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

lights floating high above him were unlit, some of the ambient, gloomy light from the outside oozed in through the windows—big grids of opaque glass and iron muntins. The light came in as hazy streaks, sparkling with dust particles, illuminating a box of nails here, a pallet full of laminate flooring there.

Silence clung along the edge of the aisle, turned a corner, cleared both sides of the row. Nothing. Just a tower of cardboard boxes and a cluster of steel drums.

He proceeded to the next row.

And heard something.

A tiny scratch.

His hearing seemed to have been enhanced since he’d been forced into quietude, a heightened sense picking up the slack for a weakened one—like blind Mrs. Enfield’s ability to see without seeing.

The noise had come from another row up, around a corner loaded with pallets full of plastic bags of coarse gravel.

He slipped into a shadow, turned the corner.

And there he was.

Glover cowered with his back against a stack of gravel bags. His eyes flicked toward Silence, and Silence perceived movement in his hands, the earliest stages of an attack.

Silence literally beat him to the punch.

More of Nakiri’s training sizzled through his brain, a newly subconscious impulse.

His fingers tightened, and his fist swung faster than his brain recognized, cracking across Glover’s cheek.

The noise it made was revolting.

Bizarre.

Wet and hollow, punctuated by a small, almost delicate crack that Silence felt through his knuckles. He’d chipped the corner of Glover’s cheekbone.

Glover stumbled back, eyes pinched shut, swung blindly. Silence easily dodged the blow.

He clasped his hand around Glover’s forearm and twisted hard while at the same time getting his leg behind Glover’s knees. Glover’s feet flew up, and with a shove, Silence sent him flying down the aisle.

Glover struck the polished concrete hard and slid several feet back, bashed into an old, discarded pallet that exploded with the impact. Pieces of wood clattered on the ground.

Silence lunged toward him, closing the distance.

A flash of movement. A streak of wood.

And Silence felt something in his palm.

Another reaction so fast Silence didn’t perceive it. Glover had swung a broken piece of the pallet, and Silence had somehow caught it.

He remembered how, earlier, he’d disarmed Doughty, the primary street thug outside Mrs. Enfield’s house, how he hadn’t even realized what he’d done. It was like that again.

Another instinctive, instantaneous, unfelt action, and the board was torn from Glover’s hand. Silence threw it into the darkness. A moment later came the echoing racket of it landing somewhere in the distance.

Silence aimed his Beretta at Glover’s chest.

Glover’s boots scratched at the floor as he pushed himself farther back into the destroyed remains of the pallet. His shaking arms shielded his face.

“No! Shit! Please! I … I told you everything!”

Had he? Had Glover really told him everything he knew?

Silence wasn’t so sure.

He thought again of the street thugs who had been harassing Mrs. Enfield. Lee, the young one, the blind follower. Silence had made good use of his destroyed voice by saying one word to Lee, a single syllable that could get other people to do the talking for him.

He said it again.

“Talk.”

Glover’s mouth fell open, and he gasped. His eyes bulged as a look of disbelief fell over him, as though Silence’s peculiar growling voice was inconceivable.

And while the voice had clearly intimidated Glover, Silence’s command to Talk had simply made the man cower more. Maybe sometimes Silence was going to need to add a little extra incentive to his one-syllable command.

He aimed the Beretta lower, at Glover’s knee: crystal-clear non-verbal communication.

Glover kicked hard at the floor, pressing himself further into the broken boards. “I swear to God! I told you everything!”

Okay. Silence believed him. There was sincerity in his fear. Silence had siphoned every bit of useful information from Glover.

Time to switch gears. His work for the Watchers was done.

Now, a little me time.

It was time to kill another one of C.C.’s murderers.

Glover had kicked C.C. while she was on the floor. He’d turned it into a dance. Hands on his hips. Legs flailing. Laughing.

Glover’s lips quivered, and his eyes went wider, filled with tears. He knew what was about to happen. His hands were still held protectively over his face, and he extended them toward Silence, pleadingly.

“Whoa, man!” Glover said. “I gave you what you want. I swear that’s all I know! Let me go.”

Silence took deep breaths. Through his stomach, not his chest. Diaphragmatic breathing. Proper breathing. C.C. had taught him this.

A flash of sweat chilled his forehead. His skin prickled. The hair on his forearms stood up.

He raised the Beretta, slowly, moving away from Glover’s knee, tracing up his body.

Then a strange look came to Glover’s face.

Recognition.

Glover’s eyes moved over Silence’s body, leaving his face, skittering back and forth, like a typewriter, moving down, assessing all the details before snapping back up to his face, locking in on him again.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Glover said in a tiny voice that wavered with his rapidly accumulating tears.

Somehow Glover had figured out that this tall figure before him was the man he’d known as Pete Hudson. Glover had seen through the plastic surgery, through the difference in eye color.

Silence didn’t reply. He continued to slowly raise the Beretta until it was aimed at Glover’s head.

He stopped.

“Why are you doing this?” Glover screamed.

Silence stared at him.

And he lowered the gun, glanced at the floor as he remembered it again.

Glover had laughed. He’d laughed as he kicked C.C. to death.

Silence’s eyes went to Glover’s, which peered out at him from the gaps between the fingers of his shaking, outstretched hands.

“For Cecilia,” Silence said.

He raised the Beretta, lined it with Glover’s forehead, and fired twice. A double tap. Just like Nakiri had taught him.

Glover’s body didn’t spasm. There was nothing particularly dramatic about his death, nothing on par with its significance. Just a bright red double-hole in the plane of flesh at the top of his head along with a splatter of blood and brain on the floor and the broken boards behind him.

Silence observed the stillness.

He holstered the