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

Dark blue drapes, pulled tight, and a fancy vase, also dark blue, filled with frilly ornamentation of some sort. A dresser with knickknacks, arranged just so. A small lamp throwing light into the darkened room.

And on the bed, her wrists and ankles zip-tied, was Kim Hurley.

“You know, Kim, in one way or another, all of this is your fault,” Finley said.

She squirmed in her binds. “No! No, I swear I’ve done exactly what I was told!”

“To the point when your conscience got the best of you and you started talking to Jonah Lund and his associate, hmm?”

Finley gave her a smug little smirk, one of disappointment. He sat on the bed beside her.

Earlier he’d considered how attractive she was, despite the obnoxious personality. She looked even better now, on a bed, the tied wrists and ankles adding a bit of kink. She pulled in a decent revenue as one of the refined, not quite one of the top earners, but far from the worst. He wondered if being tied up wasn’t so very unfamiliar to her.

“Who is he?” Finley said. “The tall guy in the dark clothes.”

“I … I don’t know. I swear. I guess he’s another one of Jonah’s private detectives.”

Finley thought about the man, everything he’d seen throughout the day. How the man had spotted Finley at the parking garage; no one had ever been able to smell Finley out before. How deadly efficiently the man had taken down two of Finley’s men. Brutally fast. Mechanical. Precise.

Finley shook his head. “That guy’s no private detective. He’s a pro.”

Kim started crying again. “Are you gonna kill me?”

“We want answers, Kim. There are always ways to get them. And, yes, those ways could end up killing you.”

She wailed. “W-w-what are you going to do?”

Finley grinned at her. “Oh, not me. The big guy wants to take care of you personally.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

They sat in the Grand Cherokee at the edge of a gas station parking lot, near the air pump, which was still humming after a guy in an S-10 had stopped to fill his tires. A steady bustle of vehicles, people on foot zigzagging around them, sipping their freshly purchased mega-cups of soda, unwrapping candy bars. Metallic clicks of gas pumps being turned on and off. Gurgling nozzles. Impatient conversations.

When they’d gotten a safe distance from the overpass, and when it was clear they hadn’t been followed, Silence had told Gavin to pull over.

Because they needed to regroup in a major way.

Silence had a children’s book in his hands. The Secret of Summerford Point. It had a bright blue cover featuring a plucky-looking, auburn-haired girl, smiling but determined. Behind her was a coastal town bathed in nighttime darkness, spotted with streetlights.

He returned to the page in the back, the one Gavin had pointed out, a blank page that had been covered with two columns of Amber Lund’s handwritten notes.

Silence had been pouring through the notes, combining his findings with the dead woman’s.

And so far, nothing was making sense, nothing was telling him what had happened to Amber…

…or how he was going to find Kim Hurley.

Kim had told him she was involved in Amber’s disappearance. On the surface, that would make Silence dismiss the idea of trying to find where Mr. Accord had taken her.

But Kim hadn’t had the full opportunity to tell her story before she was abducted, and she had seemed incredibly remorseful, which led Silence to believe that while she may have been involved in Amber’s disappearance, that didn’t necessarily mean that she was involved in her death.

Silence was good at reading people. C.C. had told him this was a positive quality, something to never lose, something that would always root him in his humanity. He didn’t sense evil in Kim Hurley.

Naturally, helping her wasn’t part of the original mission parameters set forth by Falcon. But he was going to anyway.

She was worth saving.

If for no other reason than to help find out what had happened to Amber.

In the back seat, Jonah was clearly having similar thoughts about Kim. He said, for the second time, “It’s my fault. Mine, dammit. They took Kim because of me.”

Silence looked into the rearview mirror, made eye contact with him. Jonah’s face was twisted, grimacing. He rolled his head on the headrest, side to side, over and over.

Silence returned his gaze to the book. And when Jonah spoke again, Silence held up a hand, quieting him. It was time for rationality, not emotion.

He pulled out his PenPal and took the mechanical pencil from the spiral binding. Typically, he could convey what he needed to others through his abbreviated speech or through non-verbal cues. But sometimes he simply needed to get a lot of info out at once, so he turned to his notebook.

He scribbled out some notes.

C11 gets prostitutes by offering women literal Get Out of Jail Free cards

The enforcers are “foremen” — also criminals they’ve let off the hook

Corruption starts with C11 but has influences in the rest of OPD, as well as the state police and highway patrol

The guy running the show is the Oil Man

He put the notebook on the armrest. Gavin and Jonah hunched over it, read what he’d written.

“Okay,” Jonah said. “But how does this help us now?”

Gavin picked up the notebook, squinted at a detail. “One of the thugs back at the overpass said that Amber had gone there asking about the Oil Man.”

Silence reached out, and Gavin handed the notebook back to him. He looked over the note he had written, scratched his chin.

He opened the children’s book to the back page and the note he had in mind:

Oil Man = Warren

He put his finger below this note, pointing it out to Gavin. “Warren? Character in book?”

Gavin nodded. “Right. The town’s police chief. Kara goes to him about police involvement at the docks, but he doesn’t take her seriously.”

Silence leaned his head back against the headrest, gazed at the headliner.

Since Amber was using this book to guide her own investigation, there must be something