Chapter 6 - THE ALLEY GATE
My heart stopped when I saw the silver wheels of my father’s chair through the back window of the idling medical van.
They hadn’t hidden my dad on the fourth floor of Lakeshore Rehab.
When Dante called the courier in the third-floor study fifteen minutes ago and heard that Rosa had taken the 409 key, they had loaded my father straight into the transport van and brought him here to the alley behind the mansion—because Arthur Sterling knew the only way to force Luca Moretti to let them walk out alive if things went south was to have a hostage at the back gate.
Inside the greenhouse, Vanessa pulled the rusted steel lockbox out of the smashed mahogany desk drawer and bolted toward the back glass door leading to the alley.
“Emma, take Leo inside the carriage house—now!” Luca ordered, setting his seven-year-old nephew down behind the brick garden wall and shoving the boy gently toward me.
“I’m not hiding while my dad is in that van!” I said fiercely.
I looked down at Leo. “Leo, stay right here with Mama Rosa behind the brick wall. Don’t peek out until Uncle Luca calls your name. Promise me.”
Leo nodded solemnly, grabbing Rosa’s blue wool coat with both hands. “I’m watching Mama Rosa.”
I didn’t run toward the greenhouse where Luca was intercepting Vanessa.
Instead, I sprinted low along the boxwood hedge toward the iron alley gate, clutching the heavy silver cake server I had shoved into my deep apron pocket when we left the dining hall.
Thirty feet away, inside the greenhouse, Luca caught Vanessa by the arm just as she shoved the glass door open. The steel lockbox flew from her hands and clattered across the flagstone path, popping open against the stone curb.
From inside the box rolled an old amber glass prescription bottle sealed in yellowed 2000 police evidence tape—and a micro-cassette tape labeled in my mother’s handwriting.
“Let me go, Luca!” Vanessa screamed, clawing at his tuxedo lapel as Arthur Sterling came running out the kitchen back door across the lawn to reach the alley. “Start the van! Pull out!”
At the alley gate, the driver in the courier jacket jumped back behind the wheel of the white medical van while the second man stood by the open rear doors, holding a pre-filled syringe over the IV port taped to my father’s frail right arm.
My father was awake. His woolen cap had slipped crooked over his grey hair, and his one good left hand was gripping the armrest of his wheelchair, his eyes wide as he saw me running through the snow toward him.
“Stay back, girl!” the man in the back of the van shouted, pressing the needle tip against the rubber IV port on my dad’s wrist. “One more step and I push this plunger!”
Luca froze on the flagstone path ten yards away, his pistol raised, unable to take a clear shot into the dim interior of the van without hitting my father.
Arthur Sterling reached the open passenger door of the van, breathless, and looked back at Luca with a triumphant sneer. “Drop the gun on the grass, Luca! And kick that lockbox under the van, or the old man dies right in front of his daughter!”
I stopped six feet from the rear bumper of the van, my chest heaving in the freezing air.
I looked at my father’s face. Even after a stroke that had taken half his voice and his right side, my dad’s hazel eyes—my mother’s eyes, the ones I saw in the mirror every morning—flicked down toward his left boot.
His left foot was resting right against the steel quick-release lever of his wheelchair’s floor lock.
When I had visited him at Lakeshore Rehab every Tuesday for the last six months, the physical therapist had made us practice one emergency drill over and over in case his chair ever tipped on a ramp: Pull the red lever with your left heel and throw your weight back.
“Dad,” I said clearly, raising both my hands in the air as if surrendering to the man holding the syringe. “Look at how cold your hands are. Did you leave your blue scarf in the house?”
Blue scarf. That was what we called the physical therapy strap he used to pull himself backward.
The man with the syringe glanced at me with a snarl. “Shut up and tell your boss to drop the piece!”
In that split second while the man looked at me, my father hooked his left heel under the red floor-release lever on the van’s metal track and shoved hard with his good leg against the side wall.
The heavy motorized wheelchair broke free of the floor latch and rolled backward down the metal handicap ramp like a boulder.
The IV line yanked taut and ripped cleanly out of the tape on my dad’s sleeve, jerking the man with the syringe off balance onto his stomach on the van floor.
I lunged forward as the wheelchair hit the snowy alley pavement, catching the handles with my left hand to keep my dad from tipping over, while with my right hand I slammed the heavy sterling-silver cake server straight down on the wrist of the man reaching out the back doors for my dad’s coat.
He howled in pain, dropping the syringe onto the ice.
At the same instant, a gunshot cracked through the cold night air.
Luca hadn’t shot at the van’s cab. He had fired a single round straight into the front left tire of the medical van just as the driver slammed the gas pedal.
Rubber exploded in a cloud of white smoke, and the van slewed sideways across the icy cobblestones, wedging its front bumper straight into the brick pillar of the Moretti carriage house with a crunch of crumpled steel.
Arthur Sterling tumbled out of the half-open passenger door into a snowbank, blood trickling from his forehead where he’d hit the dashboard.
I dropped to my knees beside my father’s wheelchair in the snow, wrapping my apron and my arms around his trembling shoulders.
“I’ve got you, Dad,” I sobbed against his wool coat. “I’ve got you.”
My father’s good left hand came up, clumsy and weak, and patted the back of my head twice.
“Clara’s… girl,” he rasped, his voice slurred and thick, yet stronger than I had heard it in six months. He pointed a shaking finger toward Vanessa, who was still on her knees on the flagstone path beside the spilled contents of the greenhouse lockbox. “Not… Sterling.”
Luca walked over, his gun still trained on the wrecked van as neighborhood sirens began to wail in the distance down Lake Shore Drive.
“What is he saying, Emma?” Luca asked, kneeling beside my father’s chair.
My dad reached into the inside pocket of his wool hospital cardigan with his left hand and pulled out a folded, laminated marina log sheet from Belmont Harbor, dated seven months ago—the night before his stroke.
“Not… the old man,” my father forced the words out, staring straight at Vanessa as she shivered in her torn red silk dress. “The night… Marco’s boat blew… the girl… was on the dock. She… paid Dante.”
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Luca went completely still.
He slowly turned his head away from Arthur Sterling in the snowbank and looked down at the woman he had been three days away from marrying.
