by Erik Carter
Jake squinted as they approached, the rotten asphalt crunching beneath their shoes. The man’s features grew clearer. Jake could see the white C, for Cincinnati, on the center of the man’s ball cap. Strands of hair, falling out, dark blond. He noticed that—
The man suddenly turned and ran into the empty storefront next to him.
Jake turned to Wesley. “Why’d he bolt?”
Wesley’s eyes were open wide. He shook his head. “No idea.”
Jake looked to the storefront where the man had vanished. It was one of the mall’s bigger locations, with a large glass entryway and banks of windows on each side, one of them boarded up. There were hints of shapes at the front of the store—shelving, boxes— while shadow consumed the rest of the space.
Half a second of hesitation from Jake. Then he said, “Stay here.”
And he sprinted toward the store. He drew his weapon.
He bounded onto the sidewalk, slowed down, gun in front of him. The doors were busted out, splintered sheets of safety glass hanging like drapes from stainless-steel molding.
He stepped through an empty door frame. Pebbles of safety glass screeched beneath his boots. The sharp smell of musty fabric. The drooping ceiling was a frozen sea of waves disappearing into the darkness, a mosaic of stained tiles and empty squares. Tangled piles of merchandise racks. Yellowed signs with smiling models, their faces eaten by encroaching patches of mildew.
Jake walked in, his boots finding more broken glass.
Just visible in the back was a doorway, one that must have led to an office or changing rooms. The door moved gently in a slight breeze coming through a nearby open patch of ceiling, a gaping hole, completely open to the nighttime sky.
Jake headed toward the door.
A pile of shelves to his left crashed down with a screech, and a chrome rod swung toward him, catching him across the stomach.
A hot flash of pain. Air sucked from his lungs. Jake folded over, and in this moment, the man lunged upon him, grabbing Jake’s hand in between the metal braces of two broken shelves, pinching them together, scissoring his gun free. It clanked on the linoleum.
A knee to Jake’s chest, bending him farther over. The man hopped onto a short table, a bit of high ground, and used this tactical advantage to grab Jake’s neck from behind. Rough fingers clamped into Jake’s throat. He wheezed for breath, slapped his hands behind him, weak, futile strikes. His lungs ached, neck burned.
From his bent-over position, he spotted something in his inverted perspective—the table the man was standing on. It was a glass-surfaced display table. And the man’s feet were dead-center on the glass.
Jake raised his left boot, bringing his knee over his chest. He thrust backward, an arching kick that brought his heel into the underside of the table.
The glass shattered.
Pressure vanished from Jake’s neck. He sucked in a gasping breath, the tingle of relief flooding through him, into his face, his fingertips.
A crash behind him as the man fell through the table.
Jake looked for his gun. Gone. Somewhere in the shadows, in the debris.
He swung around to the table.
And he finally saw the man he’d been chasing. He lay in a pile of broken glass and the twisted chrome frame of the ruined table, legs draped over the edge, bathed in a patch of light coming in through the front windows.
It was Glover.
Chapter Thirteen
Silence moved along the exterior of the house, mulch crunching beneath his shoes, clinging to the shadows as best he could, a challenge given that light flooded from the many windows, and exterior lighting from units on the walls and beneath the eaves added to the glow. He slid around palm trees, dodged flowers, and stopped frequently at the edges of the windows, as he continued to trace his target’s movements through the opulence of the interior.
Adriana.
She had entered through a side door of the garage, gone through a small entryway, turned a corner into a dining room with an all-glass table bearing an arrangement of abstract wire flowers in an oversized red vase, through the main foyer, and into a great room, where she finally slowed.
She looked tiny there, her housekeeper’s dress making her a gray spot that floated on a sea of dark hardwood, the cathedral ceiling with its massive scissor beams—stained to match the floor—towering far above her. A set of furniture was arranged around an off-white rug that paired with the light tan walls. A fireplace was set into the wall opposite of the arrangement. More windows behind her, a full wall’s worth, revealing a sprawling pool area in the back, glimmering light. A hallway ran adjacent to the outdoor area.
A pair of feet were propped on an ottoman, crossed, men’s black boots, denim pant legs. The owner of the feet was seated in one of the armchairs whose backs were facing Silence’s window, and the man was evidently slouching, as Silence could see nothing of him over the back of the chair.
Adriana put her hand on the corner of the sofa and faced the armchair, spoke.
Silence reached into his pocket for his listening device. And stopped.
Because the man behind the chair stood up, arresting Silence’s movement entirely.
It was Lowry.
The man who’d kidnapped Adriana’s son. The man who extorted her life savings.
The man who’d sent his thugs to burn her house down little more than an hour ago…
Silence’s hand remained in his pocket, fingers resting on the device.
The revelation blew charged blasts into the storm of his mind. Confusion swallowed him, and he felt his chaotic headspace slipping from his control, assuming a path of its own.
He’d sat with her. Right across from her. He’d not seen it. Seen what? What the hell was this? He’d handed her the card, the damn card, the solemn offer—I’m here to help. The Watchers. Falcon, his boss, had picked this assignment personally, said that it was a perfect Watchers investigation. He’d said innocent people were being hurt. This mansion… Lowry didn’t have the money for a mansion. He wasn’t a mansion type of guy, not with his scruffy face, his thug associates.
Silence was lost in incertitude.
He felt himself drifting.
A man untethered in space, arms and legs kicking, darkness consuming him.
He needed to mind map. No, he needed to meditate. That was it. He needed to—
Focus. That’s what you need to do. Focus, damn you.
He pulled the device from his pocket, grabbed the pair of earbuds that were coiled beneath it, stuck one in his ear.
From the hallway in the back, another person stepped into the room.
And a fresh wave of oblivion crashed over Silence.
No.
That couldn’t be the man it appeared to be.
Silence hadn’t turned on the device yet, and the man’s lips moved noiselessly through a toothy grin as he approached the other two.
Late thirties. A physique that was toned in a country club fitness center sort of way. A short beard with a few grays. Parted hair on a mature hairline. He walked with the weight of someone proud of his surroundings, but the lines at the corners of his eyes spoke to harder struggles than difficult college classes or losing a few grand in the stock market. This guy had a past. Although the mansion was clearly his, he looked ever so slightly out of place.
He couldn’t be who Silence thought he was. No, surely not.
Silence thrust his hand into his back pocket, pulled out the folded section of the newspaper.
Hardin to Bury Hatchet with Mayor Sizemore
The photos beneath the headline. The one on the left.
Commissioner Matthew Hardin.
It was him.
Chapter Fourteen
Lowry hated this.
He hated everything about it.
Sure, the surroundings were glorious, but they were that guy’s surroundings, the douchebag standing in front of him with that cheesy politician smile.
Hardin.
Goddamn Matth
ew Hardin.
Lowry never thought he and Hardin would be buddies. Of course not. Lowry pursued any fruitful means to further his ever-expanding grip on this city, this little bit of the world, and he’d seen joining up with Hardin as a way of catapulting his growth. But he also didn’t think Hardin was nearly as big of a piece of shit as he discovered him to be.
It was mostly that smile. That disingenuous smile. The guy looked at you like you were a minion, a subject. He was a city commissioner, for Christ’s sake. He acted like he was already mayor.
But there was something deeper to the smile as well. It didn’t say lawyer, which is what Hardin was. It said, I’m more dangerous than you think. That’s what Lowry really despised about the guy, this unknown quality, his X factor.
Something moved.
Lowry turned. One of the windows at the front of the house. There. In those big leaves.
The Quiet Man…
Was that a figure? A man? In the shadows?
He remembered the efficiency with which his three men had been dispatched earlier. Thaxton, yanked back into the trees. Goodman, consumed by a shadow. Poletto, a knife between the ribs, the Quiet Man’s hand clamping on his mouth, smothering his scream.
Lowry squinted. The leaves moved in the breeze outside, artificial light glistening off them. One of the bigger ones slapped noiselessly against the glass.
Paranoia. His imagination getting the best of him.
His encounter with the ghost story of the underworld had made him jumpy. How could the Quiet Man have possibly tracked Lowry clear out here to Hardin’s house? Impossible. Lowry needed to relax.
That stupid politician’s grin remained on Hardin’s lips as he stepped closer to Lowry and Adriana. “All right, what exactly is the issue?”
Adriana, frightened, looked at Lowry. She wanted him to do the talking.
Of course she did.
She was that kind of person. A weakling and a fool. The wrong kind of person to involve in this operation. Which was exactly the reason she wanted Lowry to do the talking.
Idiot woman. Hardin should have never involved her.
Lowry turned a shoulder to her pleading, moist eyes, took a step closer to Hardin.
“The hit never happened,” Lowry said. “We never torched her house.”
Hardin’s smile dipped a few millimeters. The slimeball was talented at putting on appearances, but he wasn’t perfect. A flash of cold crossed his eyes.
“Why not?” he said through the smile.
“We have a serious problem.” Lowry paused. “Someone’s caught on to us.”
Chapter Fifteen
Silence adjusted the volume dial on the device.
It was a Sony unit, a black plastic box six inches long and an inch and a half across—a digital voice recorder, something not yet available to the public but acquired by the Watchers and modified by Specialists. They had Frankensteined in the microphone component of a government-grade listening device, a thin, black wire spliced into the earbud cords, a half-inch, round mic on the end.
Silence had this microphone against the window, as he peered through a sliver of space between two big banana leaves.
A few moments earlier, Lowry had looked his direction, suspicion in his eyes. Though Lowry had returned to his conversation with Adriana and Matthew Hardin, Silence would need to be wary.
The voices came through the earbud staticky and flat.
“Interrupted how?” Hardin said.
“As in, nothing happened,” Lowry said. “My men are dead, in a pile outside her house.”
Hardin looked at him for a moment, hands in his pockets, a relaxed pitch to his shoulders, the affected, casual calm of a practiced leader. “Who was it?”
Lowry didn’t immediately respond. He crossed his arms tightly over his black leather jacket, rocked his weight between his heels.
A strange reaction. Not one Silence would have predicted from the tough, scruffy-cool street crime mogul from the files he’d studied, the criminal leader he’d seen in the shiny red 3000GT VR-4 earlier in the evening.
And Silence believed he knew the reason for Lowry’s out-of-character demeanor.
Lowry’s lips began to form words. Stopped, as though thinking better of them. Then he pointed at Adriana and said, “Ask her.”
Hardin’s gaze fell on Adriana.
She jerked back, hand going to her chest, eyes wide. “I don’t know who he is! I swear. I’ve never seen him before tonight.”
Lowry lunged toward her, index finger jabbing. “Bullshit! How did he know we’d be at your house? He’s either been following us for weeks, or he’s a friend of yours. That’s what they say about him, that he helps people in need.” He turned to Hardin. “My men and I have not been followed. I’d know. This bitch is playing you for a fool. She knows the guy.”
“I don’t!”
Hardin took one hand from a pocket, raised it, still the composed statesman, quieting them both, not taking his eyes off Adriana. “This man,” he said to Adriana. “Did he speak to you?”
Adriana nodded.
“Did you tell him anything that would jeopardize us?”
“No!” Her hand shot up again in that same defensive motion. “I just spun him a story, random stuff as quickly as I could make it up—that Lowry was blackmailing me, that someone mugged me before I could make my payment, that—”
Hardin cut her off with a two-finger swipe. “Can you describe him? Did you get a good look at him?”
She nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Well … yes, actually. A very good look.” She glanced down. “He came into my house.”
Lowry scoffed. “Oh, how convenient.”
“Shut up,” Hardin said. Then to Adriana: “Go on.” He stroked his short beard as he prepared to listen.
“He was white. Tall. His hair was dark and straight. Tan skin. Handsome.”
“His build?”
“Athletic. Broad shoulders. But the most unusual thing about him was…”
She trailed off.
“Was what?”
“His voice.”
“Shit…” Lowry said. He started rocking between his heels again.
Hardin slowly lowered the hand from his chin, and it was a moment before he replied. “What about his voice?”
“It was … awful. Hideous. Deep and gravelly. Like a machine in bad need of oil. And he hardly spoke. Just a lot of one- and two-word sentences.”
Hardin’s face slackened.
Lowry stepped away from the other two, ran a hand through his long hair, paced in a tight circle.
“I knew it,” he said to Hardin. “It was the Quiet Man. Shit! I knew it when he took my guys out at her house, three of ’em, took them out like a goddamn video game. God, I thought he was just a myth.”
Silence’s assessment a few moments earlier was correct, his thought as to why Lowry had been acting so strangely, why his reactions had been so strangled. He’d detected it the moment they locked eyes across the distance back in Adriana’s neighborhood, Lowry in his sports car, Silence standing before three dead bodies, three of Lowry’s soldiers that he’d easily dispatched.
It had been dreadful awareness. Lowry had heard the rumors, the legends.
Silence’s reputation had preceded him.
Hardin shook his head slowly. “He’s no myth.”
Adriana glanced between the two, nervous energy building on her face. “Who?”
“There’s a guy,” Hardin said. “I’ve heard several names for him—the Quiet Man, Whisper, the Shadow. You don’t get to my position as quickly as I have without meeting some unsavory characters.” His eyes flicked to Lowry, perhaps subconsciously. “They all say there’s a Quiet Man, goes around Florida, and other states too, righting wrongs. Anybody who’s gotten away with something—murderers, rapists, child-abusers, gangsters, mobsters. And more often than not he kills them. They say he’s perfectly silent, slipping through the shadows. You won’t see him until he’s right in front of you, about to put
a round between your eyes. If you see him at all. He’ll just as easily slip behind you, slit your throat. They say he has a ruined voice, hardly speaks. He lets you do all the talking.”
Hardin paused, looked at his travertine tiling. Lowry fidgeted, muttering. And Adriana blinked rapidly, eyes locked on Hardin, her chest expanding and contracting with deep breaths.
Hardin looked up. “When you spoke to him, did he just say ‘Talk’?”
Adriana, who was shaking now, nodded.
“It was him. Goddamnit.” He glanced between Adriana and Lowry. “We’re all in danger.” He crossed his arms, brought a hand to his chin, looked to the back wall. “But for the time being, there’s nowhere safer for us than where we’re going.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
Hardin turned on his heel, left for the hallway behind them. Lowry followed, and a moment later Adriana rushed to catch up.
“But what are we going to…”
Her voice faded away. Just hints of their footsteps on the tile, then the feed in Silence’s ear went to pure, soft static.
The trio turned a corner, disappeared into the belly of the house.
Adriana, the attack on her home. A fake. Insurance fraud? No, that wasn’t Lowry’s game. And, more importantly, why was Hardin running the show, the city commissioner who had been in the papers for bashing the mayor’s leadership during the time of Lowry’s gang’s crime spree. What the hell were the connections?
Silence had to clear his mind, make sense of the competing pieces of information.
He pulled the microphone away from the glass, wound the wires, and put the listening device in his pocket. He went around the banana plant and crouched among a patch of flowering bushes, took the PenPal from his pocket, looked over the mind map he’d created back at the restaurant.
There was the bubble he needed to focus on, the one written to the side, isolated, not connected to any others: CONNECTION?
He slashed the pencil beneath it, hard, over and over, a violent spring of markings, wound tight, ready to explode.
