by Erik Carter
Surely not…
Maybe Silence was over-analyzing, jumping to conclusions, allowing the similarities to cloud his judgment, to create new connections where there were none.
Maybe he should meditate.
What would C.C. think?
“That’s why I have to keep doing this,” Val said. “You gotta have a ‘why,’ as they say. I just think of Toby, and I…”
Her words faded away again.
Silence’s attention drifted downward, away from Val, to the tabletop. His brow knitted, eyes squinted.
Dammit! He hated how chaotic his thought process was, the roiling pool of ideas and correlations.
Was there a connection?
What would C.C. think?
He turned back to Val.
She was still talking, animatedly. But Silence heard none of it.
A different voice. Another woman. Muted, barely audible.
“You’re thinking it to death,” C.C. said.
The sound of waves.
Val said something particularly important, something that produced a big flourish of her arms. And a silent laugh. Her lips moved rapid-fire, hands telling the symphony of her story, as the sound of the waves grew louder.
Waves. And seagulls.
Silence allowed his mind to visit the past again, going back even further, before he’d gone to New Orleans, before he’d met the Bowmans.
Where Val’s head, shoulders, and torso had faced him there was now a different woman, roughly the same age, in her late twenties, olive skin, full lips, Italian, her hair and bare shoulders shining in the sunlight, the field of sand surrounding her a blazing, pure white.
Pensacola Beach, Florida.
Jake and C.C. were cross-legged on towels, a few feet apart and facing each other. People in swimwear all around them, lying out in the sun, walking, laughing, tossing footballs and frisbees, swimming in the emerald green waves. In the distance were a large pier and towering condominium buildings.
Jake wore standard beachwear—a pair of sunglasses, tank-top, shorts. By contrast, C.C.’s clothing, while definitely not out of place, had a quirky flare different than those around her—a long, sheer sarong over a pair of bicycle shorts, white tank with spaghetti straps and a mass of dangling necklaces. Her dark, curly hair was tied up with a red-and-white headband that looked straight from the 1940s, stripped from the head of Rosie the Riveter herself.
“How can a person think too hard about something?” Jake had said. “That makes no sense at all.”
“Exactly.”
“Huh?”
“It makes no sense because of the very fact you think things to death.”
“Now I’m thinking too hard about the concept of thinking too hard?”
“Precisely.”
Jake groaned. He loved this woman, but sometimes she confounded him. He let his chin drop to his chest, which was moist with sweat.
“You’re so confusing.” He looked back up, gave her a smile, before turning to look at the beach surrounding them. “Can we stop sitting like this? People are staring.”
“Who cares? Now, listen, we’ve been working on this, clarifying your mind. You’re a thinker, love. You think so much. And you believe that if you think really hard, you’ll find your answers, that if you don’t think really hard, you’re somehow being negligent. Let’s go back to where we were the other day. Hands.”
She put her hands on her knees, yoga style.
Jake glanced left and right. “A lot more people here than last week.”
C.C. gave him a look.
Jake sighed, put his hands on his knees in the same manner as hers.
“Eyes,” C.C. said.
Jake closed his eyes. And immediately eased one back open, stole a glance at C.C. Her eyes were open, watching him, like a mindful teacher. She scowled, and he closed the eye.
“Good,” she said. “Now quiet your mind.”
Jake smiled with his eyes closed. “Hey, you! Mind! Yeah, you. Zip it before I sock you a good one!”
“Jake…”
“Fine.”
He took a deep breath.
“What thoughts are in your head?”
“The same ones that were there when my eyes were open. Why there appears to be a schism forming in the gang. How this is going to play out in terms of arrests. Hell, not even arrests. I’m jumping the gun. Warrants. All the warrants that are going to be needed. God, what a nightmare. And, of course, with some of these, Tanner and I are going to need to find the right judges, and around here—”
“Love?” C.C. said gently.
“Yeah?”
“Shut up. Quiet your thoughts. Forget the details of the assignment for the time being. Be here. Right now. Find the silence of the present.”
Jake smirked through his closed eyes again. “The silence of the present? Babe, do you hear all of this?”
He lifted one of his yoga hands from his knee and gestured broadly toward the cacophony of sounds around them—squawking seagulls, laughter, children screaming, pounding waves.
“Where are your feet?” C.C. said, still with her gentle tone, unperturbed.
“Just below my ankles.”
“Jake…”
He grumbled. But when he spoke again, he tried to be more accommodating, less stubborn. He’d done these exercises with her before, and though he didn’t particularly like them, he knew the drill.
“They’re folded beneath my legs.”
“Yes, pressed against your beach towel. How does the towel feel?”
“Soft. Fuzzy.”
“Good. And warm?”
“Very warm. Hot, actually. The sun’s hot.”
“Now your touch points. Other than your feet, where is your body making contact with the earth?”
Jake was quiet for a half moment as he monitored.
“My butt. And the outside edges of my thighs.”
“Good. Now begin with the top of your head. Do you feel the sun on your part? The breeze tussling your hair?”
“Yes.”
“Relax your scalp. Let all the tension wash away. Your face next, releasing all pressure, letting all the tiny muscles go soft and slack. Very good. Continue down. You carry a lot of tension in your neck. Let it go. Down through your chest and shoulders, through your arms, all the way to your fingertips. Let all of those tiny muscles melt, all the stress drifting away, into the sea. Good, love. Down through your stomach, into your thighs, your calves.”
The sound of the waves grew quieter. Echoey. And then abstract. Lines on a canvas. Seagulls were pinpoints. Laughter became phosphorescent blossoms.
“How do things sound now?” C.C. said from the other side of the beach, the opposite end of the canvas, a parallel plane.
“Quieter,” Jake whispered.
“Good. Now listen to your mind, love.”
Val laughed.
Silence jumped.
Her lips stopped mid-story. “You okay, Rob?”
Silence nodded.
She continued. “So, yeah, I just need the money so damn bad. Even a single class is expensive, ya know. And without a way to…”
Silence had to clear his mind. The parallels between this assignment and the undercover work in his past were creating a confused muddle. The Ramirezes. The Bowmans. Intercepted protection payments. It was all getting jumbled.
He needed to meditate.
Normally in a situation like this he’d close his eyes and meditate right there, wherever “there” might be. But he couldn’t now. Not with his unintentional companion still talking. If he could—
Movement. At the Ramirez house.
Though Silence hadn’t checked the house for several minutes, he had kept it carefully in his periphery. His mind might have had a tendency to get overcrowded with thoughts, but his situational awareness was expert.
He turned, looked through the window, into the darkness.
Two blocks away, Adriana stepped out of the front door, headed down the porch steps, a
nd went toward an old Volkswagen Beetle, keys in hand.
Shit!
He knew it.
He popped out of his seat and bolted toward the entrance.
“…so when the time is right, I need to— Hey! Where you going?” Val shouted after him.
Silence didn’t turn around, just sprinted for the door.
“You can’t leave! I’ll get a point for this! Hey!”
He pushed through the door and sprinted into the thick, warm night.
Chapter Ten
In New Orleans, years earlier, the nighttime air was also dense with humidity, but the temperature was lower, almost cool, the strange phenomenon of mugginess that can make a person sweat at the same time they’re feeling chilly. The window in the Bowmans’ kitchen was open, and the cool, moist air wafted in through the screen.
The kitchen was as typically middle class as the living room—light-stained maple cabinets with white drawers, decorative copper cookware hanging on one wall, dirty dishes mounded in the dual-basin sink, the lingering scent of that evening’s dinner.
Jake sat next to Wesley at the wooden table, which was covered with a simple cloth, a washed-out coral color, red once upon a time.
Kip was the only other person in the kitchen, but he wasn’t seated at the table. He circled around the room, muttering, his tone switching periodically from pitiful to outraged. Half the time he couldn’t look at Wesley; the other half of the time, he glared into the younger man.
Wesley looked at neither his father nor Jake but the tabletop in front of him. His head drooped between his lowered shoulders, hands knitted in front of him, twisting.
Jake watched Wesley, waiting for the answer to his question.
“I thought joining the gang would be a way to escape this life,” Wesley said, his voice small, completely devoid of all the gun-toting bravado it had moments earlier. “I thought—”
“‘This life?’” Kip shouted, halting his endless loop around the kitchen. “What life would that be? This comfortable home I raised you in? That you still live in as a nineteen-year-old man? College was your path to something bigger, boy, and—”
Jake gave Kip a small, mediating motion of his hand. “Mr. Bowman, please.” And to Wesley, he said, “Who were the people you worked with? How did you meet them?”
Wesley still didn’t look up. He focused on his hands, the fingernail he was scratching at. “One of them approached me at the college last week. Never gave me his name or the name of the gang. But he said he’d noticed me playing ball, thought I had what it takes. I hoop on the campus courts sometimes. You know, pick-up games.”
Kip muttered behind them.
“What did he look like, the guy who recruited you?”
“White, kind of stocky. I’ve never gotten a good look at his face. He always wears this Cincinnati Reds baseball cap real low. Low profile, you know? Gangsta.”
“Have you met any other members of the gang?”
Wesley nodded. “Twice. At this old strip mall. There are two other guys. I’ve never seen those other two’s faces; they always wear black ski masks, like they wear when they…” He trailed off.
“When they rob your family?” Kip shouted.
“Go on,” Jake said to Wesley.
“We meet in person, at the strip mall. No phone calls. They said I’d be made, dude. How the hell could I pass that up?”
Kip scoffed, passing by on his latest path around the kitchen. “Get ‘made’ and destroy your family in the process.”
“There was another drop planned for tomorrow,” Jake said. “When were you to meet them and make arrangements?”
Wesley glanced at the clock again. “In fifteen minutes.”
Jake looked from the clock to Kip and back to Wesley. “I see. Then you and I need to take a little drive.”
Chapter Eleven
Like his prior self, Silence had determined he needed to “take a little ride,” this one a nighttime cruise through Sarasota, Florida, with lovely views of the backside of a blue, rusty 1970s Volkswagen Beetle.
He’d gotten to his rented Crown Vic before Adriana had made it out of the neighborhood. He’d caught up with her a couple of blocks away from her house, at which point he pulled back, avoiding detection.
She’d left her home.
After people had just attacked it, tried to burn it to the ground, after the mysterious assassin who had eliminated her attackers had expressly told her not to leave.
She’d left.
And Silence had a feeling she wasn’t out to pick up some McDonald’s.
Ideally there would have been a lot of traffic on the streets, plenty of places for him to hide, but the night was relatively quiet, so he kept a few car-lengths of distance between them, and only occasionally did another vehicle fill the void. From his first meeting with her, Adriana’s tells had informed him that she wasn’t the most street-savvy of people. She wouldn’t notice him trailing.
A red traffic light ahead. The Beetle’s right turn signal blinked. Adriana was about to merge onto U.S. 41, the principal highway running through Sarasota.
Silence followed her south on the multi-lane, languid, forty-mile-per-hour street through miles of strip malls and chain restaurants and gas stations and palm trees and doctors’ offices, nearly all of it quite clean and comfortable. Sarasota had money.
After fifteen minutes of this, the Beetle’s turn signal came to life again, and Silence followed.
A quiet side street, so quiet that he had to slow down, pull farther back. There were no longer any vehicles between them.
Communities full of expensive homes lined either side of the street, which was dotted with benches, towering palms, and pink-flowered crape myrtles. Decorative yet solid ten-foot walls rolled past, walls that defined the different communities, multi-story houses looking out over the top edges.
Sherman Heights. Woodsman Grove. Blue Creek Valley. Stately signs gave the community names in big, proud lettering, illuminated from below with bright lights stationed in lush landscaping. The Beetle passed by more and more of them, for over a mile, to where Silence was starting to think that Adriana had become aware he was following.
But then the Beetle’s turn signal came on again, and it entered Miller Springs. Silence pulled back farther.
One- and two-story behemoth homes. Precisely trimmed lawns, obscenely green. Chattering sprinkler systems. Palm trees. Perfectly, intentionally quaint streetlights.
A couple more turns, and the Beetle pulled into the driveway of a sprawling one-floor, coastal-style affair of probably four or five thousand square feet. Walls of stone and stucco interrupted by copious windows. Elaborate Florida landscaping lush with several types of palms of drastically different heights, flowering bushes, and tangles of broad tropical leaves. Modern, sophisticated decor could be seen through the many towering rectangular banks of windows, from which warm, inviting light poured into the lawn.
Why the hell had Adriana Ramirez left her recently attacked home, defying his request that she stay, to come to a place like this?
Silence brought the Crown Vic to a halt, two blocks back. He leaned down over the dashboard and looked up at the massive, brightly lit house.
Chapter Twelve
In New Orleans, Jake had also leaned down over a vehicle dash to peer at a building outside. He was on the passenger side of a dry-rotted vinyl bench seat, and in the misty New Orleans night before him was an abandoned strip mall, the destination for Wesley Bowman’s scheduled meeting with the unnamed representative of the gang he’d been trying to join, the people for whom he’d sold out his family and their life savings.
Wesley brought the Ford Ranger pickup truck to a slow stop in the blacktop expanse of the parking lot, which was scarred by weed-filled fissures, not unlike the parking lot behind the warehouse earlier in the evening. He put the stick in neutral and pushed the parking brake pedal. “This is it.”
Though Jake was in full police mode, deep-seated paternal instincts also vied
for his attention. He wanted to chastise the kid—How the hell did you think anything good would come from dealing with people out of a place like this?
It had been a long time since the strip mall had seen customers. The parking lot islands were overgrown with tall grass, weeds, runaway juniper bushes, and untrimmed palm trees, their dead fronds rustling in the breeze. The mall itself was a long, single-story slab of building, beige and probably bland even in its heyday. Now it was as stripped of any vestige of joy as it was stripped of all signage. Particle board and broken glass. Rusty shopping carts. Tipped over, collapsed garbage cans.
Jake turned to Wesley. “All right. Here’s the story: I’m a buddy of yours, an older guy, a friend of the family who wants to join the gang as well. I’m good with cracking locks, so you think I’d be a good recruit. Got it?”
Wesley nodded.
Jake opened his door. “Let’s go.”
They started across the parking lot, toward the mall. Wesley pointed. “Over there. In the corner. The red hat.”
He was indicating the back central point of the L-shaped building, a deep shadow beneath the overhang. Just visible was the silhouette of a man, hands in his pockets, hints of his figure and a bright red baseball cap.
And as Jake saw this man, he felt the presence of another. He turned.
A different shadow figure, in the distance, at the far end of the strip mall. When Jake’s gaze fell upon him, the man disappeared around the corner.
He remembered the man who’d been watching him an hour ago when he knocked on the Bowmans’ door. He’d thought then that his imagination was running wild, that the person was nothing more than a neighborhood resident. But now it was confirmed.
Someone was following him.
However, like before, Jake couldn’t concern himself with the person following him. His immediate attention needed to be here, focused on this other figure shrouded in darkness.
