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The Shimmer
Carsten Stroud
‘Carsten Stroud is a world-class storyteller… He effortlessly combines hard-nosed cops, mafia dons, and supernatural events with convincing ease. The prose is music. He had me reading late into the night.’ STEPHEN KINGHow do you hunt a killer who can go back in time and make sure you’re never born?Sergeant Jack Redding is hot on the trail of a time travelling serial killer who rides The Shimmer across the decades. The stakes turn brutal when the chance to alter past events offers Jack a terrible choice.Taking us from modern-day Jacksonville, to 1950s Mafia-ruled St. Augustine, and on to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1914, The Shimmer is a unique, time-shifting thriller that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.Readers love Carsten Stroud:“Great pacing, intriguing plot twists, evocative prose.”“page-turner with a satisfying and ingenious plot”“a very clever time travel mystery that is fast-paced and engaging”“Exciting, suspenseful, violent at a couple of points, frightening and heartwarming”“a magnificent literary gift”
How do you hunt a killer who can go back in time and make sure you’re never born?
A police pursuit kicks Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his trainee, Julie Karras, into a shoot-out that ends with one girl dead and another in cuffs, and the driver of the SUV fleeing into the Intracoastal Waterway. Redding stays on the hunt, driven by the trace memory that he knows that running woman—and he does, because his grandfather, a cop in Jacksonville, was hunting the same woman in 1957.
Redding and his partner, Pandora Jansson, chase a seductive serial killer who can ride The Shimmer across decades. The pursuit cuts from modern-day Jacksonville to Mafia-ruled St. Augustine in 1957, then to the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1914. The stakes turn brutal when Jack, whose wife and child died in a crash the previous Christmas Eve, faces a terrible choice: help his grandfather catch the killer, or change time itself and try to save his wife and child.
The Shimmer is a unique time-shifting thriller that will stay with you long after its utterly unforeseen and yet perfectly diabolical ending.
Also By Carsten Stroud (#u28112b36-bc24-5294-8754-1428358201f5)
The Reckoning
The Homecoming
Niceville
Sniper’s Moon
Cobraville
Cuba Strait
Black Water Transit
Deadly Force
Iron Bravo
Lizard Skin
Close Pursuit
The Shimmer
Carsten Stroud
Copyright (#u28112b36-bc24-5294-8754-1428358201f5)
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Carsten Stroud 2018
Carsten Stroud asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9781474082839
For The Love Of My Life
Contents
Cover (#uff3c5c23-ad69-5e5b-a916-a5f6d6a2e751)
Back Cover Text (#u739f6cc4-b4be-551d-9a89-09b335b44bb0)
Booklist (#u2b4629f1-fb75-5274-92e7-956aba668040)
Title Page (#u2c9c6605-914b-50bf-aeb6-a7993ecc4099)
Copyright (#uece71d1a-43bb-5877-a5be-037293608849)
Dedication (#ubfe0b4b7-accb-5aeb-b6fe-4c2f512d3678)
go down to the river and prey (#uf42a7614-2ce1-5713-98bd-dd822f661863)
seventeen days ago (#u729eb4b4-bcba-5dbc-9c26-4ab1c0bb9ba3)
the lady in the lake (#ua4a71e49-2e90-5119-ab33-1df79fc0afe4)
karen walker reaches a vital conclusion (#ud190797e-72d7-5bc7-8858-6737af2a0cea)
selena contemplates the past and the past contemplates selena (#litres_trial_promo)
things get antediluvian (#litres_trial_promo)
selena consults the crocodile (#litres_trial_promo)
the last walker breathing (#litres_trial_promo)
nostalgia...from the greek nostos (to return home) and algos (the pain) (#litres_trial_promo)
selena finds a curved space in the air (#litres_trial_promo)
objects in the mirror are closer than they appear (#litres_trial_promo)
selena dreams of home (#litres_trial_promo)
the truth about truth (#litres_trial_promo)
the death and life and death of mary alice (#litres_trial_promo)
you’re not from around here are you (#litres_trial_promo)
never send to know for whom the phone rings (#litres_trial_promo)
time lockets (#litres_trial_promo)
death in the afternoon (#litres_trial_promo)
though hell should bar the way (#litres_trial_promo)
feral is as feral does (#litres_trial_promo)
you know what, tony, I believe you (#litres_trial_promo)
event horizon (#litres_trial_promo)
september first nineteen fifty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
the beach house (#litres_trial_promo)
departures (#litres_trial_promo)
author’s note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
go down to the river and prey (#u28112b36-bc24-5294-8754-1428358201f5)
An afternoon in late August, a Thursday, four hours and sixteen minutes left on Day watch, cruising down the A1A twenty miles south of St. Augustine in an unmarked shark-gray Crown Vic, Sergeant Jack Redding of the Florida Highway Patrol and his rookie trainee were watching a black Suburban with heavily tinted windows and Missouri plates. They were watching the black Suburban because it was lurching across two lanes of heavy traffic like a wounded rhino.
Far out over the Atlantic a tsunami of storm clouds was filling the horizon. An onshore gale gritty with beach sand was lashing at the rusted flagpoles over the tired old lime-green and pink stucco motels—Crystal Shores, Pelican Beach, Emerald Seas—the gale fluttering their faded awnings. The air smelled of ozone and sea salt and fading magnolias.
Redding looked over at his trainee, a compact sport-model blonde by the name of Julie Karras. Since she was fresh out of the Academy and this was her first day on the job, she was on fire to pull the truck over and carpet bomb the driver’s ass.
“What do you think, boss? Can I hit the lights?”
Redding went back to the truck. It had eased up on the lurching. It was now more of a wobble. Maybe the driver had been fumbling around in the glove compartment or checking his iPhone and had finally stopped doing that. Or maybe he was totally cranked out of his mind and had just now noticed a cop car riding his ass. Whatever it was, the guy was slowing down, doing a little less than the 60 per allowed.
“Grounds, Julie?”
He could see her mentally running the Traffic Infractions List through her mind. She was too proud to check the sheet on her clipboard. Although he’d only met her at 0800 hours, when Day watch started, Redding liked her. She had...something.
Style was the wrong word.
No. She had bounce.
“I Five,” she said, after a moment, “Improper Change of Lanes.”
Julie Karras was in Redding’s unmarked cruiser because her regular training officer—who had been born in Chicago, the frozen attic of the nation—had confused Canadian ice hockey with a real American sport, such as football, and had gotten all of his upper front incisors duly redeployed. So the CO had handed her off to Redding for the week.
“Try not to get her killed on her first shift,” said the CO, whose name was Bart Dixon but everybody called him, inevitably, Mason, often shortened to Mace. “It’s bad for recruitment.”
Dixon, a bullet-shaped black guy with a shaved head and bullet scar on his left cheek, had grinned at him around an Old Port cheroot that smelled like burning bats. The part about not getting her killed wasn’t entirely irrelevant because Redding’s main job wasn’t Patrol.
He worked Serious Crimes Liaison with the State Bureau of Investigations. He’d killed five men and one woman while doing that because, while he didn’t go looking for gun fights, he didn’t do a whole lot to avoid them either. And in a hellhole city like Jacksonville, gun fights were always on the menu.
Redding didn’t mind taking on Julie Karras. She was crazy pretty, it was a fine summer day—or had been up until just now—and late August was slack time for the SBI, with most of them off on vacation. So if you were a career criminal and you desperately wanted to get your ass busted you were going to have to wait until after the end of the month.
Karras was from up North he remembered her saying. Charleston or Savannah so she had that sweet Tidewater lilt in her voice. She had the infraction number wrong though.
“I Six, you mean,” he said, but gently.
I Five was Improper Backing. Both infractions, but when he’d been in Patrol that’s where you started off, with a possible infraction. It hardly ever stayed there, but you had to have probable cause before you could make a stop. Otherwise everything that flowed from the stop—drugs, guns, illegal transportation of underage gerbils across state lines—would get thrown out of court.
“How about you run those plates first? Let’s see what we’re getting into here.”
Karras swiveled the MDT display around on its base, punched in 407 XZT, hit the search tab.
The Suburban had steadied and was now doing the speed limit. Exactly the speed limit. Redding’s unmarked was several cars back, in heavy traffic. Maybe they’d been seen and maybe not. But something was going ping in Redding’s cop brain.
He didn’t like big black SUVs with dark-tinted windows. Most cops felt exactly the same way. Big Black Boxes packed with Explosive Situations.
A gust of wind blew a cloud of beach sand across all four lanes of A1A and everybody’s brake lights flared as the drivers reacted. Grains of sand were peppering the glass at his shoulder and he could feel the car rocking. He looked east past the roofs of the beach houses that lined the coast, and there it was, heading their way, a white squall.
Karras looked up from the computer screen.
“Comes back with a Gerald Jeffrey Walker. DOB November 10, 1971. Address of 1922 Halls Ferry Road, Florissant, Missouri. No Wants No Warrants.”
Redding started to back off, letting his ping fade. Not every black Suburban was full of—
“Now this,” said Karras, giving him a puzzled look. “It just popped up on the screen. A ten-thirty-five? What’s a ten-thirty-five?”
Redding kept his eyes on that black Suburban. It had suddenly become much more interesting.
“That’s the code for Confidential Information.”
“What does it mean?”
“You’ll see in a moment,” he said, letting the Suburban drift farther ahead, falling back out of the guy’s rearview, if he was watching the cruiser at all. Which he sure as hell was because everyone did. A cop car in your rearview was like a scorpion in your martini. People noticed. He heard the MDT chirp, and Karras read off the radio code.
“It says ten-seventy-six?”
Redding was expecting that.
