The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  Blood and brains and hair and bone shards were splattered over the side of the truck. Her eyes were wide-open, sightless, staring at whatever comes next after this life ends. Lying on the road below her right hand was a collapsible steel baton called an ASP. It was extended, and there was blond hair and blood stuck to the tip.

  People, gawkers, were standing around in the dwindling rain, mouths slack, gaping at this scene, but no one had come in closer to help or shelter or comfort Julie Karras. She tried to sit up as Redding came to her, her eyes unfocused, shock setting in.

  “She...she hit me. Pulled my baton out while I was helping the other kid out of the truck and...she hit me.”

  Redding was saying something soothing as he gently lifted the Glock out of her right hand. He ejected the mag, checked it, put it back in, but he didn’t chamber a round. He slipped the pistol into the back of his belt. He lifted her face up by the chin, gently, assessed her eyes, his manner calm but his heart was hammering in his chest.

  She looked back at him, both eyes the same—fear. Shock, anger—but no sign of brain injury, pupils the same size, reactive. Her lips moved in a whisper and then in a stronger voice.

  “Is she alive?”

  Marsh had been checking the girl out while Halliday was kneeling beside the other sister, on the ground, looking for injuries. And weapons.

  Marsh glanced over at Redding, shook his head.

  “No. She’s gone, honey,” Redding told her.

  Karras started to cry, choked it back.

  “Can you stand, Julie?”

  “I...I think so.”

  Redding did a quick inventory, decided she was not hurt in some way that he couldn’t see and she couldn’t feel, put his hands under her arms and got her to her feet, put her back up against the driver’s window of the Suburban, turned her head to the side and studied the damage.

  It was a nasty wound.

  The ASP was an impact weapon, two feet of solid steel when extended, with a little balled tip. It was meant to be used on muscle mass—thighs, calves, biceps. Never against bone. Bone shattered. Used like that the ASP was a killing tool.

  Blood was still pulsing out of a three-inch rip in the flesh just above Karras’s right ear. Her ear had actually cushioned some of the impact. The upper part was crushed and flattened and ripped open. An inch higher and the blow could have punched through her temple. She’d be dead, or brain damaged. The girl had meant to kill her and had come damn close.

  Halliday jerked the other girl to her feet and had her up against the hood of the squad car, spread out on it, facedown.

  He was searching her pockets, putting whatever he found onto the hood of the unit—a wallet; an iPhone; a roll of candy; a small silver can with a breathing mask attached, presumably an asthma puffer; a small notepad with a unicorn on the cover. She was ferociously angry, her voice a birdlike screech, steel on slate.

  “She killed her. That bitch killed Rebecca. You’re dead, you cunt, you’re so fucking dead.”

  Halliday finished searching her, told her to shut the fuck up in a low growl and frog-walked her around to the rear door of his cruiser, not gently. He popped the door and shoved her in, ran her cuffs through a ringbolt and chain welded to the floor of the cruiser and slammed the door on her string of obscenities. He walked back, his face white, scalded by her anger.

  He collected the items off the hood.

  “Got ID there?” asked Redding.

  Halliday flipped open the wallet, found a Florissant High School ID in the name of Karen Anne Walker, age sixteen, a couple of credit cards and a membership card for something called the Glad Day Assembly, with an address in Florissant, Missouri. Florissant was a suburb of St. Louis, Redding recalled.

  “Check the other one, see if she’s got any ID on her, but don’t move her body if you can help it, okay?” Halliday stepped away, went over to the dead girl and carefully went through her pockets, looked back at Redding.

  “Nothing.”

  “See if there’s a purse or something in the truck.”

  Halliday checked the truck, came back with a small lime-green leather wallet, flipped through it, found a Missouri driver’s license.

  “Got a Rebecca Walker, seventeen, same address, picture matches.”

  “Run the names, Jim. Let’s see what we get.”

  Halliday went off to his cruiser to do that.

  Redding turned to Marsh.

  “Let’s get an EMT for Julie and bring some County units in here. We need to control this scene.”

  “Still want the dogs?” Marsh wanted to know.

  “Hell yes. Two units.”

  Marsh stepped away to make the calls and then went back to his cruiser for a roll of crime scene tape, started to string it all around, from signpost to telephone pole, herding the people back as he did this, the rapidly growing crowd babbling and staring, their smartphones and iPads out, taking video, chattering into their phones, snapping shots.

  Whatever they were doing, Redding could feel the electrons radiating out into the cyberworld, flashing around the town, the city, the state, the globe. Redding asked Karras if she could walk.

  She said yes, and he walked her back to their unit, sat her gently inside on the shotgun seat, tugging a first-aid kit out of his glove compartment.

  He put a sterile pad up against the wound and then wrapped it in place with a roll of gauze, making those pointless little comforting sounds parents make when their kids are hurt.

  It reminded him of when he’d been a husband and a dad. That hurt to think about so he stopped thinking it and concentrated on what he was doing.

  Karras was staring through the window at the Suburban, where Marsh was draping an aluminum foil thermal blanket over the dead girl’s body.

  “She’s really dead, isn’t she?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “She is. You okay to tell me how it happened, before all the official machinery starts up?”

  She managed to look at him, one eye half-covered with the gauze strip.

  “I did what you said. I checked them both for weapons, knives... They were crazy, panicked. I got them calm, but I searched them first, I really did, Sergeant Redding... They were both in shock. At least, that’s what I thought. I wanted to get them into the back of the cruiser, away from the truck, because it was now a crime scene, get them out of the rain...”

  She went away for a moment and Redding let her. She’d have to tell this story over and over again. Let her remember it as it came to her.

  He was thinking about the dash cam. It would all be on the dash cam. Not just on the dash cam either. It was likely that half the people in the crowd gathered around had already been taking cell phone shots when the shooting happened.

  It was entirely possible that somebody was loading it onto YouTube right at this second. Or selling it to one of the cable networks.

  He hoped to God it was a righteous shooting because if it wasn’t, they were both in the barrel, but especially her.

  Although, now that we’re on the topic, he was the dickhead who left a rookie in charge of two kidnapping victims while he raced off like some dumb-ass greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. No, whatever happened, this one was on him, not her.

  “I was helping the younger one—Karen. I think she said Karen was her name. I was helping her out of the truck, she had trouble walking and I remember holding her up and walking along with her—she was holding on to me like she was drowning, I was half carrying her...and then she looked back over my shoulder, like behind me, back at the truck, where Rebecca was, and I saw her eyes get big, and she—”

  Karras went quiet, remembering it.

  “She smiled, a big happy grin, and I turned to look and I felt a tug at my belt—Karen was holding my arms down, wrapping me up tighter, like she was holding me? I threw her off, I was turning—and my hea
d exploded—I went down—I was trying to get my weapon out... Rebecca was right over me with that baton and Karen was screaming, ‘Kill her kill her smash her skull,’ and Rebecca started to swing it down at my head and I had the Glock in my hands and I shot her. Saw the rounds hit her. I don’t know how many I got out—”

  “Three rounds.”

  She thought about that.

  “Three? Okay. I don’t know.”

  Redding had already checked her mag. She had fifteen rounds left in the seventeen-round mag. And she’d had one already chambered, as she’d been trained to do. Which was good because, if she’d had to take the time to rack the slide and chamber a round and then aim and fire, she’d probably be dead now. So three rounds out, and all of them hits.

  “Three is pretty damn good, Julie. Most cops would have emptied the mag into her. Or tried to.”

  “I...was thinking about the backstop. About ricochets. About all the people standing around.”

  “Good. Good for you. That’s trigger control. All three shots were right on target, center of the visible mass. That’s textbook fire discipline. Remember that, when they ask later. The shooting board.”

  Karras took a moment to absorb that idea—the shooting board—and then shook it off.

  “Anyway...she was going back and down, back into the rear door. I pivoted on my hip and Karen was coming right back at me—I could hear her coming, her shoes scraping—and I figured she was after my weapon because that was what she was focused on. I put the gun on her and I said... I have no idea what I said. She lay down on her face, I went over and cuffed her...and next thing I knew my legs gave out and my ass was on the ground and my back was up against the side of the truck and there was blood in my eyes.”

  She looked down at her hands.

  “My first day,” she said, mostly to herself. “I can’t fucking believe it. I’m on the job five hours and I’ve fucking killed someone.”

  Tears close but not there yet, her blue eyes wide, blood in the right eye and on her cheekbone, a little blood on her teeth as she tried to find the words. Redding put his hand on her right shoulder, feeling the warm wet blood on her uniform shirt, the red stains on her gold braid.

  “If the dash cam shows the same thing—”

  She hardened up.

  “It will.”

  “Then it was a good shooting. Take a deep breath. You did just fine. Better than fine. I’m proud of you, Julie. Remember that.”

  The EMT bus had arrived, complete with sirens and lights, and now there were County cars rolling in from both ends of the street, along with two K-9 units of the Highway Patrol. And right behind them, Mace Dixon in his Supervisor truck.

  Redding leaned in close to her, speaking low but urgently, making the point.

  “It’s going to get real intense real fast, Julie. You’re not to talk, got that? Not to anyone. You can answer health questions for the EMT people. Everybody else, you have nothing to say. Got that? Nothing. Not even to the CO. You’re just confused. Your head is killing you—”

  “It really is,” she said, trying for a smile.

  “You’re too shook up to talk right now. Mace will understand. You don’t talk until you’re discharged from the hospital and you’ve had a good night’s sleep, and we’re back at Depot, and your Patrol Advocate is sitting beside you. And I’ll be right there too. It’ll take a couple of days before that happens. They’ll be taking you to Immaculate Heart to look at that head wound. Our guys will be around everywhere and they’ll keep you safe. They won’t ask you about the shooting. They all know better. But you don’t talk about the shooting to Flagler County. Or any city cops. Or to the medics. Basically, not even to Jesus Christ Himself if He appears in your room with a six-pack of Coronas and a box of Krispy Kremes. Not to anyone.”

  She managed to laugh at that, and then the tears finally came, and she was looking at her hands, at the blood on them.

  “I killed a living person,” she said. “That girl was alive just a few minutes ago, and now she’s dead, and she will be dead...forever.”

  Redding put a hand under her chin, lifted her head and turned her to face him.

  “Yes, you did. It was your sworn duty to do that, and you did it. You put the aggressor down and you stayed alive and no civilians got hurt. It was your job to protect the public, and you did that. You killed a crazy bitch who was trying to kill you. And when you were dead she’d have taken your gun and then what could have happened? She could have started firing into the crowd and killed a lot of innocent people. But you stopped her. Stopped her dead. And you know what you need to think about, every time you think about this?”

  “What?”

  “Fuck her. Better her than you.”

  She looked up at him, trying to take that in.

  “Really?”

  He put a hand on her shoulder, a thin smile.

  “Yeah. Really. Welcome to Cop World, Julie.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later Redding and Marsh and Halliday watched the EMT wagon roll away with Julie Karras, lights but no siren, as Mace Dixon, who’d been speaking to a Flagler County staff sergeant, came across to talk. To listen, actually.

  They laid it out for him in the most basic terms, and he took it all in without a comment, other than one or two clarifying questions.

  Dixon made sure he got it all straight, and then he lit up an Old Port, using the brim of his Stetson to shelter the match from what was left of the rain.

  “Okay. We’ll look at the dash cam. If it holds up, I think we’re gonna be okay on this. Media is gonna make a BFD out of it being a kid killed. A female. And all of these people around here, the civilians, every one of them has probably got sound and video on the whole thing. Look at them, they’re still shooting cell phone video. They’re like goddamn zombies with little metal rectangles attached to their foreheads. What happened here, it’s going all over social media. They probably know about it in fucking Oslo by now. Nothing we can do about that. It is what it is.”

  The Officer Involved Shooting Unit was on the scene, dropping tiny yellow cones all over the place and taking video. Two satellite trucks from the Jacksonville stations, Fox and CNN, were being held off a block away. So far no Eye in the Sky news choppers had arrived to screw up the crime scene with rotor wash. Redding could see the hard white lights as the reporters did Eyewitness to the Shooting interviews with everyone who wanted to be on television, which was close to a hundred people by now.

  Dixon blew out the smoke, turned to the three of them. “You figure she’s still out here somewhere?”

  “Has to be,” said Redding. “Flagler County guys have sealed off the entire neighborhood.”

  “Might have broken into any one of these houses along here,” said Dixon. “We’ll have to get foot patrols out, go from door to door.”

  “Might be out there in the reeds,” said Dixon.

  “I think she is,” said Redding. “That’s where we last saw her. We’ll get the flatboats out looking for her. If she went in there, Mace, we’ll flush her out.”

  They turned as a burst of angry barking came from the direction of the Suburban. Two K-9 Unit officers were dragging their dogs away from the driver’s side of the truck.

  Redding watched the dogs, both big German shepherds. They were both fighting to get free of their leads, barking furiously. The handlers were pulling them away from the truck, the dogs resisting as hard as they could, straining against their harnesses. Both handlers were looking confused, angry, fighting the dogs.

  “What the...” said Redding, walking across to talk to one of the K-9 handlers, a serious heart-attack blonde named Jennifer St. Denis. St. Denis had the dog under a tight grip as Redding reached her.

  “What’s with the dogs, Jen?” Redding asked.

  St. Denis shook her head, looking exasperated and puzzled. “I have no idea
.”

  Now her dog, a big muscled-up German shepherd, was staring up at Redding, panting heavily, gazing up at him as if he knew him, which he did.

  He’d once spent nine months with this fine dog before he’d handed him off to another K-9 officer, the one before Jennifer, a guy who was KILO now, killed in the line of duty, after which this same dog, Killington, had mauled the shooter so badly he lost his left ear, most of his left cheek, all of his left eye and over two quarts of blood from his ripped-out carotid. Killington’s DNA made him nothing less than an apex predator.

  Guy later sued the Highway Patrol and the State of Florida for Excessive Use of Force. He was on Death Row at the time. He lost. A while later they spiked him dead and buried him in unconsecrated ground.

  The dead K-9 officer’s friends took Killington out to the convict’s grave every now and then and they’d stand around drinking beers until they were all charged up, at which point everybody would unzip and piss on the grave, including Killington.

  Redding bent down and offered a hand to the dog, which took some nerve, even if they were old friends.

  “Hey, Killington. What’s up? What’s the problem?”

  Killington twitched his ears and then whimpered, showing the whites of his eyes. He ducked his head and then licked Redding’s hand.

  “What’s with Killington?” he asked.

  “You ask me,” said St. Denis, in a low voice, “I’d say he doesn’t like whatever he can smell in that vehicle. I’ve never seen him do this. Never.”

  Across the road the other K-9 guy was putting his shepherd into the back of his cruiser. He glanced across at St. Denis and Redding, shaking his head, lifted his hands in a WTF gesture.

  “Got a feeling we’re not gonna get a lot of help from the dogs today,” said St. Denis.