Chapter Two

Ignore the Man in the Shadows

-x-

I am the second

Alone in a faceless crowd

A human caught

I monotone dreams

I scream to wake up

My voice drowns deep underground

Only the dead can hear me,

See me…

Akira Yamaoka, "Rain of Brass Petals", Silent Hill 3

-x-x-x-

It was hot. It was just too goddamned hot.

But saying it was merely hot was an understatement, Jackson thought with a grimace. It wasn't as hot as it was so stifling humid. The air of the marshlands was close and heavy and wet, and breathing it was like trying to breath through a wet washcloth. And it was sticky…there was just no other way to describe it.

Jackson hated it. He hated the way his clothes clung wetly to his body, forcing him to abandon his usual attire for a pair of khaki shorts and gray wife-beater, making him look like some ordinary yank rather than the esteemed manager that he was. The breeze that filtered into the house through the high French windows was hardly a relief; it was hot and sticky too. Thunder rumbled in the distance, an echo of the storm that had just passed over not more than an hour before. The air was rank with the smell of churned marsh water, decayed vegetation, and the masses of slimy things coaxed out by the rain.

Jackson sighed, turning away from the window and running a hand through his sweat-damped hair. The humidity had matted his thick brown hair to his forehead, clumping it uncomfortably at the back of his neck, giving him the perpetual feeling of just getting out of the shower. He hated that feeling, too. He had been meaning to ask Roxi to give him another haircut.

He hated it all. It was that simple. Being stuck out here, in this old, decrepit plantation house in the middle of the Louisiana marshland outside New Orleans with no air conditioner in the middle of summer was driving him insane.

More so than normal.

Why Rodney and the others chose willingly to set this place up as their home base for the past five years was completely beyond him.

Something buzzed at Jackson's ear, and with a hiss of annoyance, he slapped the mosquito away. And the bugs! The goddamn bugs were enough to cause him to loose his mind alone!

"Come away from the window, Jackson. They'll eat you alive if you stay there."

Jackson heeded his associate's words silently, moving away from the open window and back into the darkened room, lit only by the flickering glow of a single television. The drone of half a dozen fans created a hypnotic hum, circulating the stagnate air but overall not doing much to lower the temperature. In the center of the near empty parlor, Jackson saw the silhouetted forms of his associates huddled before the forty-four inch TV, their attentions locked in a vicious Halo match. Roxi was winning again. Big surprise there.

With a frustrated grunt, Jackson slumped down onto the single worn sofa. Christ, it was so humid that even the cushions were damp. He winced as a trickle of sweat ran down between his shoulder blades. How could they sit there completely oblivious to this heat?

Jesus Christ. Jackson thought miserably. How did it ever come to this?

But he already knew the answer to that question. She had happened to him. Lisa Reisert. The one woman who had single-handedly managed to fuck everything up.

There was not a day that went by that Jackson was not haunted by the events of the red eye. The failure of the job could not have been pin-pointed to a single event; it had been a disaster since he had revealed his true intent to the woman sitting next to him on the plane. The eight weeks that he had spent watching Lisa, making careful observations in order to get to know her as well as possible before the job even started, had been all for naught. Who would have ever known that the people-pleasing, isolated chit of a hotel manager that he thought he knew would have put up such a fight? It wasn't so much that she had managed to efficiently kick the crap out of him with a field hockey stick (Rodney and the others still laughed about that, the assholes). It was everything that had come before that. The message in the Dr. Phil book hadn't been anything too remarkable. The soap-written message on the mirror on the bathroom, though? That was one he hasn't thought of, and it had almost cost him…cost both of them…very dearly. Then there was her clever little stunt with the pen. Jackson winced at the memory, absently fingering the scar at the base of his throat. He had to admit, he had to admire her for her creativity with that one.

"Christ, Jackson, stop picking at it. You're dwelling again."

Jackson scoffed, letting his hand fall away from his throat. "I am not dwelling." He countered.

From where he sat on the floor, Rodney rolled his eyes, although Jackson could feel the gesture more so than see it, given his companion's features were lost in shadow against the TV screen. "Whatever, man."

But Jackson was dwelling, and no matter how much he denied it, they all damn well knew it. But who could blame him? It was because of Lisa Reisert that he was in his current position now. Although his company did not fire him for the botched job – or, even worse, kill him for it, thank God – the failure did not come without its repercussions. Instead, he had been put on indefinite suspension, poised in a delicate balance that did not put him out of the job, but kept him from doing his job all the same. As his superiors saw it, Jackson was too valuable of an asset to the company for them to simply let him go or knock him off; he had always taken pride of being one of the best managers in their current state, regardless of his younger age compared to the rest. No one in their history had become a manager in only ten years since joining. It had always been attributed to lack of experience, but Jackson was able to prove his worth in a mere five years after his employment began.

To top everything else off, the law was still after him. Not so much for the attempted Keefe assassination, however, but more so for the attempted murder of Lisa Reisert in her own home. Not that it would have been easy for the authorities to trace him to the assassination, even if they did look at the calling records of his cell-phone; his company was always ten steps ahead to prevent something like that from happening in case one of their people was ever intercepted if a job failed. Still, his little disappearing act from the hospital room was enough to snag some unwanted attention, and so it was only in Jackson's best interest to lay low for a while until authority's sights were set elsewhere.

That was why he was stuck in his festering house in the middle of the Louisiana swamplands to begin with. And after being here for nearly ten months, he was almost ready to take his chances on the outside again, had it not been for his superior's strict instructions that he stay put if he wanted any hope of keeping his job in the near future. It had been tolerable, at first, considering that this was the first time he got to see his old college buddies in years. But as the weeks wore onto months, and the months were progressing into a year after his arrival, Jackson became increasingly restless, finding himself dwelling more and more on the past as the scars on his body itched with the constant reminder of his failure.

Then there was Lisa… Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, who infected his thoughts like a plague! A noxious, incurable plague with no remedy to at least sooth the seething animosity he felt every time he thought of her.

He had been fooled by his assumptions of her; even after watching her for eight weeks, recording each and every little thing she did, it had done nothing to prepare him for the surprising fight she had put up from the very moment he had her cornered on the red eye flight. But he would be damned before he would admit that perhaps he had been too arrogant, too overconfident in believing that the job would be quick and effortless, easy-in, easy-out, move on with his life once he got the confirmation call that the Keefes had been taken out.

"I can't believe that." Byron had said, shortly after Jackson arrived at their safe-house and he told them the full story was what exactly happened on the red eye. There was no use skimping around the truth; he never lied, and even if he did, he couldn't put it past his friends to not know when he was bull-shitting any details in the story. "You, who have been responsible for organizing some of the top-ranking assassination in the past five years, being bested by a cute little hotel manager? Sounds to me like you're beating around the bush, Jackie-boy."

"Seriously, Jackson." Roxi had sneered over a bottle of beer. "Who ever thought that you would be one to fuck things up over some bitch?"

Jackson had glared daggers at Roxi for saying that – hell, he had killed people for less than that! – but no amount of arguing could deny that it had been that one insignificant moment of weakness that caused his downfall, that one instant that he allowed himself to feel some sympathy for the woman he had dragged into his plot to knock off Keefe. It had been that scar… That fucking scar! That was perhaps what haunted him the most. How different would the job have turned out if he had never found it? He could probably safely bet his left nut that he wouldn't be in his current situation. If he hadn't known about the scar, there would have been no need for that momentary lapse in weakness. He probably could have even stopped her from jamming that pen into his windpipe, seeing as he would have had no reason to lower his defenses.

"I can't believe that was the only reason." Rodney said once the others were out of hearing distance. "Sounds to me, Jackson, like you were rather enjoying yourself with her before you ever stepped foot on that plane. In all honesty, I don't remember you being that open around a girl since we were still living in the dorms at college."

It meant nothing… Jackson thought to himself. The flirting had only been a cover, only as a means to gain her trust to make the job go easier once it was in full swing. There wasn't supposed to have been anything about Lisa that attracted him to her, before he ever found out about that bloody scar, but he would be dead and buried six feet under before he admitted to any of them the way her smile made his pulse speed up the slightest bit in his veins, how he burned with the secret curiosity to know why she was so secretive, so utterly alone…

Nothing at all

Somewhere in the depths of the darkened house, a phone rang, an electronic sound that meant it could have been nothing but business. It only rang twice before being silenced, have been being answered by the fourth member of the group that resided in the house before Jackson came to stay. Sure enough, not more than a few minutes later, a shadowed figure appeared in the doorway, holding a mobile phone in one hand.

"Higher Ops just called." Lionel said. "Apparently the drug traffickers in Florida have been engaging in more suspicious activity than normal. We're supposed to keep an eye on them."

No one looked up from the TV screen. "Old news." Byron said. "Since when has that ring not been involved in any suspicious activity?"

"Apparently they've been spotted talking to some unknown party, but it's assumed that it might be linked to politics or something like that. They just want you to tap the phones, Rod. Nothing serious, they just want us to keep an eye on it."

"Fine, fine." Rodney said nonchalantly. "I'll get on it in the morning."

From where he lay on the couch, Jackson suppressed a groan, draping an arm over his eyes. Every time the phone rang, he could not help but hope that it would be High Ops informing him that they needed him back on the force, that some assignment had at last surfaced that they needed him to handle…

But for the last ten months he had only been faced with one disappointment after another. There was nothing too terribly special about watching crime rings or drug traffickers… That was not his field of expertise. But for the intelligence teams, like Rodney, Roxi, Byron and Lionel, this was right up their ally, and Jackson had no other choice but to continue to sit on the sidelines and watch the world pass him by.

All because of one woman…

His fingers were back at the base of his throat, only this time he wasn't even aware of it.

-

Author's Notes: Slow-moving, I know, but at least Jackson's finally in the scene. I apologize for the tardiness of this chapter, and the fact that it's so short, but it wasn't exactly easy to write. I'm not so happy with the end, either, so I might go back and edit it later. But for now, it's almost 2:30 AM, and I need to sleep.