Hush Hush by Erik Carter (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📗

blindside fate, his choices had cost him his voice, his prior face, his prior identity, and his freedom.

He’d have it no other way.

The revenge had been worth it.

It had been his choice.

Jonah took a deep breath and leaned back in the driver’s seat, faced Silence again.

“Should I watch it?” he said and reached into the large front pocket of his Baja jacket—blue-and-gray-striped, nice and clean and cozy, not a genuine hemp “drug rug” but something purchased at a shopping mall—and brought forth the VHS tape bearing a sticky note with his name written in his wife’s hand.

Silence hadn’t noticed that he’d brought the tape with him. It was such an odd thing to do, carrying it with him in his jacket, that it made Silence wonder if Jonah brought it with him everywhere.

As a reply, Silence only gave a shrug.

This wasn’t Silence’s area of expertise, consoling a brand-new acquaintance. Jonah’s decision of whether or not to watch Amber’s do-over vows was entirely his own.

His choice.

Silence’s mind flashed to what Jonah had told him, that he’d cheated on Amber because she “couldn’t do everything” in the bedroom.

He was looking at Silence. Waiting. Hopefully.

Silence wanted to break his nose.

Abhorrent piece of shit.

Silence had no qualms about leaving him hanging.

Silence pointed to the steering wheel. “Drive.”

Jonah exhaled. He squared up to the wheel again, lowered the brake, put the stick into first, and they took off.

Chapter Six

A realization came to Jonah, and it almost made him laugh out loud: the stink of filthy people reminded him of Amber.

There was a long line of homeless individuals outside the Morrison Mission—a drab, two-story brick building, a repurposed factory—and their combined sour stench was overpowering, a reaction that almost made Jonah feel guilty. Handwritten signs on neon green tagboard proclaimed today to be the mission’s celebrated “Meals on Monday.” The local homeless were not missing out on the opportunity.

This was just the sort of thing that Amber would have been keen on. She got as excited about giving back as other people did about their weekly sitcoms. But the fact that these incredibly smelly people outside the Morrison Mission—who were almost entirely men—reminded Jonah of his sweet wife nearly made him chuckle. It would be the first time he’d laughed in weeks.

And since this charitable place was so perfectly Amber, he was growing more and more frustrated that Brett insisted on investigating it. What was the point of investigating something so obvious?

Jonah followed behind Brett’s tall frame to his latest quarry, a white guy in a brown field jacket and a blue toboggan hat with a red pompom and large tear in the side.

“Weasel. You know him?” Brett said.

The man shook his head, the pompom flopping from side to side. He gave Brett a wary look.

Brett moved forward, continuing their path next to the line of people shuffling into the mission. Jonah followed. This had been the technique—ask that abrupt question with his intense stare and stone-troll voice, receive a negative response, assume the question was heard by the nearby people in the line, move forward four places or so, and ask the next man. Repeat.

Jonah sighed.

Why, oh why had he done this? Whoever Brett was—charitable benefactor, private investigator hired by a charitable benefactor, OPD Internal Affairs officer, government investigator—this was stupid. Just stupid. And it was making Jonah think that Brett was nothing more than a crackpot.

“Weasel. You know him?”

A black man in a patchwork leather jacket and laceless hiking boots shook his head.

Brett moved on.

All right. Jonah had had enough. He hurried forward, catching up to Brett, tapped him on the back.

“Come on, man,” Jonah said. “I told you, this is a dead end. This must be another one of Amber’s volunteering things. Let’s head to the press conference.”

Brett ignored him, continued up the line.

“Weasel. You know—”

A voice from behind them. “I know him.”

An old guy, not standing in line but leaning against a lamppost. Stringy white hair dangling over a stringy face with a stringy beard. Tall. Jeans and an orange T-shirt, rotten with holes, bearing the logo and phone number of an out-of-state barbecue joint.

Brett stepped past Jonah, approached the man. Jonah followed.

“You’re looking for Weasel, huh?”

Brett nodded.

“Haven’t seen that guy in ten years. Shit, man, I ain’t even heard the name.”

Brett nodded again.

“Talk,” he said, prompting the man, kindly almost. It was amazing how much inflection Brett could get out of his demon growl.

“What’s to say? When I knew him, he wasn’t nothing but a strung-out junkie. Heroin. You can see it in the eyes, man. Tiny little pupils. And track marks on the arm.”

“Description,” Brett said.

The man narrowed his eyes and grinned at Brett. “Man, what the hell is wrong with your voice?”

Brett just stared at him.

The man shrugged. “Black guy, pretty big. But, you know, losing mass ’cause of the poison. Sunken cheeks. Skittish as all hell. Nervous.” He laughed. “Don’t know where he came from. Just showed up one day. Hadn’t never seen him around here before. They say…”

The man trailed off, scratched at his beard, narrowed his eyes at Brett, suddenly skeptical, as though a voice in his head had implored him to stop saying so much.

“They say what?” Brett said.

“You guys cops?”

Brett shook his head.

The man looked up and down the line of people, to the far end of the street. Paranoia. “You know what, I … I’ve said too much already.”

He turned.

Brett reached out, caught him by his thin bicep, brought him to a halt.

“Talk.”

The man took another glance at the surroundings, scratched his beard again, then looked from Jonah back to Brett. “They say he’d been a cop, kicked off the force.”

Jonah’s mind flashed on Amber’s investigation and her position as a dispatcher, a job she’d held for only two years.

Weasel had been a cop.

A junkie cop from ten years prior.

A decade ago—when this man claimed to have last seen Weasel—Amber would have only been about fifteen. Not yet a dispatcher. Just a child.

The daughter of a different cop.

One in District C11.

Brett gave