by Erik Carter
The Suppressor
Erik Carter
Copyright © 2021 by Erik Carter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
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Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Pensacola, Florida
The 1990s
The man was out there, somewhere, hidden in the shadows and completely silent.
And the man was on the hunt.
Clayton Glover, the prey, squeezed himself tighter against the uneven surface, trying to match the silence of the predator. He inched his face toward the corner, stole a glance.
Nothing.
Just deep darkness pierced by crisscrossed streams of faint light that came in through the warehouse’s banks of windows, dust particles dancing within. Row after row of pallet racks, their skeletal steel uprights and beams climbing high above him into the darkness. Boxes and tubes and machinery and tools lined the shelves, all of it macabre and shadowy.
He ducked back into his position of safety, chest heaving. He let his head fall back against the stack of plastic bags behind him, which were full of coarse gravel. The plastic was cold against his sweaty hair. The stones poked at his scalp. He took in choppy breaths, willing them to be quieter, willing himself to shut the hell up.
All of this was happening because of Glover’s decision to follow Burton.
Glover wasn’t smart enough to be a leader, but he knew whom to follow. People like Lukas Burton—a winner, a born commander. He was the sort of man who could lead a guy like Glover to success, wealth, safety.
But if Burton was so damn great, why was Glover being hunted down now in a darkened warehouse?
And who the hell was the man hunting him?
Prior to the confrontation in the parking lot a few minutes earlier—when Glover had told the man Burton’s secret, before he’d managed to escape—Glover had never seen the man before, this large, cruel-looking individual with sculpted features, dark hair, and cold eyes.
He took another look into the warehouse. Still nothing. But how could—
There!
A flash.
The movement had come at the nearest window.
A reflection.
Something moving. Fast. he had just enough time to turn and find the fist hurtling toward his face.
Pain exploded in his eye socket, a burning wave that surged through the back of his head, up his nose, down his throat.
He stumbled back, took a blind swing, and a powerful hand clasped down upon his forearm and twisted. Glover’s feet were swept from beneath him, and he was thrown.
He landed hard on the floor several feet away with an impact that sent another pulse of pain through him, this one rattling his bones, erupting in his shoulder.
He slid along the polished concrete, bashed into something wooden. His eyes strained to open. Jagged boards surrounded him, the shattered remains of a pallet.
A moment of nothing. He breathed.
And then a shadow moved in front of him, the dark man loping forward, pistol in hand.
Glover grabbed one of the broken deck boards and swung just as the man reached him.
In a blur of movement, the man caught the board—caught it—and brought Glover’s swing to a dead stop.
After another streaking motion, the board was wrenched from Glover’s grip and the man threw it into the darkness. It clattered, the racket echoing off distant walls.
The man stood above him and aimed his Beretta 92FS at Glover’s chest. A silencer extended the pistol’s length.
Glover kicked feebly at the concrete, but there was nowhere to go.
“No! Shit! Please! I … I told you everything!” He shielded his face, his chest.
But the man’s face said he wouldn’t fire.
Not yet, anyway.
The look wasn’t there, that look in the eyes that said a person was prepared to take a life. Glover had been around violence his entire adulthood. This guy—whoever the monster was—had a reason for pinning Glover down like this. He wanted to squeeze more information out of him.
“Talk,” the man said, the first time he’d spoken. Minutes earlier, in the parking lot, the man had said nothing. He hadn’t needed to. The beating he’d given Glover was enough to get him to spill his guts.
Glover gasped.
The man’s voice…
It was a growl. Something at the same time mechanical and of the earth—deep in its bowels, forced up between layers of rock and lava.
The man brought the gun down, taking his aim off Glover’s chest and to his knee.
Talk, or you’ll never walk right again.
Glover’s arms pulled in tighter over his face. “I swear to God! I told you everything!”
He really had told the man everything. There was nothing left to share.
The dark eyes continued to stare down upon him. The pistol’s suppressed barrel didn’t waver.
Glover’s hands quivered in front of his face. He peered through his fingers, making eye contact with the man, a human connection, a plea.
The man’s expression changed. But not in the way Glover had hoped.
The look was there now, in the monster’s eyes, a veil of subtle changes to the muscles in his face. He bore the countenance of a man ready to go the full distance, to end someone’s life.
The desire to kill.
“Whoa, man!” Glover said. “I gave you
what you want. I swear that’s all I know! Let me go.”
Glover’s heart pounded. His eyes moistened.
Why? Why was this happening?
This wasn’t how things worked. There were codes to be followed. Glover had snitched. And therefore the man was supposed to let him go. That’s how this was supposed to work.
The man’s nostrils flared. His eyes went wider, took on a distant, hazy appearance—the kill look gathering power, building steam.
He raised the Beretta, away from Glover’s knee, going higher.
And then Glover noticed something.
The man’s eyes.
They looked … familiar.
No.
No, it couldn’t be.
The man was the same height, the same proportions, similar build, if a bit more muscular. Dark hair, too, yes.
But the face was completely different.
All angles and sharp lines. Brooding chic, like a fashion model or something.
Those cold eyes, too. They were dark brown, not bright green.
So it couldn’t be him.
But somehow … it was.
It was him!
Glover’s lips parted.
A slight change in expression on the foreign but somehow familiar face showed that the man knew Glover recognized him.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Glover’s voice was weak and pathetic, flavored by the tears building in his eyes.
The man didn’t reply. The Beretta continued to ascend, past chest level, to Glover’s head, and stopped.
“Why are you doing this?” Glover screamed.
The man blinked.
He lowered the gun, glanced to the floor.
But only for a moment.
Then, he looked Glover directly in the eye, that intense glare boring right through him.
“For Cecilia,” the man growled.
He raised his gun.
And fired.
Chapter Two
Silence Jones eased onto the front porch, slowly, carefully transferring his weight onto his lead foot. The floor was concrete, an advantage to him—no creaking boards to give him away. But the porch was deep, as large as a back porch, and the night was quiet, so even his careful steps had the potential to make scuffling noises against the concrete.
It had been gray and miserable all day, and now, with evening approaching, a fraction of sunlight was beginning to pierce through the gloom. But that bit of light didn’t concern him. Noise was his enemy at the moment. And so far he hadn’t made a sound.
Excellent.
He couldn’t risk even the tiniest of noises. The person whom he was slipping past had superb hearing.
The individual wasn’t another member of Lukas Burton’s gang. With Glover’s execution a half hour earlier, Silence had eliminated all of those people. Except Burton himself.
No, the person he was trying to elude wasn’t nearly as dangerous as Burton’s contingent. She wasn’t dangerous at all.
She was, in fact, a little, old, blind woman.
And she was Silence’s only companion in this new life he’d been given. She was his next-door neighbor.
The only threat she posed was the fact that she monitored his drinking, and this watchdog quality of hers was an issue at the moment, because Silence most definitely needed a beverage after what had happened a half hour earlier.
And what was still to come that evening.
His mind was reeling, not from finishing off Glover—which should have been profound enough, should have been a monumental, delectable moment for him—but because of the intel he’d squeezed from Glover before putting two rounds through the man’s skull.
The information was staggering, something that sent Silence’s assignment careening precipitously into the dark unknown, proving that Burton’s plan was much grander than anyone could have possibly imagined.
The implications were unthinkable.
The scale, massive.
Which, along with the fact that Silence just killed the second to last of the men who had stolen his fiancée from him, was the reason Silence held a plastic sack with a six-pack of beer.
One drink. Nothing that could impair him. Just something to smooth the edges.
Or, as his next-door neighbor would see it, something to feed Silence’s habit, the monster that had emerged in his life since he lost C.C.
She meant well.
Silence would sip his beer while he pondered what he was to do next, how he could solve the new threat that Burton posed.
Because Glover had said that Burton was making his move.
Tonight.
At 8 p.m.
That gave Silence three hours to figure out where to find the man.
But if Silence was going to consume an alcoholic tonic to calm his pulsating, confused brain, he first had to escape the old woman next-door and make it into his house.
She sat only a few feet away, in the shadows of her front porch, her white eyes shining from the darkness like a pair of tiny judgmental searchlights.
He made it to the front door, slowly put his hand on the doorknob, noticed blood on his fingers.
His?
Glover’s?
It didn’t matter. He’d find out when he washed.
He eased the key into the deadbolt cylinder, turned. No sound. So far so good. The lock was new and well-oiled. While his house was built in the 1950s, many of the details, including most of the hardware, had been updated.
Another quarter turn. The brushed nickel beauty continued to work noiselessly. But Silence wasn’t optimistic, because he knew there would be that inevitable noise, the clunk, when the deadbolt fully retracted into the unlocked position. There was no avoiding it. A person with normal hearing would easily discern that sound, let alone a blind individual to whom hearing was amplified. But maybe Silence could lessen the sound if he—
The beer bottles clanked together.
“Silence?” Mrs. Enfield’s little wavering voice called.
Shit.
Silence exhaled. He stepped to the far side of his porch, which terminated only a few feet from Mrs. Enfield’s, separated by the gravel drive that ran between the two houses. His neighbor’s tiny figure was on the green cushion of her porch swing, the empty white orbs of her eyes looking but not looking in his direction.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Come over.” She waved her hand.
Silence looked at the plastic sack, felt its comforting weight. Sighed. “One moment.”
There was a twinge in his throat with that last word, moment, a sting substantial enough to make him grimace. Every syllable he spoke brought pain, little movements from what felt like a permanently lodged knife, dulled with time and rust, but still effective. The more he spoke, the more it hurt, but sometimes the pain simply spiked for no apparent reason, as it had with moment.
He crossed the porch again, back to the front door. When he opened it, a pleasant gust of chilly air struck him. Humidity bothered him, and he lived in the most humid region of the continental U.S., so he kept his air conditioning cranked.
He headed for the kitchen, which lay right beyond the living room area, in the house’s long, shotgun-style layout. The house was built in 1955, and some aspects showed their age, like the floorboards squeaking beneath his feet, but the Watchers had renovated the interior shortly before they moved him in two weeks ago. While Silence had been surprised that they’d been able to locate such a perfect location for him, what really amazed him were the renovations. They’d gone to great lengths to consider Silence’s personal tastes—the palette was all black and grays and whites, and the design touches were modern and chic.
He caught a whiff of fresh rubber and plastics as he opened the refrigerator, a glossy black, state-of-the-art model, so new that it still felt unnaturally clean. The other kitchen appliances were also updated and also black, all the same brand. For whatever reason, the Watchers hadn’t taken down the old cabinetry, but they’d still continued with their policy
of utilizing his tastes and covered the cabinets with dark gray paint. He found this detail charming.
A nice notion, yes, but he would replace the cabinets soon enough.
He took the six-pack from the plastic sack, placed it on the top shelf. Heineken. Six green bottles in a green cardboard carrier, a splash of color in the glowing white, nearly empty environment. The only other item on the shelves was a white, five-by-five styrofoam to-go box. A bottle of ketchup was on the door.
A cold breeze wafted from the fridge, across his sore knuckles, and he stared at the beers. Wanted one. He could quickly drain a bottle, but Mrs. Enfield could—and would—smell it on his breath.
A feeling swept from nowhere, rushed over him. Self-loathing. Disgust. So pathetic, so worthless, this need for alcohol.
Just like the old man.
He closed the door, noticed again the blood on his fingers. It had to go. Mrs. Enfield would inspect his hands, part of what had become standard protocol this second week of his two-week stay in this home.
The bottle of hand soap at the stainless steel kitchen sink had been there when he first moved in, another of the Watchers’ efforts to make the house livable. It was from Bath & Body Works and had little scrubbing beads inside, which Silence thought might do the trick on the blood.
