After Surviving a Bribe-Free $40 Million Syndicate Brake-Sabotage Ambush, a Rebuilding Mafia Boss Faces His Traitorous Protégé Step-Brother and an African Grey Parrot in a Unanimous Battle for Rede...
The city felt like a trap, every familiar street corner potentially holding a pair of Julian’s loyalists ready to “confirm” my supposed madness. I needed to disappear, at least for a while, to think and plan. My car, a nondescript sedan, cut through the rain-slicked Chicago streets, heading west, away from the glittering downtown.
I found myself at a remote diner on the outskirts of Lombard, a place so off-grid it looked like it belonged in a different decade. The neon sign above the door, “Rosie’s Roadside Diner,” flickered weakly. Inside, the air hung thick with the smell of stale coffee and frying onions.
I slid into a booth at the back, pulling out my phone. The audio recording of Shadow’s mimicry played on a loop, a chilling reminder of Julian’s betrayal. “Cut the lines. Make it look like an accident. Forty million reasons to disappear.” The parrot’s voice, Julian’s voice, replayed, again and again.
A woman sat two booths down, nursing a cup of lukewarm tea. She had an unusual shock of bright purple hair and wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. She seemed to be doodling in a small notebook, occasionally glancing up at me.
After the fifth repetition of the parrot’s phrase, she looked over.
“African Grey, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice quiet but clear.
I stiffened, my hand instinctively going to the small pistol tucked under my jacket. “Excuse me?”
She gestured vaguely towards my phone. “That bird. The timbre, the vocal range, the subtle inflections. Definitely an African Grey. Quite remarkable mimics.”
I hesitated. She didn’t look like any associate of Julian’s. More like an eccentric university professor.
“Yes,” I admitted, lowering my hand. “It is.”
She took a sip of her tea. “I specialize in avian acoustics. Specifically, vocal mimicry. That recording… it’s incredibly clear. But there’s something else.”
My heart gave a jolt. “Something else?”
“Listen closer,” she instructed, leaning forward slightly. “Beneath the vocalization, very faint, almost inaudible… there’s a low-frequency hum. It sounds like an engine. A very specific engine, actually.”
I replayed the audio, concentrating. Beneath Julian’s mimicked voice, deep in the background, a faint thrumming. I’d assumed it was just ambient noise, a poor recording quality.
“What kind of engine?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“It’s hard to be certain without proper isolation, but it has a very distinct harmonic signature,” she replied, tapping her pen against her notebook. “Almost like a custom exhaust. Old-school, high-performance, maybe a modified hot rod or a heavy-duty truck from the 70s or 80s.”
She introduced herself as Dr. Aris Delancey, an avian acoustic analyst. My chance encounter in a rundown diner had just given me a new lead. A faint hum. A custom exhaust. It was a thread, however thin, that could lead me out of Julian’s web of lies.
“That hum,” I said, a new resolve forming. “Could you isolate it? Clean it up?”
Aris nodded, pushing her glasses up her nose. “With the right equipment, yes. It would take some time, and it wouldn’t be cheap. But it’s definitely there.”
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