Chapter 6 - THE BANDAGE ON MY WRIST
For two seconds, the sound of the pouring rain and the approaching police sirens seemed to vanish inside a hollow roar in my ears.
I looked down at the neat white gauze bandage wrapped tightly around my right wrist.
An hour ago, in the estate housekeeper’s office, sixty-year-old Dr. Harris—who had been the Moretti family physician since Uncle Dante hired him ten years ago—had cleaned the minor skin scrape on my wrist with a cold alcohol swab, applied a thick yellow ointment pad underneath the gauze, and told me to keep the pressure wrap tight all night so the swelling wouldn’t spread.
Wait—for the last twenty minutes in the car, I had thought the strange tingling numbness creeping up my right forearm and the fluttering rhythm in my chest were just adrenaline and fear.
“Hannah!” Luca’s face went pale beneath the rain as he lunged toward me, pulling open his pocketknife with one hand and slicing through the medical tape and white gauze on my wrist in a single swift motion.
Underneath the bandage, taped directly over the pulse point of my radial artery, wasn’t an antibiotic pad. It was a clear transdermal medical patch soaked in a viscous yellow compound—designed to absorb slowly through broken skin over ninety minutes until it triggered what would look to any county coroner like a sudden, tragic heart arrhythmia in a stressed twenty-seven-year-old woman!
Luca ripped the transdermal patch off my wrist and threw it onto the gravel, then grabbed a bottle of drinking water from the open door of the Range Rover and poured the entire bottle over my skin, scrubbing the yellow residue off my pulse point with the clean cotton cuff of his own dress shirt.
“Why would they poison me?!” I gasped, my knees wobbling slightly as Luca caught me around the waist and lifted me effortlessly onto the dry leather tailgate of the SUV.
“Because when Vanessa saw me send you to Dr. Harris from the dining room, she realized you had seen the watch in the pantry!” Luca said fiercely, his dark eyes locked onto mine as he pressed two fingers against the side of my neck to check my pulse. “If you died in your sleep tonight at your apartment, Dante and Vanessa could claim you stole the watch yourself and had a panic-induced heart failure! Cole—tell that state trooper to call a Medevac ambulance to this driveway right now!”
“Wait—don’t give her epinephrine from a standard ambulance kit!” Marco Santoro barked, limping rapidly over to the tailgate of the Range Rover with Daniel’s help and shining Leo’s flashlight directly onto the discarded yellow patch on the gravel. “Look at the blue medical stamp on the corner of that patch backing, Luca! Digoxin-75. That’s the exact transdermal heart-glycoside patch Dante used to induce your father’s fatal stroke in 2018! You didn’t only take off the patch in time—she only had it on for forty minutes, and the cold rain slowed her skin circulation!”
Marco reached into the deep pocket of his canvas barn coat and pulled out a small amber prescription bottle filled with large charcoal-activated binding tablets and a vial of sublingual nitroglycerin.
“My cardiologist in Poughkeepsie keeps me on glycoside blockers for my scarred lung valves,” Marco said, pressing two black tablets into my hand and pouring a second bottle of water for me to swallow them down. “Chew those right now,Arthur’s girl! They’ll bind whatever trace got into your bloodstream before it hits your heart muscle—and the hospital in White Plains is right on the way back to Manhattan!”
I chewed the bitter black tablets and swallowed the water, leaning my head against Luca’s chest as his arm stayed wrapped around my shoulders like a steel band. Beneath his wet linen shirt, his heart was hammering even faster than mine.
“You’re going to be okay, Hannah,” Luca murmured against my hair, his voice shaking for the first time all night. “I’ve got you. Breathe with me.”
Ten feet away, two New York State Troopers had already handcuffed Enzo Bellini and his three gunmen and were clicking a pair of steel cuffs around Vanessa Bellini’s wrists right over her silver beaded gown.
“Wait a second!” Luca called out to Victor Cole as the private investigator handed his surveillance drive to the lead State Police sergeant. “Vanessa just said Dante and her father walked into Hudson National Bank in Manhattan at ten-thirty tonight to open Vault 714!”
“Hudson National Bank doesn’t have a twenty-four-hour vault in Manhattan,” Marco Santoro said sharply, looking from the brass 714 key in Luca’s hand to the matching 714 key on Leo’s silver St. Christopher chain. “Luca, 714 isn’t a bank box in Manhattan! Think! Where did your father and Arthur Parker work every single night until November 14, 2015?!”
My eyes widened as the numbers clicked together in my head.
“Pier 14!” I gasped, sitting bolt upright on the tailgate of the SUV. “My dad’s security master keys all started with the dock zone number—Zone 7, Pier 14! 714! After the fire burned down the upper wooden warehouse, your father’s company built the new concrete port authority headquarters right on top of the old foundation!”
Luca’s head snapped toward his Uncle Marco. “The subterranean tide-vault in the concrete foundation under the old billing office! It requires two brass keys turned simultaneously to open the waterproof steel chest!”
“And Dante didn’t have either key!” Marco said grimly. “That’s why he hasn’t gone to a bank tonight—he’s at the Pier 14 port headquarters right now with a thermal lance crew to burn that vault open before midnight! Because what your father locked inside Box 714 on the night of the fire isn’t money, Luca—it’s the original title deeds to the Bellini trucking syndicate and the video tape of Dante and Donato Bellini executing the port commissioner in 2014!”
Wait. Why had Vanessa lied to us thirty seconds ago about Hudson National Bank in Manhattan?
To make us drive south into Manhattan traffic—while Uncle Dante and Donato Bellini were thirty minutes away at the East River docks in Queens, three blocks from the apartment building where my father was sleeping alone right now!
Then I froze, a wave of cold terror washing over me as I remembered my job application file sitting in Mrs. Carter’s office desk at the estate—the desk Dr. Harris and Uncle Dante had searched before leaving the mansion.
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My emergency contact address—my father’s first-floor apartment on 44th Drive in Long Island City, four hundred yards from Pier 14—was written in black ink on the top page of my personnel folder.
“Luca,” I whispered, grabbing his forearm with my left hand. “Dante knows who my father is. If Dante found out tonight that Arthur Parker’s daughter works in your house and saw the watch... he’s four blocks from my dad’s apartment right now!”
