Score of silence, p.1
Score of Silence, page 1
Copyright © 2018 by M. A. Gardner
Cover design by M. A. Gardner
Edited by Valerie Kann
Book design by M. A. Gardner
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. 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 permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Visit the author’s website at http://www.article94.com
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Printed in the United States of America
Second Printing: January 2023
5x8 Paperback ISBN: 9781546413097
6x9 Hardcover ISBN: 9798837007286
Remembering Stubby,
The best dog a boy could have.
Contents
Also by M. A. Gardner
1. Focus
2. Sanguine Tears
3. Darkness Abated
4. Soirée
5. Weight of Darkness
6. Hallway Lurking
7. Feeling Fine
8. Remember
9. Sleepless Knights
10. Confrontation
11. Breakfast Belated
12. Intrusion
13. Vibrations of Violence
14. Self Confidence
15. Caviar Dreams
16. The Stakeout
17. Tupper Investigations
18. Discovery
19. Interrogation
20. Escape!
21. Lady by the Window
22. Standoff
23. Conclusion
City Before Sunrise
Acknowledgments
Character Bios
About the Author
Also by M. A. Gardner
Tupper Jones Mysteries
Score of Silence
City Before Sunrise
Lost in the Fold
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Champion Series
Nala’s Story
Champion Standing
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Clockwork Tales
(Co-written with D. Paul Angel)
Brass Automaton
Brass Queen
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Quicksilt Tales
(Co-written with Cole Poindexter)
The Light of Joy
A House of Sand
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Stand Alone Titles
Mental/State
Warmache
(Co-written with L. Fergus)
One
Focus
Blood.
She woke with the taste of blood in her mouth.
The metallic ichor caused her to gag and spit out a mouthful of blood and bile. After a few exerted gulps of air, Caroline realized she had bitten her tongue. As the dark shadows of catatonia faded, she realized two things.
The air smells like blood. She drew it in through her nose, and her face pinched in protest. The urge to purge was strong, but she overcame it.
The blood isn’t mine. Nowhere did she feel the telltale signs of an open wound. There was definitely pain, just not that kind of pain.
I don’t know where I am. Well, that was three things...
Caroline gazed at the ceiling overhead. Ornate features came into focus. She knew the names of the delineations sculpted into the plaster form surrounding the base of the chandelier, but they escaped her given her current state of confusion. No, it wasn’t just confusion; she simply ached all over. Her head housed a jackhammer; her body felt heavy and sluggish as if she had been working hard for hours. She felt spots of warm pain. Bruises, she thought, clinging to remnants of her training. It was as if this body were not hers. She focused on the thought for a moment. No, this was definitely her body. She turned her head, her vision clouding. The area behind her eyes exploded white hot, and she was forced to clamp them shut. She felt soft cotton on her cheek. It was of a good quality, but a lower thread count. It was designed to look expensive, but the thread used was rough, almost scratchy.
She eased her eyes open and took in the scene to her left. It was a murky space. The room was large; it had to be to warrant such an ornate chandelier. The space was also empty. No other furniture greeted her darting eyes, and there were spots on the walls where the sun damage was not uniform. Wall hangings and furniture had once blocked the destructive ultraviolet. A rough-hewn wooden table dominated the view, and she thought that it was out of place. A door stood agape beyond the table to reveal a washroom and mirrored doors to a large walk-in closet.
She turned her head to the right and saw... a corpse.
Her body was wracked with a sharp pain, and her hip cried out in protest. She’d fallen to the floor. Painfully crossing her legs, Caroline forced herself to sit up. She sat there, heart thundering in her chest, a chest rising and falling in horror as she stared at the gruesome scene on the bed. A duvet that was once white peeked from under the quilted blankets. It was easy to see it on the squat bed. Eyes stared back at her. Lifeless eyes. For some reason, only one of his eyes was bloodshot. The corpse was turned toward Caroline, mouth open, as if it had been frozen mid-sentence, like a ghastly Hallowe’en scene. A white button-down Oxford, like the duvet, was stained with streaks of carmine that had gushed from a single slash across the throat. Caroline cringed at the clichéd thought that the man had a macabre grin from ear to ear. His ashen face was devoid of life.
Caroline let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. She closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth. Her training was kicking in, and it took several iterations of the breathing exercise before her thundering pulse returned to something resembling normal. She stared at the remains and realized she didn’t know the man. It wasn’t as if knowing him would’ve changed anything, but the mind focused on odd things when working overtime to discern a shocking situation.
Why is there a body here? she thought before another equally obvious introspection replaced it. Why am I here?
The juxtaposition of the living and the dead was not lost on Caroline. She felt as if the bed she occupied were one of Joseph Cornell’s surreal shadow boxes. A crooked smile flashed on her lips. Surreal was the perfect description of her situation.
Tupper, Caroline decided. I need to call Tupper.
Caroline slowly rose to her knees, careful not to touch anything. She ran her hands over her body. Her suit jacket was missing, and her pockets were ripped and turned out. She didn’t expect to find her cell phone, but she was in survival mode, processing everything one step at a time. She glanced around the gloom and spotted a cell phone on a nightstand she hadn’t initially noticed. It was unfamiliar, and the cerise splatter that covered it had already faded to a sticky brown. She grabbed the smartphone with shaky hands, her first attempt to dial unsuccessful. It took considerable concentration, but on the second try, the call connected.
The ringing centered her focus and energized her mind. She rested her tired head against the side of the bed, reconsidered, and flopped against the nightstand. She couldn’t flee, and she could barely hold herself upright. Somehow, even on the floor, Caroline could feel the empty, accusatory stare from the bed. She made a concerted effort to look away, instead staring at the threadbare carpet.
The phone was answered after three rings. It took long enough that she was shaking again, but not long enough for her to consider why she hadn’t gotten the hell out of there.
“Jones.” The clipped voice had barely registered when Caroline sagged on the floor, spent.
“Tupper?”
At the sound of Caroline’s voice, Tupper exploded into a tirade of force and fury. “Missing for hours,” “unauthorized operation,” and “chain of command” were just a few of the choice words she gleaned from the outpouring cell phone speaker. The anger surprised her, and she flinched at Tupper’s heated volley. Such anger was out of place for the stodgy retired colonel. Even when he was in the FBI, he never raised his voice at her. Caroline’s eyes wandered down her body and stopped on an open gash on her calf. An impotent sound escaped her lips and the cacophony in her ear ceased.
“Caroline?” The voice went from vitriolic to concerned.
“My tracker’s gone,” she blurted. She stared at the long tear in her pants and the smattering of dried blood. The familiar lump was missing. Tupper had told her again and again that she was imagining the lump, but its absence was more frightening than its presence—real or not. The exponential shaking was making it hard to grip the cell phone.
“I...” she began and swallowed. “I don’t have my...” Caroline blinked, tears forming at the corners of her eyes. The carpet blurred and sharpened with each blink. She clutched the bloody cell phone closer to her face and gagged at the coppery smell. “I don’t know where—” she tried again but stopped when she gulped in more rancid air. “You can still find me without it.” She phrased it as a declaration, but the lilt in her voice betrayed it to be a question.
“Are you all right? What’s going on?” Tupper started edging back into another tirade. His voice had shifted to something less livid, but not less frenzied.
Caroline squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know. I... It’s gone. I...” She gripped the cellphone in her right hand and felt the expanding purple on her calf. Her skin felt clammy.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Caroline held the cell phone away from her ear, and when Tupper’s tirade of swearing died down, he continued in a more even tone. “Your tracking information was lost within an hour or two of your leaving the office.” She imagined his face increasing in its shade of red. “What the heck happened?” he continued, and when she didn’t respond, the volume increased. “Caroline? Caroline!”
“My tracker,” she mumbled. Her hand squeezed the gash in her calf. Why doesn’t the Colonel get it, she thought. It reminded her of when they apprehended that “man” in the park. Sometimes Tupper could be so dense.
“Caroline!” Tupper shouted, sounding frantic. “Are you hurt?”
No, I don’t think so... Caroline responded in her head. She removed her hand from her calf and played with the frayed thread that used to secure a button to her shirt. No, she wasn’t in pain; it was more of a numbness. Pain equated with hurt, so she was fine, right? Besides, it wasn’t her blood.
“Blood? What blood?”
Oh, she thought, I must’ve said that out loud. Caroline worked her neck first to the left, then to the right. Each resounding crack was oddly comforting even though it made her vision swim, but the action allowed her a modicum of familiarity. She hunched her shoulders and surveyed her ruined pants. They could be mended, but her missing suit jacket was a matched pair. She doubted that she could find exactly the right color. Her bare arms felt the chill of the room.
Knock it off, brain. Focus!
“I don’t know where I am,” she mumbled. She longed for the fog to clear. The heaviness of her head led to a blank state of being. She was empty of all that she’d learned under Tupper’s reluctant tutelage. Her inability to flee the gruesome scene bothered her as much as her inability to remember how she’d gotten there. All she knew was that concentrating on the cell phone she held to her cheek, dried blood flaking off and sticking to her hair, was the only thing keeping her from losing her shit altogether.
Tupper had gone silent, and Caroline held her breath, straining to hear. Did she lose the connection? Did the battery die? She remembered charging her phone the night before in preparation for the operation today... She sighed heavily; she wasn’t using her phone. It belonged to the corpse on the bed. Maybe if she changed hands holding the phone? No, she admonished herself, why would that even make sense? She squeezed her eyes closed yet again and spastically swallowed the growing lump in her throat. Nothing made any sense right now.
“You’ll find me, right?” Caroline whispered into the cellphone. She nearly dropped it when Tupper’s voice returned, just as quiet, but with the force of will she’d come to appreciate from him.
“Darn right I will.”
The address the tech team provided didn’t make much sense. How did she end up “upstate” when her tracker relay had ceased not far from her apartment? Then again, Caroline wasn’t making much sense lately, he thought.
Tupper lifted his arms through his shoulder holster. He had a small team, but the group decked out in Kevlar awaiting Tupper’s orders dwarfed his usual operatives. Tupper gestured with his right hand, a circular motion, and pointed to the windowless panel van in the parking lot.
“East,” the nondescript Special Weapons And Tactics officer said from the passenger seat, a global positioning unit gripped in his left hand. He grabbed the “oh shit” handle, and the knuckles of the hand holding the GPS pushed against the roof of the van to steady himself as Tupper made a U-turn, driving through a bicycle lane and cutting in front of a cherry luxury car. He ignored the gestures flung out of the window.
“Watch for—” The SWAT officer swallowed the rest of what he was going to say as Tupper stomped on the brakes, then the accelerator, and cut off an aging wood-paneled station wagon. The armored SWAT team in the back of the van shifted and lurched with each zany maneuver, but their eyes, the only visible facial features, revealed only a professional disinterest in what was going on around them. If the SWAT officer harbored any ill feelings about Tupper using his organizational clearance to “borrow” the SWAT team, his eyes didn’t show it. Tupper had the accelerator pressed to the floor, his brows knitted in frustration. He wasn’t going fast enough.
Traffic signals were ignored, and cars braked and honked in response. Even with the advance notice of lights and sirens, civilians seemed to have a hard time figuring out how to get out of his way.
Caroline made tiny, hitched noises in his earpiece.
“Caroline, we’re five minutes out,” Tupper spoke into his throat mic. The SWAT officer shook his head and turned the GPS screen toward him. The estimated time until arrival read twelve minutes.
“Five minutes, Caroline,” Tupper repeated when she didn’t respond. He could hear her labored breathing. He wasn’t used to hearing this from her. After all, she was the one that stormed into his office and demanded to be part of this operation.
“Tupper...”
“We’re almost there, Caroline, just hold on.”
“Someone’s coming.”
Tupper felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The pain in his gut stole his voice for a moment. He swore silently and tried to make the accelerator push through the floor as if that were something at all possible.
“Caroline, hide. We’re gonna find you.”
The line was quiet, followed by a scraping sound and a gasp.
Click.
“Caroline? Caroline!”
Silence replied mournfully in his earpiece.
Two
Sanguine Tears
At first, she thought the body had moved. Then she realized it was shuddering in response to her contact with it. Her stomach hitched at the thought, and she clenched her hands together, fingers intertwined to staunch the shaking. The jackhammer in her head had moved to her chest, and her heart was racing. She heard the flow of blood in her ears, the constant pounding surging through her body, causing a throbbing pain in her head. She willed her ears to behave, but the staccato thundering was still distracting her.
The sound of encroaching footfalls is getting louder, and therefore closer, her addled brain told her. There was a slight squeak as the tread reacted with the smooth bare floor. Each step sounded purposeful, perhaps confident. She could discern two distinct step patterns. There are two of them, her brain fired off again.
The presence of the cell phone still pressed against her ear dragged her out of the chaotic thoughts swirling around her like the tide. Pieces of instruction and training floated on the surface like flotsam and jetsam. Her urgent goals were rocks eroded by the constant bombardment of foam. She knew that she needed to do something. What is wrong with me? she thought.
Caroline scanned the room, and the floor beneath her spun like a carnival ride. So did her stomach. She waited for the floor to drop out from under her. As a child, she’d anticipated the exhilaration. Maybe it was through that lens of the carnival experience, but everything looked warped, far away, and impossible to reach. Voices intruded now—sharp, gruff, and rapid. Whoever they were, they were arguing. What were they arguing about? Caroline strained to make out the heated exchange. She still couldn’t understand the words, whether from the distance or the fog that had settled in her head. Are they going to kill me? A glance at the body on the bed told her she shouldn’t wait to find out if they were returning to finish the job. She knew that she needed to do something.
Hide.
She couldn’t figure out if she had heard the word, or if her subconscious was screaming, echoing the notion against her skull. Regardless, Caroline found herself nodding in acquiescence before a wave of nausea caused her throat to burn with the effort not to vomit. She struggled to get up.
