Carsten Stroud - The Shimmer

The truck engine was running hot and loud, the rain hammering on its roof. Water was running down Julie’s face and she blinked it away, wishing she had put on her Stetson.

Redding was going left, and he came to a stop about ten feet off the left rear wheel, his gun up. Karras had taken the same position on the right rear side. They could smell scorched rubber and overheated metal steaming in the rain.

The driver’s door hung wide-open, the seat belt dangling. From the interior of the truck, someone crying, a woman’s voice.

“In the truck,” said Redding in a voice of brass, “show me your hands. Do it now!”

Faint, from deep inside the truck, a shaky female voice, young. “Don’t shoot us. Please.”

Karras moved up a yard, reached for the rear door. Redding told her to stop. He stepped up to the left-side rear door, leveled his gun and jerked the rear door open.

Two teenage girls were lying on the rear bench seat. They were cord cuffed to the front-seat floor struts. They were crying, beyond hysterical.

“Help us,” said one of them, dark haired, possibly the older one.

“Please. She’s crazy. She kidnapped us.”

Karras popped the other rear door, put her gun on them, wary, tense, her finger almost inside the trigger guard. Both girls were in jeans and boots, T-shirts, hair every which way, eyes red from crying, faces flushed and frightened.

In shock, scared to death.

“Who are you?” he asked, in a softer tone.

“I’m Rebecca Walker. This is my sister Karen. Help us please? That woman kidnapped us!”

Redding looked at Karras. She looked back, and they both did a quick check of the interior. Luggage scattered around. Remnants of a Happy Meal, candy wrappers, water bottles. No one else. Just the girls, cuffed to the floor.

Redding lowered his weapon and after a moment Karras did the same.

“I’m gonna go after the runner. Can you take care of these two?”

Karras said she would, lips so tight they were blue.

“You go, Sergeant. I’ll get EMT in here.”

“Search them first, Julie. Before you cut them loose. You never know.”

“I will. Go get her.”

Redding took one last look at the girls, showed them his teeth, a quick smile that was supposed to be comforting and wasn’t even close.

Redding turned away and raced down into the trees, a big lean rangy guy who could move like a linebacker when he had to. He pulled out his portable.

“LQ, I’m coming in.”

“Roger that, Jack.”

Redding jogged into the trees, ducking under the dripping branches, feeling the mossy ground squelch under his boots. He had his Glock out, down by his side, and every nerve on redline.

The stand of scrub trees was dense, maybe a hundred feet deep. When he came out from under them after a paranoid two-minute jog-trot during which he checked out every treetop he passed under, he could see Marsh walking the shoreline, gun out but down at his side, his back to Redding. He was facing out across the swamps and reed beds toward the Intracoastal, head turning back and forth. Halliday was down the shore about fifty yards.

Marsh heard Redding sloshing through the seagrass, even with this rain lashing down and the wind ripping through the trees.

“Jack.”

“LQ. Got anything?”

“She left a trail all the way down,” he said, his face slick as patent leather in the rain, a puzzled expression in his eyes.

“You can see it over there, that silver streak in the grass. Comes right down to the shore here, stops dead.”

Redding looked out over the swamp, sort of a mini Everglades, clumps and islands of sawgrass and reeds and cattails, all of it bending down under the rain. The sky was shredding, wisps of lighter gray showing through the cover. The wind was backing off but it was still raining hard.

Halliday walked up the shoreline toward them, staring down into the shallow murky water that ran in curving channels under and around a thousand little islands of seagrass. He was a big blond Panhandle kid who had played two years as a starting DB for the Gators. He did a 180 to check the tree line one more time, and then came back to them, his face as blank and confused as Marsh’s.

“Sure she’s not back in the woods?” Redding asked. Halliday and Marsh shook their heads in unison.

“Not back there, Jack,” said Marsh. “We were close, we could see her going through the forest—”

“She ran like a fucking gazelle,” said Halliday.

“Yeah, she could move real good,” said Marsh. “Faster than us. We lost her in the rain here, and the branches were in our faces like whips. By the time we cleared the trees all we could see was that.”

He tilted his head toward the silver track in the tall grass.

“Ending at the water,” Halliday finished. “Broad just flat-out vanished . Fucking weird, Jack. Like into thin air. Too fucking weird. We walked the shore up and down, looking for a ripple where she coulda gone in. Mud bottom kicked up. Nothing.”

“That’s right, Jack. Vanished.”

All three of them turned back to the swamp.

It was about two hundred yards wide at this point, running for about a mile along the shore. On the far side of the marsh was the Intracoastal. The Intracoastal was like a marine version of I-95. In the summer it was as crowded as an interstate, although the squall had driven everyone except a few crazies into the marinas.

“How deep do you figure this is?” Redding asked, meaning the swamp.

Marsh, who was a bass boater, shook his head.

“No more’n two maybe three feet. But the bottom is thick muck, just like quicksand. You think she had 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.”