The Shimmer. Carsten Stroud

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СКАЧАТЬ Get one of the PW’s to bring her milk and cookies. Get her a fucking blankie. She’s not under arrest, she’s a victim in Protective Custody.”

      “And if she asks for a lawyer anyway?”

      “If you work it right she won’t. If she insists, the duty PD is Hobie Pruitt. He’s a good man. If you have to get her a PD, make sure you get him, and not that stainless-steel bitch—”

      “Marylynne Kostic.”

      “Yeah. Her. Anybody but her. We can slow-walk that issue for twenty-four hours. Mace, this is too fucking serious now. This is Attempted Murder of a cop. One of ours. I know you’re pissed—”

      “I’m pissed, yeah, of course, but this isn’t my first rodeo, Jack.”

      “I know that. I just...”

       You’re a great cop, Mace, but you have already fucked up two good beefs when you lost your temper.

      Redding didn’t say that.

      He didn’t have to.

      “I know,” said Mace, aware of what was not being said. “We don’t wanna lose her on a...technicality.”

      “Yeah.”

       A technicality.

       Like throwing a handcuffed suspect down a flight of stairs. On camera.

      “Well, neither do I,” said Dixon, hardening up. “And I won’t. Any OT you need, I’m authorizing it. Good hunting. See you back at Depot. You bring that woman in, Jack.”

      “I will.”

      Redding stepped back, watched Dixon pull away, put his Stetson on, squared it up, took a couple of deep breaths and headed back into the trees.

      * * *

      A squad of Flagler County Deputies was moving through the forest, slowly, working their way down to the shoreline. Night was coming on, the short sharp twilight you got in these latitudes, the sun a dying flame in the far west, low enough to light up the underside of the clouds.

      He got to the shoreline and watched as two flatboats marked FHP Marine Unit were slowly paddling their way through the reeds.

      Redding pulled out his portable.

      “Jax 180 to Marine.”

      He saw one of the cops tug out his radio, put it to his lips.

      “Roger, Jax 180.”

      “That you, Leo?”

      “It’s me, Jack.”

      “How you doing?”

      “Bugs are murder out here. Driving us all nuts. Must be a billion of them.”

      They were buzzing around Redding as he stood on the shoreline, but not as bad as it must have been out there.

      “Getting anything at all?”

      “Other than my nose and ears bit off? No.”

      “Well, do your best, Leo. They found the rest of the Walker family.”

      Leo didn’t come back for a second.

      Then he keyed his mike.

      “All three?”

      “Yeah. The mother and the kid were dead.”

      “But not the dad?”

      “He’s still with us. So far.”

      “In the ICU?”

      “Baptist Hospital in Fernandina Beach. Listed as Grave.”

      “How’d it happen?”

      “Someone left them tied up in a storage locker. Ten days. The wife and the kid died of dehydration.”

      “Eventually.”

      “Yeah. Eventually.”

      Silence.

      Then, “Shit.”

      “Yeah,” said Redding. “That’s about it. So look real hard, Leo. We want this woman.”

      “If she’s in here, Jack, we’ll find her.”

      But they didn’t.

      * * *

      They came close.

      Close enough for Selena to hear what the boat cop was saying into his radio. They had found the mother and the father and the little girl. The father was still alive. She regretted that. He must have had a very strong life force to survive that long. When Rebecca helped to force them into the storage unit, helped to bind and gag them, the mother had begged her daughter not to do it, with tears and pleas.

      But Selena had the pistol, and Rebecca really wanted to go to New Orleans, and the sex was pulling her along, so the thing was done.

      She wondered if, in the airless dark of that place, the father had seen the Shimmer when his wife and child passed. It would have been better to kill them all—and perhaps to have taken the Shimmer for herself when she did it—but the girls weren’t up to that. Not yet. They were too young.

      But they had done very well, Rebecca and Karen, right up to the end here in this place. Selena was proud of them. They had been strong and brave. They had made it possible for her to escape and continue her work.

      The three gunshots might have been for them, because they had tried to do what she had asked of them. If that was true and they were safely dead, it was all for the best. Selena would always remember them with fondness. And they had been delicious.

      The hull of the boat actually brushed against the back of her jacket as it drifted by and she could smell the cigarette one of the cops was smoking in a vain attempt to ward off the mosquitoes.

      In a way, what saved her were those mosquitoes, because they went for the eyes and the faces and straining to see clearly through a swarm of biting flies was a difficult thing to do properly. And she was being still, even as she felt the hull of the boat sliding across her shoulder blades and little icy jabs of panic were flickering up and down her belly. That was the hardest part, not moving with the boat so close, not giving in to the urge to burst up out of the water, knife them deep, kill them both before they could do anything but die.

      But then the men in the other boat would shoot her and she’d be dead. And that was unthinkable. So she did not move. And after a long while, the boats went away, rowing back out into the waterway, rowing back to the big motor launch that had brought the flatboats in two hours ago.

      * * *

      Another half hour and the dark was now almost complete. She lifted her head...slowly...slowly...and СКАЧАТЬ