SURVIVORS (crime thriller books)

by T. J. Brearton

  But he would know. Surely this man would know who Heilshorn had hired to plough into Brendan’s wife and child.

  “No one is going to poison you,” Staryles said in the kind of soothing tone reserved for upset toddlers. “You can tell your story all you want. To the men at Riker’s Island, who’ll kick in your teeth so you can give better blowjobs, lying on top of you in the night, breathing in your ear.”

  Brendan’s heart was racing. “What about Lawrence Taber?”

  “The Sheriff works for us. Delaney, Colinas, all your buddies. You know that. Eventually, everybody does.”

  No, not everybody, thought Brendan, realizing that Argon’s funeral was today. He felt a pinch in his chest, a sudden and profound sense of despair.

  The whole thing was entirely too much to process. What constituted a national threat? Argon had been doing his own investigations into corrupt cops and politicians. What did the CSS care about some small-time executives and congressmen who were dabbling in prostitution or gambling for their own perverse pleasure? Did such minor transgressions really filter all the way up to effect the multinational corporations? Even in aggregate, the sins of local, regional, and state leaders couldn’t possibly penetrate the thick insulation of the billion-dollar companies, the IMF, the World Trade Organization. Something else had to have been at stake. Something that could threaten the stability of the entire country, and the expanding global empire.

  Jesus.

  It was right there – he only needed some more time, to clear his head, to look at the evidence, to digest the events of the past three days, the previous two years, and put it all together.

  Prison loomed like a nuclear winter, threatening to devastate everything, to annihilate his very soul.

  “What can I offer you? I don’t understand.”

  Staryles came a little closer, Brendan could see the color of his eyes, the light blue irises and the perfectly white corneas of someone who started their days with Spirulina shakes and ended them with murder. Staryles showed no sign of fatigue, no trace of compassion, no hint of ever giving up. Brendan could see in his face the entire universe that was behind him. He was one of many, and he knew it, and it gave him supreme confidence. Staryles was on the winning team.

  “You let me worry about that. You just make your decision. You have one hour.”

  Staryles hung up and left.

  Brendan set the phone down in the cradle on the wall beside him.

  EPILOGUE / Tuesday 6:31 AM

  About twenty minutes later, Brendan stepped up to the open toilet to relieve himself.

  A man Brendan recognized came closer in the gloom. It was the guy with the star tattoo on his neck.

  “Smart to come out against the New World Order, the fourth Reich,” he said. “Go on record. Smart.”

  Brendan found it hard to urinate with the star man standing beside him. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” the star man said. He leaned on the wobbly, chest-high partition on the side of the toilet area. He looked out through the bars. In the corridor beyond the holding cell, high barred windows allowed a glimpse of the breaking dawn, salmon-pink with hints of yellow.

  “It ain’t Jews in camps,” the star man went on. “Know what I mean? It ain’t Jews in camps, but that’s exactly what it is. Prison camps right here in our own country – people talk about how much money it takes to feed a convict like me. Man, I been jumping out since I was a kid. Been bitched. You know? They don’t talk about how much white money is made. They don’t talk about the camps built to put the Mexicans. To put terrorists. American terrorists. You don’t get your shot, boom, they lock you up. You don’t play ball, you say boo, man, they on the Erie Canal, and boom, they lock you up. Smart to come out against that shit.”

  Brendan flushed. The gurgle of the toilet and clanging of the pipes seemed to vibrate through the whole building. “Why is it smart?”

  The man, who had been looking out of the cell, or at anywhere but Brendan, now turned his gleaming eyes on him.

  “Judgment Day, man.”

  Brendan was silent.

  “It’s right here, right on Earth, man, when there’s a new day. When we start over, it will be remembered, what you did. That’s why I say it’s smart.”

  Brendan didn’t know whether to get away from this man or not. He stood where he was, waiting to see if star man had any more to say. People who dragged the mops and worked the tolls and lived in tenements, had holes in their socks, did time, they had real perspective. This guy had said he was bitched – a habitual offender.

  “It’s economic slavery now,” star man said. He had tight cornrows of ropy, blond hair. A pinkish scar cut across below his jaw, and along his neck, as if someone had once tried to cut his throat. “We reach in anywhere in the world we want and we take what they got. We put ‘em in debt, see what I’m saying, and then they work off that debt by giving us all they got.” He shrugged. “We don’t gas ‘em, but they kill themselves working – they commit suicide, see what I mean, or they get disease, or if their leaders resist, we send in the boys and pop, then we put someone else there who is . . . what’s the word.”

  “Amenable,” Brendan said.

  “Yeah, yeah. Amendable.” Star man shrugged, and stuck out his lower lip in an endearing, what do I know expression.

  “People be waking up to this shit, man, bet. And them motherfuckers don’t like that. They don’t like it. That waddn’t the first time the shit happened.”

  “What shit?”

  “Nine-eleven. That waddn’t the first time. And it won’t be last. That shit is happening again. And it’s gonna come right here, right on American soil, right in our backyards, just like the Revolutionary War.”

  The whole conversation had caused Brendan’s thoughts to drift back to Argon, and Argon’s sister, Mena, and their parents.

  Then the star man turned and wandered away, mumbling to himself as he went.

  * * *

  Jennifer Aiken spent the night in the hospital. As day broke, she came out of a drug-induced haze and into a bright, terrifying moment of lucidity. This moment followed on the heels of whatever half-conscious dream she had been having, one she could only recall a few snapshots from, impressions left in the spongy matter of her brain, like footsteps on brand new plush carpeting, already starting to fade as the fibers righted themselves again.

  In the dream she had been high in some tower – not surprising, but not a city high-rise or skyscraper either, but something much older, with massive alabaster-white columns atop tremendous plinth slabs. She had been looking down on the city far below, watching as a battalion of soldiers marched up the avenue. A voice had drifted through her dozing mind – she thought now that it might have been C. Northcote Parkinson, or someone like him who she’d studied in school.

  Parkinson was saying that democracy tended towards socialism, which tended towards chaos, which created dictatorships.

  Which created revolutions.

  And she felt something press against her heart like an icy knife blade. Someone had appeared beside her, and she turned and saw Brendan Healy. He bled from wounds she couldn’t locate, just a pool of blood at his feet, and she had screamed, and then she had found herself looking out the window of the hospital room, suddenly assured with startling clarity that everything she cherished, everything she knew and loved in the world, was in danger.

  She pressed the call button for the nurse. A moment later, one arrived, asking what she could do for Jennifer and how she was feeling. Jennifer interrupted her and asked to speak to the FBI man sitting outside of the door, sure that one was posted there. The nurse looked her over and checked her vitals and then brought the agent into the room. It was not Petrino, but some kid from Quantico who looked all of twenty-four years old, someone they posted to keep an eye on her so he wouldn’t get in the way of whatever other important shit they were doing.

  “I need my phone,” she told him.

  He looked at her, speechless for a moment. S
he realized he might have been posted outside her door in the night and not had a look at her yet. She imagined how bad she looked.

  “Um,” he said. “Yeah, yeah.” He gaped around the room; looking like he couldn’t find a clue in a detective store.

  “It’s probably with my things,” she said. “Right there, that little dresser there. Bag on top.”

  He went over to the plain white dresser and started rummaging in the bag. This went on for a while and she could feel her blood rising. She wasn’t usually someone with a quick temper, but the dream had left her unsettled, to say the least. Awaking with a feeling that everything you knew and loved and took on faith was in the worst kind of jeopardy did not exactly put you in a good mood.

  Finally he found the phone, holding it up a little and barely able to contain his sense of accomplishment. He was a handsome kid, and came back across the room wearing a wide grin on his square face, eyes shining. He handed her the phone as if it were some precious artifact he’d recovered. She might have even dated someone like him, she thought, back in the day, before John Rascher. Now she was a frail, half-poisoned wreck of a woman on a hospital bed in one of those flappy little gowns.

  She realized her head was getting all swimmy; these random thoughts and bursts of anger weren’t happening for no reason. She hadn’t asked the nurse but she was sure they had her on some sort of sedative as the Prussian blue worked through her system.

  She looked at her phone and saw she had a ridiculous thirty-three voice messages. She scrolled through her missed call list. Most of them came from people she knew. Of those that didn’t, one number showed up repeatedly.

  Brendan Healy. She was sure of it.

  She poked at the screen and then put the phone to her ear. The agent in the room was watching her – she’d almost forgotten he was there. When she looked at him he grew sheepish and didn’t know where to direct his gaze.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

  “Yes, absolutely,” he said. He started backing away, performing a little unconscious half-bow as he went. It would almost have been charming if it hadn’t, for some reason, thrown her full-force back into the realm of her dream, where she had stood between those massive pillars, looking down at the marching army, hearing the sound of its million leather boots slap the pavement, like some machine with its pistons pumping.

  She turned away from the agent and looked out the window, not wanting him to see her stricken with this horrific feeling, to see her face turn grey, her eyes fill with terror. As she stared out the window, she worried for a split second that the feeling would never go away, that she would be stuck in this mental state forever, and then a voice broke the spell.

  She listened to Brendan Healy’s message.

  “Ms. Aiken. It’s Brendan Healy.” He paused, and she could hear voices in the background, and the clank of metal. “I haven’t called anyone from jail since I was twenty-two and I called my dad. I was a cop for three years, a detective for about a minute, and a P.I. with no cases, after that. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.” He paused again. She heard muffled voices. “So I’m at the 11th precinct jail, but I don’t think for long. A lot’s happened. I don’t know what you know, what you don’t. I don’t know if you got out; I can only hope they came for you. I hope you’re safe.”

  Jennifer felt a tear track down her face. She wiped it away, but another one followed, and she left it, and watched the daylight continue to spread in the sky.

  “I need your help.” Another pause. “I keep thinking about this stupid shit. About bad guys and good guys. And that it’s all mixed up now. Everybody blames everybody else. But there are no good guys and no bad guys – and there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re all good. You know? I’ve listened to everyone’s lies – in the last five years I’ve heard everything. If someone was talking, they were lying. They were cheating. But that’s not them. That’s this world. That’s this system we’ve got right now; what we’ve created.”

  A final pause, and a muffled voice that was louder, closer. “I got to go. But, it’s like . . . it’s like this really is the end, you know? After all the bullshit, this really is the end.”

  She could hear the pain in his voice, and the resignation, and her tears came faster.

  “This is the end, but we don’t die. We don’t die from it. Whatever it is, whatever is wrong in the world, wherever we’re headed with all of this, we don’t die. We live through it.”

  There was an unpleasant beep and the message ended. She pulled the phone away from her ear and checked the screen to verify it. He’d run out of time.

  Jennifer dropped the phone on the bed beside her. She stayed on her side, looking out the window.

  She felt nauseous in her stomach, sore in her joints. Dear God, she had lost some of her hair. She would have to cut it all off. Screw it. Just cut it off. Soon as she got out of here. Change of clothes, a goddamn buzz cut, and she would go and find him.

  But first, she slept.

  THE END

  TJB

  1 November 2013 –

  20 June 2014

  Etown

  USA

  For Gianna, and all of the survivors.

  THE SEQUEL TO SURIVORS WILL BE RELEASED 2015

  Follow T.J. Brearton on twitter @BreartonTJ for news on the next book in the Titan Trilogy. Further novels by Brearton are scheduled for release in 2014 by Joffe Books.

  Read the first novel in the Titan Trilogy now

  “A #1 best-selling thriller that you won’t be able to put down”

  A young woman, Rebecca Heilshorn, lies stabbed to death in her bed in a remote farmhouse. Rookie detective Brendan Healy is called in to investigate. All hell breaks loose when her brother bursts onto the scene. Rebecca turns out to have many secrets and connections to a sordid network mixing power, wealth, and sex. Detective Brendan Healy, trying to put a tragic past behind him, pursues a dangerous investigation that will risk both his life and his sanity. Habit is a compelling thriller which will appeal to all fans of crime fiction. T.J. Brearton amps up the tension at every step, until the shocking and gripping conclusion.

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/HABIT-detective-mysteries-thrillers-BREARTON-ebook/dp/B00HRIJVFS/

  http://www.amazon.com/HABIT-detective-mysteries-thrillers-BREARTON-ebook/dp/B00HRIJVFS/

  Thank you for reading this book. If you enjoyed it please leave feedback on Amazon, and if there is anything we missed or you have a question about then please get in touch. The author and publishing team appreciate your feedback and time reading this book.

  Our email is jasper@joffebooks.com

  http://joffebooks.com

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  bsp; T. J. Brearton, SURVIVORS (crime thriller books)