The Fourth Horseman.

Chapter 2.

It had been some minutes now, Jericho was now walking the halls of the mansion talking to a friend back in Greenwich through the phone.
“Yeah believe me you need to get a load of this house. I’ve been here a couple times but there are still parts of it I haven’t explored yet.” He walks into an elevator -the same one his uncle’s group had used a few minutes earlier- and begins to ascend to the top floor. “I mean, sure it’s nice and all but it gets boring fast. I tried going to this dude’s house but he’d probably be at Church right now. And the only other friend I have here whose house I can walk to… well… I can’t really be alone with her right now. What? No I don’t have a crush on her, she’s pretty ‘n shit but she just doesn’t do it for me. What? Screw you man.”
The elevator door opens, revealing a massive office with a glass window behind the desk overlooking most of Brooklyn. The room was sparsely but expensively furnished but one thing was missing, one thing which should have been there –his uncle.
“Hold on, I’ll call you back.” He hangs up the phone and throws it into his pocket.
“Um, Uncle Francis?” Begins to walk toward an adjoining room which was the office library. “Maybe he’s in there” on his way to the door, something catches his eye, something he had never seen before, the large liquor cabinet in the middle of one of the walls was pushed aside and in its place was a passageway leading to God knows where.
“Bloody hell! What is this” Despite the fact that all his senses were screaming against going in, Jericho just couldn’t deny that tiny part of him that felt compelled to venture in and see what lay at the end of the passage, he walked in, his heart inching ever so closer to his heart with every step. It was rather long because he had walked what would seem like fifty meters before he started hearing indistinct voices, on getting closer he began to see lights. “I wonder if Uncle Francis knows there’s a secret room connected to his office. Wait what am I saying? Of course he’ll know. He’s probably in there right now… with those strangers.” At the recalling of the old man in a strawhat who made him feel a sense of danger, Jericho couldn’t help but feel very uneasy at the prospects of what he was going to see in that room.
In one shocking moment, all his worries were justified. In this room half the size of his uncle’s office, he would see four large paintings on the walls. One, a horseman riding a white horse, holding a bow and wearing a crown. The second, another horseman riding a red horse and holding a sword. The third horseman rode atop a black horse and held weighing scales in his hands. And the final one which was probably the most unique, was a skeleton riding upon a pale horse. These creepy paintings were however the least of his worries as in the center of the room was his uncle, Miguel, the other old man and his escort. Before them was lying on the ground, two fresh corpses, the victims of gunshot wounds to the face. Another man was beside them, wearing only a pair of black shorts and lying on his knees with tear filled eyes. Behind them all was a big tub filled with a transparent liquid Jericho quickly judged to be acid.  Immediately he enters the room, a shot rings out which results in the kneeling man falling flat in his side- he was dead.
This was the first time Jericho had seen someone die. It was so abrupt. One moment the dude was begging for his life, the next, he was silenced… forever. It made the young boy sick to his stomach and turned his legs to jelly, forcing him to fall down on his knees. The sound of his fall draws the attention of all in the room.
His uncle immediately panics, “No! I told you idiots to close the fucking door behind you!” at the same time, everyone in the room except his uncle and Miguel pull out pistols and point them at Jericho. Seeing this, Francis yells at Karric. “Put your weapons down! This child is my family, no one touches him”
Karric seems not to pay attention to Francis and continues to stare at Jericho on the ground; “you know the code Francis. Outsiders cannot see our activities. That’s the boss’ number two rule”
Now overcome with anger, Francis’ tone increases by an octave, “I plan to break the number one rule if the lot of you don’t drop your fucking weapons right now!”
Karric chuckles, “Is that a threat Francis?”
“let it be to you whatever you choose” by now, both men were staring daggers at each other while Jericho remained paralyzed and mute by the horrors he had just experienced. What was his uncle into? Those people couldn’t really be dead could they?
He slowly tilted his head toward Francis, expecting an explanation.
Francis, noticing his nephew’s confusion yells again. “Drop your weapons now Karric!!!”
“Fine, fine. I shall not kill your family” signals his bodyguards to lower their weapons and they immediately comply. “I hope you can solve this little screw up before our next chat. Come on boys, we shall see ourselves to the door.” He and his body guards begin to walk toward the exit when Francis stops him.
“Karric, we can  avoid a brutal cascade of deaths and chaos if you’d keep what just happened to yourself.”
Karric chuckles again, “I don’t take kindly to your threats Francis.”
“Do not speak a word of this to anyone” Francis’ voice was becoming lower, more sinister, while Jericho just remained mute, unable to voice any of the thousands of questions dancing at the tip of his tongue.  “Are we in agreement, friend?”
“As I said, we shall see ourselves to the door.” The party would continue walking away when Francis, knowing very well that Karric was not planning on keeping his mouth shut, with a curse, he pulls out a pistol from the back of his waistline. This was Miguel’s clue. The large Latino male follows his master’s lead and pulls out two sub-machine guns from underneath his suit and so did Karric and his bodyguards. It all happened so fast, the sudden flurry of gunshots and sparks, too fast for the young Jericho to keep track of. At the end of this brief gunfight, three men were lying on the floor dead –Karric and two of his bodyguards- the last one was nowhere to be found. Miguel was also lying on the floor, he had taken a few dozen bullets for Francis but he was wearing a thick bulletproof vest underneath his suit so only one or two bullets were able to even scratch him
“Are you okay sir?”
Francis nods once, “I’m fine Miguel. Will you live?”
With a smile and a grunt, Miguel gets up “all they did was scratch me sir. I’ll live. Karric’s last bodyguard must have escaped. I’ll have our security place the entire mansion on lockdown. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.”
After making sure his right hand man was fine, Francis turns to his nephew who was still on the floor trying to process the preceding events.
“Jericho” when the boy doesn’t answer, he calls again “Jericho!” this time, the boy turns to look him in the eye. “You weren’t supposed to see any of the things you just saw, but you did, now what I want to know is if you were hurt in any way.”
For what would seem like the first time in ages, Jericho speaks, “i… I’m fine. But what just happened?”
Francis looks at him for a while with a slightly pained face, wondering if it was the right thing to introduce the child to the dark secrets of his life. Meanwhile, Miguel had communicated instructions to the mansion’s guards and was now throwing the dead bodies into the tub of acid in the room. Eventually, Francis decides to open up to Jericho; “what you just saw now was me protecting you. Had those men been allowed to live here alive, you’ll be dead before nightfall. Now one of them is still somewhere in the building. Until he is found, you’ll remain in this room. Is that understood?”
Jericho understood what his uncle just said, but there was still one detail he didn’t quite understand yet. “Who were those other people? The one’s whose faces you guys shot.”
Francis didn’t quite know how to answer this one yet. “I wish I could tell you soon, but that’ll only make you more involved in this. And believe me, you don’t want to be involved in all this more than you already are… it’s for your own good”, having said this, he signals Miguel and the two of them begin to walk away. “I will send some guards to protect the entrances to this place, I have a little roach to kill”