by Erik Carter
He flipped to another of the commissioned photos, this one of Jonah Lund. He was walking down a sidewalk in what must have been downtown Orlando, head down, hands shoved in his pockets. An open green flannel over a black T-shirt. Jeans. Sunglasses. White, twenties, average build.
Another photo of Jonah Lund, one of the newspaper photos, clearly taken long before losing his wife, a snapshot, happy times. He wore a different flannel over a different T-shirt and a casual, lopsided smile that twisted up a corner of his face, the sort of smile that had surely been a factor in winning Amber’s heart. Dark brown hair coifed. Slight cleft to his chin. A guy brimming with the breezy confidence of youth, grasping life firmly by the balls.
Silence waited to view Amber Lund’s image last. In Silence’s line of work, it was always difficult dealing with missing persons. It would be a challenge under any circumstances, but with the cases Silence worked, there was always something hideous involved.
Always.
He was an assassin, after all.
So when a person was missing, this invariably meant something awful was happening or had happened to the individual. The best-case scenario, sadly enough, was that the person was being held for ransom.
Or the person might be raped.
Or sold into human trafficking.
Or tortured.
Or dead.
That’s why he hesitated before flipping to a photo of Amber Lund.
It was a newspaper photo, a snapshot like the one of her husband. Sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a restaurant or café or coffee shop. Laughing. Sunglasses perched atop her head, consumed by blonde hair. Thin. Heart-shaped face. Slightly wide-set eyes under a slightly tall forehead. At a casual glance, someone might see simply the latest blonde-haired, blue-eyed perfection. But there was a lot more to Amber Lund. Silence could see it.
Some people viewed others only in shades of the apparent, but Silence could see more, into the depths of those around him. C.C. had told him he was empathic, that he could see people’s souls, their auras. Silence wasn’t spiritual in the same way as C.C.—his ethereal, kindly, bohemian beauty—but he recognized that he had a mostly accurate ability to sense a person’s character upon sight, even from a photograph.
And in Amber Lund, Silence saw deep humanity. One hell of a soul. She radiated it. The biographical information noted that she had cerebral palsy. Silence had observed that afflictions like this often left people with a deeper appreciation, some sort of stronger tie to the purer core of all that was, a glimpse behind the veil at the simplicity of the magic. What some might see as a curse often ended up being a blessing.
One more glance at her photo, then he stuck it back in the stack.
Time to begin.
Chapter Three
A city bus.
As Finley sat down on the thin, cheap cushion, he could almost feel the embedded grime work its way through his pants, the back of his shirt. The chrome pole beside him—which he refused to touch—was slick with the oils of a thousand hands, finger- and palm prints smeared into a wavy, blotchy mess. His shoes stuck to the floor.
The bright, ugly lighting revealed dust mushrooming up from his soft impact against the seat. And it also revealed a lot of ugly people. Fat people and smelly people and working people and happy people and sad people. More sad than happy.
But the only person who mattered was the one in the back, the one staring at him—Guzman, the reason Finley had found himself entombed in this rolling shithole cocoon of rotting humanity. The organization had offered Finley a second chance, and one that he was incredibly grateful for. But gratitude and humbleness weren’t equivalent to lowering oneself. Finley had worked damn hard to get away from things like city buses and dive motels and cheap discount stores with flickering lights, the smell of cigarette-drenched clothing, slightly damaged goods, and grimy floors.
He took his eyes off Guzman for just a moment, looked down, at his shoes, a nice pair of Doc Martens that he’d paid full price for at a nice store. Fashionable, trendy, but rugged enough for the sort of work he did. He moved his left foot. Crrrruff as the floor stuck to the thick rubber sole.
Finley sighed inwardly.
You’re here for a job. It’s not your life.
A job. A second chance. The best opportunity he’d ever gotten. He’d damn well better get his head on straight.
He looked up at Guzman. Found his eyes already staring at him.
Fear looking right into Finley from smallish, wide-set eyes. Guzman had surely thought he’d gotten free—Finley had kept his distance for twenty minutes after momentarily losing track of the guy back at the parking lot—and this bus was going to take Guzman to the depot and out of town.
That’s why Finley had strolled so casually onto the bus, as much as he detested doing so. That’s why he’d sat in plain sight of the man, locking eyes with him as he sat down. Guzman needed to see how easy it had been, how little chance there was of escape.
Guzman would no longer be getting off at the depot where the line terminated. He would get off at the next stop and try to escape into the darkness. Hell, Finley was surprised that Guzman hadn’t pulled the bus’s stop-request cord, thrown open the doors as they slid apart, and dashed off.
Guzman was the shape of a potato and short. Dark, thinning hair. A compressed face too small for his head, leaving lots of extra skin at the sides. Dirty sneakers. Jeans and a clever print T-shirt bearing an industrial-style warning sign—CAUTION: STAY BACK 25 FEET. HAVEN’T HAD MY COFFEE YET.
Hilarious…
Finley would enjoy this.
The metallic squeal of brakes, piercing, an unpleasant punctuation to an unpleasant experience. Everything shifted forward. Finley refused to grab the grimy pole beside him. He kept his eyes locked on Guzman.
The bus stopped. Several people stood. And, as predicted, Guzman bolted for the rear door. He shoved his way past a woman—who barked at him—and was the first person out of the bus.
Finley stood and waited at the front door. Two people in front of him. No rush. There was no need.
Outside. A less-than-wonderful area of town. A McDonald’s across the street. The smell of day-old grease. Steamy windows. Teenagers loitering by the doors. Laughter and shouts echoing in the distance, a few conversations nearby from the others leaving the bus, all of it sounding as hopeless as the surroundings.
Guzman would have considered going into the McDonald’s, losing himself in the late-night crowd, maybe going to the bathroom with the plan of hiding in a stall for a couple hours, sitting on the toilet with his knees pulled to his face, hiding his feet from view. But he would have decided against it, felt it foolish.
Finley had been dealing with Guzman long enough to know how the slimeball’s mind worked. Guzman would have gone for the dark alley behind the McDonald’s.
Finley walked past the reek of the overfilled dumpster, around a fence, and to the alley.
Yep. There he was. Crossing the backyard of one of the houses bordering the alley, clinging to a line of shadows that edged a patch of illumination from the floodlight on the house’s deck.
Finley whistled.
Guzman stopped. Looked back.
“Oh, shit!”
Finley dashed toward him, his Doc Martens gripping into the wet, overgrown weeds of the backyard, through the light and to the shadow. He caught Guzman by the back of his clever, sweat-soaked T-shirt and pulled him back.
Guzman took a swing, which Finley casually turned to avoid. He used the creep’s new position to his advantage, wrapping Guzman’s arm around his own body, tying him up.
A sound to the right. The sliding glass door at the back of the house. Opening.
With one hand on Guzman’s arm, Finley used the other to grab a hold of the man’s jeans and rolled him over the short wooden fence. Then he hopped the fence himself.
He crouched beside Guzman in the scraggly, forsaken plants running along the fence in the neighbor’s yard, which was perfectly dark, no exte
rior lights, no light coming from the windows.
He gave Guzman a shut up look. Guzman remained quiet, his tiny eyes looking up at him, having reached their full scope.
Footsteps in the yard beside them. They came a few feet away from the glass door, seemingly in Finley’s direction, but quickly went the opposite way, back to the house, followed by dumb-sounding muttering, “Gawd damn it.” The sliding door shut.
Finley reached under his sport jacket, took his Smith & Wesson 4506 from its shoulder holster, put it to Guzman’s sweaty temple.
The small eyes closed. The lips turned down into a cartoon-perfect frown and trembled along with the rest of him. He raised his hands.
Finley didn’t need to say much. These situations required no communication. There was never a fraction of uncertainty in a mark’s mind about why he’d been marked, why he’d been hunted and caught. They always knew.
So Finley just said, “Six hundred dollars.”
“I … I don’t…”
Sobbing.
Finley patted him down, his hand slapping against Guzman’s soft flesh, which jiggled. A small pistol in his back pocket. Finley transferred it to his own. Then he holstered his Smith, slapped a hand over Guzman’s wet mouth, and brought a fist hard into his stomach.
Guzman squealed. Finley felt it through his fingers.
“Eight hundred, then. Tomorrow.”
Another fist to his stomach. Harder.
“Eight hundred, asshole! Have it tomorrow.”
Another punch. Another. Again and again. Driving his fist into Guzman’s doughy stomach. Blood trickled between Finley’s fingers, mixed with spit and sweat and tears. Soon Guzman would be pissing blood as well. Maybe shitting it.
Finley stopped. He stood up.
“Eight hundred.”
He eyed the spot in the center of the stomach where he’d been punching, used it as a bullseye, lined up a vicious kick—
And the cellular phone in his pocket rang.
Back outside the McDonald’s, at the sidewalk, under a streetlight, a few feet away from the restaurant’s outdoor playground, its menagerie of wooden structures and slides and swing sets inhabited by three stumbling, grown-ass men in baggy pants and gold chains, drunk at six in the morning.
He’d left Guzman in a weeping, crippled pile in the yard and walked a few feet away to somewhere he could return the call. He would have preferred getting the hell away from this decrepit part of the city, but his employer was not the kind of person you kept waiting. And there was no way in hell Finley was going to jeopardize his opportunity, this life he’d been afforded.
“Sir,” he said when his employer answered.
His employer inquired as to his whereabouts.
“Somewhere on the west side. Guzman, sir. He needed a little encouragement. It’ll be eight hundred tomorrow. Or I’ll terminate the account. My thought is—”
His employer had a different matter to discuss, wanted him elsewhere.
“But Guzman—”
His employer didn’t care about Guzman. There was something much more pressing.
Finley’s eyes widened as he listened. And before he replied, he was already moving, heading in the direction he needed to go.
He had to get there damn fast.
“I’ll be right there, sir.”
Chapter Four
People do confounding, even counterintuitive things during times of high pressure, Jonah Lund assured himself. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. But he was still rather amazed at himself—he’d let this large, intimidating-looking man into his apartment!
Jonah stared at the plastic business card in his hand, which the man had handed him wordlessly when Jonah answered the door. He squinted at it as much to decipher the reality of the situation as to question the credibility of the text.
Jonah held it in both hands, and he rubbed his thumbs along the rounded corners. The plastic was clear but frosted with a matte finish. The ink was thick, raised off the surface, dark blue, glossy. Simple but stately blue stripes on the left side. It was the sort of card you expected from a Wall Street trader, an elite real estate agent, an embellishing piece of flair that says, See? I’m so successful I can spend a dollar per business card.
But this card had been completely repurposed. Where there would normally be a company logo, a name, an address, a phone number, maybe even an email address, there was just the strange message.
And its owner wanted it back. The man held out a hand.
Jonah reached across the coffee table and gave it to him. The sharp cuts of the man’s jaw and cheekbones and chin along with his piercing dark eyes said fashion model, but the professional air, the assertiveness, and the look of quiet compassion while he patiently waited on Jonah to finish examining his card said something else.
He was tall, about six-foot-three, and he dwarfed Jonah’s rather small armchair—part of Jonah’s entry-level set that the lady at Rooms To Go had assured him would look larger in his apartment, furniture that would soon have been a memory when he and Amber bought their first house. The man’s pale gray V-neck shirt had a bit of sheen, and it looked brand-new and expensive. The bit of the man’s chest that showed at the shirt’s V was taught and hard, striations rippling at the edges. He wasn’t bulky, but he was muscular as all hell. He wore a pair of dark gray pants and a dark sport coat over the V-neck.
Jonah leaned back in his seat. “So I don’t understand how … You … you’re here to help me?”
The man nodded.
“And you can speak, only limitedly?”
“Yes.”
Jonah jumped back in his seat. The man’s voice sounded like it came from the depths of his belly, forced through stratifying layers of rock before leaving his mouth. That one word, one syllable, Yes, had been a small equation of sounds, rumbling and hissing and popping.
It was so startling that for a moment, Jonah didn’t reply. The man just looked at him, unfazed, waiting.
“What’s your name?” Jonah said.
“Brett.”
Another syllable, another crackling growl. This time, though, the man also gave him a slight raise at the corner of his mouth, a tiny, communicative grin.
He didn’t look like a Brett.
“Your name’s not really Brett, is it? You’re not going to tell me who you really are or who you work for.”
He shook his head.
“Government?”
He shook his head.
“Why should I trust you?”
He shrugged.
Jonah breathed in. Held it. Sighed it out. Whoever this man was—whoever Brett was—he was the only person in a month who’d offered to help. And Jonah needed help. He was all by himself.
He stared at Brett for a while longer. The refrigerator a few feet away hummed. Brett blinked.
Jonah crossed his arms over his knees. “How do we begin?”
“Talk,” Brett said.
The word was as gentle, as kindly sounding as could be expected from his demonic voice.
“Since you’re here to help, I’m guessing you know the situation—that Amber disappeared and I’m the husband who won’t let the story die, who thinks she’s still out there in the marshes, while her father is convinced I’m a loser and Amber’s just run off from me.”
Brett nodded.
“What the papers didn’t tell you is that her father, Carlton, hates me for a good reason.” He looked to the faux wood laminate floorboards. “I cheated on Amber.”
He glanced up at Brett, waited for a reaction. Nothing, just a blink.
“I didn’t tell her until a few months into the engagement. So at first she didn’t know if she was gonna go through with the wedding. And then after the wedding there was new contention, which is why we went to the couples therapy.”
“You told her?” Brett said and stopped to swallow. A small grimace. “Or she found out?”
“I confessed to her. I may seem like a real scumbag to you now, but
I did truly love her. The cheating wasn’t that important. I mean, if it was only a few moths after we started dating, and we’d been together for years afterward, what did it really matter?” He looked Brett over, expecting condemnation. The face was still blank. “But I couldn’t marry her and keep the secret.”
He took one of the remote controls off the glass coffee table that sat between them, watched it move as he twisted it in his hands.
“I want you to know that Carlton always hated me, from the very beginning, before the cheating. Said I was pitiful, that Amber could do better than a guy who worked at a coffee shop. A year later, me and my buddy owned the coffee shop—Roast and Relax, downtown. Didn’t matter to Carlton. Still a loser in his eyes. Then, of course, Amber told him about the cheating shortly before the wedding. And after the new … um, contention surfaced, it was Carlton’s idea that we go to the couples therapist, Dr. Nogulich, an expert he’d heard about. Carlton tried to swoop in after treating her like shit her entire life, take on the sanctimonious role at the expense of his daughter’s loser husband.”
“Explain,” Brett said.
“Amber had cerebral palsy.” He stopped. He’d said had. Amber had cerebral palsy. Past tense. Even though he’d made peace with it, the sound of it was still abrasive. “It was slight but very much a part of her. A limp, poor function in the left side of her body. She was never good enough for Carlton, flawed, always trying to prove herself to him.”
Brett cocked his head slightly.
“I’m serious, man,” Jonah said. “What kind of father wouldn’t want the search for his daughter to continue as long as possible? I’m telling you, he didn’t give a shit about her, and her disappearance is because of the police district he worked in when he was a cop, District C11. Shady stuff goes down there—corruption, internal affairs investigations. And I think Amber was a victim of it all, years after Carlton retired, some old grudge, somebody getting payback. Carlton’s holding a press conference later, at the police headquarters downtown.” He looked at the clock. “In two hours. Trying to discredit me once and for all.”
