Deadly Silence
Erik Carter
Copyright © 2021 by Erik Carter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Continue Your Silence Jones Journey
The Suppressor: Chapter 1
The Suppressor: Chapter 2
Also by Erik Carter
Chapter One
Sarasota, Florida
The 1990s
A silent assassin in the shadows. A vigilante killer righting wrongs without a word. A man who would look someone in the eye as they begged for life—and not flinch as he pulled the trigger.
But only a myth. A legend.
Reports of serial rapists left outside seedy motels with bullet holes in their skulls. Crime bosses discovered behind mahogany desks, their heads on backwards, twisted all the way around, noses pressed into rich leather high back chairs.
Rumors. Fanciful stories. Little jokes that were followed by too-emphatic chuckles, like children laughing off superstitious threats they had to convince themselves not to believe—ghosts, monsters, the boogeyman.
Rupert Lowry had heard all the tales, and he’d heard most of the names too. The Whisper. Shadow. Silent Death. But the name Lowry had most often heard attributed to the legend was the Quiet Man.
The underworld’s own boogeyman.
Of course, Lowry had never thought the Quiet Man was real— until the night he saw the man with his own eyes.
Lowry had been parked a block and a half away from a shitty little shack of a house, planted a few feet behind a set of railroad tracks. Faded blue paint. Flaking white trim. At the back of a disproportionately large, weed-filled yard, the Ramirez house flaunted a single door, a single window, and a comically small front porch.
The entire building was smaller than a nice hotel suite. Lowry was doing the world a favor by eliminating it.
Three of his men closed in on the place, crossing the yard and converging toward the tiny porch. They moved stealthily, purposely.
One of them held a red plastic gasoline can.
Lowry took a hand off the leather-wrapped steering wheel of his Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 and clicked the bottom end of the temperature control rocker a few times. It wasn’t hot outside, but the humidity was picking up, turning the orange-amber glow of the streetlights—those that were functioning—into halos of tinted haze.
As he returned his hand to the wheel, there was a bit of movement in the patch of trees a few feet beyond the Ramirez house, a little copse that ran along the property line.
Lowry squinted, leaned over the steering wheel, and took his attention away from his men for the first time as he looked into the trees. There was a strong breeze, and the branches tossed viciously, cutting through the misty orange light. As a gust buffeted the 3000 GT, rocking him slightly in the bucket seat, he leaned back again, confident that his imagination had gotten the best of him.
It had been a tree branch, most likely. At worst, it was a neighbor from the adjacent house, sneaking into the trees and gawking at the three people creeping toward Adriana Ramirez’s home.
If the latter were true, his men would handle the situation.
Thaxton, his man with the gasoline can, stepped onto the porch. He fumbled a moment with the can’s childproofing.
And then something yanked him into the trees.
Bent in two. Arms, legs flailing.
A shadow flashed behind him, then the gas can clunked on the wooden porch.
And he was gone.
Lowry jumped to attention.
His other two men—Goodman and Poletto—exchanged a look, their frames tense, their movements twitchy. But neither of them panicked.
Goodman pulled out his piece and slowly approached the copse. Poletto also retrieved his weapon, then covered the house, getting closer to the porch, eyes on the door.
Goodman adjusted his grip on his pistol, aiming it before him as he closed in on the spot where Thaxton had disappeared. He crept closer and squinted. He was to the trees. He reached for the branches, and—
A dark figure swooped over, consuming him. There were a few brief sounds of a scuffle.
Then all was quiet.
Poletto’s mouth hung open. He whipped around, looking across the yard to Lowry in the car, giving him a What the hell do I do now? look.
Lowry swiped his hand hastily, urging Poletto forward.
Damn. He hated when his men got weak on him, and Poletto was one of the weakest.
Poletto approached the same spot where the other two had been. He pulled back a branch, and Lowry could just make out in the distance the other two men, lying in a pile among the trees, motionless.
“Oh, shit!” Poletto shouted, which Lowry heard muted by distance.
Dread on his face, Poletto stumbled backward, breath shuddering from his mouth, eyes locked on his dead friends.
And then Lowry saw the man behind Poletto. Emerging from the trees.
The Quiet Man.
There had been no logical reason for Lowry to know that the figure who emerged from the trees and stepped behind Poletto was the man of legend. Call it intuition. A cold, sinking feeling in his gut.
The man was about six-foot three inches, quite tall, as rumors held the Quiet Man to be, though Lowry had heard descriptions as tall as six-foot-seven. Broad-shouldered, lean, and powerful. Black pants, dark gray button-up shirt under a light sport jacket. His figure cut across a patch of light, stepping within inches of Poletto’s side, unnoticed, and in that quick flash, Lowry perceived dark hair, straight and choppy, and an angular, hewn face.
Lowry saw all of this for only a moment.
Then the man was just a figure again. A silhouette looming within inches of Poletto.
The silhouette tapped Poletto’s shoulder, who swung around, pistol flailing in his grasp.
Lowry could just make out Poletto’s face across the distance, in the dull artificial light—his eyes like globes, his
