The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  Jack turned to Pandora.

  “The Walker guy, the dad? Didn’t Karen say he was with the government?”

  “Yes. The Army Corps of Engineers.”

  “Yeah, but what did he do? Specifically?”

  Pandora’s face changed as she got it.

  “Forensic archaeology. Which is—”

  “Old bones and relics.”

  “Told you so,” said Mollie.

  “No, you didn’t,” said Jack.

  “Well,” she said, shrugging, “I was about to.”

  Jack looked at Pandora. She looked back. They were both thinking about what Karen Walker had told them, just before she died. That Diana Bowman was obsessed with finding a particular gold locket.

  “You got anything pending, Pandora?”

  “Two weeks vacation, long overdue.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but work related?”

  “No. Nothing I can’t free up. Why?”

  “Well, unless Mace objects, I’m gonna take this one on. I want to ask this Walker guy if he knows anything about lockets, anything that might have to do with why Bowman got close to him in the first place. You in?”

  “Road trip? All expenses?”

  “Yeah. Road trip. And maybe I buy you lunch.”

  * * *

  They threw together some traveling gear, checked an unmarked slate-gray pursuit car out of the motor pool, and headed north to Amelia Island, specifically to the Intensive Care Unit of Baptist General at Fernandina Beach, where Gerald Walker, the last Walker breathing, was, they sincerely hoped, still clinging to life.

  * * *

  Back at the Depot Mace Dixon was up to his garrison belt in a toxic spill of print reporters and TV newspeople, all of them wanting to know how a sixteen-year-old kidnap victim had managed to die in Protective Custody, which seemed, to the media pack, to be something of a contradiction in terms when you looked at the outcome, namely a dead girl.

  Dixon was dealing with the barrage of questions as well as he could while keeping one nervous eye on the back of the Press Briefing Room, where a grim-looking rake-thin blonde woman named Marylynne Kostic was leaning against the wall, her arms folded, her face in Full Hatchet and her pale blue eyes locked on him the way a mongoose looks at a chicken.

  In his heart Dixon wished he was on the road with Jack Redding and Pandora Jansson. He even closed his eyes and tried to make that happen—if he had ruby slippers he would have clicked them—but when he opened them again he was still here facing an angry mob of flying monkeys and those two ratbags were still heading safely out there, disappearing into the misty blue distance.

  Dixon got them all to shut up, for a moment.

  “Look, look—we’ll get to the questions in just a second. But we—the FHP—want to ask you guys for some help here.”

  “Looks like you need it,” said the carrot-head dork from CNN. Got a big laugh.

  “Well, maybe we do. The woman we’ve been looking for—”

  “Got an ID on her yet?” asked one of the bobblehead media chicks from the local affiliate.

  “Not yet—”

  “Got a photo? Must have from somebody’s security camera.”

  “Not ready to comment on that yet.”

  This brought on a babble of objections, which, it occurred to Dixon, for only the fiftieth time, made them sound like a room full of geese. He held up a hand.

  “When we’re ready. But right now, we are working on the idea that the fugitive might have gone to ground right there in the Flagler Beach area. Flagler County did a house-to-house, but we think it might be possible that she slipped the net somehow, that she might still be in that area, in a house, maybe holding hostages. So what we’d like from the people of Flagler Beach is to check on their neighbors.”

  “And get themselves shot—” said Carrot Head.

  “Not in person. Phone, email, text—whatever. And then if anyone comes across anything even remotely suspicious, they call it in to the Bureau of Criminal Investigations—not 911—the number is 850-617-2302—and we will investigate.”

  “You think she’s taken hostages?” said Bobble Head Two.

  “We have no information that she has. This is just a request for the people of Flagler Beach to do some very careful checking in their area to make sure everyone is safe.”

  “So release the picture you’ve got,” said Carrot Head, and everyone started gaggling again, and at the back of the room the mongoose was waving her stick-figure arms and making angry mongoose sounds. Pointing at her, he braced himself and said, “Yes, Ms. Kostic, you have a question?”

  She had several.

  selena consults the crocodile

  For an old man dying of multiple and competing causes, Tessio “Cocco” Vizzini was giving Death a serious run for her money. He was confined—perhaps confined was the wrong word—to a sunlit and palatial upper bedroom suite in the large Italianate villa that sat inside the heavily fortified Vizzini family compound, which took up four hundred feet of prime Atlantic shoreline a little ways south of St. Augustine.

  Now closing in on ninety-three years of age, he was a hunched and saggy hawk-faced man who always wore blue pin-striped suits and polished brogues and radiated the aura of a clinically depressed buzzard.

  Tessio spent most of his days sitting in a battered leather wingback chair placed in the center of a graceful bay window, which opened up onto a marble-tiled terrace with a 200-degree view of the Atlantic Ocean.

  His very complicated needs, medical, social, sexual and fiscal, were seen to by his extended family, a phalanx of armed retainers and an attentive staff composed mainly of pretty young female Guatemalan and Honduran immigrants, all of them illegally here and therefore at his mercy.

  These servants earned every penny of their salaries because Tessio Vizzini was a harsh judge of service standards, and a single frown frequently resulted in the unfortunate recipient being flown back to Tegucigalpa a few hours later and dumped—not gently—out onto the tarmac, in an exercise the handlers liked to call il rotolando, which needs no translation.

  On the intricately inlaid table set within reach of his arthritic claws were a decanter of grappa, a set of tiny crystal glasses arranged in military ranks and a box of Ghurka Black Dragon cigars. (For those of you who are not keeping abreast of the market for obscenely expensive cigars, the Ghurka Black Dragons retail for $23,000 a box.)

  Tessio “Cocco” Vizzini had made his fortune in the 1950s through gambling and gunrunning and prostitution and heroin-and-cocaine selling, up and down the Florida coast and over in Havana. He had been on a “first-name and hearty abrazo” basis with Fulgencio Batista, and Meyer Lansky was his financial adviser—but he made his name because he liked to have people who displeased him thrown bound and naked into a lagoon at the edge of his property.

  It was full of alligators who had gotten used to dining there on a regular basis. This was done for the entertainment of his family, and also to convey the standards of loyalty he expected from his capos and button men.

  The Italian word for crocodile is coccodrillo but Tessio preferred to be called Cocco because that was so much sweeter on the ear. Today his ear, as furry as a hamster’s butt, was tweaked and piqued by a familiar voice out of the far distant past, and he turned, creaking in his wingback, to watch as a woman who looked oddly familiar, was shown in by a slender Guatemalan girl in a tight black sheath dress.

  As the woman came fully into the glimmering light that filled the room, Tessio’s heart lurched in the brittle bone cage of his sunken chest.

  She came to stand beside him, smiling down, her hair a black bell cut short around her oval face, her green eyes as clear as emeralds. He stared up at her, and wondered if he were dying.

  “Aurelia,” he said, in a harsh squawk, his lips working, his mouth suddenly dry. “It cannot be you, Aurelia. Am
I dying? Are you a ghost, come to call me to God?”

  “But it is Aurelia, Cocco,” said Selena. “It is your Aurelia. I am not a ghost. I am here.”

  Selena leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, and he put a hand on her arm, to see if she were not a ghost. “But you haven’t changed, cara mia. How long since I have seen you?”

  She waved that away, said something about the surgical arts and good makeup, speaking over and through his puzzled expression, counting on the years to have slowed him down a bit, and his failing eyes would certainly help.

  She found a little deck chair out on the terrace, brought it back in and sat down in front of the old man, crossing her legs in her tight little skirt as she did so, because even a ninety-three-year-old man dying of practically everything possible can’t resist a pretty woman in a tight little skirt.

  “May I pour you some grappa?” she said, leaning forward, taking the bottle up, smiling as she saw the familiar light fire up in his tired eyes. He watched as she poured out two glasses, handed one to him, making sure it was safely in those twisted and veiny hands, remembering how they had looked upon her body so long ago, brown and strong, taking and possessing.

  Time is a thief, she thought, sooner or later she steals everything you ever had.

  * * *

  Selena passed a pleasant hour in polite and occasionally obscene reminiscences with the old man, who seemed to shed his years as they talked about the old times, about how they used to meet at the Monterey Motel on the canal and make love all afternoon, about the button men and pezzonovantes and the made men with silly nicknames and the Alcazar Hotel and the parties they had there and the wine that flowed like blood and the blood that got spilled like wine...good days...golden days...all gone now...all gone...

  He patted her on the knee, let his hand rest there, looking into her, seeing her. He moved back, creaking in his chair, put his hands back onto his knees and let the silence come down and they both sat there, in the westering sun, listening to the surf and the wind in the lemon trees that lined the window walls.

  He took in a long ragged breath, tilted his head to one side, and said, “I know you have come for a favor, Aurelia, and if it is in my power I will grant it, but first I have a question, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Aurelia, my dear comare, what are you?”

  She sat back, putting on her surprise face although the question had been asked of her many times before, although usually by people who were about to be dead.

  He waved her surprise face aside.

  “No, no, please, cara mia. I am too old for games now. I see you here before me, exactly as you were when I was a young man. This is an impossible thing, even with the doctors and the magic makeup. Do not treat me as a fool. My eyes are not so bad as you think. If you wish me to grant a favor, I require to know what it is you really are.”

  “What do you think I am, Tessio?”

  “I have wondered about you off and on for many years, after the family fell and you were gone. For a time I thought you were some kind of strega o demone o anche una fantasma...a witch or a demon or even a ghost.”

  “Do you still think I am una fantasma?”

  He considered her.

  “No. I had my pet policeman look into your background—don’t be offended, but a man in my position has responsibilities and hard things must be done...”

  Selena knew the answer to her question before she asked it, but to maintain her cover she asked it anyway.

  “And who was your pet policeman?”

  His mood shifted from reminiscence to white heat. “That traitor, that murdering pig.”

  “The one who came that terrible night?”

  “Yes. That man. Clete Redding.”

  “And what did he find?”

  “This was the strange thing that for a while made me think that you were a demon. You called yourself Aurelia DiSantis. But he found records that said you were born Selena D’Arcy in New Orleans, in Plaquemine Parish, in 1909, five years before the Great War broke out.”

  He shrugged it away.

  “So this is fine with me at the time. You seemed younger than your years. People change their names, they wish to leave behind an inconvenient lover, perhaps a bad experience, perhaps they avoid the law. This is done all the time. But the woman I see here before me is not a hundred and nine years old, is she? The Selena D’Arcy name is of no importance to me. You will always be Aurelia DiSantis, but this fact is also before me, is it not?”

  “And what have you decided?”

  “Two things are possible. Either you are not my Aurelia DiSantis but an impostor come to play a cruel game on an old sick man. Or you really are my Aurelia DiSantis, and you really are one hundred and nine years old.”

  “And what do you believe?”

  “I believe you are my Aurelia. Only my Aurelia could know all the things we have talked about this afternoon. What we used to do at the Monterey Court. I have never spoken of those afternoons to anyone, not even after my wife died. That is why I wanted you to talk about the old days, because I needed to be sure. And I am. But again I come back to my original question.”

  “Which is, what am I?”

  He inclined his head, lifted his hands, palms up, a very Italian gesture.

  Selena’s heart had gone icy cold and her chest was clamped tight. She should never have taken the old man for a fool. He had never been a fool, because if he had been, he would have been thrown to his own alligators years ago.

  * * *

  She hesitated and he saw that, but he didn’t try to ease the moment. He expected an answer, and if she didn’t give him a plausible one, she could expect no help, and he might even have her walked out of the compound. Or worse.

  “Tessio, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a genetic quirk, but I don’t age. I don’t know why. I mean, I do age, but it’s very slow.”

  He sat for a time, considering her, and she felt a chill rising up from her belly. But in the end, he seemed willing to let her simple acknowledgment of her age stand.

  “So you really were born before the Great War, and you are really one hundred and nine years old? Tell me. Why are you not insane?”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  He laughed, or at least showed his teeth, a row of yellow tombstones in gray gums.

  “Yes. And who is to say I am not insane either, because I do believe you. Do you know why this has happened to you?”

  Because of the Shimmer, she was thinking, but would never say.

  “I don’t know, Cocco. I just accept it.”

  “Do you think you are insane, cara mia?”

  Yes I do, she thought but did not say. The Shimmer has made me what I am.

  She smiled, touched his hand, kissed his leathery cheek.

  “Yes maybe a little, caro Cocco. I know you used to drive me mad in our bed at the Monterey.”

  A silence came down, but it was an easy one. Finally, it was time for business.

  “So, carissima...what has brought you to me after all this time? Is there something you wish to ask of me? Or of my people?”

  She took a sip of grappa, which she loathed, and set the glass down with a silvery ping.

  “You were talking about that Jacksonville detective. Clete Redding.”

  Vizzini struggled against his resurgent anger, grew sad in the memory of that night.

  “He came like a black angel, killing as he came in the door—he had a...come se dice in Inglese—the gun that fires all the time?”

  “A machine gun?”

  “Yes. Like that. And two more pistols in his belt. He came for a meet, to talk about the death of his Mary Alice. We met down by the lagoon there. For no reason, he began shooting. He killed my Anthony, killed his cousin Sergio, my dear old friend Salvatore Bruni... They all died. Redding w
as shot many times I was told, but he would not fall down. Like a black wind he was. He never said a word, until the end, when he was standing in front of me, covered in blood, and all he said was ‘Mary Alice.’ Then he walked away.”

  He was silent for a while.

  “Mary Alice was his wife, you know. She died the night before, in a car accident. Redding blamed us, our family, the Vizzini family.”

  “Was he right?”

  Vizzini flared again.

  “We don’t make war on the families. If we have an enemy, we kill him. We are not woman killers. Child killers. It was a car accident, but he believed that we had done it. We did not.”

  Another silence.

  “He died ten years ago, you know,” he went on, “in his eighties, in his fucking sleep, on that boat of his, the Siren, the one he bought with money I gave him, like the beach house—also bought with money I gave him—like a brother he was—he should have gone into the lagoon with the rest of those betrayers those fucking snitches...but no, he lives into old age...in one single night he destroyed our family...we lost the respect of the other capos...the five families moved against our interests...the Traficantes, the Bonnanos...even Meyer Lansky turned against us.”

  He wandered into a raving reverie again and Selena let him go on for a while, pleased that his anger and his thwarted lust for vengeance burned so bright in his ruined body. After he had subsided once more, she leaned forward and touched him again.

  “So,” he said, after a pause, “why do you bring this man up now, after all these years?”

  “He has a grandson, who is also a policeman.”

  Tessio’s eyes narrowed.

  “I have read of him. He is also a killer, like his grandfather. A capo in the highway patrol.”

  “Yes, he is a killer. He is also a problem.”

  “A problem? A problem for who?”

  “A problem for me, caro mio.”

  the last walker breathing

  Gerald Jeffery Walker was still alive when they got to Baptist General. A charge nurse finally agreed to let them into the ICU pod, where they found Walker on the other side of a glass wall, a pale blond guy, big and rangy looking, but skinny as a bundle of sticks. He was lying in the middle of a matrix of tubes and drips and monitors, machines beeping and whirring in the darker shadows of his room.