The Shimmer. Carsten Stroud

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СКАЧАТЬ big cop, standing there in the dying light, was one of the three who had chased her until they heard the gunfire back on the road. This was also the same cop who had spotted them first, back there on the coast highway.

      She had seen his face in her side mirror as he followed the truck, a craggy cowboy face, a big man with heavy hands on the steering wheel of his cruiser, his pale blue eyes, sharp and steady, fixed on her. He had the look of a raptor. She’d known then that she was going to have to run. She’d told the girls to prepare to do what they had talked about if something like this happened.

      The same cop was now standing on the shore, stone still. She could see gold chevrons against the dark gray of his uniform, a sergeant. His right hand was resting on the butt of his service piece, and he was staring out at the swamp. Selena could feel his mind reaching out for her, feel the force in his animal spirit. He was burning for her.

      He stayed there for an unknowable time, watching as the police launch slowly churned away to the main canal and the night came down. She got a vibration off him that wasn’t like the feelings she got from other officers, that wolf pack feeling.

      This one was different from the others. She had encountered his type once before, but not in a very long time. She couldn’t quite catch that distant memory. But this cop was strangely familiar. As if they had known each other in another life.

      She put these thoughts away. Eventually he would tire and leave and she could come back to shore. She knew what to do once she got back to the shore. She had done it often. So she waited.

      Time passed slowly and still it was just the two of them, the police sergeant standing motionless by the shore, and Selena two hundred feet out, shivering violently in the water, aware that something large and slithery was close by her, only a few yards away, resting on the floor of the swamp, lidless eyes considering her.

      She could feel its reptilian mind working, thinking dim slow thoughts about catching and ripping and swallowing, maybe mixed up with a bit of doubt, getting strange signals off her, its hunger and its fear fighting with each other. There was nothing to be done about that.

      She was very cold and very hungry and starting to be just a little afraid, her skin on fire with bites and wounds and stings.

      Beyond the trees the streetlights came on, and over her head the stars were shining through shreds of cloud. She could hear the cop’s radio crackling with chatter and out on the roadway blue and red and white lights were slicing up the sky and spearing through the treetops.

      And still he stood and still he stared.

      And now he was beginning to worry her.

      She idly wondered if she should slip a hundred feet down the shoreline, try to get behind him and kill him. If he didn’t go soon, she might try it, even though moving—not being still—would be acting like prey instead of predator.

      But a few minutes later he walked away up the slope until he reached the tree line. He stopped there and turned back to the swamp. And called out, a deep rolling voice, a strong Southern accent, Georgia or the Carolinas.

      “Lady, if you’re still out there, I have something to tell you. I know you. I’ve seen your face somewhere. So I’m gonna look everywhere I can until I find you. Every police record. Every newspaper story. Every official site in the US. I’m gonna hunt you. And when I have your file, I will come for you. My name is Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol. Enjoy your evening.”

      Then he turned and disappeared into the trees and Selena was alone in the swamp and she had a lot to think about. Redding. She knew that name, but she couldn’t quite remember from where, or why.

      * * *

      She was still thinking about it when she reached the shoreline a while later and moved silently, invisibly, a darker shadow in the night, gliding up the grassy slope and slipping through the trees toward the backs of the houses, where most of the people would be out on their front porches, watching the police cars, talking to their neighbors, having a lovely time savoring all the excitement, enjoying the delicious idea that something dangerous, something fatal, had happened right in front of them.

      But it hadn’t happened to them.

      * * *

      Two Flagler County Deputies, Danika Shugrue and Luke Cotton, knocked on the front door of a trim little white bungalow two hours later. The porch lights were on and old-timey music was coming through the door, what used to be called big band music. While they waited for an answer, Deputy Shugrue checked her clipboard, a list of local residents.

      “We’ve got a Willard Coleman, eighty-seven, a widower. Lives alone. He’s in a wheelchair—”

      “Hence the ramp we’re standing on,” said Cotton.

      “Stop saying hence, will you? Next it’ll be hither and forsooth.”

      Cotton, who was hunting a promotion, was taking a college-level English Lit course online and Shugrue felt it was having a bad effect on him.

      The door opened. A pretty woman was standing in the doorway, in a ratty powder blue terry-cloth bathrobe, obviously naked underneath, since the robe was not quite pulled in tight enough for modesty, her hair wrapped up in a big white towel and her face covered in some kind of lime-green cream. She smiled at them.

      She had a great smile.

      “Evening, miss,” said Deputy Shugrue, the senior deputy in this pair. “Can we talk to Mr. Willard Coleman?”

      The woman made a pursed-lip expression, thinking about it, but then she brightened.

      “Well, I think he’s asleep, but of course, come on in. Is this about the shooting thing earlier?”

      “Yes it is, Miss...?”

      “How terrible. I’ve been watching it on Fox. They have all sorts of video on it, I guess from people and their cell phone cameras and stuff. That poor lady police officer. The whole thing is on film. They’re playing it over and over. Is the lady officer okay?”

      “She’s in the hospital,” said Shugrue, stepping inside and scuffing her boots on the doormat to clean off the mud. “But we think she’s going to be okay. Thank you for asking.”

      “And the little girl who was shot? They’re not saying whether she was okay too?”

      Shugrue exchanged a look with Cotton.

      “She, ah, she died, I’m afraid, Miss...?”

      “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m Catherine Marcus. Call me Cathy. I’m with Helping Hands? We’re the assisted-living people?”

      Marcus backed away from the door, inviting them into a neat little front room with a green leather sofa and two chairs, antique lamps, a fireplace with family pictures, a flat-screen TV with the sound off—Fox News—an oxygen tank in one corner.

      “I’m the resident nurse for the night,” she was explaining. “Will... Mister Coleman...has some mobility issues, and he suffers from sleep apnea. So we try to have someone here through the night.”

      “Can we talk to Mister Coleman?”

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