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

having a bad day, and he’d just run way too many syllables through it speaking with Mrs. Enfield. It throbbed, and as he swallowed, even the saliva hurt.

But he said it. All five words. No interruptions. No pauses to lubricate his throat. He forced himself through every syllable, feeling all the slicing, all the ripping, all the red-hot burning until his eyes were bloodshot and wet.

“My name … is Silence … Jones.”

His chest heaved. The muscles in his jaws tensed again. His nostrils flared.

A moment passed.

And then it was over.

C.C. would tell him to let go.

So he let go.

The steam clouded the last bit of his reflection as his jaw muscles slackened, eyes brightened, and a slight smile came to the corners of his lips.

He thought back to what Falcon had said the previous evening, before he turned and walked away, leaving Silence alone on the pier outside the Auditorium with police lights dancing off the water.

You’re going to be a legend.

A legend.

Silence could live with that.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Years later.

The 1990s. Somewhere in Florida.

Walter Bowles tried to control his breathing, but the more he struggled to quiet himself, the more his breaths came out choppy, shuddering. Loud.

Shut up, shut up, shut up!

He rested his head against the concrete, cold on his crown of sweaty hair. Deep breaths. Slowly. He sucked in dust, nearly coughed.

The air in this goddamn place wasn’t making it any easier to quiet his breathing. Dust everywhere, gray dust that marred his clothes, his face, his moist palms.

Everything around him was gray, not just the dust. Long flat planes of concrete broken by doorways and halls and endless columns. All of it was lines and angles, an exercise in geometry, an abstract painting come to life, drained of all vibrance until the only remaining color were patches of light coming in through the unfinished window openings, the sole source of light in the dark place, which illuminated particles of never-settling dust.

Walter managed to slow his breaths slightly. And he listened.

Nothing.

Dammit, he heard nothing. He couldn’t believe it, but he would rather hear something than nothing. Because hearing nothing didn’t mean that the man wasn’t still out there somewhere in this partially completed concrete skeleton of a future office building.

No, the man was near. Hidden. Getting closer. Somewhere, moving through the angles of concrete, snaking through the shadows.

Walter knew this because he knew who the man was.

A man of myth among the criminal element.

Some people called him the Shadow. Others, the Quiet Man or Quiet Death. Walter had even heard him referred to as The Suppressor, both a clever play on his supposed persona and one of the ways in which he was said to dispose of his prey—a silenced pistol.

He’d heard rumors of the man appearing in Miami and Ocala and the Keys and the Panhandle. All over Florida. It had seemed to Walter and many of his associates that the man was some sort of vigilante protector of the Sunshine State.

But then a friend of his in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places, shared a story. Gus sounded terrified when he told Walter that a group of pervs in his city were found dead in a motel room, all with two bullet holes in their foreheads. Their toy for the evening had been safely returned to her parents.

In the wake of the attack, the lowlifes of Lincoln had converged, compared their experiences. The collective conclusion was that a man had been snooping around the city, asking questions, breaking arms. A tall man. Pure muscle—not bulging but taught, hard. Dark, chiseled features. Cold eyes.

And those who were left alived reported that the man did very little speaking; he simply told them to, “Talk.”

Talk. That’s what the Florida legend was famously rumored to say! He wouldn’t scream at you. He wouldn’t throw a thousand questions at you to confuse you. He would simply say, “Talk.”

And when he said that word, it came out through a horribly rough, deep, inhuman voice.

What did that mean, then, that Florida’s killing shadow was also working in Nebraska? Could it simply be a case of blind, stupid regionalism that led people like Walter to believe the man was operating solely in Florida? Or could the man be tormenting the underworld of the whole country? The entire world?

No. No, that was crazy. All of it. Utter lunacy.

A man with a demon voice hunting down murderers and rapists and drug bosses? Come on.

Walter wasn’t thinking right. There was no vigilante killer in Nebraska or Florida. There was no Shadow. No Quiet Man. No Suppressor.

Whoever was out there in the shadows wanted him dead. That was for sure. But he wasn’t the boogeyman.

If Walter was going to make it out of this alive, he had to get his head on straight. And he had to walk straight as well, which was a challenge given the state of his ankle.

He put his hand on it, grimaced. Just the slightest touch, that’s all it took to send ripples of electric pain up his calf. When he’d sprinted out of the alley and into the construction site, momentarily escaping the big man, he’d made a beeline for a room in the back corner, which was small and dark and seemed like the perfect place to lay low.

What he hadn’t noticed were the rectangular cutouts in the concrete floor, future homes for heating and air conditioning components, assumedly. His shoe had caught in one, twisting his foot back and to the side. Walter had let out a scream that echoed off the empty corridors.

He’d limped through the labyrinth of walls for a minute or two after that, not going to the room he’d originally spotted, thinking that his scream might have alerted his pursuer to his destination.

Instead, he’d taken a circuitous path through hallways and empty doorways, up and down half flights of steps, dodging construction debris, until finally he could stand the pain no more and turned the corner into the next available room, which must have been a future