by Erik Carter
But it was so damn dark. Only the tiniest indications of shape, infinitesimal grays.
Then there was a flash. Two minuscule, glistening spots of light, appearing for just a moment. Eyes.
Got you now.
Silence reached out.
And something small and soft and loaded with four razor-sharp points smacked him across the face.
Silence yelled. He instinctively jumped away from the bed, going from a hands-and-knees position to landing on his back. The round area rug absorbed the blow, but his weight brought the rug sliding back on the hardwood floor, and he bashed into the nightstand, his head smacking a drawer handle.
He grunted and put one hand to the back of his head, the other to the wound on his cheek.
A deep, hate-filled, almost prehistoric growl rumbled from beneath the bed.
A moment of grimacing, then Silence took his hand from his cheek, examined it. Two tiny spots of blood.
Baxter’s usual temperament was the feline equivalent of Mr. Rogers coming out of heavy sedation. But when a veterinarian visit was in order, the cat transformed into a beast worthy of Roman mythology.
Naturally, on such occasions, Mrs. Enfield called her next-door neighbor for assistance, and Silence dutifully marched over, even though it was a forgone conclusion that Baxter would beat the shit out of him. He simply had to help. Mrs. Enfield—and Baxter, too, for that matter—had been incredibly good to him for years. And one doesn’t turn down a blind elderly woman’s requests for help.
Silence leaned his head back against the dresser and looked at the bed. The black strip of shadow beneath the box spring taunted him, particularly since the grumbling, popping, sinister growl persisted—one long, unending note.
He took a deep breath, catching a whiff of old lady smell mixed with the scent of the house, which was even older than Mrs. Enfield herself, amazingly enough. It was a nineteenth century beauty, one of many in Pensacola.
Along with his deep breathing, Silence closed his eyes and did a quick meditation. C.C. had taught him the importance of presence. His energy was horrible just then, filled with anger, and there was a frightened animal who needed him. He had to realign.
Looking into the warm nothingness of the inside of his eyes, Silence listened to the ticking of the clock at the bedside, the cat’s growling. He sensed his touch points, where his body came into contact with the world around him—the back of his head against the dresser; his hand on his head; his other hand on the hardwood floor; his butt and legs on the wool rug. He envisioned Baxter in his usual state, staring up at Silence with that dumb, pleasant smile and contented eyes bearing a look of sheer admiration, the ever-present line of drool coming from the corner of his mouth, pooling on Silence’s thigh.
Silence opened his eyes.
All right, all right.
He pushed himself to his hands and knees and crawled back to the bed, grabbing the bath towel from the floor. He’d brought it with him, but he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. Baxter hated being toweled, and he was already stressed enough knowing that he was going to the vet. Silence had made the fool mistake of revealing the plastic carrier crate before having Baxter fully secured. That’s how the cat had ended up dug into his stronghold beneath the guest room bed.
But with the wound on his cheek and the appointment time growing nearer and nearer, Silence had no choice but to towel him.
Silence saw the little eyes at the far wall as he crawled. And Baxter saw the towel in his hand.
The growl—which still hadn’t broken, a long, continuous sound—suddenly reached an ear-piercing crescendo. And stopped. Baxter hissed.
Silence brought the towel in front of him, scooted his head and broad shoulders under the bed frame as best he could, and made contact with Baxter.
Immediately he felt the cat’s strength through the towel. Aside from the fact that Silence was stunned once more by Baxter’s ability to change temperament—this was a cat who was rattled by houseflies and lived for scratches behind the ears and marathon naps in the windowsill—Silence also noticed how similar Baxter’s sudden strength was to his own. A rigid, taught, wiry, endurance sort of strength. Silence trained for this, the sort of strength that allowed him to pry open rusty doors, pull himself up steep embankments, squeeze the life from a man’s throat. But Baxter seemed to have it naturally in some animalistic reserve that he could tap into whenever he needed, which was apparently when he had to go to the veterinarian.
Silence spoke, trying to make his hideous, demonic growl of a voice as kindly as it could sound. “Come on, Baxter. It’s okay.”
It was more syllables than he would typically utter at once, and it tore his throat up, making his eyes water. But Baxter was worth it. He was a good boy.
One quick thrust of the hands, and Silence finally had a good grip on the cat, wrapping the towel fully around him.
He shuffled out from beneath the bed, grabbed the carrier, threw open its metal gate, and secured the target.
The old wooden steps squeaked as Silence descended to the first floor. Every time he used the staircase—which was rarely, and more often than not for a Baxter-wrangling mission, as Mrs. Enfield hardly used the second floor—he felt like some sort of Southern gentleman of yesteryear. The house was no mansion, but it had to Silence’s mind a very Gone with the Wind vibe with all the ornate Victorian-era touches such as the exquisite handrail that his fingers traced as he continued down the steps.
In his other hand was the pet carrier handle. Baxter’s hissing had ceased the moment Silence got him inside, and since then the cat had been alternating between growls and scared, pathetic mews. Mostly the latter. Poor guy.
Mrs. Enfield was at the base of the stairs, her milky eyes looking up, right at the carrier, somehow knowing exactly where Baxter was. She was small, black, frail, and had hair even whiter than her functionless eyes, from which two lines of tears streamed down the crevices of her wrinkled cheeks.
Knobby knuckles moved in a wave as she rubbed her hands over each other, an infinite loop. She quivered with her sobbing. With her shoulders slouched and her knees bent, she was even tinier than usual, an effect that was amplified by the normal-sized woman standing beside her, wrapping a pair of consoling arms around her.
Lola. Mrs. Enfield’s former caretaker. She too was looking up the stairs, but she was looking not at the cat carrier but at Silence. When Silence met her eyes—which were dark and of the Asian variety, the more dominant half of Lola’s multiracial heritage—she smiled, motioned toward Mrs. Enfield, and then gave a little shrug of the shoulders that said, Isn’t she cute?
Silence found nothing cute about Mrs. Enfield’s suffering. Sure, this was most likely another false alarm, the latest in a long string of old cat lady vicarious hypochondria. Baxter had been puking for a couple days, which was more likely from chewing the wrong houseplant than sipping Liquid Plumber. But if Mrs. Enfield felt in her heart of hearts that something was wrong with him, then she was hurting. And that wasn’t cute.
He looked away from Lola’s gaze.
“You got him!” Mrs. Enfield said, almost shouted, between sobs. “Oh, thank the Lord, you got him!”
“Yes,” Silence said.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a slight reaction from Lola. They’d seen each other many times through the years when she came to visit Mrs. Enfield, but upon every new encounter, there was still some sort of involuntary response to his horrendous voice. People couldn’t help themselves; the voice was that jarring.
He stepped up to the women, raised the carrier a few inches to Mrs. Enfield’s height so that Baxter could see her and she could sense him.
“Hi, Si,” Lola said in a tone too upbeat for the situation. She was a good caretaker, though, and she continued to rub Mrs. Enfield’s shoulders even while looking at Silence.
“Hi.”
She’d called him Si. Mrs. Enfield called him Si, a nickname of familiar endearment, and she’d passed it on to Lola.
The old woman had a finger halfway in the carrier, and Baxter rubbed against it.
“It’ll be okay, baby,” she said as she ran her fingertip along the wet part of Baxter’s nose.
“Nice of you to come over,” Lola said, rubbing her hand over Mrs. Enfield’s shoulder after a fresh wave of tears but still looking at Silence. “You’re lucky I’m visiting, or you’d be the one taking her to the vet.”
She leaned closer to Mrs. Enfield.
“It’s time for us to go, ma’am.”
A moan from the old woman, hands going to her face.
“Will be all right,” Silence said.
Lola took the carrier from Silence, their hands brushing on the handle. A sudden laugh as she looked past Silence.
He turned, but he already knew what she was looking at.
That damn photograph.
It sat in a pewter frame on a small accent table near the base of the stairs. To Silence, it felt like the photo had been taken yesterday, but as he thought about it, it had been over three years.
Lola had taken the photo. At Mrs. Enfield’s request. Silence, sitting upright in a hideous old wooden chair, one of many items in Mrs. Enfield’s house that looked like it had been yanked straight out of a horror movie. On Silence’s lap was Baxter, looking at the camera, head twisted just so, the biggest goddamn cat smile you’ve ever seen in your life, a steady line of drool draining from the lower corner of his mouth, a puddle of it clearly visible on Silence’s pants, which he remembered were one of his favorite pairs of Calvin Kleins at the time.
Silence, too, was looking at the camera. And smiling. He rarely smiled and never did so on command, so the expression would have been unnatural enough had his mind not also been both toying with the humiliating awkwardness of the situation and also wondering why the hell he was being forced to pose for a photo for a blind woman. The resulting look on Silence’s face was one of pain, bewilderment, and despair, something truly hideous, something that would scare small children and wilt perfectly healthy fields of crops. Just absolutely hideous.
And it made Lola break into hysterics every time she came to Pensacola to visit her former employer.
She kept a hand on Mrs. Enfield’s shoulder as she bent over, folding at the waist, the knees. Her laughter turned so intense it went silent.
“You’re looking at the picture again, aren’t you?” Mrs. Enfield said. Her white eyes roamed her immediate surroundings, drifting over Silence to Lola, bent over beside her. She sniffed. And a small smile came to her lips, the first all morning.
When Lola couldn’t respond, Silence answered for her. “She is.”
“Now you stop it.” The old woman stepped out of Lola’s hand and padded to the table, picked up the frame, held it gingerly, squeezed it to her bosom. “It’s a beautiful photo. My two boys.”
“You can’t see,” Silence said.
“Stop it! Both of you. I was there when she took it. I know what it shows.”
Lola finally straightened up. Her laughter became audible again. She wiped tears from her eyes, took a deep breath, sighed.
“Come on, Mrs. E.” She stepped over and took Mrs. Enfield’s hand. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the temperature was pleasant, but the sun was hot, the humidity high. Willinger Street was one of many quiet streets in Pensacola’s East Hill neighborhood, full of historic homes, well-kept gardens, and children on bicycles. Lola’s Ford Taurus was parked right in front of the house, and once she’d seat-belted Baxter’s carrier in the back seat and Mrs. Enfield in the front, she closed the door and stepped to Silence.
“I’ll take good care of her.”
“Thanks.”
“Tonight’s my last night in town…” She left it dangling. Not unfinished. Just open.
“Okay.”
She knew Silence was engaged. That’s what Mrs. Enfield had always told her. That’s what Silence had always told her. And in Silence’s mind, it was true.
But through the years, Lola had noticed that Silence never got married, that his fiancée was never around. Mrs. Enfield hadn’t told her that C.C. was dead, and neither had Silence. And while Lola had never expressly asked him out, she was more friendly to him than she should be to an engaged man.
She looked at him. Waiting.
BEEP!
His pager sounded.
Thank god.
He pulled it from his pocket, squinted at the screen, perhaps a bit too dramatically, then gave Lola a Work, Whatcha gonna do? shrug and left for his house.
“Bye,” she called behind him.
He turned. She stood where he’d left her, a few feet from the Taurus.
He waved.
When he dialed the number that had beeped him, the voice that responded didn’t say hello. Nor did it offer any other word of salutation. Rather, the greeting was a laugh—a big, hearty belly laugh, the kind of laugh that belts across a restaurant or an airport terminal upon the reunion of two buddies who haven’t seen each other in years. It was a man who went by Falcon but whose actual name was Laswell. Silence’s boss, a higher-up in the Watchers. And it had been less than three weeks since they’d spoken.
“Hahaaaaaaa!” Falcon shouted. Silence pulled the phone from his ear. “Si, how you doin’, you big, dog-voiced son of a bitch?”
Like Mrs. Enfield, Falcon had very early on chosen to shorten Silence’s name to Si.
“Good. You?”
“I’m doing great. Just great. Thanks for asking, amigo. The sun’s shining here in whatever state it is I live in.” Silence wasn’t permitted to know Falcon’s location, occupation, or even his real name, though Silence had figured that last one out. “Meatloaf’s on the menu tonight. And I have a hell of a juicy assignment for my Florida man. You ready for this?”
“Yes.”
“Orlando. Two months ago a newlywed woman disappeared a couple weeks after the wedding. Amber Lund. She was driving home from couple’s therapy.” He chuckled. “Therapy after two weeks of marriage—love must not’ve been in the air. Car was found at the side of a highway a couple miles from a bus station. Of course, the immediate assumption was she got retroactive cold feet, that something big came up in the therapy sessions and she ran off to cope with it, hopped on a bus and got the hell out of Dodge.
“But here’s the thing—highway patrol didn’t even search for a full week. Since then, the husband had insisted that people continue to look for her, but the father has been fighting it, saying that the husband’s a loser, that his daughter surely had second thoughts and is out there somewhere in the great wide open finding herself, that’s why no one’s heard from her in two months.
“The dad’s a former Orlando police officer, worked for a district known for corruption, multiple internal affair investigations spanning decades, from which nothing ever materialized. Seems an awfully weird coincidence. My thought is that the district is so corrupt that people get caught in the crossfire. Family members. Like Amber. Could be retaliation, a planned hit from someone the district pissed off, which would explain why the search was called off so abruptly, why the dad’s so quick to brush it off—can’t have people digging too deep into the district’s dirty business.
“Sounds like somebody needs some killin’. That’s where you come in. Figure out what the hell happened to this girl. Eliminate those who need it. Details coming momentarily. Questions?”
“No.”
“Good luck, Suppressor.”
Click.
He was gone. The next time Silence would hear from him would be the next time Silence needed to do “some killin’.” Which would be sooner than later.
Silence put the phone back in the cradle.
There was a beep from one of the bedrooms. His fax machine.
The boards of the old home creaked as he walked to the back. The house wasn’t old in the same way as Mrs. Enfield’s—his was a leftover from the post-war boom, much newer—but it bellyached nearly as much as hers.
Silence waited next t
o the machine, which sat on a small table by the window. It buzzed as it worked, huffing out plasticky-smelling heat, warming Silence’s arm. Papers stacked up in the output tray as they printed. When the last sheet fell into place, there was a final screech of communication through the phone line.
Finished.
He picked up the stack.
On top was a brief note from Falcon, the same information he’d given over the phone, with a final sentence stating:
I’m rootin’ for ya.
Sincerely,
Your Biggest Fan
XOXOXO
Falcon enjoyed making light of the relatively short life expectancy Silence enjoyed as an Asset, one of the Watchers’ field agents.
Photocopied newspaper articles followed Falcon’s initial note.
New Bride Feared Missing
Lund Search Continues
Search Called off for Missing Orlando Woman
Husband Pleads for More Resources in Private Search for Missing Woman
Following the articles were two pages of biographical information on the three individuals the Watchers had deemed to be pertinent to the case—Amber Lund; her father, Carlton Stokes; and her husband, Jonah Lund. The information had been mined via the Watchers’ considerable talent hidden in plain sight within all levels of U.S. bureaucracy.
The last pages were photos of the three people. Some were scans from newspapers while several of the photos of Carlton Stokes and Jonah Lund had clearly been photos taken surreptitiously—candid images of them leaving buildings, ordering coffees, crossing parking lots. Commissioned photographs taken by a private detective.
Silence picked up a photograph of Stokes, one of the spy pics. White, early sixties. Silver-and-black hair, medium length, with sideburns. Dark eyebrows over a generous nose and a long, slightly jowly face. Silence could easily put this guy’s image behind a desk in a 1980s cop movie, have him fill the cranky ol’ lieutenant role. You’re a loose cannon! I’m gonna have your gun and badge after this latest stunt you’ve pulled! Knowing that Stokes was a former police officer perhaps informed the fantasy.
