  “Please. She’s crazy. She kidnapped us.”

  Karras popped the other rear door, put her gun on them, wary, tense, her finger almost inside the trigger guard. Both girls were in jeans and boots, T-shirts, hair every which way, eyes red from crying, faces flushed and frightened.

  In shock, scared to death.

  “Who are you?” he asked, in a softer tone.

  “I’m Rebecca Walker. This is my sister Karen. Help us please? That woman kidnapped us!”

  Redding looked at Karras. She looked back, and they both did a quick check of the interior. Luggage scattered around. Remnants of a Happy Meal, candy wrappers, water bottles. No one else. Just the girls, cuffed to the floor.

  Redding lowered his weapon and after a moment Karras did the same.

  “I’m gonna go after the runner. Can you take care of these two?”

  Karras said she would, lips so tight they were blue.

  “You go, Sergeant. I’ll get EMT in here.”

  “Search them first, Julie. Before you cut them loose. You never know.”

  “I will. Go get her.”

  Redding took one last look at the girls, showed them his teeth, a quick smile that was supposed to be comforting and wasn’t even close.

  Redding turned away and raced down into the trees, a big lean rangy guy who could move like a linebacker when he had to. He pulled out his portable.

  “LQ, I’m coming in.”

  “Roger that, Jack.”

  Redding jogged into the trees, ducking under the dripping branches, feeling the mossy ground squelch under his boots. He had his Glock out, down by his side, and every nerve on redline.

  The stand of scrub trees was dense, maybe a hundred feet deep. When he came out from under them after a paranoid two-minute jog-trot during which he checked out every treetop he passed under, he could see Marsh walking the shoreline, gun out but down at his side, his back to Redding. He was facing out across the swamps and reed beds toward the Intracoastal, head turning back and forth. Halliday was down the shore about fifty yards.

  Marsh heard Redding sloshing through the seagrass, even with this rain lashing down and the wind ripping through the trees.

 
; “Jack.”

  “LQ. Got anything?”

  “She left a trail all the way down,” he said, his face slick as patent leather in the rain, a puzzled expression in his eyes.

  “You can see it over there, that silver streak in the grass. Comes right down to the shore here, stops dead.”

  Redding looked out over the swamp, sort of a mini Everglades, clumps and islands of sawgrass and reeds and cattails, all of it bending down under the rain. The sky was shredding, wisps of lighter gray showing through the cover. The wind was backing off but it was still raining hard.

  Halliday walked up the shoreline toward them, staring down into the shallow murky water that ran in curving channels under and around a thousand little islands of seagrass. He was a big blond Panhandle kid who had played two years as a starting DB for the Gators. He did a 180 to check the tree line one more time, and then came back to them, his face as blank and confused as Marsh’s.

  “Sure she’s not back in the woods?” Redding asked. Halliday and Marsh shook their heads in unison.

  “Not back there, Jack,” said Marsh. “We were close, we could see her going through the forest—”

  “She ran like a fucking gazelle,” said Halliday.

  “Yeah, she could move real good,” said Marsh. “Faster than us. We lost her in the rain here, and the branches were in our faces like whips. By the time we cleared the trees all we could see was that.”

  He tilted his head toward the silver track in the tall grass.

  “Ending at the water,” Halliday finished. “Broad just flat-out vanished. Fucking weird, Jack. Like into thin air. Too fucking weird. We walked the shore up and down, looking for a ripple where she coulda gone in. Mud bottom kicked up. Nothing.”

  “That’s right, Jack. Vanished.”

  All three of them turned back to the swamp.

  It was about two hundred yards wide at this point, running for about a mile along the shore. On the far side of the marsh was the Intracoastal. The Intracoastal was like a marine version of I-95. In the summer it was as crowded as an interstate, although the squall had driven everyone except a few crazies into the marinas.

  “How deep do you figure this is?” Redding asked, meaning the swamp.

  Marsh, who was a bass boater, shook his head.

  “No more’n two maybe three feet. But the bottom is thick muck, just like quicksand. You think she had a boat waiting? Why she came down this way?”

  “You see one?” Redding asked.

  They both shook their heads, water running off the brims of their Stetsons. Redding looked back at the muddy water and the reeds bending in the rain.

  “What do you figure lives in there?” he asked of no one in particular.

  Marsh laughed.

  “Nothing you’d want to take home to the wife.”

  Marsh immediately regretted that comment, considering what had happened to Redding’s wife and their little girl last Christmas Eve, but it couldn’t be unsaid, and Redding didn’t react. So Marsh went on.

  “Snakes. River rats. Leeches. Every kind of biting, stinging, itching bug you can think of. I’ve seen gators around here, but not real big ones.”

  Redding smiled at him.

  “Define ‘not real big.’”

  Marsh just grinned back at him.

  “Could even be monitor lizards,” said Halliday, trying to be helpful. “They been finding huge ones—two, three feet long—down in West Palm. People had them as pets till they got too damn big. Let them go into the rivers. Monitors. Smart as dogs too. They got these monster mouths full of huge backward-curved fangs, sharp as needles. But huge.”

  “And don’t forget the giant anacondas,” added Marsh, just to complete the picture.

  Neither man had any intention of letting Sergeant Redding order either of them into the swamp to start searching. If Redding did, Marsh had already decided he was going to push Halliday into the water instead and say he stumbled into him. Which Halliday was already braced for, because he knew Marsh only too well, and he wasn’t going in there either.

  Redding, aware of all this, and thankful that they hadn’t thrown in mutant vampire unicorns, looked up at the sky. The storm was starting to break up. The rain was coming down hard.

  “Can the dogs follow a trail in this weather?” Halliday was asking, mainly to distract Redding from the whole “into the swamp, boys” idea. Redding had run a K-9 car for a couple of years.

  “A light rain will freshen up a scent, but heavy rain and wind, that’s a lot more difficult.”

  “Been done,” said Marsh. “Remember that case last year, prisoner goes into the Glades, in a hurricane, but the dogs found him anyway?”

  “Because he was half eaten by a gator,” said Halliday, “and he’d started to stink. My mom coulda found him.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Redding. “Worth a shot. Let’s get the dog cars down here. And I want some Marine units out there. And let the Flagler County deputies know what’s going on too. I want a tight perimeter—lady could sure as hell motor—”

  “Damn straight,” said Halliday. “She was going away so fast I thought I had stopped to pee.”

  “So where the hell is she?” Redding said, a rhetorical question.

  “Gotta be here somewhere,” said Marsh.

  “LQ’s right, she’s still around. Have Flagler County set up a cordon around these blocks.”

  “All this for an F thirty-seven?” said Marsh.

  “I know. A lot of overtime. I just...”

  “Got a feeling she’s worth chasing?”

  “Yeah. I do,” he said, thinking about the expression on her face, cool, defiant, not frightened at all. And he knew her from...somewhere. “She got my attention.”

  Marsh was reaching for his portable to make the calls when they heard two sharp flat cracks close together, a brief pause and then one more.

  “Gunfire,” said Halliday, but Redding and Marsh were already running back toward the trees.

  seventeen days ago

  By the time Gerald Jeffrey Walker and his family arrived at their vacation condo at Amelia Island on Florida’s Atlantic coast—after thirteen hours on the road from St. Louis—the feeling inside the family’s GMC Suburban was sharply split on the issue of the Harwoods.

  The Harwoods—Marietta, pronounced Mayretta, and her husband, Ellison—were Christian Evangelicals and they ran a very large and very rewarding ministry—financially rewarding at any rate—called the New Covenant Celestial Ministry, and one of their many income streams came from the sale of their Evangelical Christian audiobooks.

  Walker—sometimes known as “Jerry Jeff” after the blues guy—was a forensic archaeologist working for a unit of the US Army Corps of Engineers based in St. Louis. His team was called in whenever artifacts or bones were unearthed at a construction site, sometimes in remote corners of the world.

  He considered this calling a sacred duty, since it involved an effort to determine exactly where these artifacts or bones came from, and what sort of spiritual beliefs had once been attached to them. This information was hard to come by.

  It required bone and DNA analysis, the assessment of causes of death, including weapons that might have been used if there were indications of murder or human sacrifice, as well as a grip on local cultural history and a great deal of spiritual imagination.

  Perhaps because of his work and the moral challenges it presented—bringing peace to the spirits of the dead—in his off-hours Walker served as a Worship Leader at the Glad Day Assembly, an Evangelical Christian megachurch in their hometown of Florissant, Missouri.

  Walker and his wife, Marilyn, who ran the childcare center at the Glad Day Assembly, tried very hard to believe that they had a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ, a difficult exercise in faith that met with varying degrees of success, particularly for a ma
n with a PhD in forensic archaeology and a woman with a master’s degree in education.

  In an effort to bridge this gap they had invested in the Marietta and Ellison Harwood Collection of inspirational Christian audiobooks.

  They did this because Walker’s work had brought him face-to-face with mass graves, with human sacrifices, with the residue of every kind of violent evil, and the only protection from the fallen world, both ancient and modern, seemed to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

  So they decided to take advantage of the drive down from Florissant to share the Harwood Ministry’s latest releases—Ellison’s The Power of Love and his wife Marietta’s My Celestial Heart Sings—with their three daughters, admittedly a captive audience.

  The Suburban seated seven, but divisive forces relating to the Harwood Ministry had affected the family dynamic on the way down Interstate 75.

  This had resulted in the front bucket seats being occupied by Walker and his wife, Marilyn, of course, since they shared the driving, and the bench seat immediately behind them had become the private domain of the youngest Walker daughter, six-year-old Alyssa.

  Alyssa had set up housekeeping across the entire bench seat, surrounded by her Hello Kitty and Littlest Pet Shop collections.

  Jerry and Marilyn and Alyssa composed what had become the pro-Harwood faction. Since the trip from St. Louis covered just under a thousand miles their time on the road lasted several hours, which is a long time to be in a car listening to inspirational evangelical audiotapes; it was longer for some than for others.

  Which brings us to the anti-Harwood faction, the two older Walker daughters: Rebecca, seventeen, and Karen, sixteen, both very beautiful in that Midwestern corn-fed style, and both of them in many ways typical American teenage girls. And, as it turned out, in other ways, not at all typical.

  Rebecca and Karen were sitting at the very back of the truck, in the two fold-down seats, pressed up tight against the luggage stacks that crowded the rear deck, isolating themselves as much as they could from the pro-Harwood faction up front, because, after a few hundred miles, they were both totally sick unto eye-rolling, please-kill-me-now death of Ellison and Marietta Harwood.