The Suppressor

by Erik Carter

  Into the garage, closing the door behind him, and into the idling Grand Prix. He shut the driver door, seatbelted himself, and hit the garage door opener button.

  The ceiling-mounted door began to retract. With the dim light put out by the opener’s bulb, he looked down and regarded the body a couple feet from the car. When the garage door was completely open, he looked away.

  And backed out.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Holy shit,” the woman calling herself Christie Mosley said. “He killed him.”

  She held a pair of compact binoculars with one hand and pressed her cellular phone to her ear with the other.

  “How do you know?” Falcon said.

  “Because I’m looking at the damn body right now.”

  She’d parked her red Cutlass Supreme across the street and a block back from where Rowe had parked the bullet-riddled Taurus. She’d watched through the binoculars as he’d slipped into the side door of the garage. Several minutes later, the garage door was now open, and a black Pontiac Grand Prix was backing out, its tail lights glowing red, clouds of exhaust from the muffler tips.

  And to the side, on the floor of the garage, was Cobb’s lifeless body.

  The car’s hood cleared the garage, and the taillights went brighter as it braked, came to a stop. The garage door began to lower.

  “He’s leaving now,” she said. “Backing out in a Grand Prix.”

  The car moved again. When it reached the end of the drive, it reversed onto the street.

  At the house, the garage door met the ground.

  “He’s just leaving the body behind.”

  “Interesting,” Falcon said. “Follow him.”

  She waited for the other car to get to the end of the block then pulled out, not yet turning on her headlights. The other car slowed at the stop sign, and she took her foot off the gas, keeping a good distance between them.

  Then the Grand Prix turned to the right, no turn signal.

  She accelerated.

  A sharp sound from behind her, in the distance. Sirens.

  She checked the rearview mirror. At the edge of the tiny crest in the street behind her, there was a faint glow of red and blue police lights, growing brighter.

  She rolled to the stop sign and turned right.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Ah, dammit,” Tanner said as he stepped past a uniformed officer and through the side door of the garage.

  There was a body on the floor before him.

  Which meant that Jake Rowe—the guy Tanner had thought so much of, the guy Tanner had put on a fast track to detective—was now a murderer.

  The corpse’s name was Cobb. One of Burton’s underlings. He lay on his back. Arms splayed. Eyes shocked. A bicycle chain wrapped around his neck, embedded in the skin.

  Tanner jolted slightly as Pace cleared his throat behind him, too loud. The fed stepped beside Tanner, shook his head, shoved his hands in his pockets, then jingled his keys. Tanner inched away from him.

  Outside was a handful of uniformed cops. Tanner could hear their chatter through the garage door. But the only other person inside with him and Pace was the photographer, crouched beside Cobb’s body, yellow block lettering on a dark blue windbreaker.

  A flash of the camera lit the garage, a typical middle-class place. This typicality was the reason the department had rented the house—it was the perfect abode for the unassuming car thief character they’d created.

  Which now brought to Tanner a nightmare of red tape and diplomacy. How the hell was he going to explain to the leasing company that a murder had happened on their property?

  And the bloodstain on the garage floor—that was gonna be there for a while.

  If not forever.

  Jake had been a fictitious criminal.

  And now he was a real one.

  Tanner had been in this line of work for decades and had seen this far too often—a good person dealt a horrible stroke of fate, turned into a violent criminal.

  Well-to-do parents of murdered honor roll students. Boyfriends of raped girlfriends.

  And now Jake Rowe. One of the most decent and resourceful guys to join his department.

  Tanner felt sick. He needed an antacid.

  “Self-defense,” Pace said. “Rowe comes back, tries to get his wheels; they got a guy waiting for him; Rowe takes care of business.”

  Tanner shrugged. “Maybe. But where is Jake now? We still haven’t heard from him, have we?”

  Pace shook his head.

  Tanner pointed at the body. “And look at all this blood. It’s not from that neck wound. Rowe’s hurt. He’s bleeding bad. Watch the hospitals.”

  Pace nodded.

  Tanner stepped past Pace to the side door, pulled it open, and stepped into the muggy night. Thankfully, Pace didn’t follow. Tanner needed a breather from the guy, a moment alone.

  Curious neighbors had congregated outside the crime scene tape, half a dozen or so. Blue and red lights flashed off oaks and palms. A news van pulled up, stopped.

  Shit. The press. Just what Tanner needed.

  His thoughts went to Jake, this man who was no youngster when Tanner met him a year ago but who was fresh-faced and wide-eyed in spirit, brimming with convictions and ambitions.

  And smarts too.

  He wasn’t all that book smart, despite having taught some college. Jake was the first to admit that. But he more than made up for any shortcomings with his incredible analytical skill. He could think through anything. That’s all he did: thinking. He’d think and think and think until an answer came to him.

  His thought process was often convoluted—which was something Cecilia Farone was supposedly helping him sort out—but it always led him in the right directions. He had instincts, and he came to the right conclusions.

  But most importantly, Jake had guts. That’s what mattered most.

  It looked like he was using that courage for the wrong reasons now.

  Tanner turned his attention past the gasping neighbors, down the street, to the west. The sun had recently set, and the sky was all pinks and yellows, deep violet clouds. Not too far from where Tanner stood, this would be a beautiful sunset on the Gulf.

  Tanner ran a hand along his jaw. “Where the hell are you, Jake?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The adrenaline or the madness or the fog or whatever had been keeping the pain from Jake’s leg had worn off. Now his entire calf felt like a piece of molten stone.

  It was as heavy as stone too, and it scraped behind him as he dragged it up the cracked sidewalk. His homemade bandage had soaked through with blood, saturating the jeans, which stuck to his leg, heavy and cold.

  He grimaced as he pulled the leg another step farther. The damn thing seemed heavier with each step. Not much farther to go.

  The neighborhood was a shithole, the kind of place that still bore signs of life at one in the morning. Laughter in the distance. A bottle clattering on concrete.

  At the next crossroad, he took a right onto a short dead-end street with a clump of trees and a buzzing streetlight at the end. Two houses on the right side of the street. On the left side were two more houses and a one-story, ancient-looking brick building with shuttered windows, something that must’ve been a soda shop or a grocery in the neighborhood’s happier days. Now, however, it would seem uninhabited were it not for the single illuminated bulb by the door.

  Jake was one of the initiated few people who knew the true nature of the building. Rather, his alter ego, Pete Hudson, was.

  He stumbled up to the battered metal door and gave two solid bangs.

  A few moments later, the door opened, and Dr. Mayer’s face peered out of the gap, blinking the sleep from droopy yet sparkly blue eyes that sat behind a pair of round, old-fashioned glasses. He was an older man with combed-back, gray hair and a jowly basset hound face. His shirt was a button-up, wrinkled from his sleep.

  Mayer regarded Jake’s leg wound. “Oh my. Let’s get you taken care o
f.” He opened the door farther and looked past Jake. “Just you? Sylvester said to stay here all night because there might be many wounded. I figured you’d be showing up hours ago.” He glanced at Jake’s leg again, scrunched his lips. “I didn’t get a call.”

  Jake took his PenPal notebook from his back pocket, and his fingers stuck to the tagboard backing, which had a splotch of soaked-in blood that hadn’t fully dried.

  C.C.’s blood. Or his. Or both. He couldn’t be sure.

  He flipped to the first of the notes he’d prepared.

  I couldn’t call. There wasn’t time

  The doctor squinted at the note, then at Jake. “Can’t you talk?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “Took a blow to the neck, did you?”

  Jake nodded.

  Mayer put his hand on Jake’s neck, examined. Jake was good at reading people, and he could see skepticism in Mayer’s eyes. He’d caught Jake’s lie.

  Mayer stepped back, still squinting at him, hesitant. “I’ll need to call. This is … very unorthodox, you just showing up like this.”

  Jake took out the Glock 19, pointed it at him, and flipped to the next note.

  You’re not calling this in

  He shuffled inside, crowding Mayer back, and shut the door. A jolt of pain in his leg.

  Mayer’s eyes went wide, and he put his hands up.

  It was a small, dimly-lit space, one unit in the old building—a medical exam area and a tiny bathroom to the side. All of it dingy and utilitarian. Hardly sanitary looking. Hardly even organized. An exam table dominated the center of the room. A cot—for the doctor’s use in all-night situations such as tonight—was at the far wall, blankets messed up, pillow askew.

  Mayer’s lip trembled but his eyes burned fire—not fear but shock. He’d been in this game for decades and had surely been though many hairy situations.

  “Do you know who you’re messing with, you stupid shit?” Mayer spat. “I’m Joseph Farone’s personal doctor.”

  Jake flipped to the next note, showed it.

  Get what supplies you need. Then we’re leaving

  Mayer read the note, looked up at Jake with eyes that had gone even darker.

  “Leaving?”

  Jake jabbed the gun toward the back of the room. Mayer glanced over his shoulder and saw what Jake had indicated: the door in the back.

  “Oh, I see,” Mayer said as he turned back around. “You’re a damn traitor, aren’t you? That’s why I didn’t get a call. They know you’re injured; you can’t go to the hospitals; so you come here to grab the doctor, but you gotta get out of here as quickly as possible since they might come here looking for you.”

  Jake nodded then swiped his gun, a turn around command, and led Mayer to the cabinets. The doctor opened one of the glass doors and started taking out supplies: antiseptic, sutures, gauze.

  Jake noted one important omission from the doctor’s gatherings. Keeping the Glock leveled at Mayer, he yanked the mechanical pencil from the notebook’s spiral binding and scribbled out a note.

  Grab something for the pain, dickhead

  Mayer glowered at him then grabbed a bottle of lidocaine and a sterile-wrapped syringe.

  Jake had the Glock pointed at Mayer as the doctor finished his work, wrapping the elastic bandage around the gauze-covered stitches. They were in the wooded patch of earth on the opposite side of the sidewalk where Jake had parked the Grand Prix, a couple blocks away from Mayer’s building. Jake sat on a half-destroyed wooden crate. Bottles and plastic shopping bags and McDonald’s wrappers littered the earth around them.

  “You know I’m going to call the moment you leave,” Mayer said as he made the final pass with the bandage.

  Jake shook his hand and gave him a look that said, No, you won’t. He pointed at the doctor’s waistline, where a cellular phone was clipped to his belt, and made a little gimme motion with his hand.

  The doctor fumed as he handed the phone to Jake, knowing full well what was about to happen.

  Jake smashed it on the sidewalk.

  He hobbled off the crate. The Glock felt unduly heavy in his hand, and he stumbled to the side, regained his balance. Naturally, Mayer hadn’t given him a blood transfusion, and from Jake’s bit of medical training as a police officer, he estimated that he’d lost several hundred mils of blood.

  He was gonna be woozy for a while.

  He kept the Glock leveled on Mayer as he limped to the Grand Prix and got in.

  “You stupid shit,” the doctor said before Jake shut the door and peeled off.

  Twenty minutes later. A different shithole part of town. Somewhere he could disappear for a few minutes. Gather himself. Rest his leg briefly.

  Before he tracked down and murdered the rest of Burton’s men.

  He was parked beside an abandoned factory, its chain-link fence rotting and falling over like the fence he’d seen earlier that evening at the abandoned parking lot outside Wagner High School.

  That felt like a year ago.

  He leaned his head back and exhaled. Closed his eyes. A long moment passed, so long that he realized he might have even fallen asleep.

  Eyes open.

  He took out his notebook, fingers sticking to the bloody back cover, removed the mechanical pencil, and wrote a list of names, then crossed out the first one.

  Cobb

  Gamble

  Hodges

  Knox

  McBride

  Odom

  Glover

  Burton

  His eyes lingered on the list, then he flipped to a fresh page and scratched out a quick note.

  My name is Jake Rowe

  He faced the rearview mirror and held the notebook beside it.

  His eyes flicked from the note to his reflection. He tried to speak, breaking it down to the first couple words.

  My name…

  Nothing. His lips moved silently.

  My name…

  Nothing again.

  It wasn’t that the words just wouldn’t come to him. He literally couldn’t speak. He was giving it his full effort, but no sounds would come out.

  He slapped the notebook shut, shoved the pencil back into the binding, and dropped it on the passenger seat where it landed beside the microcassette player.

  His hand went to the player. Stopped. Hovered over it for a minute. And then grabbed it.

  He reached into his pocket and retrieved the tiny tape he’d taken from his answering machine. He put it in the player. Hesitated. Pushed the PLAY button.

  There was a beep. And then the message began.

  C.C.’s voice.

  “Hey, it’s—”

  He pressed STOP.

  Her voice.

  Oh, my god.

  Deep breaths. His eyes went up, staring into the headliner, and his head returned to the headrest. He closed his eyes.

  And his mind went to a memory, took him back several months.

  He and C.C., hand-in-hand, nighttime on the beach, a favorite spot of theirs, a literal common ground for two people who were very different but couldn’t get enough of each other.

  The moon lay a long, shimmering trail on the black water. The waves weren’t choppy, but they were steady and loud. The glistening condos and hotels were ahead of them in the distance. They’d walked to the national seashore—a long stretch of natural, untouched beach—and were now returning to civilization. C.C. had asked him what was on his mind.

  And he’d answered her, letting all the disordered, tumultuous thoughts in his head spew from his mouth.

  “…which is why I just don’t know about all these new diet trends, you know?” he was saying. “It seems to me that if they put something in a green box, say it’s low-fat, then people gobble it up. Is that how easily people are persuaded? Green packaging? I mean, come on. Those things are loaded with sugar, and sugar is what’s gonna make you fat, not dietary fat. It’s like people just assume fat is gonna make you fat because the word’s the same. Word-choice, packagin
g—people are so easily manipulated. It’s mind-boggling. And—”

  C.C. waved a hand to cut him off, her fingers pinched. “Maybe that was a bad question on my part, asking a ‘loudmouth’ what’s on his mind. You use ten words when three will do.”

  Jake chuckled. “You did it again.”

  “Did what?”

  He upturned one of his hands and pinched his fingers together like she’d just done. “You did the Italian hand. For as quirky and individualistic as you are, you still go full pizza pie every now and then.”

  She smiled, shrugged. “We all take bits and pieces of our experiences to become what we are, consciously and subconsciously. And you’re changing the subject, mister. We were talking about that wild mind of yours. You’re a smart man, love. You really are. But you—”

  “I’m not that smart. I was an average student at best.”

  “Whatever you say, Professor. Book smarts aren’t everything, anyway. You ponder things. You see the whole picture. That’s intelligence. But you think too much.”

  Jake looked at her, raised an eyebrow. “How can a person think too much? You just said I see the whole picture. Isn’t that kind of synonymous with thinking too much?”

  C.C. shook her head. “Not at all. Confucius said that life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. Try taming your thoughts.”

  “And how do I do that, exactly?”

  “You can start by taking some deep belly breaths. From the stomach, not the chest. Diaphragmatic breathing, like I taught you. It’ll calm you down.”

  “Like this?” Jake took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks, crossed his eyes.

  She just looked at him, not granting his idiocy a response.

  Jake let the breath out, chuckling. “C’mon, babe. I don’t see how breathing is going to ‘tame my thoughts,’ as you say. I think a lot, yes. I know it’s a problem, but, I mean, breathing? Maybe I could get one of those calming drugs that’ve been in the news. I’ve already had my department psych exam, but maybe Tanner could—”