Deadly Silence (Silence Jones Action Thrillers Series) by Erik Carter (fun to read .TXT) 📗

Jake gave Kip a small, mediating motion of his hand. “Mr. Bowman, please.” And to Wesley, he said, “Who were the people you worked with? How did you meet them?”

Wesley still didn’t look up. He focused on his hands, the fingernail he was scratching at. “One of them approached me at the college last week. Never gave me his name or the name of the gang. But he said he’d noticed me playing ball, thought I had what it takes. I hoop on the campus courts sometimes. You know, pick-up games.”

Kip muttered behind them.

“What did he look like, the guy who recruited you?”

“White, kind of stocky. I’ve never gotten a good look at his face. He always wears this Cincinnati Reds baseball cap real low. Low profile, you know? Gangsta.”

“Have you met any other members of the gang?”

Wesley nodded. “Twice. At this old strip mall. There are two other guys. I’ve never seen those other two’s faces; they always wear black ski masks, like they wear when they…” He trailed off.

“When they rob your family?” Kip shouted.

“Go on,” Jake said to Wesley.

“We meet in person, at the strip mall. No phone calls. They said I’d be made, dude. How the hell could I pass that up?”

Kip scoffed, passing by on his latest path around the kitchen. “Get ‘made’ and destroy your family in the process.”

“There was another drop planned for tomorrow,” Jake said. “When were you to meet them and make arrangements?”

Wesley glanced at the clock again. “In fifteen minutes.”

Jake looked from the clock to Kip and back to Wesley. “I see. Then you and I need to take a little drive.”

Chapter Eleven

Like his prior self, Silence had determined he needed to “take a little ride,” this one a nighttime cruise through Sarasota, Florida, with lovely views of the backside of a blue, rusty 1970s Volkswagen Beetle.

He’d gotten to his rented Crown Vic before Adriana had made it out of the neighborhood. He’d caught up with her a couple of blocks away from her house, at which point he pulled back, avoiding detection.

She’d left her home.

After people had just attacked it, tried to burn it to the ground, after the mysterious assassin who had eliminated her attackers had expressly told her not to leave.

She’d left.

And Silence had a feeling she wasn’t out to pick up some McDonald’s.

Ideally there would have been a lot of traffic on the streets, plenty of places for him to hide, but the night was relatively quiet, so he kept a few car-lengths of distance between them, and only occasionally did another vehicle fill the void. From his first meeting with her, Adriana’s tells had informed him that she wasn’t the most street-savvy of people. She wouldn’t notice him trailing.

A red traffic light ahead. The Beetle’s right turn signal blinked. Adriana was about to merge onto U.S. 41, the principal highway running through Sarasota.

Silence followed her south on the multi-lane, languid, forty-mile-per-hour street through miles of strip malls and chain restaurants and gas stations and palm trees and doctors’ offices, nearly all of it quite clean and comfortable. Sarasota had money.

After fifteen minutes of this, the Beetle’s turn signal came to life again, and Silence followed.

A quiet side street, so quiet that he had to slow down, pull farther back. There were no longer any vehicles between them.

Communities full of expensive homes lined either side of the street, which was dotted with benches, towering palms, and pink-flowered crape myrtles. Decorative yet solid ten-foot walls rolled past, walls that defined the different communities, multi-story houses looking out over the top edges.

Sherman Heights. Woodsman Grove. Blue Creek Valley. Stately signs gave the community names in big, proud lettering, illuminated from below with bright lights stationed in lush landscaping. The Beetle passed by more and more of them, for over a mile, to where Silence was starting to think that Adriana had become aware he was following.

But then the Beetle’s turn signal came on again, and it entered Miller Springs. Silence pulled back farther.

One- and two-story behemoth homes. Precisely trimmed lawns, obscenely green. Chattering sprinkler systems. Palm trees. Perfectly, intentionally quaint streetlights.

A couple more turns, and the Beetle pulled into the driveway of a sprawling one-floor, coastal-style affair of probably four or five thousand square feet. Walls of stone and stucco interrupted by copious windows. Elaborate Florida landscaping lush with several types of palms of drastically different heights, flowering bushes, and tangles of broad tropical leaves. Modern, sophisticated decor could be seen through the many towering rectangular banks of windows, from which warm, inviting light poured into the lawn.

Why the hell had Adriana Ramirez left her recently attacked home, defying his request that she stay, to come to a place like this?

Silence brought the Crown Vic to a halt, two blocks back. He leaned down over the dashboard and looked up at the massive, brightly lit house.

Chapter Twelve

In New Orleans, Jake had also leaned down over a vehicle dash to peer at a building outside. He was on the passenger side of a dry-rotted vinyl bench seat, and in the misty New Orleans night before him was an abandoned strip mall, the destination for Wesley Bowman’s scheduled meeting with the unnamed representative of the gang he’d been trying to join, the people for whom he’d sold out his family and their life savings.

Wesley brought the Ford Ranger pickup truck to a slow stop in the blacktop expanse of the parking lot, which was scarred by weed-filled fissures, not unlike the parking lot behind the warehouse earlier in the evening. He put the stick in neutral and pushed the parking brake pedal. “This is it.”

Though Jake was in full police mode, deep-seated paternal instincts also vied for his attention. He wanted to chastise the kid—How the hell did you think anything good would come from dealing with people out of a place like this?

It had been a long time since the strip mall had seen customers. The parking lot islands