Hush Hush

by Erik Carter

  Mr. Accord…

  He was beneath the building.

  “Come on!” Silence said.

  They ran for the door.

  CRACK!

  Another shot. A couple feet behind them. Silence felt the tremor through the soles of his shoes.

  A yard from the door.

  CRACK!

  This one blew particles between his jacket and his shirt, peppering his back with stings.

  Outside, Jonah stared at Silence through the open doorway, mouth slack, cheeks pallid.

  “Run!” Silence shouted, a painful tear in his monstrous throat.

  Jonah turned, sprinted off.

  CRACK!

  Through the doorway, into the homeless camp. Frightened people staring his direction, pointing.

  Jonah running ahead of him. Gavin struggling a few feet behind.

  Silence looked back.

  Mr. Accord was on his stomach, in the open space between the building and the earth, emptying a magazine from the bottom of his H&K, grabbing another from his pocket.

  Shit.

  “Go! Go!”

  CRACK!

  A bullet whistled past. People screamed. They scattered in all directions.

  CRACK! CRACK!

  A woman in front of them took a round to the back, dropped.

  Silence ran to the side, behind one of the massive concrete uprights. Jonah and Gavin followed suit.

  CRACK! CRACK!

  More rounds screamed past. One of them struck the upright with a solid thwack.

  The street was ahead. There was the Fiero.

  Which was a two-seat vehicle.

  Two seats. Three men. A major tactical disadvantage in a situation like this.

  Silence was just about to dash toward the Fiero, planning to figure it out when they got there, when Gavin darted in front of him.

  “Come on!” Gavin said and went toward a green Jeep Grand Cherokee.

  Silence and Jonah followed.

  More screaming. People bashed into Silence from all sides.

  The smell of bonfires. Urine.

  The shots rained from the building.

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  Another homeless person took a hit, a man in his fifties, a brutal head wound that took off his toboggan hat and a chunk of his skull.

  They were to the Jeep. Silence threw open the passenger door, got in, closed it, crouched beneath the window.

  Gavin got behind the wheel. Jonah was in the back.

  Gavin threw the Jeep into gear, and they screeched off, dodging people as they scattered across the street.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  A half hour after the pandemonium at Falconer Street, Finley found himself in an entirely different environment.

  A guest room in a suburban home.

  A nice bedspread, light blue with stripes, clean and new. Dark blue drapes, pulled tight, and a fancy vase, also dark blue, filled with frilly ornamentation of some sort. A dresser with knickknacks, arranged just so. A small lamp throwing light into the darkened room.

  And on the bed, her wrists and ankles zip-tied, was Kim Hurley.

  “You know, Kim, in one way or another, all of this is your fault,” Finley said.

  She squirmed in her binds. “No! No, I swear I’ve done exactly what I was told!”

  “To the point when your conscience got the best of you and you started talking to Jonah Lund and his associate, hmm?”

  Finley gave her a smug little smirk, one of disappointment. He sat on the bed beside her.

  Earlier he’d considered how attractive she was, despite the obnoxious personality. She looked even better now, on a bed, the tied wrists and ankles adding a bit of kink. She pulled in a decent revenue as one of the refined, not quite one of the top earners, but far from the worst. He wondered if being tied up wasn’t so very unfamiliar to her.

  “Who is he?” Finley said. “The tall guy in the dark clothes.”

  “I … I don’t know. I swear. I guess he’s another one of Jonah’s private detectives.”

  Finley thought about the man, everything he’d seen throughout the day. How the man had spotted Finley at the parking garage; no one had ever been able to smell Finley out before. How deadly efficiently the man had taken down two of Finley’s men. Brutally fast. Mechanical. Precise.

  Finley shook his head. “That guy’s no private detective. He’s a pro.”

  Kim started crying again. “Are you gonna kill me?”

  “We want answers, Kim. There are always ways to get them. And, yes, those ways could end up killing you.”

  She wailed. “W-w-what are you going to do?”

  Finley grinned at her. “Oh, not me. The big guy wants to take care of you personally.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  They sat in the Grand Cherokee at the edge of a gas station parking lot, near the air pump, which was still humming after a guy in an S-10 had stopped to fill his tires. A steady bustle of vehicles, people on foot zigzagging around them, sipping their freshly purchased mega-cups of soda, unwrapping candy bars. Metallic clicks of gas pumps being turned on and off. Gurgling nozzles. Impatient conversations.

  When they’d gotten a safe distance from the overpass, and when it was clear they hadn’t been followed, Silence had told Gavin to pull over.

  Because they needed to regroup in a major way.

  Silence had a children’s book in his hands. The Secret of Summerford Point. It had a bright blue cover featuring a plucky-looking, auburn-haired girl, smiling but determined. Behind her was a coastal town bathed in nighttime darkness, spotted with streetlights.

  He returned to the page in the back, the one Gavin had pointed out, a blank page that had been covered with two columns of Amber Lund’s handwritten notes.

  Silence had been pouring through the notes, combining his findings with the dead woman’s.

  And so far, nothing was making sense, nothing was telling him what had happened to Amber…

  …or how he was going to find Kim Hurley.

  Kim had told him she was involved in Amber’s disappearance. On the surface, that would make Silence dismiss the idea of trying to find where Mr. Accord had taken her.

  But Kim hadn’t had the full opportunity to tell her story before she was abducted, and she had seemed incredibly remorseful, which led Silence to believe that while she may have been involved in Amber’s disappearance, that didn’t necessarily mean that she was involved in her death.

  Silence was good at reading people. C.C. had told him this was a positive quality, something to never lose, something that would always root him in his humanity. He didn’t sense evil in Kim Hurley.

  Naturally, helping her wasn’t part of the original mission parameters set forth by Falcon. But he was going to anyway.

  She was worth saving.

  If for no other reason than to help find out what had happened to Amber.

  In the back seat, Jonah was clearly having similar thoughts about Kim. He said, for the second time, “It’s my fault. Mine, dammit. They took Kim because of me.”

  Silence looked into the rearview mirror, made eye contact with him. Jonah’s face was twisted, grimacing. He rolled his head on the headrest, side to side, over and over.

  Silence returned his gaze to the book. And when Jonah spoke again, Silence held up a hand, quieting him. It was time for rationality, not emotion.

  He pulled out his PenPal and took the mechanical pencil from the spiral binding. Typically, he could convey what he needed to others through his abbreviated speech or through non-verbal cues. But sometimes he simply needed to get a lot of info out at once, so he turned to his notebook.

  He scribbled out some notes.

  C11 gets prostitutes by offering women literal Get Out of Jail Free cards

  The enforcers are “foremen” — also criminals they’ve let off the hook

  Corruption starts with C11 but has influences in the rest of OPD, as well as the state police and highway patrol

  The guy ru
nning the show is the Oil Man

  He put the notebook on the armrest. Gavin and Jonah hunched over it, read what he’d written.

  “Okay,” Jonah said. “But how does this help us now?”

  Gavin picked up the notebook, squinted at a detail. “One of the thugs back at the overpass said that Amber had gone there asking about the Oil Man.”

  Silence reached out, and Gavin handed the notebook back to him. He looked over the note he had written, scratched his chin.

  He opened the children’s book to the back page and the note he had in mind:

  Oil Man = Warren

  He put his finger below this note, pointing it out to Gavin. “Warren? Character in book?”

  Gavin nodded. “Right. The town’s police chief. Kara goes to him about police involvement at the docks, but he doesn’t take her seriously.”

  Silence leaned his head back against the headrest, gazed at the headliner.

  Since Amber was using this book to guide her own investigation, there must be something to the fact that she thought the Oil Man was synonymous with the corrupt police chief.

  But specifically how, Silence couldn’t know without fully understanding the story.

  Silence looked at Gavin, held up the book, and flipped the bookmark, which was about ten percent in from the end of the book.

  “Tell story,” Silence said. He swallowed. “To point where…” He swallowed. “…you left off.”

  Gavin looked at him for a moment, squinting, confused. Then a look of understanding.

  He began. “Okay. It starts with Kara arriving at her grandmother’s in coastal Maine for a two-week stay during her summer vacation…”

  The other two had gone quiet as Silence read The Secret of Summerford Point.

  After listening to the recap, Silence had started his reading at the point where Gavin had left off. Silence wasn’t a particularly fast reader, but it was a kids’ book and the print was large; he could get through it quickly enough.

  What else could he do at this point?

  After discovering how dark Summerford’s weapons-smuggling operation really was, Kara’s unexpected ally O’Malley had said he was going to the docks to investigate that night’s shipment from Whitehead Incorporated, a front for one of the world’s largest illegal arms dealers. After the obligatory argument, O’Malley begrudgingly allowed Kara to join him. They hadn’t been there long when O’Malley was abducted.

  Silence continued reading.

  Oh my goodness!

  Kara’s mind kept repeating those same three words.

  Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!

  O’Malley was gone.

  Taken.

  She just kept seeing those eyes, over and over, another repetition in her mind. O’Malley’s stern face, beaten and bloodied, captured, being dragged away by the two men.

  But he’d still been calm, in control, commanding. Even in his precarious situation, he’d been able to make eye contact with Kara and give her the smallest of shakes of the head.

  No, his expression had said. Don’t follow.

  And she hadn’t. She’d stayed right there, around the corner of the wall. Only O’Malley knew her location, not the other men in the dock.

  She felt like a coward, like she should have disobeyed him even though he was an adult, even though he was a high-ranking authority.

  What should she do?

  There was a voice then. From the other side of the wall. A man’s voice. Someone in command.

  “Just put him in the back room,” the man said. “We’ll deal with him after the shipment’s unpacked.”

  Kara recognized the voice!

  No, it couldn’t be…

  Her back was squeezed against the wall, making her even more aware of her pounding heart, her shaking limbs. She didn’t know if she could move. Fright had completely enveloped her.

  But she had to see who belonged to that voice.

  She had to confirm.

  Her fingers quivered as she put both hands onto the cold, dusty concrete, pushed, and turned herself around. She reached up and grabbed the sill of the window under which she was hiding, the window that looked into the other room. She slowly pulled herself up until she could see.

  There was O’Malley, being dragged to a door on the far side of the other room.

  And there was the man giving the commands, the man she’d suspected.

  It was Police Chief Warren.

  Silence paused for a moment before he turned the page. He rubbed his eyes.

  A big reveal in the story. Warren was corrupt. Summerford’s police chief was the one running the weapons-smuggling operation.

  But what good did knowing this do for Silence? A dark, nagging thought whispered to him from somewhere on the rational side of his brain—reading this children’s book could be a waste of time, one that could cost a person her life.

  Sure, Amber Lund had been following the story as she conducted her investigation, but that didn’t mean she had been taking it so literally that—

  And then he saw it.

  As he turned the page.

  Another note. In Amber’s adult handwriting.

  Just like Dad.

  He read the first few lines of the page, which detailed a further description of Chief Warren from Kara’s perspective as she hid behind the wall and peeked through the window.

  Warren.

  The corrupt police chief.

  The one heading Summerford’s illegal operation.

  Silence turned to the back of the book, traced a finger down Amber’s list of notes until he found the one he was looking for.

  Oil Man = Warren

  Then back to the page he’d just been reading.

  Just like Dad.

  Silence felt his face slacken.

  And the other two men noticed. Jonah leaned up between the seats. Gavin squared to face him.

  “What is it?” Gavin said.

  Silence remembered the note he’d found in Beasley’s office. Beasley, the notorious rat, had recently contacted Carlton Stokes. And someone had also contacted Beasley recently—Carlton’s daughter.

  Amber.

  Silence fumbled for his notebook. He furiously scribbled a note and slapped it on the armrest.

  Amber’s father is the Oil Man. He’s the one running the Well. He has Kim Hurley.

  The air felt stagnant in the car after the gasping reaction of the other men.

  Silence faced Gavin.

  “Carlton’s house.” A twinge of pain in his throat. He worked up some saliva, swallowed. “You can get us there?”

  Gavin nodded.

  “Drive!” Silence said.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Carlton Stokes took another sip of bourbon and savored its warm travel down his throat, into his stomach.

  “Shit,” he said.

  He placed the tumbler on the end table beside him, next to the laptop computer, the principal component of his last-ditch effort to fix the damage.

  Nothing was working out the way he had hoped. None of this was going according to plan.

  For one thing, there were people in his house—the sort he didn’t enjoy associating with, but the sort he needed in situations like this one. They were in his kitchen, a few feet away. Laughing. Causing a ruckus.

  “Shut up!” he shouted without turning around.

  They quieted.

  He ran his fingers along the laptop. Things had gotten so bad he’d been reduced to this.

  He exhaled, and it came out as much a grumble as a sigh.

  It was all falling apart because of Jonah Lund. The loser, the layabout.

  Jonah freaking Lund.

  That was the most unbelievable part of all this. Somehow Jonah had found a man—this strange mystery man that Finley had told Carlton about—someone who had brought the light of day upon the shadowy operation, the Well, that Carlton had created so many years ago, a subcomponent of C11’s already shady dealings.

  And Carlton knew who the mys
tery man was, who he had to be.

  After years in the Orlando Police Department’s corrupt District C11, Carlton had heard plenty of rumors about The Shadow. Most thought he was just a legend, and for many years, Carlton assumed this to be the case. But after a while, there were too many coincidences, too many serial killers who randomly committed suicide, too many ruthless gang leaders found shot to death behind heavily guarded walls. Someone was out there. Or something. And Carlton started to believe in the myth of The Shadow.

  He just never thought he would personally encounter him.

  However, experience had also taught Carlton that adaptability was the most important attribute one could have, especially when one was doing things of the illegal variety.

  And now Carlton would need to adapt once more.

  Adaptation was how he would survive The Shadow.

  He grabbed the tumbler, stopped before he raised it to his mouth. His fingertips tingled. He should quit. He needed his wits.

  He put the tumbler back on the table, squeezed his fingers into fists, willing out a bit of the tingle, then grabbed the laptop and stood.

  It was time to move on to the next step.

  Time for adaptation.

  The house was shadowy dark. He switched on a couple more lamps as he crossed the living room.

  Up the stairs. His feet sank into the plush carpeting.

  To the second-floor landing. Three doors—two bedrooms and a bath. One of the doors was closed.

  He approached the closed door. Faint, warm light traced its edge, spilled out of the gap at the bottom.

  He wrapped his fingers around the brass, lever-style doorknob, pressed down, slowly guided the door open. A slight squeal of the hinges. They would need to be oiled.

  The door did a wipe reveal of the bed.

  And the person lying on it.

  Kim Hurley.

  Lit by the soft glow of the bedside lamp. Her wrists and ankles zip-tied.