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

forty-year-old furniture.

C.C. held a yellow dress, black flower print, daisies or something. She’d skipped away from him when she spotted it. She held it to her chest, spun in a circle, hopped.

—God! What have—

The mist. The tapping sound. From the brightness.

Tap, tap, tap.

C.C. there now. In the mist. Before him. Blocking his view of the bright spot he was trying to reach. Why would she stop him? He needed to see it.

But suddenly he didn’t care anymore. Not with that ethereal face. Her dark  brown eyes mellow with contentment. The light now illuminated her from behind, tracing her outline, tinting the edges of her black hair a deep crimson.

She smiled.

Then screamed.

The left side of her face boiled. Pink, purple, shiny. The right side exploded, flesh flying off. The mist turned pink.

Loud footsteps. Vibration in Jake’s side, through the floorboards, through the blood-soaked rug.

The taste of vomit, on his gums, burning the back of his throat. The copper smell of blood. Moisture on his arm, his face.

His eyes snapped open.

Someone was rushing toward him from the library’s doorway.

Saunders.

Red, sweaty, rage-filled face.

“My God, what have you DONE?”

Jake’s eye’s flicked to C.C. Inches away. Her destroyed face.

He looked away, couldn’t look at her, back to Saunders.

The old man’s barrel chest looked ready to rip out of his three-piece suit. His teeth were bared. Feral.

It was only then that it became clear to Jake—Saunders thought he’d killed C.C.

The notion had been so ludicrous it hadn’t immediately gelled in his mind.

He tried to speak.

It wasn’t me!

Nothing. Popping sounds from his throat.

Saunders stopped three feet away from him. Sweat dripped down his cheeks, which were blotched bright red and pale white. His arms quivered.

“Mate, tell me this isn’t what it looks like…”

I found her, Saunders. I love her!

Small crackles from the back of his mouth.

Saunders’s lip quivered. “You son of a bitch.”

An explosion of movement, and then pain rippled through Jake’s side. A brutal kick from Saunders’s wingtip. Jake’s mind flashed on the old man’s history in the London underworld.

Jake rolled to the side, further into C.C.’s blood, which was now cold.

How long had he been out?

He looked up. Saunders was not there.

And Jake knew where he’d gone. His eyes flicked to the right.

Saunders was pulling at a bookshelf, the one that had a row of books on a concealed set of metal tracks—a hidden compartment that stored a Mossberg 590.

Jake turned. His Colt had settled several feet away from him.

Saunders heaved back the hidden drawer, SMACK, grabbed the shotgun.

Jake felt his body move on instinct. No time to think. No time to scramble for his gun.

No time even for a last look at C.C.

There was a pump-action shotgun behind him, one that Jake knew was loaded to full capacity with nine rounds of buckshot.

He sprinted through the doorway, down the dark hallway, footsteps echoing harshly once more. He slipped on the blood-slicked sole of his right shoes, arms flailing momentarily.

His chest burned. His thighs ached. He tasted the cold, sour vomit in his mouth.

And he ran faster than he ever had.

The corner was ahead of him, the one he needed to take to get to the front door.

BOOM!

A deafening sound echoed through the hallway as buckshot ravaged the wall several feet back. Even so far away, debris peppered the back of Jake’s legs, the soles of his flailing shoes. A fragment of wood whistled past his shoulder.

Around the corner. He threw the door open and quickly closed it. Into the thick night.

The Taurus was ahead, achingly far, maybe fifty yards, where he’d left it by the fountain. A few feet from it was the Farones’ Bentley, which hadn’t been there when he arrived.

No sound behind him yet. Saunders hadn’t made it out of the house.

To the Taurus. He threw open the door, fell into the driver’s seat.

BOOM!

Searing pain in his calf. Metallic pops around him.

A pellet of buckshot had struck his left leg just as he was pulling it into the car.

Door shut. His body continued to move on instinct, ignoring the pain, forgetting about time. He fired up the engine.

A quick glance back to the house. Saunders, bursting through the front doors, the Mossberg at his shoulder. He racked it.

Jake smashed the gas pedal, dropped the clutch. The tires screamed. The Taurus shot forward.

BOOM!

More pellets thunked into the Taurus’s sheet metal.

The tires screamed as Jake spun the car around the circular fountain.

BOOM!

Past the fountain, heading down the driveway, toward the dark trees, the empty road.

BOOM! BOOM!

He looked in the rearview. Saunders behind him, emptying the shotgun with abandon. The blasts flaring into the inky night.

To the road. A screeching turn.

And Jake roared off into the darkness.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Briggs hadn’t spoken the entire time Laswell had described the series of events that led to Jake Rowe’s revenge-fueled string of murders throughout Pensacola, Florida. Now that Laswell had reached a good stopping point in the tale—with Rowe taking a pellet of buckshot to the leg—he gave the old man a moment to gather his thoughts.

Fortunately, Briggs had stopped staring at the wall, which was such a weird, off-putting habit. Instead, while Laswell had outlined the events, Briggs had sat nearly perfectly still across the desk from him, listening intently, only small movements of his arms, adjustments of his ass position in the cheap chair.

Laswell had long since given up on fidgeting in his own chair. His ass had fallen entirely asleep, as he’d earlier predicted.

And now, in this quiet moment, Briggs just continued to stare at him, blue eyes locked in, as he processed the information. So intense. Laswell had to look away.

Sheesh, now he wished the guy would just go back to staring at the wall.

Finally, Briggs broke the awkward quiet.

“Rowe was injured when he began his bloody revenge.”

He’d said it as a statement, not a question, and though he raised an eyebrow in an almost skeptical manner, Laswell could tell he was impressed.

“That’s correct. One of many indicators of his tenacity.”

It was like a job interview. By now, Laswell felt like he was selling