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“Is this personal with you?”
Redding thought about it.
“I don’t know... Maybe... I sort of felt like...like I had seen her somewhere.”
“Like on a Wanted sheet?”
“No. Something else. Don’t know what. Anyway, now that we got a rookie hurt, that makes it personal.”
“Yes, it does. See you later.”
“Mace, you be careful when you talk to the kid. Now that what we have is two, potentially three dead victims. That kid is sixteen going on sixty. She knows what the hell happened. Don’t Mirandize her. We don’t want her to ask for a lawyer—”
“If she does ask?”
“Try not to make her ask. I told the guys, we’re Officer Friendly. Be nice. Be caring. 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 there was one lone figure at the edge of the marsh, facing out into the dark.
That 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...?”
