The Suppressor

by Erik Carter

  “I love you, too.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded.

  “Then why the pause?”

  He studied his knees, hesitated again. “Because there’s something important I need to tell you also.”

  He picked an oak leaf off the bench, pinched it between his fingers.

  “I’m not who I’ve told you I am. My name isn’t Pete Hudson.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  When Jake woke again, things felt different.

  Somehow he knew that time had passed.

  A lot of time.

  The visual, too, was different. While his environment hadn’t changed—the same dark hospital room cramped with beeping machinery—now there was a man standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed.

  Jake jumped.

  The plastic strips securing his arms snapped tight, digging into his wrists. A washed-out, drugged-up wave of discomfort swept over him.

  The man took a step closer, looking directly at Jake, hands in the pockets of his suit pants. White. Fifties. Tall with an athletic physique, no hint of a middle-aged gut. Thick mustache that he wore in a cool, don’t-give-a-shit sort of way that, on his strong face, made him look rather like Tom Selleck, the post Magnum P.I. years.

  “Welcome back,” the man said in a deep voice spiced with a bit of strange, seemingly inappropriate whimsy, accented by a small smirk. “I suspect you think I’m associated with Lukas Burton. Don’t worry about that, buddy. You’re very, very far away from Pensacola, Florida. Your guardian angel whisked you a thousand miles north after she saved your life.”

  Jake tried to reply.

  And he was immediately stopped, as though his voice smacked into a concrete wall.

  Even with the pain medication clouding his system, a searing slice of pain had torn right through his throat, gnashing, ripping.

  He jerked again. His wrists snapped in their binds.

  “Don’t speak,” the man said. “Not yet. You need more time. Burton did a number on your throat.”

  Burton.

  The punch to the throat.

  Yes, that was the last thing that had happened. That horrible, crushing destruction that had sent his world into a white cloud of nothing.

  Jake had been dead. He had to have been.

  Then how was he here?

  The mustached man continued to grin. “I had them take you out of sedation for a few moments. I want to implant a few things for your subconscious to ponder while you’re knocked out for a few more weeks. Let’s start with this.”

  He reached to the top of the beeping monitor beside him and grabbed a plastic-framed hand mirror, stepped to the side of the bed, and held the mirror a couple inches from Jake’s face.

  Pure bandages. A mummy head with a thin open strip in the middle where his dark eyes looked back at him. Someone had removed his bright green contacts. The eyelids were pink, shiny, bloated. They didn’t look like his eyes.

  The man stepped away, put the mirror back on the monitor, then smiled down at him, his mustache twisting to one side.

  “You’re never going to look like or sound like or be the man you were before. You need to understand that. It’s been a few weeks since your incident. This isn’t a hospital; you’re in a private facility in northern Virginia, three stories underground. The person who rescued you is one of my, um, employees.” He paused. “You killed four people, Mr. Rowe. That’s a serious crime, about as serious as they come.”

  The man stepped to the door in the back. There was a small shuffling sound, and suddenly a patch of light flooded the room.

  Jake squinted. The light actually hurt.

  The man had cracked the door open. His back was to Jake, leaning his face out the gap in the doorway.

  “Go on,” the man said to someone on the other side, and then the door closed, darkness returning.

  A beep from one of the machines.

  Immediately, the inside of Jake’s left forearm cooled. The drop in temperature coursed through his body.

  He exhaled and felt peaceful. In fact, he felt really damn good. He sensed C.C. nearby, heard her laugh.

  His eyes fluttered.

  The man approached him again, closer than he’d been before, stopping right at Jake’s side and looking down at him. “You’re facing life in prison. Or the electric chair. But my organization is willing to offer you a second chance. I just wanted to put that idea in your brain.”

  Jake’s head fell back onto the pillow.

  His eyes shut.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  As Jake’s mind slowed once more, at first there was a blank nothingness.

  Only for a moment.

  And then he was alive again, in a memory.

  He was on one side of a table with C.C., and on the other side was Tanner. Two of the most important people in Jake’s life, meeting for the first time under terrible circumstances.

  With Jake getting sucked further and further into his undercover role, this was the first time he’d seen Tanner in weeks. Meetings with the police were tough to arrange when people thought you were a mobster.

  Jake looked at the older man, studying him in a glance. Decency exuded from Tanner, so much that Jake sometimes thought his grumbling was a compensation tactic. Wouldn’t want to appear soft. His skin was a deep, warm brown, and his eyes had a sad wetness to them that was complementary to and yet at odds with his grumpy countenance.

  They were in an empty office in the police headquarters. Nothing but the table and chairs in the center of the room and a pendant light hanging above. The air was musty and tasted way too dry for Florida. The place felt like an interrogation room, though it wasn’t. There was even a window—covered with battered Venetian blinds—where the quintessential two-way mirror should be.

  None of this was helping C.C., who was already uncomfortable as all hell, turned in on herself, eyes downcast, the reluctant center of attention who must have felt like she was being interrogated. She wore one of her typical quirky outfits—a pair of vintage flared jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a Georgia peach orchard—and the splash of wackiness was at odds with both the surroundings and the situation.

  Not only could Tanner have picked a better place for them to meet, but Tanner himself was only making things worse with the way he kept leaning forward on the table, inching into C.C.’s personal space, his exasperated huffs every time C.C. offered any form of resistance.

  His shoulder holster wasn’t helping matters.

  Jake knew where Tanner’s insistence was coming from—the months of work he and Jake had put into this investigation and the opportunity to bring Sylvester Farone and the rest of the crime syndicate down for good—but he couldn’t fathom how Tanner could have such little tact, leaning toward her in his authoritative manner.

  C.C. squirmed back in her chair, as far as possible, knitting her fingers on the table’s laminate surface.

  “Miss Farone,” Tanner said. “If you really want to end the suffering your brother is causing, this is the only way.”

  Tanner uncrossed and recrossed his arms. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, as was his custom, revealing thick forearms with striations. Once upon a time, Tanner had been a gym rat, like so many cops. These days he retained a lot of his former mass, though it was softer than it had been in the old ’70s photos Jake had seen. He’d also added mass to his midsection.

  C.C. nodded, bit her lip, looked to the linoleum floor.

  Jake didn’t want to push her much harder, especially after how bothered she was getting by Tanner’s insistence, but after a moment, he gave her a gentle prod.

  “Babe?”

  She looked at him, lips parted, eyes uncertain.

  Tanner leaned in even closer. “Ma’am, with all due respect, what’s the issue here? You’re uncomfortable with the way your brother conducts his business—the torture, the gruesomeness. And you’ve already been assured that the legitimate part of the family fortune will be yours.”

  C.C.
shot him a look. “Money? That’s not what I’m worried about.” There was no quicker way to get a rise out of C.C. then to accuse her of being money-hungry. “I’m concerned about my father.”

  Tanner finally leaned away from her. He dropped a knuckle to the table, clearly all he could do to keep from lashing out in frustration. “I already told you that—”

  “Tell me again!”

  A reluctant smile came to Tanner’s face. “The DA has assured me that given your father’s mental condition, the state won’t waste taxpayer money pressing charges.”

  “And you can get him into protection with me and Jake? Transfer him to a different nursing home?”

  “Of course.”

  C.C. nodded. “Sylvester. My brother … If I do this, if I bring evidence against him, promise me you’ll treat him with as much leniency as you can.”

  Tanner started to reply, but Jake thought it better if he replied here, something more reassuring than Tanner would give. He simply said, “We promise.”

  Tanner scowled at Jake, and Jake gave him a look that said, Be cool.

  C.C. placed her hand on Jake’s knee, turned to him. “We’ve been together a few months now. Not that long, I suppose. You said you love me. Did you mean it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe I was just a part of this sting of yours. A tool. Something for you to—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Tanner cleared his throat. “Ma’am, you and Jake can iron out the details of your relationship another time. What I need from you now is confirmation. Can we count on you?”

  C.C. looked off to the blinds.

  Tanner shot Jake a look, eyes widening, lips pinching tight.

  Jake gave him another Be cool look and a short chop of a hand.

  Tanner leaned in a bit closer to C.C. and forced another smile through his tightened lips. “What’s the hesitation, ma’am?”

  “You’re asking me to send my brother to prison. He may be a monster. Twisted. Evil. But he’s still my brother.”

  She paused.

  “He’s still my brother.”

  Jake woke with a jolt.

  Darkness around him. Beeping medical equipment. Small, bright lights of different colors.

  He was back in the tiny hospital room.

  Not a true hospital room, though. The mustached man had told him that this was some sort of private facility.

  How long had he been out this time?

  He took a few deep breaths and relaxed his bandaged head back into the soft depths of the pillow.

  His thoughts returned to the memory from which he’d just awoken. Tanner had been insistent that day with C.C., and it had frustrated Jake. But the old-timer had been doing so for admirable reasons. There wasn’t any bad in Tanner.

  Sure, he was a grumpy old fart. A Luddite. A grouch. But he was a good cop and a good man. When Jake first joined the police department, he had gravitated toward Tanner immediately, someone to model, someone so different from his father, a man who had been passionless even before he became a drunk.

  And now Tanner was surely hunting Jake down.

  That’s how good cops act. Impartially. Tanner wouldn’t care that Jake had been a protege. To Tanner, Jake would now be nothing more than a suspect, a man who’d murdered four men.

  Jake wondered if Tanner sympathized at all, knowing that Burton had killed C.C. Or maybe he hadn’t determined that Burton had killed her.

  Maybe no one knew she was gone.

  Maybe Tanner thought Jake had killed her.

  He wondered what Tanner was thinking right now.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Tanner reclined in the old squeaky chair, his back turned to his desk, looking at the corkboard that had recently been redecorated. For months, it was plastered with information about the Farone crime syndicate and the emerging Burton gang. But in recent weeks, the dominating motif was Jake Rowe—charts and bulletins and lookalike reports from as far away as North Dakota.

  Jake’s face stared back at Tanner from a half dozen spots among the materials.

  Behind Tanner, leaning casually, putting his fed ass on the corner of his desk yet again, was Pace.

  “It’s been over a month, and we haven’t heard squat,” Pace said. “Face it—either Burton or the Farones finished Jake Rowe off. He tangled with the mob, and they sent him sleeping with the fishes.”

  He said the last part in a thick, Godfather-worthy Italian accent.

  Tanner didn’t believe that Jake had been snuffed out. No. Not for a moment.

  All Jake had was his training and a single year with a badge. No one would ever call him street-smart either. And with his strange thought process and tendency to over-analyze, Jake’s head spent more time floating among the clouds than it did rooted in the here and now.

  But he was a survivor. Jake found a way. That’s why Tanner had invested so much in the guy, placed him on the fast-track to detective and jeopardized his own reputation by doing so.

  Neither Burton nor the Farones had gotten the best of Jake Rowe. Tanner knew that.

  “No,” Tanner said. “He’s still out there. Somewhere. I can feel it.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Burton strolled through the large office suite that the Farone family had secretly maintained for many years. It was so secretive that most non-family members of the organization—even high-ranking individuals like himself—never knew of its existence.

  But Burton had a way of rooting out the truth.

  The facility was no longer a secret to him.

  It was his.

  Whereas the other, well-known location printed counterfeit cash, this one produced more elaborate documents—driver’s licenses, social security cards, birth and death certificates.

  And passports, Burton’s chief interest in the place.

  White walls. Drapes that were permanently down, tacked to the bottoms of the windows. A drop tile ceiling with rows of fluorescent lights.

  The floor was filled not with cubicles and desks and swivel office chairs but with large plotters—elaborate, expensive devices used for sophisticated printing jobs, some of them humming, some of them screeching, the sounds melding into a surprisingly comforting din.

  A chemical scent perfumed the air, and it was also surprisingly pleasant. Maybe this was simply a case of association—perhaps Burton had grown to associate the tangy scent of ink with his upcoming successes.

  Success aside, since Burton took over the press some weeks back, there had been copious hurdles to overcome at the converted office space. To gain his power, he’d had to kill off most of the Farone contingent in one fell swoop—that fateful night when he’d made his arrangement with the Rojas. In the process, though, he’d also killed off most, if not all, of the people who knew how to operate this facility.

  And it was a challenge to get his guys to figure them out. First, they weren’t the smartest of fellas. Second, Pete Hudson and Christie had killed off all but one of his original lieutenants, leaving only Glover. And third, the new underlings he’d brought on were idiots.

  He stepped behind one of them, a scrawny, a white trash-looking guy in a threadbare, yellow-stained T-shirt. His name was Maxwell.

  Burton silently held out a hand; he didn’t need to say anything. Maxwell handed him a passport.

  They’d used Glover’s photo on the test run. Next to Glover’s image on the inside of the passport was the biographical information. He was listed as Reagan, Ronald, and his address was 123 Fake Street.

  Burton turned the document over in his hand, squinting at it.

  They were getting closer. But they weren’t quite there.

  His cellular phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, flipped it open.

  “Burton.”

  It was his most important client, the one whose need for the passports was most pressing.

  Burton looked at the passport in his hand as he replied, turning it over, studying it. “Wonderful to hear from you, my friend.
Yes, certainly we’re getting closer. The fonts are flawless, as is the ink match. We’re very close on the security features, which I know was your primary worry. At the moment, the issue slowing us down is the covers.”

  He closed the passport, ran his thumb across the cover’s blue texture. Too smooth. It needed to be slightly rougher.

  His client expressed concern about the timeliness of the order.

  “Don’t fret. We’re still figuring these machines out, but it’ll get done in time. I’ve got some real quick learners working for me.”

  He looked at Maxwell as he said that, whose dull-looking face was again squinting at the screen.

  Never hurts to stretch the truth a tad, he thought.

  But despite some of his more lackluster talent, Burton wasn’t lying when he said the order would be ready on time. Burton knew how to persuade people.

  His client asked if there was anything else that might impede progress.

  “Nothing will get in the way,” Burton said. “The only distraction left for us here is a few remaining Farone-faithful, a couple pods of them still embedded in the region.”

  He grinned at the thought of slaughtering them.

  “But I’m tying up those loose ends very soon.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Jake hadn’t realized he’d woken up.

  But somehow, as his senses returned, he found himself propped up in the bed, pillows behind his back, looking about the small dark room, at all the medical machinery. For how long? He’d simply faded back into existence, which made him suspect that they—whoever “they” were—had brought him out of sedation again.

  He glanced at the plastic handcuffs binding his arms to the bed’s handrails and saw that both arms were now free of bandages, except for a tiny, fresh-looking patch of gauze on his right arm, about two inches squared. His arm hair had been shaved and was growing back in.

  Gone, too, was the cast on his left forearm. He pressed the forearm’s bulge of muscle into the handrail, and, as he expected, it was doughy from atrophy. Curious, he also pressed his right forearm into the opposite handrail. While it wasn’t pure mush like the left, it had also gone soft. He’d been in this bed for some time.