Silence had this microphone against the window, as he peered through a sliver of space between two big banana leaves.
A few moments earlier, Lowry had looked his direction, suspicion in his eyes. Though Lowry had returned to his conversation with Adriana and Matthew Hardin, Silence would need to be wary.
The voices came through the earbud staticky and flat.
“Interrupted how?” Hardin said.
“As in, nothing happened,” Lowry said. “My men are dead, in a pile outside her house.”
Hardin looked at him for a moment, hands in his pockets, a relaxed pitch to his shoulders, the affected, casual calm of a practiced leader. “Who was it?”
Lowry didn’t immediately respond. He crossed his arms tightly over his black leather jacket, rocked his weight between his heels.
A strange reaction. Not one Silence would have predicted from the tough, scruffy-cool street crime mogul from the files he’d studied, the criminal leader he’d seen in the shiny red 3000GT VR-4 earlier in the evening.
And Silence believed he knew the reason for Lowry’s out-of-character demeanor.
Lowry’s lips began to form words. Stopped, as though thinking better of them. Then he pointed at Adriana and said, “Ask her.”
Hardin’s gaze fell on Adriana.
She jerked back, hand going to her chest, eyes wide. “I don’t know who he is! I swear. I’ve never seen him before tonight.”
Lowry lunged toward her, index finger jabbing. “Bullshit! How did he know we’d be at your house? He’s either been following us for weeks, or he’s a friend of yours. That’s what they say about him, that he helps people in need.” He turned to Hardin. “My men and I have not been followed. I’d know. This bitch is playing you for a fool. She knows the guy.”
“I don’t!”
Hardin took one hand from a pocket, raised it, still the composed statesman, quieting them both, not taking his eyes off Adriana. “This man,” he said to Adriana. “Did he speak to you?”
Adriana nodded.
“Did you tell him anything that would jeopardize us?”
“No!” Her hand shot up again in that same defensive motion. “I just spun him a story, random stuff as quickly as I could make it up—that Lowry was blackmailing me, that someone mugged me before I could make my payment, that—”
Hardin cut her off with a two-finger swipe. “Can you describe him? Did you get a good look at him?”
She nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Well … yes, actually. A very good look.” She glanced down. “He came into my house.”
Lowry scoffed. “Oh, how convenient.”
“Shut up,” Hardin said. Then to Adriana: “Go on.” He stroked his short beard as he prepared to listen.
“He was white. Tall. His hair was dark and straight. Tan skin. Handsome.”
“His build?”
“Athletic. Broad shoulders. But the most unusual thing about him was…”
She trailed off.
“Was what?”
“His voice.”
“Shit…” Lowry said. He started rocking between his heels again.
Hardin slowly lowered the hand from his chin, and it was a moment before he replied. “What about his voice?”
“It was … awful. Hideous. Deep and gravelly. Like a machine in bad need of oil. And he hardly spoke. Just a lot of one- and two-word sentences.”
Hardin’s face slackened.
Lowry stepped away from the other two, ran a hand through his long hair, paced in a tight circle.
“I knew it,” he said to Hardin. “It was the Quiet Man. Shit! I knew it when he took my guys out at her house, three of ’em, took them out like a goddamn video game. God, I thought he was just a myth.”
Silence’s assessment a few moments earlier was correct, his thought as to why Lowry had been acting so strangely, why his reactions had been so strangled. He’d detected it the moment they locked eyes across the distance back in Adriana’s neighborhood, Lowry in his sports car, Silence standing before three dead bodies, three of Lowry’s soldiers that he’d easily dispatched.
It had been dreadful awareness. Lowry had heard the rumors, the legends.
Silence’s reputation had preceded him.
Hardin shook his head slowly. “He’s no myth.”
Adriana glanced between the two, nervous energy building on her face. “Who?”
“There’s a guy,” Hardin said. “I’ve heard several names for him—the Quiet Man, Whisper, the Shadow. You don’t get to my position as quickly as I have without meeting some unsavory characters.” His eyes flicked to Lowry, perhaps subconsciously. “They all say there’s a Quiet Man, goes around Florida, and other states too, righting wrongs. Anybody who’s gotten away with something—murderers, rapists, child-abusers, gangsters, mobsters. And more often than not he kills them. They say he’s perfectly silent, slipping through the shadows. You won’t see him until he’s right in front of you, about to put a round between your eyes. If you see him at all. He’ll just as easily slip behind you, slit your throat. They say he has a ruined voice, hardly speaks. He lets you do all the talking.”
Hardin paused, looked at his travertine tiling. Lowry fidgeted, muttering. And Adriana blinked rapidly, eyes locked on Hardin, her chest expanding and contracting with deep breaths.
Hardin looked up. “When you spoke to him, did he just say ‘Talk’?”
Adriana, who was shaking now, nodded.
“It was him. Goddamnit.” He glanced between Adriana and Lowry. “We’re all in danger.” He crossed his arms, brought a hand to his chin, looked to the back wall. “But for the time being, there’s nowhere safer for us than where we’re going.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
Hardin turned on his heel, left for the hallway behind them. Lowry followed, and a moment later Adriana rushed to catch up.
“But what are we going to…”
Her voice faded away. Just hints of their footsteps on the tile, then the feed in Silence’s ear went to pure, soft static.
The trio turned a corner, disappeared into the belly of the house.
Adriana, the attack
