Sunken Graves by Alan Lee (life books to read txt) 📗

wireless drill. Ideally he’d use a workbench and vise but he made do by pinning the gun between his mattress and box spring. The drill bit didn’t remove metal from inside the gun barrel but rather the outside, thinning it. He went slowly, keeping the bit and the barrel well-oiled, shaving off half an inch. The final step was threading the outside of the newly-shaved barrel with a die cutter. A pivot tool kept the die cutter on track, evenly carving the outside like a screw so the suppressor could be twisted on.

The finished product looked…passable. The shotgun would never be beautiful again but now it would take a silencer.

Your grandfather must be turning in his grave, Daniel.

Holding the shotgun vertically, braced on the floor, he seated the suppressor and used a spanner to tighten it to the barrel.

The shotgun, a historic hunting heirloom, took on a mean look. A tool of war now. Utilitarian and brutish.

Jennings felt the urge to declare his intentions out loud. He needed to say it, needed to hear himself.

“I could kill Peter Lynch with this.”

What he should have done then was go to sleep. The spoken words should have shocked his senses, but it’d been days since he’d slept well. He dreaded the nightmares, the hissing PTSD in the dark.

That night, fighting in the mud, Lynch was changed. He lost his sanity. But maybe you did too. Maybe your need for sleep is desperate.

Instead of getting into bed, Jennings dwelled on Peter Lynch burying him alive in the mud. On those sunken spots. On aiming at the man and pulling the trigger with this very shotgun. It would tear a hole through Lynch he couldn’t survive, fired close. And if it was quiet…

But the weapon was too long, too unwieldy.

Sitting on his carpet again, he unscrewed the silencer. Did some measuring and wrote figures on a notepad. Measured again. Asking his grandfather for forgiveness, Jennings began cutting off fifteen inches of the barrel.

48

Peter Lynch preferred working late. The best things transpire in the dark. He sent emails like scud missiles at midnight, destructive legal motions so the opposing counsel had a bad morning. When the other side’s attorneys pissed him off, he’d place untraceable calls at godforsaken hours so they got no sleep. His employees knew to respond to his texts in the middle of the night or risk termination. Though his rampaging work ethic had slipped of late.

His office was a small palace on Franklin near Lawyer Row, a collection of firms that he harassed. His office was the grandest and biggest, subject to frequent egging.

That night Lynch was writing a brief, moving to dismiss a case. His client was the wife of a respected neurosurgeon, one of the school’s titans. She’d been driving intoxicated, blood alcohol level .27, reaching eighty in a forty-five at eleven in the morning and she’d driven into a tractor, half killing the farmer. A slam dunk, the farmer’s lawyers grinning and drooling. But Lynch had pored over the paperwork and found a missing signature on the complaint. He’d stalled to let the two-year statute of limitations expire, and now it was too late to amend—a legal nullity. A ludicrous loophole that he would exploit. He could hear the judge and opposing counsel groaning, the farmer crying, but the case would be dismissed. His fingers pounded on the keyboard with mad glee.

Despite his best efforts, his eyes kept drifting to two monitors he’d installed earlier that day. The monitors displayed the feed from two distant nanny-cameras but nothing moved at the moment.

He was wishing something would move when his brother, Francis, knocked on the door to his inner office. Peter glanced up and flinched.

“Got’damn, Francis, why’re you so spooky.”

“I mastered moving silently. You never did, wouldn’t learn your lesson.”

Above the doorway was a framed quote by Nietzsche— I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

Peter liked to see that quote when someone entered.

He muted the two monitors. “The chief was here earlier.”

“He told me.”

“The old bastard is disowning us. Or me.”

“That’s not accurate.”

“You’re right. He can’t. He never really adopted us,” said Peter. “The Chief had no idea what he was getting into, did he. Us two little boys, with all our brains and sin.”

“What’d he say?”

“His standard mundane rigamarole. I must grow up and this is my final chance. He can’t keep cleaning my messes.”

“Have you noticed he’s sick?”

“He looked like shit.”

“Speaking of, what happened to your office? It’s ransacked.”

“I sent my staff home. Worthless cowards, they don’t have the killer instinct.”

“You threw furniture at them,” said Francis.

“Work for a genius, deal with his whimsy. They’re paid to endure it.” Peter watched his brother’s eyes walk around the lavish office. “It galls you, doesn’t it, how much money I make.”

“It does.”

“You craved success, played things innocent, never got caught, yet I’m loaded and you’re a public servant. The irony.”

“Your face is bruised. The recent battle?”

Peter stood. “I destroyed a Green Beret. Had him begging, the runt of the Jennings lineage. You should have seen me, Francis.”

“But you didn’t kill him.”

“He’s only alive because of pure luck.”

Francis drew himself higher. “Peter. You’re losing control.”

“Watch your mouth, brother. You’re drooling.”

“That happens. When I’m worried. I want you to check yourself into Carilion. You need immediate therapy.”

“What a cowardly little bitch you are. You came here to wipe my ass.”

“You sound like the chief. It doesn’t become you.”

Peter covered his smile with his hairy fingers. “The hospital. And do what? Talk to a quack about our childhood? Talk about rabbits and phonebooks and Zippo lighters? Take pills? Lithium and Phenytoin?”

“That’s exactly what you should do.”

“Exactly what I should do.” Peter giggled.

Francis snapped a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his lips. “You’re a lunatic.”

“I have cocaine in my top drawer, how about that? Or maybe Desipramine. Maybe we hammer my personality until I’m gone.”

“Your mental stability is deteriorating. Hammering might restore it.” Or kill you, either way is fine, Francis didn’t