Chapter 5 - THE STANDOFF AT THE STONE BARN
Luca looked down at the nine-year-old boy holding my hand by the open trapdoor.
For a fraction of a second, the ruthless boss of the Moretti family looked completely breathless. In the pale silver light filtering through the pantry window, the resemblance was unmistakable: Leo had the exact same dark, heavy-lidded eyes and stubborn jaw as Luca—and the same high cheekbones as the oil portrait of Luca’s late sister, Elena, that hung at the top of the grand staircase back at the estate.
“Elena’s son,” Luca whispered, dropping to one knee beside the boy and resting a steady, trembling hand on Leo’s small shoulder. “Your name is Leonardo?”
“Grandpa calls me Leo,” the boy whispered back, looking at Luca with wide, solemn eyes. “Are you my Uncle Luca from the picture in the tin box?”
“I am, little man,” Luca said, his voice thick with an emotion I had never heard from him before. “And nobody on this earth is ever going to make you hide again.”
CRASH.
The front door of the cottage splintered inward off its brass chain under the boot of a heavy man in the hallway.
“Go!” Luca ordered, shoving Daniel, Marco, and me toward the open wooden hatch in the pantry floor. “Take them through the woodshed tunnel to the Range Rover! Cole and I will draw them toward the creek!”
“Luca, no—there’s two carloads of them!” I whispered fiercely, gripping the lapel of his white shirt with my bandaged hand as I lowered Leo down onto the earthen steps beneath the pantry floor.
“Go with Hannah, Leo,” Luca told his nephew gently, then looked straight into my eyes as he gently pried my fingers from his shirt and pressed the silver St. Christopher medal and the second 714 key into my palm. “Keep him with you until I open the car door. That’s an order, Hannah.”
He pulled the wooden trapdoor shut over our heads just as heavy footsteps pounded into the kitchen above us—and we heard Luca deliberately kick the back screen door open onto the side porch to lead them away from the pantry floor!
Down in the narrow, four-foot-high root cellar passage beneath the house, it smelled of damp earth and cedar woodchips. Daniel half-carried Marco Santoro ahead of us while I kept my arm wrapped tightly around Leo’s shoulders, guiding him through the dark until we emerged behind a stacked wall of split firewood inside the detached woodshed thirty yards from the stone barn.
Outside in the rain, a voice I knew all too well rang out across the muddy yard from the open passenger window of the black town car:
“Tear the bedroom apart, Enzo!” Vanessa Bellini shouted, her cultured society voice stripped down to a shrill, vicious rasp. She was still wearing her forty-thousand-dollar beaded silver engagement gown under a black fur wrap, standing under an umbrella by the town car’s fender. “The investigator said the old man can barely walk! If he’s not in the house, he’s in the barn! Pour the gasoline around the porch anyway—we don’t have time to search every bush!”
Beside me in the dark woodshed, Leo stiffened as one of Enzo Bellini’s men walked toward the cottage porch carrying two red five-gallon plastic fuel cans.
“My mom’s tin box is under my bed!” Leo gasped softly, trying to pull away from my grip toward the woodshed door. “It has her wedding ring and her letters to Uncle Luca!”
“Stay right here with me, Leo,” I breathed into his ear, holding him tight against my chest and wrapping Luca’s thick cashmere coat around both of us so the boy wouldn’t shiver. “Look at the woodshed window—we already have the keys from the tin box right here in my hand. Your Uncle Luca isn’t going to let them burn the house.”
Fifty feet to our left, by the creek bank, two gunshots cracked through the rain—Luca firing into the front grill of Enzo’s silver Escalade to puncture the radiator and draw the three gunmen away from the cottage porch!
Enzo Bellini—a stocky, bull-necked man in a leather jacket—cursed loudly and spun toward the creek bank with two of his men, firing blindly into the dark willow trees while the fourth man stayed by the town car with Vanessa, still holding the red gasoline can.
At that exact moment, Victor Cole stepped out from the shadow of the stone barn behind the fourth man, racked the slide of the twelve-gauge pump shotgun from Luca’s trunk, and pressed the cold steel barrel squarely against the back of the arsonist’s neck.
“Drop the gas can on the mud, pal,” Cole said calmly. “Or the state troopers five minutes down Route 9 will be scraping you off the windshield.”
The man froze and dropped the red plastic can with a wet thud.
Across the yard, Luca materialized out of the rain behind Enzo and the other two gunmen—who were caught squarely in a crossfire between Luca’s Beretta on the creek bank and Daniel’s heavy Glock aimed from the corner of the woodshed.
“Put the weapons in the mud, Enzo,” Luca said, stepping into the beam of the Escalade’s headlights with the rain plastering his dark hair to his forehead. “Cole already called the State Police barracks before we left the highway, and my men just disarmed your driver.”
Enzo stared down the barrel of Luca’s gun, his chest heaving, then slowly opened his fingers and let his pistol drop into the puddle at his feet. His two men immediately did the same, dropping to their knees with their hands interlaced behind their heads.
By the open door of the black town car, Vanessa Bellini stood frozen under her black umbrella.
When she saw me step out of the woodshed alongside Marco Santoro—with my arm wrapped protectively around a nine-year-old boy who looked like a miniature carbon copy of Luca Moretti—her jaw dropped open.
“You,” Vanessa hissed, staring at my white housekeeping apron peeking out from beneath Luca’s own trench coat. “A maid? You ruined ten years of planning for a twenty-dollar-an-hour kitchen maid?!”
“She’s the daughter of the man your father and my uncle framed for Pier 14,” Luca said coldly, walking across the gravel until he stood in front of his former fiancée. He reached down, grabbed her left hand, and slid the five-carat Moretti family emerald ring straight off her finger. “And this boy is my sister Elena’s son. The sister your brother ran off the coastal road in Positano nine years ago.”
Vanessa’s face went ghost-white at the mention of Positano, but before she bowed her head, a strange, chillingly calm smile twisted the corners of her red lips.
She looked down at the diamond wristwatch on her wrist—which read 10:42 PM.
“You think you won because you drove up to the woods to save an old cripple and an orphan, Luca?” Vanessa laughed, a high, brittle sound as distant blue and red state police lights began flashing through the pine trees across the creek bridge. “Look at the time! Why do you think I stalled you in the dining room until nine-thirty before leaving the estate?!”
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Luca’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”
“Your Uncle Dante didn’t stay at the mansion tonight to entertain your guests,” Vanessa said triumphantly as the first State Police cruiser rumbled across the wooden bridge into the driveway. “At ten-thirty tonight, Dante and my father walked into the private night-vault at Hudson National Bank in Manhattan with a notarized death-and-incapacity power of attorney—signed by your own house doctor, Dr. Harris! And they’re emptying Vault 714—and taking the antidote courier for the slow-acting digitalis Dr. Harris injected into Hannah’s wrist bandage an hour ago!”
