The Suppressor by Erik Carter (best free novels .txt) 📗

Burton slipped through the hole and tested the door handle. Unlocked. Just as he was told it would be.

Inside, the hallway was a long tunnel of cracked flooring and dangling ceiling tiles, bounded by battered lockers. None of the light fixtures were operating, of course, but there were plenty of ambient city light to illuminate his path.

At one time, this had been a magnificent place. The quality of the workmanship and materials was apparent even as it decayed from existence. Burton imagined teenagers in 1950s garb roaming the hallway, smiling big 1950s smiles, smart kids on their way to futures as doctors and lawyers and engineers.

The public had complained when the powers-that-be boarded up this grand old place. How can you shut down such a beautiful building? It has so much history. Do we really need a new school?

People with that mindset were being left behind in the emerging world, dying off as much as the twentieth century itself. People like that were the reason people like Burton were prospering. Change was inevitable. And inevitabilities were profitable.

At the staircase in the back, he took the handrail and climbed the granite steps, which were smooth and scalloped from decades of foot traffic. The tapping of his shoes echoed off the walls as more phantom 1950s kids funneled around him, late for class. He could almost hear the ghost of a bell.

The second floor hallway was as dilapidated as the first. No lockers on this floor, just classrooms. Some doors were closed, some open, some hanging from their hinges, some missing entirely. Burton headed to his designated location, one of the empty doorframes.

As he turned the corner, he saw the man he was to meet, at the opposite side of the room, past a vista of ruined, upturned desks. The man was a silhouette by the windows, his back turned to Burton.

Burton stopped at the doorway and gave the man a warm greeting.

“Good evening, Mr. Roja.”

Chapter Fourteen

In the brief pause before the phone attempted to connect, Jake looked past the other two cars, across the abandoned parking lot to Wagner High School, a stately, two-story classic. When Jake had first moved to Pensacola as a kid, the school was still operational—past its prime but still magnificent. Since then, time and neglect had done their parts, eroding its austere character.

Instead of dialing, the phone gave a busy signal.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP…

Jake frowned.

The Farone mansion had several phone lines, and the one he’d dialed was C.C.’s personal line, which rang in her bedroom and the library. She rarely used the line—as she rarely spoke on the phone—and she didn’t own a cellular.

He pressed END.

“What’s the matter?” Charlie said.

Jake shook his head.

A tickle of guilt wriggled in Jake’s gut. He could have called C.C. before he left Burton’s beach house, but he purposefully hadn’t. He’d thought that if he called her from the Roja hit, explained that he’d had to go, the immediacy of the situation would make her less likely to be upset.

That had been cowardly of him.

He entered another number, Saunders’s, which rang in the butler’s pantry.

An immediate busy signal.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP…

Another number, one that rang in the great hall and kitchen.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP…

All the lines busy at once. That could only mean one thing: some sort of technical issue. A fallen tree lying over a cable, perhaps, or a vehicular collision with a telephone pole.

Of all the freaking times for this to happen…

That guilt he’d tasted a moment earlier compounded. Now he wouldn’t be able to contact C.C. until after the hit he’d promised her he wouldn’t attend.

He exhaled, let his head drop back to the headrest.

He couldn’t let that worry him right now. There was a task at hand, something much more immediate.

C.C. was always trying to help him organize his chaotic mind space, and she told him that one thing he needed to do was focus on one task at a time. Multitasking, she’d told him, was highly overrated.

Focus.

The phone was still in his hand, and there was another phone call he needed to make, the one to Tanner.

This call would finalize Jake’s decision, would alert his superior that he was ready to be pulled from the operation he’d been working on for months. It would solidify his lie to C.C.

Here we go.

He entered the number.

And pressed SEND.

Chapter Fifteen

Tanner adjusted his helmet, and as he did, he could feel sweat on his scalp. A drop slipped out of his hair, over his forehead, around his eye. The elbow pads, too, were frustrating him, and he adjusted them simultaneously by grinding them into the armrests on either side of his seat.

The interior of the SWAT vehicle was as squarish and bolted as the exterior. The passenger seat where Tanner sat was a series of stitched-together blocks of hard-as-rock cushions. The dash in front of him was a long plane of plastic and metal. The ceiling was riveted rectangles.

The truck sat in the darkness beneath the I-110 overpass. The city beyond was quiet—an empty and forgotten area, with a deserted high school and its equally deserted parking lot to the right and an abandoned pair of two-story brick industrial buildings to the left. No people and no traffic, aside from that rumbling on the interstate highway overhead. A plastic bag fluttered by, urban tumbleweed.

“Eyes peeled, boys,” Tanner said. “We’re looking for a black semi with a green trailer, ‘Garrison Power Tools’ in plain, block letters across the side.”

He hadn’t turned when he’d said it. Aside from the driver to his left, there were four SWAT-gear-clad guys in the bench seats in the back. They were all looking to him for leadership, but he could feel one particular pair of eyes staring at him—those coming from the first position on the bench right behind him.

Dammit.

He turned around, found Pace looking at him. With that smug grin. Even with the strap of his helmet secured tightly around his jaw, Pace’s face had a strong yet irksome quality.

“Now or never, huh?”