The Suppressor by Erik Carter (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📕

Silence watched Mrs. Enfield’s hands, twisting against each other in the dip between her legs. Her blind eyes were apprehensive as they looked over the peaceful street in front of them. The two of them were on her porch swing. Baxter sat between them, purring and drooling.

“You’re sure they’re not coming back?” she said, her white eyes looking past him, to the end of the block.

She’d been fretting about her recent visitors since they sat down.

“I’m positive.” Silence swallowed. “You’re safe now.”

He spoke as gently and reassuringly as his crackling voice would allow. He was getting better at controlling its intonations, evidenced by the way Mrs. Enfield leaned back in the swing and unknotted her fingers.

She exhaled. And nodded. Tension left her face as she fully accepted his words of reassurance. Silence wished he could let go that easily. He was working on that.

“God sent you to me,” Mrs. Enfield said. “Right when I needed you. Lola, my last caretaker, left the state a few weeks before you moved in. I got no family left. Never had kids. Blind and alone, except for Baxter. But now I have a guardian angel next door.”

Silence had never considered how difficult it would be to live alone with a disability. Nor had he ever thought he’d be someone’s guardian angel.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“I can’t very well go on calling you Silence. I give all my friends nicknames. I’m gonna call you Si. Work for you?”

That was two people in the last twenty-four hours who’d taken it upon themselves to shorten his name to Si. He really had no say in the matter at this point.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The old woman tussled the fur on top of Baxter’s head. The purring grew louder. “Will you tell me now what happened to you, why it is you won’t talk to me?”

Silence didn’t reply.

Mrs. Enfield nodded. “On your time, son. On your—”

“It was bad,” he said and swallowed. A quick breath. He held it. Released. “My fiancée was…” He swallowed. “Murdered. Brutally.”

Mrs. Enfield said nothing, just nodded again. She placed her hand on his knee and left it there.

He’d said it. Out loud. Through his ruined throat, with his monster voice. He’d put it out into the world, a simple fact that he’d kept entirely in his mind for months.

C.C. had been murdered.

In a typical action movie, after a revelation like this, the hero would receive his long-due relief. A look of serenity would fall over his face, as though it had been denial that had brought him such grief for so long.

But Silence had never denied that C.C. was gone. He’d not repressed the image of her mutilated face, the screams he’d heard when he’d been forced to watch the video of her murder.

For Silence, verbalizing that her incredible life had been cut short, that she’d suffered, that she’d been taken from him, was an act of solemn acceptance.

C.C. had told him he had control issues, that he desperately wanted to be in charge of his fate. But he couldn’t, she’d said, and when he accepted that fact, things would get better for him.

She told him that he needed to stop trying to dictate the course of the future. She told him to stop thinking so much. She told him to relax.

She told him to let go.

So while he would never let go of her—never—he would let go of her murder.

As much as he could.

He wouldn’t see the destroyed face, his final image of her. He wouldn’t focus on the fact that the last thing she’d said to him, in the answering machine message, was a bit of anger. A swear word. A vile name, directed at him. Asshole.

He would see her beautiful smooth skin, dark eyes, beaming smile that crackled with kindness and wisdom and trivia and joy. He would hear her kind words. Like love. She always called him “love.”

For a few moments, he and Mrs. Enfield sat without saying a word, just staring into the quiet street. No cars or people passed. A solitary insomniac bird twittered in the magnolia tree to their right.

Then Mrs. Enfield broke the hush, asking him a simple but personal question: what was his favorite ice cream flavor? Chocolate chip cookie dough. Mrs. Enfield hadn’t tried that flavor, nor any of the other “newfangled concoctions.” Give her good ol’ strawberry. The next question was similar but slightly more serious in tone: he was in such good shape that she wondered if he might have some pointers for her. She was trying to lose a couple pounds. He looked over her tiny frame and asked her where she planned on losing those pounds from.

From that point, the conversation’s seriousness level rose no further. It was nearly an hour that they spoke, and Mrs. Enfield was quite patient with Silence’s constant pauses as his throat became progressively sorer.

He didn’t mind the pain.

When their conversation ended and Silence returned to his own home, he found a FedEx delivery by the door.

Inside the house, he placed the small box on the marble kitchen counter, cut the tape with a utility knife, and opened the smaller box within, which was long, thin, and full of cards. He took one out, held it in his hand.

When he’d devised this plan, he’d never actually seen plastic business cards; he’d simply assumed—hoped—that they actually existed. A print shop downtown confirmed that plastic business cards were indeed a real thing, but he’d have to order them from a specialty business. The shop gave him the website of an out-of-state supplier.

It was one of the few times Silence had ever ordered something via the Internet, so he’d been apprehensive about the process. But as he looked at the card now in his hand, he was pleased.

Unlike most paper business cards, plastic ones had rounded corners. The proportions were slightly different too, creating an overall shape that, along with the thickness of the plastic, made plastic business cards identical to a credit cards or other swipe cards—the only