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

a man standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed.

Jake jumped.

The plastic strips securing his arms snapped tight, digging into his wrists. A washed-out, drugged-up wave of discomfort swept over him.

The man took a step closer, looking directly at Jake, hands in the pockets of his suit pants. White. Fifties. Tall with an athletic physique, no hint of a middle-aged gut. Thick mustache that he wore in a cool, don’t-give-a-shit sort of way that, on his strong face, made him look rather like Tom Selleck, the post Magnum P.I. years.

“Welcome back,” the man said in a deep voice spiced with a bit of strange, seemingly inappropriate whimsy, accented by a small smirk. “I suspect you think I’m associated with Lukas Burton. Don’t worry about that, buddy. You’re very, very far away from Pensacola, Florida. Your guardian angel whisked you a thousand miles north after she saved your life.”

Jake tried to reply.

And he was immediately stopped, as though his voice smacked into a concrete wall.

Even with the pain medication clouding his system, a searing slice of pain had torn right through his throat, gnashing, ripping.

He jerked again. His wrists snapped in their binds.

“Don’t speak,” the man said. “Not yet. You need more time. Burton did a number on your throat.”

Burton.

The punch to the throat.

Yes, that was the last thing that had happened. That horrible, crushing destruction that had sent his world into a white cloud of nothing.

Jake had been dead. He had to have been.

Then how was he here?

The mustached man continued to grin. “I had them take you out of sedation for a few moments. I want to implant a few things for your subconscious to ponder while you’re knocked out for a few more weeks. Let’s start with this.”

He reached to the top of the beeping monitor beside him and grabbed a plastic-framed hand mirror, stepped to the side of the bed, and held the mirror a couple inches from Jake’s face.

Pure bandages. A mummy head with a thin open strip in the middle where his dark eyes looked back at him. Someone had removed his bright green contacts. The eyelids were pink, shiny, bloated. They didn’t look like his eyes.

The man stepped away, put the mirror back on the monitor, then smiled down at him, his mustache twisting to one side.

“You’re never going to look like or sound like or be the man you were before. You need to understand that. It’s been a few weeks since your incident. This isn’t a hospital; you’re in a private facility in northern Virginia, three stories underground. The person who rescued you is one of my, um, employees.” He paused. “You killed four people, Mr. Rowe. That’s a serious crime, about as serious as they come.”

The man stepped to the door in the back. There was a small shuffling sound, and suddenly a patch of light flooded the room.

Jake squinted. The light actually hurt.

The man had cracked the door open. His back was to Jake, leaning his face out the gap in the doorway.

“Go on,” the man said to someone on the other side, and then the door closed, darkness returning.

A beep from one of the machines.

Immediately, the inside of Jake’s left forearm cooled. The drop in temperature coursed through his body.

He exhaled and felt peaceful. In fact, he felt really damn good. He sensed C.C. nearby, heard her laugh.

His eyes fluttered.

The man approached him again, closer than he’d been before, stopping right at Jake’s side and looking down at him. “You’re facing life in prison. Or the electric chair. But my organization is willing to offer you a second chance. I just wanted to put that idea in your brain.”

Jake’s head fell back onto the pillow.

His eyes shut.

Chapter Forty-Six

As Jake’s mind slowed once more, at first there was a blank nothingness.

Only for a moment.

And then he was alive again, in a memory.

He was on one side of a table with C.C., and on the other side was Tanner. Two of the most important people in Jake’s life, meeting for the first time under terrible circumstances.

With Jake getting sucked further and further into his undercover role, this was the first time he’d seen Tanner in weeks. Meetings with the police were tough to arrange when people thought you were a mobster.

Jake looked at the older man, studying him in a glance. Decency exuded from Tanner, so much that Jake sometimes thought his grumbling was a compensation tactic. Wouldn’t want to appear soft. His skin was a deep, warm brown, and his eyes had a sad wetness to them that was complementary to and yet at odds with his grumpy countenance.

They were in an empty office in the police headquarters. Nothing but the table and chairs in the center of the room and a pendant light hanging above. The air was musty and tasted way too dry for Florida. The place felt like an interrogation room, though it wasn’t. There was even a window—covered with battered Venetian blinds—where the quintessential two-way mirror should be.

None of this was helping C.C., who was already uncomfortable as all hell, turned in on herself, eyes downcast, the reluctant center of attention who must have felt like she was being interrogated. She wore one of her typical quirky outfits—a pair of vintage flared jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a Georgia peach orchard—and the splash of wackiness was at odds with both the surroundings and the situation.

Not only could Tanner have picked a better place for them to meet, but Tanner himself was only making things worse with the way he kept leaning forward on the table, inching into C.C.’s personal space, his exasperated huffs every time C.C. offered any form of resistance.

His shoulder holster wasn’t helping matters.

Jake knew where Tanner’s insistence was coming from—the months of work he and Jake had put into this investigation and the opportunity to bring Sylvester Farone and the rest of the crime syndicate down for good—but he couldn’t fathom how Tanner could have such little