The Suppressor

by Erik Carter

  And Laswell wasn’t exaggerating. No hyperbole. No embellishment. No sarcasm, for once.

  Of all the Assets Laswell had pulled into the Watchers, this guy—this former teacher, this short-term police officer, this love-struck, heartbroken fool—was a step above. He had the X factor. The dark depths of tragedy and an endless pool of resourcefulness. He was the perfect storm, a giant mass of intangibilities.

  Valuable, dangerous intangibilities.

  “Good luck, Suppressor.”

  Laswell turned and left, leaving Silence Jones to his new reality.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  The sun was too bright. The sky was too blue. The temperature and humidity were too ideal, and the breeze felt too pleasant.

  For what Silence was about to do, there needed to be solemnity. The sky should be gray with a bitter chill and nagging drizzle.

  He drove along the cemetery’s neat, well-packed gravel path. When he left Virginia two weeks earlier, Falcon had told him he wasn’t to visit C.C.’s grave. Last night, at the Auditorium, Falcon had reiterated the command, and, in the same conversation, had said he appreciated that Silence was a man of his word.

  Silence was a man of his word. It was true. But Nakiri had said that bending rules was as useful a skill as any of the others she’d taught him when it was used judiciously and in situations that were entirely necessary.

  This was necessary.

  In the two weeks since he’d returned to Pensacola, he’d yet to visit C.C.’s grave. He’d been telling himself that it was because of the true-to-his-word quality that so defined him, that so impressed Falcon.

  But that wasn’t it. Not entirely.

  There was also hesitance.

  Dread.

  He turned a corner and saw the fresh grave ahead. He pulled the car to the side, parked, and took out his binoculars.

  Falcon was right. A six-foot-three guy shouldn’t be hanging out at Cecilia Farone’s grave site when a six-foot-three guy was wanted for her murder.

  So he just observed it from a distance, seated in a vehicle, where no wandering eyes could discern his height.

  A simple, unassuming gravestone. Granite. Sparkly new. Her full name at the top, CECILIA NICOLE FARONE, and dates at the bottom—a late 1960s date on the left and an early 1990s date on the right. The only other word was DAUGHTER.

  The most special soul he’d ever known, summed up by DAUGHTER.

  She spent most of her time in her books and in her mind. She had almost no friends, and her criminal family existed in a different realm than the one she soared upon. Her father hadn’t known how special she was, not in his cogent days and certainly not after he slipped into dementia. Her brother loved her, but he was a lunatic.

  Silence was the only person who would ever know who Cecilia Farone had been.

  He stayed for two minutes looking through the binoculars. Then he left.

  That evening, quiet had returned to East Hill. There were no festival noises from a few blocks over, no jet flyovers.

  And no rattling, bass-pumping El Camino rolling past.

  Silence watched Mrs. Enfield’s hands, twisting against each other in the dip between her legs. Her blind eyes were apprehensive as they looked over the peaceful street in front of them. The two of them were on her porch swing. Baxter sat between them, purring and drooling.

  “You’re sure they’re not coming back?” she said, her white eyes looking past him, to the end of the block.

  She’d been fretting about her recent visitors since they sat down.

  “I’m positive.” Silence swallowed. “You’re safe now.”

  He spoke as gently and reassuringly as his crackling voice would allow. He was getting better at controlling its intonations, evidenced by the way Mrs. Enfield leaned back in the swing and unknotted her fingers.

  She exhaled. And nodded. Tension left her face as she fully accepted his words of reassurance. Silence wished he could let go that easily. He was working on that.

  “God sent you to me,” Mrs. Enfield said. “Right when I needed you. Lola, my last caretaker, left the state a few weeks before you moved in. I got no family left. Never had kids. Blind and alone, except for Baxter. But now I have a guardian angel next door.”

  Silence had never considered how difficult it would be to live alone with a disability. Nor had he ever thought he’d be someone’s guardian angel.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “I can’t very well go on calling you Silence. I give all my friends nicknames. I’m gonna call you Si. Work for you?”

  That was two people in the last twenty-four hours who’d taken it upon themselves to shorten his name to Si. He really had no say in the matter at this point.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The old woman tussled the fur on top of Baxter’s head. The purring grew louder. “Will you tell me now what happened to you, why it is you won’t talk to me?”

  Silence didn’t reply.

  Mrs. Enfield nodded. “On your time, son. On your—”

  “It was bad,” he said and swallowed. A quick breath. He held it. Released. “My fiancée was…” He swallowed. “Murdered. Brutally.”

  Mrs. Enfield said nothing, just nodded again. She placed her hand on his knee and left it there.

  He’d said it. Out loud. Through his ruined throat, with his monster voice. He’d put it out into the world, a simple fact that he’d kept entirely in his mind for months.

  C.C. had been murdered.

  In a typical action movie, after a revelation like this, the hero would receive his long-due relief. A look of serenity would fall over his face, as though it had been denial that had brought him such grief for so long.

  But Silence had never denied that C.C. was gone. He’d not repressed the image of her mutilated face, the screams he’d heard when he’d been forced to watch the video of her murder.

  For Silence, verbalizing that her incredible life had been cut short, that she’d suffered, that she’d been taken from him, was an act of solemn acceptance.

  C.C. had told him he had control issues, that he desperately wanted to be in charge of his fate. But he couldn’t, she’d said, and when he accepted that fact, things would get better for him.

  She told him that he needed to stop trying to dictate the course of the future. She told him to stop thinking so much. She told him to relax.

  She told him to let go.

  So while he would never let go of her—never—he would let go of her murder.

  As much as he could.

  He wouldn’t see the destroyed face, his final image of her. He wouldn’t focus on the fact that the last thing she’d said to him, in the answering machine message, was a bit of anger. A swear word. A vile name, directed at him. Asshole.

  He would see her beautiful smooth skin, dark eyes, beaming smile that crackled with kindness and wisdom and trivia and joy. He would hear her kind words. Like love. She always called him “love.”

  For a few moments, he and Mrs. Enfield sat without saying a word, just staring into the quiet street. No cars or people passed. A solitary insomniac bird twittered in the magnolia tree to their right.

  Then Mrs. Enfield broke the hush, asking him a simple but personal question: what was his favorite ice cream flavor? Chocolate chip cookie dough. Mrs. Enfield hadn’t tried that flavor, nor any of the other “newfangled concoctions.” Give her good ol’ strawberry. The next question was similar but slightly more serious in tone: he was in such good shape that she wondered if he might have some pointers for her. She was trying to lose a couple pounds. He looked over her tiny frame and asked her where she planned on losing those pounds from.

  From that point, the conversation’s seriousness level rose no further. It was nearly an hour that they spoke, and Mrs. Enfield was quite patient with Silence’s constant pauses as his throat became progressively sorer.

  He didn’t mind the pain.

  When their conversation ended and Silence returned to his own home, he found a Fe
dEx delivery by the door.

  Inside the house, he placed the small box on the marble kitchen counter, cut the tape with a utility knife, and opened the smaller box within, which was long, thin, and full of cards. He took one out, held it in his hand.

  When he’d devised this plan, he’d never actually seen plastic business cards; he’d simply assumed—hoped—that they actually existed. A print shop downtown confirmed that plastic business cards were indeed a real thing, but he’d have to order them from a specialty business. The shop gave him the website of an out-of-state supplier.

  It was one of the few times Silence had ever ordered something via the Internet, so he’d been apprehensive about the process. But as he looked at the card now in his hand, he was pleased.

  Unlike most paper business cards, plastic ones had rounded corners. The proportions were slightly different too, creating an overall shape that, along with the thickness of the plastic, made plastic business cards identical to a credit cards or other swipe cards—the only missing element was the magstripe.

  The card in Silence’s hand was opaque with a frosted, matte finish—like a glass shower door. He moved his fingers behind the card, watching the faint pinkish outlines through the plastic.

  On the left side of the card were two dark blue geometric slashes, one slightly darker than the other. He couldn’t help but grin. There had been several pre-designed templates, and while he could have gone with a completely blank card, he’d chosen one of the designs.

  In hindsight, he couldn’t say why he’d added a bit of flare to such a purposeful item. It seemed silly now. But he liked it.

  It was a little bit of his future, looking back at him from the palm of his hand. Each time he would meet someone he was to help, he would hand the person a card. His voice was too damn jarring. The card would be his means of introduction.

  Of course, once the introduction was made, he would ask for the card back. Couldn’t have it floating around in the wide world.

  Which meant he was going to have plenty of extras. The smallest order size available had been one hundred.

  He put the card back in the box with the other ninety-nine.

  Silence looked in the mirror.

  He was drawing a much needed bath, and the air was getting chewy thick as piping hot water filled his old clawfoot bathtub. Whoever had taken the lead in redesigning Silence’s 1955 home to his chic tastes had decided to leave certain retro-cool details intact, such as the clawfoot tub. He was impressed. The mystery person seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

  Fog inched in from the edges of the mirror, tightening around his reflection. He felt moisture on his fingers and finally pulled his attention away, looked down. He saw that his fingers were clenched tight on either side of the vintage sink—another purposefully preserved detail—and his left hand pinned his PenPal to the porcelain. Moisture from the steamy air had condensed on its yellow plastic cover, tickling his fingertips.

  He opened the notebook, flipped through the contents. The first several pages were leftovers from his Jake Rowe days. More precisely, the Pete Hudson days. As he continued turning, the notes evolved from his shorthand notes in the early days of the undercover investigation to the ones written on the fateful evening that led to the end of his former life. He saw the notes he’d written to Mayer, the mob doctor, when he got his leg stitched up.

  Grab something for the pain, dickhead

  A couple pages of these notes, then there was the list of names—Burton and his men. All eight names were now crossed off. The previous night, after the events at the port, he’d put the final slash through Burton’s name.

  Cobb

  Gamble

  Hodges

  Knox

  McBride

  Odom

  Glover

  Burton

  Next was the five-word script he’d written for himself when he’d parked the Grand Prix, something he’d used to test his voice after the sight of C.C.’s body had given him selective mutism, literally scaring him speechless.

  My name is Jake Rowe

  He’d held the PenPal by the car’s rearview mirror, read the note, tried to say the words—and nothing had come out.

  Another flip revealed the message he’d shown Odom.

  Did you hurt her?

  Then the pages became filled with notes from Nakiri’s training. Firearms data—cartridge types, muzzle velocities, effective firing ranges. Details about biomechanics and orthopedics. A reading list, exhaustive, years’ worth of books.

  He flipped to the last marked page, another list, one he’d written only moments earlier, after he’d turned on the water but before he’d faced the mirror.

  It was a second list of names.

  Identities.

  Jake Rowe

  Pete Hudson

  Loudmouth

  Asset 23

  A-23

  Suppressor

  dummy

  Si

  Silence Jones

  He pressed the PenPal against the mirror, into the encroaching steam. His eyes flicked back and forth between the list and his stern reflection.

  Nine monikers in less than a year.

  His fingers clenched the edges of the notebook, quivering, and for a moment, he wanted to throw it—out the door or into the filling bathtub or crashing through the thin awning window high on the wall near the ceiling.

  Then C.C.’s voice came to him.

  Life doesn’t happen to you, love. It happens for you, she’d said. One’s identity is forged by the way one meets life’s challenges.

  He took a deep breath, just like she would tell him to do. From the stomach. A diaphragmatic breath.

  He tasted the thick, warm moisture in the air, felt it in his lungs. The water gurgled in the tub.

  C.C. would tell him to meditate now, that he needed to, that one can meditate anywhere, anytime.

  He closed his eyes.

  Another deep breath, from the stomach. He monitored his body and became aware of the moment, of his presence. His legs, rather tight. His waist. His core. Up through his chest. His arms. Into his face. His jaw was clenched. C.C. used to tell him he carried a lot of his tension in his jaw muscles. He released it. The air felt cooler. The gurgling water echoed.

  His eyes opened.

  He blinked, felt the notebook in his hand. And something compelled him to look at one of the notes he’d studied moments earlier. He flipped back through the pages, found it.

  My name is Jake Rowe

  Months ago, he’d held this note beside the Grand Prix’s rearview mirror and hadn’t been able to say the words.

  He looked at the old note, then quickly flipped through the pages, past all the other notes, past the list of names he’d written a few minutes earlier, to the first clean page. He pulled the mechanical pencil from the PenPal’s spiral binding, scribbled out a note, and slapped it back on the wet mirror.

  He looked at his reflection in the tiny bit of clean mirror that the steam hadn’t yet consumed. The muscles at the corners of his jaw—on this new, angular face of his—bulged taught and hard. He did carry his tension there, just like C.C. had always said. He released the strain again, and his eyes flicked over to the note he’d just written.

  My name is Silence Jones

  This was a second chance.

  His throat was having a bad day, and he’d just run way too many syllables through it speaking with Mrs. Enfield. It throbbed, and as he swallowed, even the saliva hurt.

  But he said it. All five words. No interruptions. No pauses to lubricate his throat. He forced himself through every syllable, feeling all the slicing, all the ripping, all the red-hot burning until his eyes were bloodshot and wet.

  “My name … is Silence … Jones.”

  His chest heaved. The muscles in his jaws tensed again. His nostrils flared.

  A moment passed.

  And then it was over.

  C.C. would tell him to let go.

  So he let go.
<
br />   The steam clouded the last bit of his reflection as his jaw muscles slackened, eyes brightened, and a slight smile came to the corners of his lips.

  He thought back to what Falcon had said the previous evening, before he turned and walked away, leaving Silence alone on the pier outside the Auditorium with police lights dancing off the water.

  You’re going to be a legend.

  A legend.

  Silence could live with that.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Years later.

  The 1990s. Somewhere in Florida.

  Walter Bowles tried to control his breathing, but the more he struggled to quiet himself, the more his breaths came out choppy, shuddering. Loud.

  Shut up, shut up, shut up!

  He rested his head against the concrete, cold on his crown of sweaty hair. Deep breaths. Slowly. He sucked in dust, nearly coughed.

  The air in this goddamn place wasn’t making it any easier to quiet his breathing. Dust everywhere, gray dust that marred his clothes, his face, his moist palms.

  Everything around him was gray, not just the dust. Long flat planes of concrete broken by doorways and halls and endless columns. All of it was lines and angles, an exercise in geometry, an abstract painting come to life, drained of all vibrance until the only remaining color were patches of light coming in through the unfinished window openings, the sole source of light in the dark place, which illuminated particles of never-settling dust.

  Walter managed to slow his breaths slightly. And he listened.

  Nothing.

  Dammit, he heard nothing. He couldn’t believe it, but he would rather hear something than nothing. Because hearing nothing didn’t mean that the man wasn’t still out there somewhere in this partially completed concrete skeleton of a future office building.