Shimmer by Hilary Norman Read Free Book Online

because he’d been having trouble sleeping, and this woman wasn’t going to be needing them any more, that was for sure.
    He’d only begun stressing after he’d left Wilmington about how he was bound to have left behind some microscopic traces of himself, because that was when it came back to him that the cops probably had his DNA on their files, so even though it hadn’t been his fault that the woman had died, it had made him paranoid for a long time after. But no one had come looking for him either on Baby or in any of the places he’d moored her, so after a while he’d stopped fretting and had decided that maybe she’d had a husband who hadn’t liked the idea of other people knowing that his wife went out looking to pay for her jollies.
    And Cal figured that he had, at least, given her a happy exit.
    It had changed him, though.
    Cal had come to believe that people who’d never actually presided over the death of another human being could not begin to understand how it felt. And that was how it had felt to him – as if he’d been somehow in charge – because even though it had been her body’s fault, not his, he had still been inside her when it had happened, so he was, in a sense, responsible for it, which was, when all was said and done, pretty damned impressive.
    Not as impressive as what had happened early Friday morning.
    His heart hadn’t stopped until after the cord had choked off his breath and finished his life. But after that part was over, something entirely different had overcome Cal. A rage totally unprecedented for him, part of it directed at the dead man for being what he was to begin with – one of them – part at himself for wanting him, for allowing himself to share physical contact with such a person, physical pleasure , for fuck’s sake.
    Mostly, though, Cal knew, the rage had been directed at Jewel, who’d taught him so well about racism and hate and fury – wanton fury, he guessed it was, and he thought that ‘wanton’ was a word he remembered from the Bible, and he’d liked it enough to include it once in his Epistle.
    He hadn’t planned any of it, though, neither the killing nor the destruction that had come after, but it had seemed to him at the time that he’d had no choice, that he just had to do it.
    And then after the rage, after the out rage, once his rational mind had begun functioning again, he’d been surprised by how well he’d been able to go on thinking and planning.
    But now the cops were out there looking for him – at least they were looking for someone, for an unknown killer – and he was shut away in this hole, and he knew he was going to have to be damned careful for a while, stay here for about as long as he could stand it, before he could risk going out again.
    Being a joy-boy again.

12
    His sister-in-law was in the kitchen when Sam came down in the morning.
    Two-and-a-half hours’ sleep before going back to work on a weekend morning – and that scrap of rest had been disturbed at around four thirty by Joshua’s crying, though Sam had a fuzzy recollection of Grace waking instantly and saying she’d take care of him – but now his wife and son were still sleeping, which was good, and Sam had showered and shaved and was feeling at last half human, and he, like most of his colleagues, had been known to go to work on less rest than this.
    â€˜Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?’ he said as he walked in and saw Claudia, in a black satin robe, standing watching the kettle reach boiling point.
    â€˜You, too,’ she said.
    Their hug was warm, their fondness real, though they’d seldom spent more than a matter of days together in the seven years or so that they’d known one another. But Claudia was Grace’s beloved sister, which was all that mattered to Sam, and pulling back now to check her out, he saw what his wife had meant