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

were overgrown with tall grass, weeds, runaway juniper bushes, and untrimmed palm trees, their dead fronds rustling in the breeze. The mall itself was a long, single-story slab of building, beige and probably bland even in its heyday. Now it was as stripped of any vestige of joy as it was stripped of all signage. Particle board and broken glass. Rusty shopping carts. Tipped over, collapsed garbage cans.

Jake turned to Wesley. “All right. Here’s the story: I’m a buddy of yours, an older guy, a friend of the family who wants to join the gang as well. I’m good with cracking locks, so you think I’d be a good recruit. Got it?”

Wesley nodded.

Jake opened his door. “Let’s go.”

They started across the parking lot, toward the mall. Wesley pointed. “Over there. In the corner. The red hat.”

He was indicating the back central point of the L-shaped building, a deep shadow beneath the overhang. Just visible was the silhouette of a man, hands in his pockets, hints of his figure and a bright red baseball cap.

And as Jake saw this man, he felt the presence of another. He turned.

A different shadow figure, in the distance, at the far end of the strip mall. When Jake’s gaze fell upon him, the man disappeared around the corner.

He remembered the man who’d been watching him an hour ago when he knocked on the Bowmans’ door. He’d thought then that his imagination was running wild, that the person was nothing more than a neighborhood resident. But now it was confirmed.

Someone was following him.

However, like before, Jake couldn’t concern himself with the person following him. His immediate attention needed to be here, focused on this other figure shrouded in darkness.

Jake squinted as they approached, the rotten asphalt crunching beneath their shoes. The man’s features grew clearer. Jake could see the white C, for Cincinnati, on the center of the man’s ball cap. Strands of hair, falling out, dark blond. He noticed that—

The man suddenly turned and ran into the empty storefront next to him.

Jake turned to Wesley. “Why’d he bolt?”

Wesley’s eyes were open wide. He shook his head. “No idea.”

Jake looked to the storefront where the man had vanished. It was one of the mall’s bigger locations, with a large glass entryway and banks of windows on each side, one of them boarded up. There were hints of shapes at the front of the store—shelving, boxes— while shadow consumed the rest of the space.

Half a second of hesitation from Jake. Then he said, “Stay here.”

And he sprinted toward the store. He drew his weapon.

He bounded onto the sidewalk, slowed down, gun in front of him. The doors were busted out, splintered sheets of safety glass hanging like drapes from stainless-steel molding.

He stepped through an empty door frame. Pebbles of safety glass screeched beneath his boots. The sharp smell of musty fabric. The drooping ceiling was a frozen sea of waves disappearing into the darkness, a mosaic of stained tiles and empty squares. Tangled piles of merchandise racks. Yellowed signs with smiling models, their faces eaten by encroaching patches of mildew.

Jake walked in, his boots finding more broken glass.

Just visible in the back was a doorway, one that must have led to an office or changing rooms. The door moved gently in a slight breeze coming through a nearby open patch of ceiling, a gaping hole, completely open to the nighttime sky.

Jake headed toward the door.

A pile of shelves to his left crashed down with a screech, and a chrome rod swung toward him, catching him across the stomach.

A hot flash of pain. Air sucked from his lungs. Jake folded over, and in this moment, the man lunged upon him, grabbing Jake’s hand in between the metal braces of two broken shelves, pinching them together, scissoring his gun free. It clanked on the linoleum.

A knee to Jake’s chest, bending him farther over. The man hopped onto a short table, a bit of high ground, and used this tactical advantage to grab Jake’s neck from behind. Rough fingers clamped into Jake’s throat. He wheezed for breath, slapped his hands behind him, weak, futile strikes. His lungs ached, neck burned.

From his bent-over position, he spotted something in his inverted perspective—the table the man was standing on. It was a glass-surfaced display table. And the man’s feet were dead-center on the glass.

Jake raised his left boot, bringing his knee over his chest. He thrust backward, an arching kick that brought his heel into the underside of the table.

The glass shattered.

Pressure vanished from Jake’s neck. He sucked in a gasping breath, the tingle of relief flooding through him, into his face, his fingertips.

A crash behind him as the man fell through the table.

Jake looked for his gun. Gone. Somewhere in the shadows, in the debris.

He swung around to the table.

And he finally saw the man he’d been chasing. He lay in a pile of broken glass and the twisted chrome frame of the ruined table, legs draped over the edge, bathed in a patch of light coming in through the front windows.

It was Glover.

Chapter Thirteen

Silence moved along the exterior of the house, mulch crunching beneath his shoes, clinging to the shadows as best he could, a challenge given that light flooded from the many windows, and exterior lighting from units on the walls and beneath the eaves added to the glow. He slid around palm trees, dodged flowers, and stopped frequently at the edges of the windows, as he continued to trace his target’s movements through the opulence of the interior.

Adriana.

She had entered through a side door of the garage, gone through a small entryway, turned a corner into a dining room with an all-glass table bearing an arrangement of abstract wire flowers in an oversized red vase, through the main foyer, and into a great room, where she finally slowed.

She looked tiny there, her housekeeper’s dress making her a gray spot that floated on a sea of dark hardwood, the cathedral ceiling with its massive scissor beams—stained to match the