Chapter 7 - THE OXYGEN TANK IN APARTMENT 1B
Luca didn’t wait for the State Police to process the scene in Millbrook.
After quickly having the paramedic from the arriving Millbrook ambulance check my blood pressure and confirm that Marco’s charcoal blockers and the early removal of the patch had kept my vitals completely stable, Luca left Victor Cole and two state troopers to escort Marco and nine-year-old Leo to a guarded safe suite at White Plains Hospital.
By 11:18 PM, Daniel had the black Range Rover flying south down the empty lanes of the Hutchinson River Parkway toward the Whitestone Bridge and Queens, while the NYPD Harbor and Precinct commanders—alerted by the State Police sergeant—raced toward the East River waterfront from the opposite direction.
In the backseat, I sat pressed against Luca’s side, still wrapped in his warm black trench coat with the two brass 714 keys clutched tightly in my left palm. Every streetlight that flashed past the tinted glass made me think of my fifty-eight-year-old father sitting in his worn brown recliner in Apartment 1B, watching old baseball reruns with the clear plastic cannula of his oxygen concentrator looped behind his ears.
“He doesn’t even lock the back courtyard window when it rains,” I whispered, my voice catching as I stared at the Queensboro skyline rising across the dark water ahead of us. “Because the radiator clanks and makes it hard for him to breathe without fresh air. If Dante’s men went there before heading to Pier 14—”
Luca reached over and closed his large, warm hand completely over my trembling fist, wrapping his fingers around mine and the two brass keys inside.
“Look at me, Hannah,” Luca said quietly, his dark eyes steady and fierce in the passing bridge lights. “My father owed Arthur Parker a life debt for eleven years and died before he could pay it because Dante lied to us all. I called my dock foreman at Pier 12 four minutes ago. Six of my best men live six blocks from 44th Drive. They’re pulling up to your street right as we hit the exit ramp.”
Two minutes later, the Range Rover tires screeched around the corner of 44th Drive in Long Island City—a quiet row of brick pre-war apartment buildings standing in the shadow of the giant illuminated cranes of the East River shipping terminals four blocks away.
Sitting right in front of the iron stoop of my building, double-parked with its hazard lights blinking in the rain, was a black Mercedes sedan belonging to Uncle Dante’s personal bodyguard, Sal—and walking down the concrete alley beside my father’s ground-floor bedroom window were two men in dark raincoats!
“They’re at the side window!” I cried out as Daniel slammed on the brakes behind the double-parked Mercedes and two pickup trucks full of Luca’s dockworkers roared around the opposite corner to block the street.
Luca was out of the door before the SUV even rocked to a stop, his Beretta drawn as he and Daniel sprinted down the narrow brick alley. I ran right behind them to the front vestibule door, shoving my apartment key into the brass lock with shaking fingers and bursting down the first-floor hallway into Apartment 1B.
“Dad!” I shouted, throwing our front door open.
The small living room smelled of coffee and rain—and standing right inside the open courtyard bedroom window, with one leg over the sill, was Sal, holding a heavy silenced pistol in his gloved hand!
Except Sal wasn’t aiming the gun at my father.
My fifty-eight-year-old dad—wearing his faded NYPD Harbor Patrol sweatshirt from his twenties, with his plastic oxygen tube still looped over his ears—was standing beside the radiator holding his twenty-pound steel emergency oxygen cylinder by the brass valve neck like a battering ram, having just swung the heavy steel tank straight into the window frame and pinned Sal’s gun wrist viciously between the iron cylinder and the wooden sash!
CRACK.
Before Sal could wrench his arm free, Luca’s hand reached through the outside of the open window, grabbed the back of Sal’s raincoat collar, and yanked the two-hundred-pound hitman backward headfirst onto the concrete alley bricks outside, where Daniel’s knee came down squarely between his shoulder blades!
“Hannah?!” my father wheezed, setting the heavy steel oxygen cylinder down on the carpet and bracing a hand against his dresser as I threw my arms around his neck. “Sweetheart, what on earth are you doing home at midnight in a thousand-dollar coat—and why did two goons from Dante Moretti’s crew just try to climb through my bedroom window?!”
“Oh, thank God you’re okay, Dad,” I sobbed against his flannel shoulder, checking his oxygen tube with trembling hands to make sure the line wasn’t kinked. “They didn’t touch you?”
“Touch me?” Arthur Parker snorted between deep breaths, his sharp blue eyes looking past my shoulder toward the open window where Luca Moretti was vaulting effortlessly over the low sill into our living room. “I worked the East River docks for twenty-two years before my lungs gave out, kiddo. I heard their car idling outside ten minutes ago and waited behind the curtain with the spare tank. Who’s the kid in the tuxedo shirt?”
Luca stopped three feet inside the modest living room, lowering his pistol into his shoulder holster and looking at the graying, broad-shouldered man standing beside the oxygen machine.
Slowly, Luca inclined his head in a gesture of profound respect I had never seen him show a billionaire senator or a syndicate boss.
“Mr. Parker,” Luca said quietly. “I’m Lorenzo Moretti’s son, Luca. Marco Santoro is alive—we just got him and my nephew out of Millbrook an hour ago. He told me everything you did at Pier 14 on the night of the fire.”
My father went completely still. For eleven years, he had carried the shame of a disgraced man in silence so I could have a normal life. Slowly, his weathered hand rose to grip the back of his recliner, and his eyes glistened under the dim living room lamp.
“Marco made it?” my dad whispered, his voice cracking. “I pulled him out to the stringpiece by the water before the roof came down, and when the smoke cleared at the hospital, they told me he’d drowned under the pilings. Nobody believed me when I said Dante Moretti locked those fire doors from the outside.”
“I believe you, sir,” Luca said firmly. “And in fifteen minutes, the entire city of New York is going to know it too. Why did Dante send Sal to your apartment tonight?”
My father pointed out the front living room window toward the towering, floodlit concrete gatehouse of Pier 14 four blocks away at the end of the street.
“They didn’t come here for your maid, son,” my dad said grimly, pulling an old laminated plastic keycard with a faded blue magnetic stripe out from behind the framed photograph of my late mother on the television stand. “When they built the new concrete port headquarters over the ashes of Pier 14 in 2016, the structural engineers kept the original underground storm-surge vault doors from my old security bunker. Dante’s thermal-lance crew just set off the silent seismic alarm in the foundation five minutes ago—and the vault’s secondary steel blast shutter cannot be opened without the original Night Supervisor’s magnetic override card.”
May you like
My dad held the faded blue plastic card out toward Luca.
“Dante knew I still had my badge from the night of the fire,” my father said, his jaw setting with twenty years of iron pride. “And if you want to trap your uncle inside that basement vault before he burns the evidence, I’m the only man in Queens who knows how to flood the outer storm lock from the gatehouse panel.”
