The Suppressor by Erik Carter

Author:Erik Carter [Carter, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-Five

When Jake woke again, things felt different.

Somehow he knew that time had passed.

A lot of time.

The visual, too, was different. While his environment hadn’t changed—the same dark hospital room cramped with beeping machinery—now there was a man standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed.

Jake jumped.

The plastic strips securing his arms snapped tight, digging into his wrists. A washed-out, drugged-up wave of discomfort swept over him.

The man took a step closer, looking directly at Jake, hands in the pockets of his suit pants. White. Fifties. Tall with an athletic physique, no hint of a middle-aged gut. Thick mustache that he wore in a cool, don’t-give-a-shit sort of way that, on his strong face, made him look rather like Tom Selleck, the post Magnum P.I. years.

“Welcome back,” the man said in a deep voice spiced with a bit of strange, seemingly inappropriate whimsy, accented by a small smirk. “I suspect you think I’m associated with Lukas Burton. Don’t worry about that, buddy. You’re very, very far away from Pensacola, Florida. Your guardian angel whisked you a thousand miles north after she saved your life.”

Jake tried to reply.

And he was immediately stopped, as though his voice smacked into a concrete wall.

Even with the pain medication clouding his system, a searing slice of pain had torn right through his throat, gnashing, ripping.

He jerked again. His wrists snapped in their binds.

“Don’t speak,” the man said. “Not yet. You need more time. Burton did a number on your throat.”

Burton.

The punch to the throat.

Yes, that was the last thing that had happened. That horrible, crushing destruction that had sent his world into a white cloud of nothing.

Jake had been dead. He had to have been.

Then how was he here?

The mustached man continued to grin. “I had them take you out of sedation for a few moments. I want to implant a few things for your subconscious to ponder while you’re knocked out for a few more weeks. Let’s start with this.”

He reached to the top of the beeping monitor beside him and grabbed a plastic-framed hand mirror, stepped to the side of the bed, and held the mirror a couple inches from Jake’s face.

Pure bandages. A mummy head with a thin open strip in the middle where his dark eyes looked back at him. Someone had removed his bright green contacts. The eyelids were pink, shiny, bloated. They didn’t look like his eyes.

The man stepped away, put the mirror back on the monitor, then smiled down at him, his mustache twisting to one side.

“You’re never going to look like or sound like or be the man you were before. You need to understand that. It’s been a few weeks since your incident. This isn’t a hospital; you’re in a private facility in northern Virginia, three stories underground. The person who rescued you is one of my, um, employees.” He paused. “You killed four people, Mr. Rowe. That’s a serious crime, about as serious as they come.”

The man stepped to the door in the back.

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