by Erik Carter
She screamed.
“Hello, Kim,” Carlton said with a smile.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Finley was about to jump out of his skin.
Not because of his surroundings—a modern kitchen with all the latest appliances, everything chic and shiny, an aesthetic Finley needed to adapt to if he was going to continue his upward mobility—but due to the two people with him, the only two Finley had been able to wrangle on such short notice.
Despite the sophistication and size of the Well, its decades of operation tuning it into a precision machine, there were still only so many resources, only so many would-be prisoners to whom the corrupt police had given a second chance. In a short-notice situation, the pool of hired hands could be rather shallow.
The two behind him were Hayes, a barrel-chested, light-red-haired, smiling doofus who had been apprehended for domestic violence, and Schuyler, a dope dealer wannabe hippie with long black hair, streaked with premature gray, and scraggly whiskers poking out of an acne-riddled face.
A pair of idiots. Who wouldn’t shut up.
“Boss man said to keep it down,” Finley said.
They quieted again.
Fortunately, Finley didn’t have to look at them. He had his back turned to them as they played cards. Their game of choice was “war,” a game based not on a mix of skill and chance like so many card games, but one entirely based on chance, a glorified version of high card. It was a contest fitting of these two morons.
Finley had encouraged them to play the game, and it made him feel like a babysitter to two grown-ass men. But it only took so many people to watch the monitor, a four-inch, black-and-white screen in a white plastic housing. The image on the screen was divided into equal quadrants, tiny images that Finley had to squint to study. Each was a feed from the cameras positioned around the exterior of the house belonging to Carlton Stokes, the Oil Man.
Finley reclined, stretched his back, his arms going high. He rubbed the strain from his eyes.
The chime binged.
He snapped back to attention, leaning forward, his face inches from the screen, so close he could feel the monitor’s heat, its halo of static charge.
Excited murmuring from the dolts behind him.
“Shut up,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen.
The upper left-hand image—the feed from the far end of the driveway—showed a vehicle pulling onto the property, a Jeep Grand Cherokee. The image was grainy, but as the vehicle moved to a different quadrant of the screen—the feed for the second camera, farther up the driveway—Finley could clearly see the big man, Jonah Lund’s companion, in the passenger seat, his angular face, dark eyes and dark hair.
The Jeep pulled to a stop. The passenger door opened. And the big guy got out, moved toward the house with haste. Whoever was behind the steering wheel stayed back.
Finley whipped around in his seat, faced the others. “Wait two minutes. Then go out the side door. Anyone in that Cherokee, kill them.”
“What are you gonna do?” Schuyler said.
Finley turned back to the monitor. He watched the big man approach on the lower left-hand feed, the camera on the side of the house, near the porch.
A glance to the living room. Carlton was gone.
Back to the monitor. The big man drew a gun from beneath his sport jacket, a Beretta 92FS. He reached for the door handle.
Finley flashed the other two a look. “I’m gonna hang out in here.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The door was glass, framed with dark-stained wood and flanked by two sconces and a pair of sidelight windows. The house beyond was well lit.
Silence tried the doorknob. Unlocked. He threw the door open, cleared it.
And entered.
Into the bright light. Chilly air conditioning. There was the smell of fresh upholstery or maybe carpet and the sharp tang of cinnamon candles.
No people.
The house was spacious, airy, an open floor plan. Ahead was a hallway leading to the back of the house. To the side was a door, cracked open, that led to a darkened garage, evidenced by the unfinished quality of the wall beyond and the garage door opener mounted on it. Just past that door was a staircase with a dark wood banister leading to the second floor.
He glanced up to the landing. His view was partly obscured, but he could make out two doors—one open, one not. There was a bit of light coming from beneath the closed door.
His senses pulled him in that direction.
Before he could even take a step, his intuition was validated. From behind the closed door came a bloodcurdling scream.
Kim.
Silence bolted across the tiled entryway, around the sofa at the back side of the living room area, to the base of the stairs.
A sudden jolt.
Pressure on his shoulder, powerful fingers pressing into his skin and pulling him to the side, using his own rushing momentum against him, diverting his path. A gust of dry air against his skin. Darkness in front of him.
And as he stumbled through the doorway into the pitch black garage, he saw a flash of Mr. Accord.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Carlton laughed.
“What are you screaming about, Kim? I haven’t done anything yet. I just wanted to show you.”
He was on the bed, sitting a few inches from her, holding the tool in the air. An hour earlier, when Finley had called to say he’d be bringing Kim to the house, he’d stashed it in a drawer in the nightstand.
“Do you know what this is?”
Kim just stared up at the tool, shaking, sweating, tears trailing from the corners of her eyes. Carlton waited a moment, making it clear to her he would not continue until she responded. She finally shook her head.
“It’s a turning tool,” he said, admiring the tool himself, a long, sinuous thing, delicate and almost feminine-looking, but incredibly durable, tough. Its chiseled tip was freshly sharpened, a perfectly clean, precise edge. “Demolition has been my game since retiring from the force. But woodwork is my passion. High-end stuff. Doctors’ offices. Mansions. I’ve built a small but enthusiastic client list. Did Amber ever tell you about any of this?”
Kim shook her head.
“You know what I like about it? The immediate feedback, the tactile sensations. You press a piece of metal, like this, to a piece of wood, and you receive an immediate response. You’ve changed the wood forever. Maybe for the better or maybe for the worst, but either way, you’ve changed it. You learn from experience, and as you improve, so do your products. Very different from police work. Or the demolition business. There are so many gray areas in those lines of work, so few opportunities for tactile feedback. But this…” He twirled the tool between his fingers. “This is real. Tactile. Receptive.”
He held it closer to Kim. She cowered back into her pillow, eyes squeezing shut. The bedside lamp played off the long, thin shaft of metal coming out of a long, hourglass-shaped piece of smoothly polished ash, secured by a brass ferrule.
“It’s a skew chisel, for use with a lathe. When you put a piece of sharp metal like this against a rapidly spinning piece of wood, it rounds the corners, smooths the wood to a circular shape. Leave the chisel in one spot for a while, you start changing the curves, which means you can make things like table legs, lamp bases.
“This is a fine tool. A precision piece. I don’t buy crap. Hardened, tempered, high-speed steel, which holds an edge much longer than carbon steel.”
He brought his free hand close to the chisel, dabbed his thumb to the upper point, the toe. Chillingly sharp.
He smiled at the chisel then looked at Kim.
“We don’t have to use the chisel tonight, Kim.”
This made her gasp. A tear fell down her cheek. Then her eyes darkened into a scowl. “How did it happen? They were just gonna scare her. Rough her up her. Didn’t you tell them about her condition? How did you let this happen?”
Carlton smirked. Kim was in no position to be demanding
answers.
He turned and reached for the laptop, which he’d placed on the nightstand, opened, and plugged into the telephone jack. He twisted to face the bed, its rubber feet squeaking on the glass topper.
“Now, here’s what you’re going to do, Kim. You’ll see that I’ve directed Netscape to the OPDCOM system. And you’ll further see that the username and password fields are empty, waiting for your credentials.”
He smiled at her.
“I have a message prepared and ready to go in a Word document. I’m going to copy and paste it into an email that’s going to be delivered to the police from your account. The message explains you were the one who killed my daughter. You and Amber were friends, worked together at the dispatch center, and when Amber began asking too many questions and found out that you’re a hooker, you panicked, thought the do-gooder was going to turn you in. So you encouraged her to take her brand-new husband to couples therapy all the way out in Titusville, getting her outside the city, in the middle of nowhere on US 50. You hired people to run her off the highway and kill her.
“But now, since Amber was such a good friend of yours, you’re feeling guilty. And you want to confess. Don’t worry, Kim; the Well appreciates all your, er, hard work, so we’ll see that you don’t fry. I don’t see what other options you have. All I need from you is your username and password.”
Still smiling, he placed the chisel on the glass beside the computer and poised his fingers over the keys.
Kim shook her head. Her trembling lips searched for words momentarily before she could speak. “No. I’m not going to jail for the Well. I’m going to finish what Amber started. I’m gonna bring the damn thing down.”
Carlton smiled broader. “You know, Kim, I’ve heard you’re one of our best refined ladies, but you have a tendency to be problematic. That was a very problematic answer.”
He picked the chisel back up, and there was a small cling as its sharp tip hit the glass. He traced the chisel’s toe point down her thigh, applying a bit of pressure. Her black jeans split open, curly frayed edges.
She wailed.
He put the chisel on the bedspread, stuck his fingers on both sides of the opening in the pant leg, her smooth, warm skin brushing his fingers, and tugged, splitting the tear all the way to her knee. The jeans made a satisfying sound as they ripped, and Kim screamed again.
He put his hand on her now exposed thigh, rubbed up and down. Supple, perfectly shaved, quivering at his touch. Lovely. No wonder she was so popular. He should have partaken at some point. Oh well.
He grabbed the chisel again and brought it to her skin. The edge was terribly sharp, eliminating his need for theatrics. Let the chisel do the work. He lightly, so lightly traced it along her thigh. The skin flared with goosebumps.
And then quickly, he applied a bit of pressure, pushing the toe point in with a tiny pop, piercing her flesh. A drop of blood appeared and raced down the curve of her thigh.
Kim wailed.
He continued.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The door slammed shut.
Silence staggered into the darkness of the garage, his eyes glancing back to the door, to where Mr. Accord was, and saw just a thin strip of light, the glowing rectangular outline of the doorway.
The back of his leg smacked something hard, something plastic, a couple feet tall. A mop bucket or a trashcan or a sawhorse. The sudden impact was enough to spin him around, shuffle his feet, make him reach out into the darkness for something to steady himself. He found a suface, caught his balance, something cold and hard, the side of a vehicle.
His eyes adjusted, gathering fragmental outlines of his surroundings—a workbench to his left, a utility closet by the door.
He turned, and the bit of light from the doorframe showed Mr. Accord.
Right in front of him.
What the faint light didn’t show, until the very last moment, was a fist, swinging in a massive uppercut.
The blow caught Silence right under the chin, cracking his teeth together with a sound that echoed through the garage. His head whipped back, straining his neck, future whiplash. His arms swam in circles. He staggered back again, farther into the darkness, sliding along the side of the vehicle.
Eyes forward. Mr. Accord in front of him, pulling back for a massive jab, a twinkle of confidence in his eye.
Silence reached out, wrapped his hand around the fist, stopped it before it could even move.
The look of confidence on Mr. Accord’s face changed to bewilderment, a bit of fear. Silence’s strength confounded lowlifes.
It wasn’t the sort of strength forged with barbells and weight racks. It wasn’t honed by any sort of traditional exercise program. It was a mixture of static strength, speed, explosiveness, and muscular endurance. It came from the combination of mental conditioning, isometric exercises, and repetition.
It was a sort of strength that a scumbag like Mr. Accord had never encountered.
Silence twisted the man’s fist, a precise movement that brought incredible pressure on the rotator cuff. Mr. Accord bent at the waist, then looked up at him with those bewildered eyes again. With his free hand, Silence slugged Mr. Accord across the jaw. The man stumbled back.
Silence lunged for him, tightening his fist, ready for a deadly blow.
But as he stepped forward, he felt himself shift to the left, felt his surroundings shift as well, moving in a strange off-kilter manner. That first uppercut from Mr. Accord had been a doozy, but he hadn’t realized that it had been devastating.
Another step. Toward Mr. Accord. Silence’s hand slipped off the vehicle.
He reached under his jacket. His fingers brushed the Beretta, fell off. Grabbed it. Pulled it from the holster. It fell from his grasp, clattered on the concrete.
Silence had had the sense knocked out of him many times in his line of work, but it always returned quickly, within minutes.
Right then, though, Silence didn’t have minutes.
Only seconds.
He put his hands on his knees, straightened up, staggered to the side. Regained himself. Looked up. And in his swimming vision, he saw Mr. Accord.
Sneering.
The confidence had returned.
Mr. Accord recognized the symptoms Silence was exhibiting. He knew he’d knocked him senseless.
And so he slowly approached, sneering broader, almost gleefully, and grabbed Silence by the arm. He yanked hard and spun Silence half a revolution before releasing him.
Silence flew to the far end of the room, his shoes slapping against the concrete, deeper into darkness. Dusty, thick air. A change in direction, a twirling of his senses, and he hit something that sent a shock of pain through his back.
A set of shelves.
It cracked and collapsed upon him.
Sharp pain to his left shoulder. Something had fallen, struck him. Another blow to his head. His neck. His other shoulder. His back.
The contents of the shelves. He was being pummeled. And even in the darkness, Silence’s trained senses told him what was dropping on him—metal paint cans.
He fell to his knees.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
They struck Silence all over—left, right, top, bottom. On his stomach now. Sharp edges cracked into his back, through his clothes, through his skin, into his muscle.
More cans falling. A crack to the back of the skull, hard, an instant headache.
And with a final metallic thud, the last can crashed onto the concrete beside him.
He was half-buried in the heavy cans. The palm of his left hand was pressed flat against the cold concrete, and two cans rolled to a stop in front of him. One was latex paint; the other was a smaller can, wood stain. Which would explain why there were so many damn cans. Carlton Stokes must’ve been a woodworking hobbyist.
Silence groaned. Pain warbled throughout his body—at the top of his head, through his core, into his feet. He moved his arm. The heavy cans tumbled around him, like stones tumbling down a precipitous m
ountain face.
His eyes were closed. He opened them again, scanned the garage, found the rectangular outline of light coming in from the house’s interior.
And there was Mr. Accord, faintly silhouetted in the dim glow.
He stepped toward Silence.
And Silence’s cheek fell to the concrete.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The dark line running down Kim Hurley’s luscious thigh was only an inch long.
But it had been agony for her.
She was screaming to beat the band, and while Carlton wasn’t the type to enjoy such things—he’d taken part in similar brutalities during his active days in C11 and never gotten quite the thrill from it that some of his associates had—he couldn’t say he wasn’t enjoying it either. Kim was quite the little dish, a spirited thing, the wild child among the refined girls; seeing her kick and scream and twist and moan so much was a bit of a turn-on.
But he wasn’t doing this for fun. There was a purpose. And he needed to get it accomplished.
He pulled the chisel from her leg.
She panted.
“This can end, Kim.” He motioned to the laptop. “Username and password. Then this will all be over.”
She looked at him with wet eyes. The eyes went to the laptop. And back to him.
He felt the left corner of his mouth rise a bit in a smile.
He’d almost broken her.
Footsteps. From the other side of the house.
A sweep of panic flushed his skin. He turned dumbly to look at the door.
“Shut up,” he hissed at Kim.
And he listened.
He remembered the big man that Finley had described, about his thoughts from a few minutes earlier, his assumption that the big man was the figure of legend.
The Shadow.
In his house.
Carlton was trapped!
He needed something, an advantage, a bargaining chip, a weapon.
Something.
