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

Finley reached under his sport jacket, took his Smith & Wesson 4506 from its shoulder holster, put it to Guzman’s sweaty temple.

The small eyes closed. The lips turned down into a cartoon-perfect frown and trembled along with the rest of him. He raised his hands.

Finley didn’t need to say much. These situations required no communication. There was never a fraction of uncertainty in a mark’s mind about why he’d been marked, why he’d been hunted and caught. They always knew.

So Finley just said, “Six hundred dollars.”

“I … I don’t…”

Sobbing.

Finley patted him down, his hand slapping against Guzman’s soft flesh, which jiggled. A small pistol in his back pocket. Finley transferred it to his own. Then he holstered his Smith, slapped a hand over Guzman’s wet mouth, and brought a fist hard into his stomach.

Guzman squealed. Finley felt it through his fingers.

“Eight hundred, then. Tomorrow.”

Another fist to his stomach. Harder.

“Eight hundred, asshole! Have it tomorrow.”

Another punch. Another. Again and again. Driving his fist into Guzman’s doughy stomach. Blood trickled between Finley’s fingers, mixed with spit and sweat and tears. Soon Guzman would be pissing blood as well. Maybe shitting it.

Finley stopped. He stood up.

“Eight hundred.”

He eyed the spot in the center of the stomach where he’d been punching, used it as a bullseye, lined up a vicious kick—

And the cellular phone in his pocket rang.

Back outside the McDonald’s, at the sidewalk, under a streetlight, a few feet away from the restaurant’s outdoor playground, its menagerie of wooden structures and slides and swing sets inhabited by three stumbling, grown-ass men in baggy pants and gold chains, drunk at six in the morning.

He’d left Guzman in a weeping, crippled pile in the yard and walked a few feet away to somewhere he could return the call. He would have preferred getting the hell away from this decrepit part of the city, but his employer was not the kind of person you kept waiting. And there was no way in hell Finley was going to jeopardize his opportunity, this life he’d been afforded.

“Sir,” he said when his employer answered.

His employer inquired as to his whereabouts.

“Somewhere on the west side. Guzman, sir. He needed a little encouragement. It’ll be eight hundred tomorrow. Or I’ll terminate the account. My thought is—”

His employer had a different matter to discuss, wanted him elsewhere.

“But Guzman—”

His employer didn’t care about Guzman. There was something much more pressing.

Finley’s eyes widened as he listened. And before he replied, he was already moving, heading in the direction he needed to go.

He had to get there damn fast.

“I’ll be right there, sir.”

Chapter Four

People do confounding, even counterintuitive things during times of high pressure, Jonah Lund assured himself. Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. But he was still rather amazed at himself—he’d let this large, intimidating-looking man into his apartment!

Jonah stared at the plastic business card in his hand, which the man had handed him wordlessly when Jonah answered the door. He squinted at it as much to decipher the reality of the situation as to question the credibility of the text.

Jonah held it in both hands, and he rubbed his thumbs along the rounded corners. The plastic was clear but frosted with a matte finish. The ink was thick, raised off the surface, dark blue, glossy. Simple but stately blue stripes on the left side. It was the sort of card you expected from a Wall Street trader, an elite real estate agent, an embellishing piece of flair that says, See? I’m so successful I can spend a dollar per business card.

But this card had been completely repurposed. Where there would normally be a company logo, a name, an address, a phone number, maybe even an email address, there was just the strange message.

And its owner wanted it back. The man held out a hand.

Jonah reached across the coffee table and gave it to him. The sharp cuts of the man’s jaw and cheekbones and chin along with his piercing dark eyes said fashion model, but the professional air, the assertiveness, and the look of quiet compassion while he patiently waited on Jonah to finish examining his card said something else.

He was tall, about six-foot-three, and he dwarfed Jonah’s rather small armchair—part of Jonah’s entry-level set that the lady at Rooms To Go had assured him would look larger in his apartment, furniture that would soon have been a memory when he and Amber bought their first house. The man’s pale gray V-neck shirt had a bit of sheen, and it looked brand-new and expensive. The bit of the man’s chest that showed at the shirt’s V was taught and hard, striations rippling at the edges. He wasn’t bulky, but he was muscular as all hell. He wore a pair of dark gray pants and a dark sport coat over the V-neck.

Jonah leaned back in his seat. “So I don’t understand how … You … you’re here to help me?”

The man nodded.

“And you can speak, only limitedly?”

“Yes.”

Jonah jumped back in his seat. The man’s voice sounded like it came from the depths of his belly, forced through stratifying layers of rock before leaving his mouth. That one word, one syllable, Yes, had been a small equation of sounds, rumbling and hissing and popping.

It was so startling that for a moment, Jonah didn’t reply. The man just looked at him, unfazed, waiting.

“What’s your name?” Jonah said.

“Brett.”

Another syllable, another crackling growl. This time, though, the man also gave him a slight raise at the corner of his mouth, a tiny, communicative grin.

He didn’t look like a Brett.

“Your name’s not really Brett, is it? You’re not going to tell me who you really are or who you work for.”

He shook his head.

“Government?”

He shook his head.

“Why should I trust you?”

He shrugged.

Jonah breathed in. Held it. Sighed it out. Whoever this man was—whoever Brett was—he was the only person in a month who’d offered to help. And Jonah needed help. He was all by himself.

He stared