The Shimmer. Carsten Stroud

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СКАЧАТЬ a boat waiting? Why she came down this way?”

      “You see one?” Redding asked.

      They both shook their heads, water running off the brims of their Stetsons. Redding looked back at the muddy water and the reeds bending in the rain.

      “What do you figure lives in there?” he asked of no one in particular.

      Marsh laughed.

      “Nothing you’d want to take home to the wife.”

      Marsh immediately regretted that comment, considering what had happened to Redding’s wife and their little girl last Christmas Eve, but it couldn’t be unsaid, and Redding didn’t react. So Marsh went on.

      “Snakes. River rats. Leeches. Every kind of biting, stinging, itching bug you can think of. I’ve seen gators around here, but not real big ones.”

      Redding smiled at him.

      “Define ‘not real big.’”

      Marsh just grinned back at him.

      “Could even be monitor lizards,” said Halliday, trying to be helpful. “They been finding huge ones—two, three feet long—down in West Palm. People had them as pets till they got too damn big. Let them go into the rivers. Monitors. Smart as dogs too. They got these monster mouths full of huge backward-curved fangs, sharp as needles. But huge.”

      “And don’t forget the giant anacondas,” added Marsh, just to complete the picture.

      Neither man had any intention of letting Sergeant Redding order either of them into the swamp to start searching. If Redding did, Marsh had already decided he was going to push Halliday into the water instead and say he stumbled into him. Which Halliday was already braced for, because he knew Marsh only too well, and he wasn’t going in there either.

      Redding, aware of all this, and thankful that they hadn’t thrown in mutant vampire unicorns, looked up at the sky. The storm was starting to break up. The rain was coming down hard.

      “Can the dogs follow a trail in this weather?” Halliday was asking, mainly to distract Redding from the whole “into the swamp, boys” idea. Redding had run a K-9 car for a couple of years.

      “A light rain will freshen up a scent, but heavy rain and wind, that’s a lot more difficult.”

      “Been done,” said Marsh. “Remember that case last year, prisoner goes into the Glades, in a hurricane, but the dogs found him anyway?”

      “Because he was half eaten by a gator,” said Halliday, “and he’d started to stink. My mom coulda found him.”

      “Doesn’t matter,” said Redding. “Worth a shot. Let’s get the dog cars down here. And I want some Marine units out there. And let the Flagler County deputies know what’s going on too. I want a tight perimeter—lady could sure as hell motor—”

      “Damn straight,” said Halliday. “She was going away so fast I thought I had stopped to pee.”

      “So where the hell is she?” Redding said, a rhetorical question.

      “Gotta be here somewhere,” said Marsh.

      “LQ’s right, she’s still around. Have Flagler County set up a cordon around these blocks.”

      “All this for an F thirty-seven?” said Marsh.

      “I know. A lot of overtime. I just...”

      “Got a feeling she’s worth chasing?”

      “Yeah. I do,” he said, thinking about the expression on her face, cool, defiant, not frightened at all. And he knew her from...somewhere. “She got my attention.”

      Marsh was reaching for his portable to make the calls when they heard two sharp flat cracks close together, a brief pause and then one more.

      “Gunfire,” said Halliday, but Redding and Marsh were already running back toward the trees.

       seventeen days ago

      By the time Gerald Jeffrey Walker and his family arrived at their vacation condo at Amelia Island on Florida’s Atlantic coast—after thirteen hours on the road from St. Louis—the feeling inside the family’s GMC Suburban was sharply split on the issue of the Harwoods.

      The Harwoods—Marietta, pronounced Mayretta, and her husband, Ellison—were Christian Evangelicals and they ran a very large and very rewarding ministry—financially rewarding at any rate—called the New Covenant Celestial Ministry, and one of their many income streams came from the sale of their Evangelical Christian audiobooks.

      Walker—sometimes known as “Jerry Jeff” after the blues guy—was a forensic archaeologist working for a unit of the US Army Corps of Engineers based in St. Louis. His team was called in whenever artifacts or bones were unearthed at a construction site, sometimes in remote corners of the world.

      He considered this calling a sacred duty, since it involved an effort to determine exactly where these artifacts or bones came from, and what sort of spiritual beliefs had once been attached to them. This information was hard to come by.

      It required bone and DNA analysis, the assessment of causes of death, including weapons that might have been used if there were indications of murder or human sacrifice, as well as a grip on local cultural history and a great deal of spiritual imagination.

      Perhaps because of his work and the moral challenges it presented—bringing peace to the spirits of the dead—in his off-hours Walker served as a Worship Leader at the Glad Day Assembly, an Evangelical Christian megachurch in their hometown of Florissant, Missouri.

      Walker and his wife, Marilyn, who ran the childcare center at the Glad Day Assembly, tried very hard to believe that they had a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ, a difficult exercise in faith that met with varying degrees of success, particularly for a man with a PhD in forensic archaeology and a woman with a master’s degree in education.

      In an effort to bridge this gap they had invested in the Marietta and Ellison Harwood Collection of inspirational Christian audiobooks.

      They did this because Walker’s work had brought him face-to-face with mass graves, with human sacrifices, with the residue of every kind of violent evil, and the only protection from the fallen world, both ancient and modern, seemed to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

      So they decided to take advantage of the drive down from Florissant to share the Harwood Ministry’s latest releases—Ellison’s The Power of Love and his wife Marietta’s My Celestial Heart Sings—with their three daughters, admittedly a captive audience.

      The Suburban seated seven, but divisive forces relating to the Harwood Ministry had affected the family dynamic on the way down Interstate 75.

      This had resulted in the front bucket seats being occupied by Walker and his wife, Marilyn, of course, since they shared the driving, and the bench seat immediately behind them had become the private domain of the youngest Walker daughter, six-year-old Alyssa.

      Alyssa СКАЧАТЬ