Deadly Silence (Silence Jones Action Thrillers Series) Read online

  Silence looked up from the paper as he pointed to Lowry’s image. “Why I’m here.” He paused for a half moment to lubricate his throat. “We’re watching Lowry.”

  The woman’s eyes drifted away from him, over his shoulder, to the window behind him, a few feet from the trees where the dead lay.

  “You killed those men.”

  Silence nodded.

  The woman threw her hands up, penetrated him with her eyes, wanting further explanation.

  When he didn’t reply, she said, “There are three bodies outside my front door!”

  “Will be taken care of.”

  Her expression changed. She crossed her legs, folded her hands over her top knee, and leaned back in the loveseat, as though to put a few more inches between them.

  “You’re an assassin…”

  Silence nodded.

  “Dios mío. So you’re with the government?”

  “No.”

  He wasn’t at all with the government. Rather, his organization, the Watchers, was embedded within the U.S. government. They were a network of well-meaning individuals who surreptitiously administered justice to horrendous people who had eluded the balance of law and order.

  The woman opened her mouth as though to reply. But didn’t. She furrowed her brow then slouched over, burying her face in her hands.

  “Name,” Silence said.

  She looked back up, keeping her chin in her hands, elbows on her knees. “Adriana Ramirez. And you are?”

  Silence considered giving an alias. That was typically how he handled a situation like this, though sometimes not.

  “A friend,” he said after a moment of thought. He swallowed. “Lowry wants you why?”

  Adriana took her face from her hands, looked at him for a moment.

  “My son. Benito. Benny. We both work at a factory.” She flicked her dress, looked away, toward the little table, embarrassed. “I work custodial. He’s on the floor. Bradshaw Incorporated is the name. It’s one of the companies that Lowry’s gang was attacking with their protection racket. I mean, that’s what this all started as, ya know—Lowry putting pressure on local businesses to pay cash for ‘protection’ so that bad things don’t happen. Fires, robberies, vandalism. The guy’s got a small army of thugs to make sure those things happen if the money’s not paid.”

  She pointed toward the newspaper, now folded on Silence’s knee.

  “The papers are too afraid to print it. Slander and all that. Hell, maybe Lowry’s got them under his thumb too.”

  “Your son,” Silence said, refocusing her story.

  “Benny’s a good boy, but he’s like any other nineteen-year-old. Foolhardy. Stupidly brave. He doesn’t like seeing our factory living in fear, decides he’s gonna do something. He goes to the wrong side of town to find the right people, starts asking questions. Lowry gets wind of this. And … and they took him.”

  She paused, took in a shaky breath.

  “Now they’re attacking me. And I don’t know what they’re doing to him. They said they’d give him back if I paid. Two thousand. That’s the usual amount Lowry pressures out of companies. Monthly.”

  Silence knew this. Nighthaw, his superior in the Watchers, had already given him the background information he needed before sending him to Sarasota.

  “I got two thousand out of the bank. It was all I had, my savings.” Her face flushed. She sighed. “I tried to go to the drop point, but I got mugged on the way. Someone must’ve seen me at the ATM, followed me. When I showed up empty-handed, they gave me another week, which was tonight. I didn’t have the money, of course, ’cause the mugger wiped me out. Since I didn’t pay again, they were gonna burn my house and give me one more chance before they … take care of Benny. What the hell am I going to do when they come back in a few days? I don’t have the money.”

  Silence reached into his jacket. “You do now.”

  He handed her the stack of twenty one-hundred-dollar bills the Watchers had authorized for a scenario like this.

  She held it in both hands. Looked at it. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Silence nodded.

  She finally brought the money closer, laid it on her lap. “Thank you. So much. But Benny. My god, what if they’re torturing him? Or what if he’s…”

  Her face returned to her hands. She cried.

  Silence watched.

  Finally he spoke. “Bradshaw makes?”

  “Huh?”

  Silence swallowed. “What does Bradshaw manufacture?”

  Manufacture hit his throat wrong, an extra bit of pain.

  Adriana shrugged. “Oh, well, honestly, I don’t know. Something to do with metal. Big sheets of metal. I just mop the floors at night, you know? But I’m working hard. I won’t always be there. I’m gonna make things better for me and Benny. A person has to do whatever they can to improve their life.”

  Silence thought for a moment. Then he stood. “Don’t leave. Stay here.” He swallowed. “Lights on, all night.”

  “But—”

  “You’re safe.”

  “You can’t leave! Not now!”

  “I’ll be around.”

  She sighed, sank back into the loveseat. The cushion in the seatback sighed as well. “Okay.”

  Silence stripped the front page of the newspaper, folded it, put it in his back pocket, and dropped the rest on the chair. He gave her a nod and left.

  He stepped off the porch, across the long expanse of the oversized yard, the wet weeds brushing his pant legs, soaking through. He stopped at the sidewalk, pulled out his cellphone, pushed and held the 2 button. Speed-dial.

  An immediate response. From one of the Watchers’ on-call Specialists. A male voice.

  The Specialist gave the standard greeting.

  Silence identified himself by codename and number. “Suppressor, A-23.”

  The Specialist confirmed.

  “Cleanup needed,” Silence said. “492 Tyron Street, Sarasota, Florida.”

  He swallowed, grimaced.

  As an Asset, one of the Watchers’ field agents, Silence didn’t know where his Specialist number was dialing. He knew none of the Specialists’ codenames nor where in the country, or world, they were located. All he knew was that Specialists were his superiors, that there was a rotational system in place such that Specialists were available via the Assets’ cellphones 24-7, and he knew the list of services the Specialists could provide.

  One of the key services was the removal of corpses. Within hours, there would be no trace of the dead men in the trees outside Adriana Ramirez’s house.

  The Specialist asked for the number of bodies.

  “Three, sir.”

  The Specialist asked if they were all quite dead.

  “Yes.”

  The Specialist asked if there was any immediate danger, any locals gawking, anyone calling police, any curious canines.

  “Just the friendly.”

  The Specialist concluded the conversation.

  Silence hung up, put the phone back in his pocket, and examined his surroundings. The air was thick with humidity, visible under streetlights and porch lights. Dangling strips of siding. Paint flaking off cinderblock walls. An overturned shopping cart. Most—no, all—of the houses were larger than Adriana’s.

  Two blocks down was a busy street, Suez Street, a demarcation line where happier living commenced. This was where Lowry had escaped him. Cars zipped by at a mockery of the forty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.

  Silence had turned off Suez when he first arrived, parking immediately and walking the last couple of blocks. He’d needed the element of surprise, and he hadn’t yet cased the area, having only gotten word of the impending attack on Adriana’s house a half hour earlier through some drunken lowlifes in an alley behind a dive bar ten miles away.

  The car was a dark green Ford Crown Vic, a rental that he’d picked up two nights earlier upon arrival in Sarasota. Reflections of Suez Street’s traffic danced on the gloss of its paint, shining in
the restaurant's light coming from the other side of the street.

  The restaurant was one of those chain places—corporate, diner-style, family-friendly, late-night service, breakfast served all day. It blasted a sphere of light into the haze, a cleaner, bluer light than all the yellows and flickering oranges surrounding it in the neighborhood across the street. A large sign—shiny plastic, illuminated from within, bright blue with yellow, bubbly letters—proclaimed: BOBBIE SUE’S FAMILY RESTAURANT - OPEN LATE.

  Silence looked behind him to Adriana’s house. Drapes and blinds shielded the windows, and every window was alight, as he’d requested.

  He started toward the restaurant.

  Chapter Three

  Bobbie Sue’s Family Restaurant was as brightly lit on the inside as it was on the outside. Sears Portrait Studio bright.

  It wasn’t the sort of chain restaurant with whacky memorabilia and askew license plates hanging on the walls, but its ambience was still on the loud side with its shiny brass handrailing, preponderance of houseplants, especially ferns, and the ubiquitous robin’s egg blue paint.

  Silence sat at a booth. The seat was upholstered vinyl—also robin’s egg blue—and while it was well constructed, ample usage was beginning to make the underlying springs apparent. A grimy, laminated menu was in Silence’s hands. A potted fern hovered inches above his head, mounted via chains hanging from the ceiling. A smiling waitress crowded the edge of his table.

  Her plastic name tag sat straight on her white button-down shirt, but the sticker placed on the tag—which read, VAL—was crooked, a manager’s slapdash application, surely. The label-maker that printed the name had apparently been running low on ink, as the letters were grayish with a stratified fade.

  Val’s eyes were slightly bloodshot, and the lower lids had a faint blue hue, subtle strains on a smooth, porcelain face. But while she had an eleventh-hour appearance, she spoke with bubbly, first-hour enthusiasm. “We’re running a special on our Eggsplosion. $2.99, limited time. That’s three eggs, Colby jack, sautéed onions, hashbrowns, all scrambled together, with a side of your choice of fruit medley or—”

  Silence shook his head.

  Val smiled and shimmied her shoulders. “Okay, how about Willy’s Waffles? That’s three Belgian waffles, served our way, which means— No? Then how about Pennsylvania Pancakes? Rib-Stickin’ Breakfast Chicken? No?”

  Silence continued to shake his head to each of her suggestions, getting more insistent and perhaps a bit more frustrated each time.

  “Well, you’re no fun, are you? What can I get you?”

  “Eggs.”

  She froze for a moment, just as Adriana Ramirez had twenty minutes earlier. Lips slightly parted, looking at him with stunned wonder. And while Val’s reaction was subtler than Adriana’s and she concealed it quicker, it was just another variation of the same one Silence received every time someone first heard his voice.

  She gave him a small, awkward smile. Looked away. And then it was back to business.

  She grabbed the menu from him, ran her finger along the side. “All right, you want eggs. We have Eggs On the Run or our six different Outrageous Omelets.”

  Ugh, this could take forever. He didn’t have time to explain his condition, to tell her that he was practically, but not entirely, mute. That every word he uttered was painful, a demonic hand in his neck, armed with claws that scraped at him when he spoke. He was hungry, confused about the Ramirez assignment, and uncomfortable in the brightly corporate revelry.

  “If you like ’em runny, we can get you Cheesy Over Easy, which is—”

  “Shitload of eggs.”

  He didn’t want to cut her off. But he had to. He didn’t have time for this.

  One of Val’s eyebrows raised. She looked at him for a moment. Then she dropped the menu on the table, retreated a step, and brought her order pad to chest height, pen poised.

  She looked at the pad, not him. Smile gone. Her dark brown eyes slightly narrowed.

  “And how would you like these eggs?”

  “Scrambled.”

  “Okie-dokie.” She scribbled his order on her pad. “One ‘shitload’ of scrambled eggs, coming right up.” And as she whipped around and headed to the kitchen, she spoke again, ostensibly under her breath but loud enough for him to hear. “Asshole.”

  Silence watched her leave then glanced out the window beside him. He’d requested this booth to give him the perfect visual, straight down the side street to Adriana’s house two blocks away. All the windows were still alight. Her silhouette cut across one of them.

  He took his notebook from his pocket. It was a NedNotes brand PenPal. Five by three and a half inches. At a hundred pages, it was just thick enough for the spiral binding to hold a pencil or pen, hence the name. The plastic covers came in a variety of bold colors. This one was lime green.

  He took the mechanical pencil from the binding, flipped the notebook open, then bounced the eraser on the first fresh page. Something about this assignment had been bothering him. Something he didn’t want to face but knew he had to for the assignment’s sake.

  For the sake of Adriana and Benny Ramirez.

  When he’d been in Adriana’s house a few minutes prior, listening to the details of her situation with Rupert Lowry and his gang, Silence had been struck by an odd feeling of familiarity. It had taken him only a moment to understand what it was.

  Years ago, in his previous life, before he became Silence, before he was Asset 23 for the Watchers, he had been a police officer. An undercover assignment that embedded him within a crime family in Pensacola, Florida, had triggered the series of events that led to his destruction and rebirth as Silence Jones.

  And those events started with a trip to New Orleans.

  Silence hated thinking about that time. In fact, he rarely did. But he had to now.

  Begin.

  He pulled the mechanical pencil from the notebook’s spiral binding and turned the cover to a crisp, blank first page. He began each assignment with a new notebook. Note-taking was something to which he was quite accustomed in his previous life, where he had not only been a police officer but prior to that a college instructor. As Silence, notebooks also served as a means of communication with others should his near-muteness prove too large of an issue. But most importantly, they gave him a place to jot his mind maps.

  C.C. had always told him that his mind was chaos, and as such she’d suggested several methods to organize the mayhem. The one that resonated the most with him was that of mind mapping, a system of visually organizing ideas, jotting them down and connecting them to form a spider’s web of interconnected concepts.

  In the center of the page, he wrote, OLD ASSIGNMENT/NEW ASSIGNMENT. He circled this note.

  He then wrote ADRIANA RAMIREZ, circled it.

  A half inch away, he wrote BENITO RAMIREZ, circled it.

  He drew a line connecting the last two notes and then two smaller lines connecting them to the largest circle in the middle, the main concept.

  BOWMAN FAMILY came next, which he circled and connected to ADRIANA RAMIREZ.

  He jotted down a few more circled thoughts:

  YEARS AGO

  WHAT’S BEEN FORGOTTEN?

  CONNECTIONS?

  He leaned back in his seat. The springs squeaked. His fingers drummed on the notepad.

  He focused on one of the last ideas he’d written: YEARS AGO.

  Yes, many similarities. The harassment Adriana had been receiving at the hands of Lowry’s gang and the Bowman family’s predicament in New Orleans, so long ago.

  A moment of staring at the mind map, then he looked out the window again to Adriana’s house. Her silhouette was against the glow of the back window.

  And Silence’s hesitant mind slipped back to years ago. When he was an undercover cop.

  When he was Jake Rowe.

  Chapter Four

  Years earlier.

  New Orleans, Louisiana.

  A man stood in the gloom of a poorly lit w
arehouse parking lot, at the loading dock. He was the same height as Silence Jones, roughly the same build.

  His face, though, was entirely different.

  Before the plastic surgery.

  And unlike Silence, the man could speak, and he did so loudly, ardently.

  Before his voice was stolen from him.

  His name was Jake Rowe.

  But at that moment, in the dark, back-alley depths of a Big Easy night, no one knew him as Jake. Here he was Pete Hudson, the undercover alias he had used months earlier at his first introduction to members of the Farone crime family—those who would soon take him in, impressed by the acuity and fabricated credentials of this fictitious car thief.

  As a made man among the Farones, Pete Hudson received another name, his mobster name, a rite of passage and an antiquated tradition that the Farones kept alive. They’d latched onto his tendency to be boisterous when excited—a quality amplified by his baritone voice—and dubbed him Loudmouth.

  Pete “Loudmouth” Hudson.

  The night was cool, but it still made you sweat. Humidity thick enough to swim in. It formed droplets on the flickering light fixtures, the building’s crumbling brick facade. The cracked asphalt of the parking lot was filled with weeds but otherwise empty. There was the occasional hum of a vehicle passing by, blocks away. Chirping insects.

  Jake towered over the other two men, who were both on the short side. Charlie Marsh was short in a kid brother sort of way. Clayton Glover’s shortness was more of the bulldog variety.

  Glover stepped aside, to the far wall, hands raised to his lowered chin, the flick-flick of a cigarette lighter followed by a brief glow, silhouetting his head.

  Charlie inched closer to Jake, looked up with one of his anxious grins, and emitted a small chuckle, big strands of wavy hair flopping over his forehead and into his eyes as it always did. “This is gonna go just fine. You know? No doubt about it. They’ll have the money this time.”

  Jake smiled. “I’m sure they will.” He twisted in Glover’s direction. “Isn’t that right, Glover?”