The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  Clete tugged out his gold shield, held it up in the mirror. Then he tapped the dashboard clock. The time was 2:35. Jack nodded.

  “Okay. My name is Jack Redding. Now, brace yourself. Okay?”

  “I’m braced.”

  “I’m your grandson. Your boy, Declan, is my father. A couple of minutes ago I was sitting in your house in Crescent Beach—”

  “Yeah? Gimme the address.”

  “Thirty-Two Avenue A.”

  “Phone number?”

  “904-233-6630.”

  “Wrong,” said Clete, pouncing on it.

  Jack realized Clete was talking about the phone number back in 1957.

  “Right...right...it was... Jeez, Clete, that was sixty-one years ago!”

  “Number.” A bark, just like a drill sergeant.

  Jack racked his mind...

  “It was...JA something...9...something...”

  “Number.”

  “JA for Jacksonville 9...6630! Just like it is now.”

  “What tattoo have I got on my right biceps?”

  “You don’t have a tattoo on your right biceps. Far as I know, you don’t have a tattoo anywhere.”

  “Okay, smart guy. What was I doing on September 15 seven years ago?”

  “You were in Korea. Going ashore at Inchon with the Fifth Marine Regiment.”

  Clete was studying him in the mirror.

  “You’re from sixty-one years in the future? So I’m probably dead by then. When do I die?”

  “Maybe you’re not dead then either?”

  Clete worked out the numbers.

  “Fuck that. I’d be ninety-seven. I’ll never make ninety-seven. No male in our family ever got past seventy-five. My heart’ll give out long before that.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  Jack patted his pockets for a cigarette and then remembered he didn’t smoke. He used to, but he quit back in 2001. Which meant that in 1957 he hadn’t quit yet. But then he wasn’t born yet either, so there was that. Maybe he’d buy a pack of Lucky Strikes. And then he patted his pants pocket and found a battered pack of Lucky Strikes where he was pretty sure they hadn’t been a second ago.

  And a flip book of matches.

  On the cover was a logo for a place called the Blue Dahlia Bar. That made him smile.

  A very nice touch. Whoever or whatever was running this show—the Timekeeper?—had a very wicked sense of humor. He flipped it open, but there was no Lenox phone number written inside it.

  Still, Mace Dixon would have been delighted.

  He pulled a cigarette out, lit it up and exhaled the smoke. It was better than he remembered.

  The Blue Dahlia Bar.

  That matchbook was a signal on someone’s part—a warning maybe—but he had no idea who might be trying to warn him, or about what.

  He did get the idea that reality was going to be a negotiable issue when you were time shifting. So maybe that was the Timekeeper’s message.

  Clete was still waiting for his answer. He smiled at Clete through the cloud.

  “Why not? I’ve been thinking about that. From what I remember about time travel, if you change the past you can really fuck up the future.”

  Clete thought that through.

  Sighed again.

  “Okay. You’re my grandson from sixty years in the future—”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “Okay. Sixty-one. I take it Declan grows up and gets married and has kids. Good for him. Frankly I didn’t think he had it in him. He’s sort of a pantywaist. I mean, I love him and all that shit, but Mary Alice runs his ass. So when he’s older I get a chance to toughen him up?”

  “Dad never really toughens up, Clete. But he’s a good guy, in his own way.”

  “Glad to hear it. I hoped he would come out okay. But you. You turned out to be a cop too?”

  “Yes. Sergeant in the FHP. Just like—”

  “Just like what?”

  “Sorry. Can’t tell you that.”

  “Got a kid of your own?”

  That came in like a kick in the gut, and it showed on his face. Clete saw that clearly.

  “Okay. Yow. Bad question. Sorry I asked.”

  “Yeah...well...”

  “Kid died?”

  Jack just nodded. It was all he could do.

  “Hey... I’m...I’m so sorry. When?”

  “Last Christmas Eve. Car accident. My wife too.”

  On the same Matanzas Inlet your wife dies on in six days.

  “Jeez. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  A heavy silence, and all they could do was wait it out.

  * * *

  Clete looked out the window, checked the dashboard clock. A little after three. He’d been sitting here with the guy for thirty minutes. And now they were both depressed as shit.

  On one level he was still convinced that this whole man-in-the-rearview-mirror thing wasn’t real and that he maybe was having heatstroke or a heart attack and hallucinating the whole thing.

  And on another level, he had seen a lot of strange things in his life—like the ghosts of dead men standing on blood-drenched snowdrifts in the Chosin Reservoir—and he was ready to take life as it came. This seemed pretty real, so what the hell. He was going with it.

  He sighed, took another hit on the Southern Comfort, set it down and said, “Well, this sounds like a rat fuck from the get-go. Can you get out from behind that mirror?”

  “I don’t know. So far I haven’t done much but sit around and bullshit with you.”

  “You’re a big motherfucker, I’ll admit. Maybe the rearview mirror is too small to get through. What if we go look for a bigger mirror?”

  “This isn’t Alice in Wonderland, Clete.”

  “Hey, I took Declan to see that movie. He loved it. Anyway, fuck this. I need a drink, and you sure as hell need a drink, and there’s a big old antique mirror behind the bar at the Alcazar. Waddya say?”

  “I’m in.”

  Clete grinned at him.

  “Well, you don’t have too much fucking choice, do you? What’s your first name, anyway?”

  “Jack.”

  “Jack? Declan named you Jack? I woulda thought Chauncey or Cornel or Lester.”

  “Nope. Jack.”

  “Okay. Jack. Let’s see if we can get you pulled through the... What was it? In the movie? Alice in Whatever.”

  “The looking glass?”

  “Yeah. The looking glass.”

  * * *

  There actually was a huge mirror behind the bar at the Alcazar Hotel, and the problem of being stuck in the rearview mirror seemed to resolve itself, as Jack more or less got shifted—how or by whom he didn’t want to ask—from Over There to Over Here.

  The place was packed, and a kid on a stool was pounding away at a guiltless Steinway Grand, doing some serious damage to “Begin the Beguine.” The bartender, a pencil-necked boy who looked about eleven, wearing a red silk vest and striped black pants and a boiled shirt with a black bow tie, the collar about two sizes too big for him, pulled up short in front of them and asked what he could bring them.

  Clete appeared to know the kid pretty well, calling him by name—Freddy or something like it—it was hard to make it out over the music and the crowd chatter. The kid blushed and looked pleased to be remembered by Clete Redding.

  Jack didn’t think they’d have Barefoot Pinot Grigio on the list, and anyway he didn’t want to risk ordering a glass of white wine with his grandfather sitting on the next barstool holding a gigantic boilermaker and watching him in a considering way, so he ordered one too.

  When it came, a big glass mug of India pale ale and an oversize shot glass full of whiskey, Clete took the shot glass,
dropped it into the mug of beer, tipped the frosted mug to Jack with one raised eyebrow, said, “Here’s to family,” set himself and drained it to the bottom in one go, his throat working and his eyes closed. Jack and Freddy, the kid behind the bar, watched this ceremony with interest.

  Clete set the glass down, sighed deeply and looked at Jack expectantly. So did the bartender. Jack had never tried a boilermaker, but he had never tried time travel either, so what the hell.

  He dropped the shot glass into the mug—it went down like a depth charge—and then he lifted the mug—it was as big as a toaster and weighed a ton—and he drained the thing at one go, set it down and sighed the same sigh as his grandfather had just sighed, which seemed to satisfy all three of them.

  Freddy went away to get two more, and they sat there side by side on the red leather stools, looking at their reflections in the long bar mirror, and after a while spent in quiet contemplation of just how totally nuts this situation was—and two more boilermakers for each of them—Clete got around to the central point.

  “Well, this afternoon has been instructive as hell, if it really happened, which I doubt, but if it did, what the fuck does it all mean?”

  Jack looked in his pocket for his iPhone, pulled out a battered notebook instead, one he had never owned in his entire life.

  He looked at it for a time, thinking about the Blue Dahlia matchbook cover and the Lucky Strikes in his shirt pocket and wondered—briefly—what other messages the Timekeeper had in store for him.

  He flipped the notebook open—another nice touch here too because the pages were filled up with his own handwriting—and found an entry that corresponded, roughly, with what he and Pandora had found out about the woman calling herself Diana Bowman.

  “You’re doing surveillance on a woman who’s banging Tessio Vizzini.”

  Clete found this professionally intriguing.

  “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “It’s one of the things I can’t tell you about. I have to let you run things your way.”

  Clete didn’t like it, but he let it go.

  “Okay. Yes. I am.”

  “Well, so am I.”

  “You’re onto this DiSantis broad too?”

  “I think so.”

  “But, this broad is thirty-four years old. There’s no way she’s somebody you’re looking at sixty-one years from now.”

  “But that is exactly what I’m looking at.”

  “Same name?”

  “No. She’s calling herself Diana Bowman.”

  “Okay. And what’s the beef?”

  “Murder, kidnapping, robbery. She left three people to die in a storage locker, she kidnapped two young girls and got one of them shot and murdered the other while she was in Protective Custody—”

  Clete snorted into his beer mug.

  “Jeez, kid. How the fuck did that happen?”

  “She put cyanide into the kid’s medicine. We were stupid enough to let her take a hit of it while she was in the hospital room.”

  Clete gave him a look, and Jack took it.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. I know.”

  “You happen to have a picture of this Bowman woman?”

  “I don’t know. I might.”

  He ruffled through the notebook, and a photo fell out. It was the digital shot from the Carousel Bar, only now it was just a color snap with rippled edges. But it was her.

  Clete took the shot, held it up to the bar lights overhead.

  “Jeez. That’s her. That’s Aurelia DiSantis. When was this shot taken?”

  “Sixty-one years in the future, at the Monteleone in New Orleans.”

  “At the Carousel Bar, I see. So, like, a relative, a granddaughter?”

  “What do you think?”

  Clete studied the shot for a while.

  “Fuck relative. That’s her. That’s Aurelia DiSantis.”

  “Thank you. I think so too. So far there’s only two people who believe me. You’re one of them, and a lady cop named Pandora Jansson is the other.”

  “And where’s she?”

  “Back in the future.”

  Clete took a long drink.

  “Okay. So what we’re saying here is that this DiSantis chick is the same chick who is calling herself Diana Bowman sixty-one years from now and who you want for assorted felony murders and robberies and all that nasty shit?”

  “Exactly. It’s what this woman does. She finds somebody vulnerable, isolates the target, gets control of the money, like a parasite on a host, sucks the victim dry, kills the host and moves on.”

  “And she’s been doing this for...?”

  “No idea. At least sixty years.”

  Clete looked at the shot.

  “Fucking Spider Lady.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’ve got a pretty good idea that sucking a vic dry is exactly what that DiSantis broad is doing to Tessio Vizzini.”

  Jack let that go by, although it was sorely tempting. Clete picked up on that.

  “I meant her MO. Jeez, clean up your mind.”

  “Hey, I said nothing!”

  “You were thinking it. So what you’re telling me, is this woman can slip around in time, go up and down the time chute, and right now she’s popped out of the chute right here in St. Augustine? And you came down after her?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “You maybe shoulda thought this through a little better, kid. I mean, I’m all for a good police chase, but I think I woulda pulled up short when the chute opened up on me.”

  “Maybe next time I will.”

  “What makes you think you’ll get a next time? Look around you, Jack. This is where you are.”

  Jack took a breath, let it out, took a hit of his boilermaker, let the reality of the Alcazar Bar roll over him.

  All around them there was music—the kid on the stool was now pounding the stuffing out of Glen Miller’s “In the Mood”—and the smell of cigarettes and the cheerful talk of the crowds. Now twelve years after the end of World War II, the boom times of the fifties really starting to roll, people in baggy suits and big ties, the women in flared skirts and cashmere twinsets and pearls at the neck, the bartenders in red vests and striped pants, moving up and down the bar line, smiling and mixing and smiling, the room full of smoke and perfume, and under it all the vague remnants of the sulfur reek of the pool that used to be right in the center of the casino years ago, still there, embedded in the wood paneling and the marble arches.

  “Yeah,” he said, reaching for his beer. “Here is where I am.”

  “So, what do you want to do?”

  “Well, we’re both cops, and we’re after the same woman. So—”

  “So, let’s go be cops.”

  “Yeah. Let’s. What do you have on Aurelia DiSantis?”

  “What I have is she’s calling herself Aurelia DiSantis, but I think it’s an alias. I tossed her room here at the hotel.”

  “She’s staying here. At the Alcazar?”

  “Yes. Has a suite. Seems to have some money.”

  “And of course you had a warrant?”

  “Don’t be a putz.”

  “What did you find?”

  “ID in her name—DiSantis, Aurelia, age thirty-four, date of birth fits—a Louisiana driver’s license in that name, with an address at the Pontalba Apartments in New Orleans, about fifteen grand in cash, mixed bills, some Mexican scrip, some old photos of an apartment interior somewhere, a snub-nosed Colt .38 with a box of shells.”

  “What’d you make of all that?”

  “Looks legit enough, except for the Colt. But something ain’t right about her and I can’t quite nail it down.”

  “Why her in the first place?”

  “Waddya mean?” Clete said, a wary look flickering in his eyes.
>
  Jack knew he was on dangerous ground here.

  “I just mean, if she’s legit, then what brought her to the attention of the Jacksonville Robbery Homicide Division?”

  Clete looked at him for a long time, and then down at the half-empty mug of beer between his rough-skinned hands.

  “If you’re really from the future, maybe I’ve already told you about this shit?”

  Jack waited awhile before he answered.

  “If I say yes, you’ll know you lived long enough to tell me a lot of things.”

  “And did I?”

  “You figure it out.”

  “The Rules?”

  “Yes. The Rules.”

  Long silence.

  “Okay. Here goes,” Clete said, eventually. “Back in the car, you asked me if this was Saturday the twenty-fourth of August in 1957. Which means that date was important to you. It also means that, from where you were sitting, you recognized where we were. Which means that the photos I just finished taking a couple hours ago made it through sixty-one years, so you could be sitting in my beach house looking at them. Because that’s the view in the shots I took, and that’s the same view out the windshield. And you knew it when you saw it. You knew exactly where you were. Am I right so far?”

  Jack was impressed.

  “You are.”

  “Okay. So if you’re sitting looking at these pictures way out there in the future, there was something in those pictures that you were trying to figure out, but I wasn’t there to tell you about them.”

  “Or you were alive but you wouldn’t.”

  Clete’s head came up.

  “Why the fuck wouldn’t I tell you?”

  “You tell me.”

  Clete’s face went red.

  “You think I wasn’t doing surveillance for the PD. You think I was checking out Tessio Vizzini’s new punchboard for Tessio himself.”

  “Clete, I work in the same kind of job you do. We have gangs and syndicates there too. And sometimes you gotta do...what you gotta do.”

  “Like doing sideline shit for a Mafia capo?”

  “Absolutely. I’d do it too, if it gave me better information. You can’t work the streets without making some risky moves. I do it all the time. If you were checking out Aurelia DiSantis for Tessio Vizzini, you were also doing it for the Jacksonville PD. Because you are the Jacksonville PD. You follow this?”