The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  * * *

  After the crash team had slowly shuffled out and things had gone quiet again, Pandora looked down at the kid and said, “Shit.”

  “No,” said Jack. “Not shit.”

  He bent down and sniffed her lips, came back up.

  “Cyanide. It was in the puffer. That bitch set her up, planned this all out, just in case they got caught. It’s probably why she set them up to attack Julie Karras. She figured it would get them shot. She was half-right. This was just a backup plan.”

  “How do you know?” asked Dixon. “About the cyanide?”

  “I’ve seen it before. Chuco Barbarini. The Vizzini witness?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Dixon. “I remember.”

  Another long pause.

  Dixon got the Crime Scene guys started on their way. And they were still alone with a dead girl. She had outlived her sister by about twelve hours. She was rigid and arched. Her face was a horror, her eyes wide-open. They stared down at her for what seemed like a long time.

  “Well shit,” said Dixon.

  “I already said that,” said Pandora.

  “Given the circumstances,” said Dixon, “it’s worth saying again.”

  Pandora went quiet. They all did. Then she said, in a tentative voice, “Did either of you guys, like, see anything? When she died. I mean, right then?”

  That took a second to register.

  “What?” said Jack. “You mean like a flash?”

  “The Shimmer,” said Dixon, his tone dismissive.

  “I don’t know,” said Pandora. “Just, well...anything?”

  “I saw a bunch of crash cart crazies accomplishing dick all,” said Jack. “There was no flash of light. No Shimmer. Jeez, Pandora.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, not convinced. She was looking at the security camera now. Because she had seen...something. A flicker...something like a strobe light...but the crash cart guy had been wearing glasses and maybe it was just a reflection of the overhead hitting one of his lenses...but the security cameras were running...

  And maybe it would be...

  Forget that, she decided.

  That’s just nuts.

  Or maybe not.

  “Anything come out of the postmortem on Rebecca?” asked Jack, talking to Dixon.

  “Nothing much. Cause of death we know. Signs of recent sexual activity, consensual.”

  “Okay,” said Jack to Pandora, “and what did you get from NCIC on this Diana Bowman?”

  She smiled a kind of “oh, you’re gonna love this” smile.

  “Well. Pretty common name. Lots of hits. However, one was kind of interesting.”

  “Yeah?”

  She pulled out her phone.

  “A Diana Victoria Bowman, DOB October 30, 1963, with an address in Raleigh, North Carolina, was listed as Missing Whereabouts Unknown over two months ago. Missing Report was actually filed by her banker. Apparently she had no other relatives or regular friends. According to the Incident File, the banker noticed that her accounts were being drawn down, not all at once, but regularly. It was out of her pattern. Last known location was a private resort in Key West.”

  “He try to reach her?”

  “Yeah. He contacted her by email, and she got back to him, said everything was fine, that she was going to be doing some buying overseas and she needed cash for that. But he didn’t quite believe it. He said the tone was different. Like it wasn’t her writing the emails. Missed some in-jokes between them. So he tried to call, staff said she was out or the calls went to voice mail every time. She never responded.”

  “Buying overseas? What sort of buying?”

  Pandora smiled at him. “Exactly the right question. Antiques and estate jewelry.”

  That got their attention. Pandora held up a hand. “Like they say on The Shopping Channel. Wait. There’s more.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “The resort is restricted.”

  “You mean like gay?” said Dixon.

  “I don’t mean cheerful,” said Pandora.

  “A lesbian resort,” said Jack.

  “Not that specific. Services catering to the LGBTQ Community.”

  “What?” said Dixon. “No separate cabanas for the Two-Spirited Gender Fluid folks?”

  “Out in the Annex with the Gay Republicans, I guess,” said Jack.

  “I believe that qualifies as a clue,” said Pandora, quite pleased with herself. “I’m still waiting for the compliments.”

  “Better than a matchbook cover from the Blue Dahlia Bar with a Lennox phone number written on the inside,” said Dixon.

  They gave him a look.

  “Turner Classic Movies. The Big Sleep was on.”

  Another long silence.

  Karen remained dead.

  * * *

  “What do you make of all that Time Travel Ride the Shimmer horseshit?” asked Dixon.

  Jack shook his head.

  “Total lunacy. But the kid sure bought it.”

  “What about all those old places?” asked Pandora, making a quiet personal decision to look at the security camera footage of Karen Walker’s death as soon as she got the chance. “I don’t know much about Old Florida.”

  “Far as I could tell, she was right about pretty much everything,” said Jack. “My grandfather used to be a homicide detective in St. Augustine. Back in the fifties.”

  “Yeah,” said Dixon. “Clete Redding. He was a legend. They were still talking about him when I was in the Academy.”

  “Yeah. Big Clete,” said Jack, remembering. “When I was still a kid, he used to tell me all about those old bars and hotels. Meyer Lansky saw the potential. The whole east coast of Florida from St. Augustine to the Keys was Mafia territory. Sam Giancana, Albert Anastasia, the Genoveses, the Vizzini outfit, they were all down here, cutting deals with Batista over in Havana. The Alcazar Hotel was a big mob base in the fifties.”

  There was more to the story, something darker, but neither Redding nor Dixon wanted to get into that.

  “All gone now?” asked Pandora.

  “All the Mafia guys are gone,” said Dixon, who knew as much about Old Florida as any cop living. “At least as players, although the Vizzinis are still active, supposedly legit, cars and real estate. What we have now, the Crips and Bloods, the Cubans and the Salvatruchas, the Zetas, the Iranians, they’re six times meaner and eight times stupider. Sometimes I wish the Mafia was back. At least you could reason with those guys.”

  Silence, again.

  “Well,” said Pandora, after a while and with a final sigh, “looking on the bright side.”

  “What would that be?” said Jack.

  “She never had to hear that her mother and her baby sister were dead.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, “there’s that.”

  selena contemplates the past and the past contemplates selena

  Morning, bright and early, and the sun glimmering out there on the Intracoastal, a sinuous file of brown pelicans gliding serenely above the water, inches from the surface... Selena stood at the old man’s back door and watched the river through the screening of his backyard lanai, sipping a delicious black coffee and enjoying a quiet moment with nature before she got back to work.

  She finished the coffee and walked back down the hall toward Will Coleman’s compact little office, where he kept his iMac computer and a printer and a battered old filing cabinet.

  She had already gone through his emails and paper files and was pleased to learn from a printed statement that he had $34,962.07 in his savings account with Regions Bank in St. Augustine. That the VA was in charge of his care and they were, as usual, heroically failing to deliver any. That he had no family and apparently no living friends on this side of the continent, and that, according to a long and ragged string of scathing lett
ers and emails, all of his neighbors were niggers and kikes and spics and rag-head goat fuckers and he despised every last one of them.

  From which she inferred that the neighbors were unlikely to check up on the old bastard until there were vultures roosting on his rooftop.

  And there was a purple Post-it note stuck to the back of his Mac with what looked like a handwritten list of all his passwords for various banking and internet sites.

  She checked them all and found out that the second from the bottom worked on his Regions online banking account, and the second from the top gave him “Platinum Access” to Darling Buds of May, which was, according to his internet history, a much-visited European porn site, featuring pigtailed girls in schoolgirl outfits, all of whom were guaranteed to be eighteen years of age or older and all of whom looked about twelve.

  How lovely. She couldn’t have chosen a more deserving host. It was as if God was watching over her as she continued what was beginning to feel like her lifelong search.

  As she passed Will’s bedroom she looked in on him. He was still and silent and would stay that way forever, finally at peace, freed from all pain, freed from his bitterness and race hate, freed from his tormented perversions, freed from what looked to Selena to have been a rather tiresome life.

  Selena felt pretty good about herself this fine morning. She had done him a real kindness, and the happy thought warmed her heart as she stood there for a moment in the doorway, considering what she should do with the corpse, which was going to become a problem soon, even with the air-conditioning in his room set on high.

  Perhaps naked and into the swamp late this evening, with a heavy weight to keep him down while the local fauna bit and nibbled and gnawed him into something safely unrecognizable? But remember to take a pair of pliers to his teeth, what few were left, dental records, in her experience, being an important forensic detail. Messy work, but hadn’t she seen some gardening gloves and an old apron out in the lanai? Anyway, first things first.

  She turned the computer on, waited for it to open, humming a melody from the hit musical Hamilton, which she adored, both for its music and its important message, and which she intended to see in New York as soon as she could find the time.

  The screen brightened—a picture of a much younger Will on the stern of a big sports fisher, surrounded by a smiling crew and two other guys his age, grinning like a fool and holding up a massive barracuda-like fish she recognized as a wahoo...

  ...and she was in.

  She went straight to Google and typed in Jack Redding Florida Highway Patrol.

  She got multiple hits. The top twenty were taken from local TV and newspaper accounts of a fatal car crash that had occurred on Highway A1A at the Matanzas Inlet Bridge on Christmas Eve of the previous year.

  She read all the accounts twice, noted all the names—Barbara and Katy and the doctor, Anson Freitag. Pictures of Freitag’s widow, Helga, in full-mourning black, standing by the graveside, being held up by a tight group of what had to be family members, daughters, sons, grandkids and hundreds of other mourners, gathered to say goodbye to a much-loved and celebrated pillar of the community.

  No sign of any Highway Patrol Honor Guard, no cops of any type and certainly no Jack Redding in the background. There were a few shots of the funerals for Barbara and Katy, buried side by side in a grove of royal palms, Jack in dress blues, backed up by a full FHP Honor Guard, and hundreds of police officers, deputy sheriffs and the men and women of the Florida Highway Patrol. A lovely sunny day but filled with a cold January light.

  An interesting contrast, and something to think about—a breach, a rift, between the Freitag set and most of local law enforcement, with Jack Redding at the center of it, the pivot and focus.

  Pictures of Barbara and Katy and Jack Redding all together in a picture taken by the pool in the Casa Monica Hotel in St. Augustine—she knew the place well—Redding was a big muscular man with a careful smile, Barbara a lovely brunette with a full rounded sensual figure, and Katy a wide-eyed pink-skinned shapeless human-larva thing in a straw hat and water wings.

  Another one of them taken on the fantail of a huge five-masted sailboat off the coast of what looked to her like the Cayman Islands, another port she had visited often, usually to check on her accounts and to top off the various bribery funds that kept her bankers loyal.

  Past joy guarantees Future grief.

  Anything that makes you deeply happy will one day become your most bitter loss. After her first encounter with the Shimmer, before she even knew what it was and that it was possible to exert some limited control over it, the Shimmer had taken away everything she had ever loved.

  She closed her eyes.

  For a brief moment she was back at the Pontalba and a jasmine-scented breeze off the flowers in Jackson Square was sighing through the gauzy curtains around her open window and she was happy and safe with her mother’s gold locket in her little hand, half-asleep, drowsing...and then it was...all gone.

  Taken away by a black gibbering demon thing rushing into her room...a knife blade glittering in the sunlight, slick with new blood—and the sadness came flowing back, as it always did, a black tide of grief and loss.

  And then the Shimmer took her away.

  Selena had never again allowed herself to become attached to anything or anyone.

  * * *

  She sighed, shook herself free of that dark memory, went back to Google and looked for other references, and she got multiple hits. Court transcripts, television coverage, newspaper articles, going back for several years.

  Jack Redding wasn’t a simple patrol cop.

  He was part of a statewide task force called Serious Crimes Liaison, a multiagency operation that investigated organized crime and gang operations all over northwestern Florida.

  He had been involved in several violent collisions with gang members and professional armed robbers in Jacksonville and the surrounding counties. He had shot and killed five men and one woman in what you could only call Old West–style gunfights in the violent streets of Jacksonville. Multiple citations for bravery, wounded twice, Florida State Law Enforcement Officer of the Year three years ago.

  Selena dumped the stories and pictures into a file and hit Print. While the little Canon chugged out the pages, she sat back in the chair and thought about the implications.

  A hard man, his whole family suddenly gone, now a wounded animal, almost feral, with no other passion in his life but hunting criminals. And now he was hunting her. A dangerous man, a gunfighter, a killer just like her, a man to be taken seriously.

  She switched into a database that gave her tax rolls and property titles, drilled down to Flagler County as the most likely place to look, and after a few false starts and a lot of furious clicking found herself looking at an aerial shot of a ranch-style house at 32 Avenue A in Crescent Beach, registered to one Jack C. and Barbara Louise Redding and assessed for taxation purposes at $956,000. She zoomed in on it and found herself looking at a very nice not-so-little oceanfront property.

  Not at all new—it had the look of a place put up in the fifties—it even seemed familiar to her, someplace she had seen before—but it was a common enough style in Florida, so perhaps not. It was beautifully maintained and even had an in-ground pool inside a large Florida-style screened lanai.

  Looking at the price and the location and the condition of the house, she found herself idly wondering what sort of money a sergeant in the FHP would usually make, and how he had managed to acquire such a prime piece of coastal real estate in the first place.

  The assessment roll information wasn’t helpful since it was confined to the property taxes and the various utilities bills generated by the house, and she didn’t have access to the IRS’s records, although she knew people who did.

  But contacting those people was a risk she only took when she had a pressing need, and she wasn’t seeing that
here. Not yet anyway.

  What she needed was an angle on him, a way to distract or derail him without the unacceptable risk of a personal confrontation.

  While she had a great deal of confidence in her ability to overcome ordinary civilians—lonely middle-aged women, unsuspecting suburbanites, gullible teenage girls—she had no illusions about taking on a hardcore killer, and it was blindingly clear to her that Jack Redding was hardcore.

  And underneath everything else, like a dark shadow in a lake, was this very faint trace-memory of his name, Redding. It pinged in the deepest recesses of her past, but she could not quite bring the memory up into the light.

  Redding.

  But perhaps not Jack Redding.

  * * *

  She went back into the web, hunting for another Redding, someone who could conceivably have had some remote connection with her at some point in the past. She quickly discovered that when you simply type the word Redding into Google, you get a whole lot of information about the town in California, about how beautiful Mount Shasta is in the sunset, how Shasta Lake is slowly regaining its water levels now that the snowmass in the Sierras is melting, and lots more about a company called Redding Tool and Die...hit after pointless hit.

  The World Wide Web was an idiot savant and perfectly willing to serve up page after page of meaningless data for as long as she was willing to sit there and take it. When she got thirteen pages in and was informed that bus fare from Milwaukee to Redding was $215 one way, she shut the machine down and walked away.

  She poured herself another coffee and went back to stare out at the Intracoastal, where the marine traffic was starting to look like I-95 on the Memorial Day weekend.

  She watched as an FHP police boat churned past a floating barge packed with teenagers and putting out a rumbling bass beat she could feel in her chest from two hundred yards away.

  Bass beat.

  Distant thunder.

  A storm coming in off the Atlantic, a black disc of cloud slowly turning as it came, the cell wall clearly marking off the last of the twilight as it wheeled ponderously in, its interior filled with crackling blue fire.