Hello, Little Sparrow by Jordan Jones (the reading list .TXT) 📕

“You’re letting me do what I have to do,” he said under his breath, though I heard it clearly.

“Yes…” I was out of words.

He muttered something to someone else and returned to me.

“If that’s the case, I have something spectacular planned, Detective.” He hung up the phone.

“We have his location,” Harlow said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Forty-Six

“Where are you taking me?” I asked Harlow as she searched the GPS on the dash.

“It’s way on the other side of town,” she said. Other squad cars followed us as we weaved in and out of traffic. The sirens from every vehicle in the convoy blared as we blew through multiple stoplights in a row. Cars sat impatiently on both sides as we sped through each light.

We reached nearly sixty miles per hour rushing through town; each building on both sides of us came at us fast, and left as a blur. All the vehicles in front of us pulled to the side of the road and I turned right to enter a deserted industrial park.

The sign above read:

Franklin Scrap

Private property

I slowed to a crawl and turned the sirens off. The squad cars behind us followed suit, turning theirs off as well.

“We’re getting closer,” Harlow said, breaking the intense silence. “It came from up here on the left.”

We pulled up to a dilapidated brick building that looked like it hadn’t been used in over a decade. The entire park was filled with buildings falling in on themselves.

I stopped the car, pulled out my newly issued Glock 19, and stepped out.

The wind picked up, forcing some of the young leaves from a neighboring forest to detach and fall around us. I searched the ground for footprints, but there weren’t any.

“Inside,” Harlow responded from the passenger seat. “This is saying the call came from inside that building.”

Other officers stepped out of their cars and onto the rocky and mud mixture beneath our feet. I held up my hand for them to hold back.

“I need three,” I said. LT Anderson’s black SUV was pulling up behind the rest, but I couldn’t wait to make a move. “On my go.”

We stacked up on the door in a single file line.

“Go.” The last man in the stack was the biggest and burliest men on the force and he kicked open the door. I was the first one in and aimed my pistol straight down the narrow hallway. After all the others entered behind, we stopped and waited.

Drops of water came from all around us, falling through the holes in the ceiling above. My flashlight illuminated the dark, dingy hall, and we shuffled down in near silence.

I heard a ringing in the distance and held up my fist.

“Hold up,” I said quietly. Then, we all moved as a unit forward until the ringing grew louder.

It stopped, and then started again.

At the end of the hall, a door was half open on the right. I gave the signal, and the last man swung the door open.

The room was empty except for a single phone sitting on a desk in the middle of the room. The lights weren’t working, and the room was in obvious disrepair.

I walked over to the phone and picked it up, bringing it slowly to my ear.

The man breathing on the other side stopped to clear his throat. The other officers looked at me, confused at the circumstances.

“Detective John Trotter,” the voice said. He coughed, and then let out a sigh. “You’re so predictable.”

“What is your endgame here?” I asked, wiping the sweat off my forehead. “Do you plan on wiping out all the perverts in town? In the world? At some point you have to stop this.”

“The only thing I have to do is keep my knife sharpened and my — I mean, your gun clean.”

“Just turn yourself in,” I tried saying as calmly as I could. “This will end horribly otherwise.”

“It was always intended to end horribly, Detective,” he said, breathing even more heavily into the phone. “The former life I once knew is far behind me now. The innocence that was taken from me will now be placed upon the heads of those who violate the most vulnerable among us. I cannot defeat what’s inside of me now. I cannot stop this even if I wanted to. And, you can’t either.”

The line went click and my shoulder radio beeped.

“Detective Trotter. Do you copy, over?” LT Anderson called from outside.

“Yes, I copy that. We need some lights and Torrey Benjamin and his crew to help assess what we have here.”

“What do you see?” he called again.

“A phone.”

The other officers around me waved the rest of the crew into the building and they completed a full search of the perimeter, finding footprints and tire tracks as they did.

Benjamin’s team set up a light in the dark, makeshift office with the phone.

“What the hell is this, John?” LT Anderson said. Benjamin and his crew were scouring the room and bagging several, little items.

“I don’t know, sir. He timed it out perfectly to call us when we walked in. He had to have seen us from somewhere.”

“I’ll have the guys take another look around,” he said. “There are woods to the north. Could’ve seen you all enter from there.”

“What I can’t understand is how this phone was active,” Harlow said. “This place looks like it’s been vacated for twenty years or more. Who hooks up a phone line all the way out here?”

I shook my head. “We’ll have to check with the phone providers. Someone’s paying for this line and someone’s providing the service to it.”

Benjamin looked up from his kneeling position.

“Detectives,” he said.

We walked over to him and he didn’t take his