Chapter 7 - UNDER THE GREAT CLOCK
I didn’t hear Luca scream. I only saw him move.
Wait—he was thirty feet behind Lily, too far to reach her before the green transit van jumped the granite curb.
It wasn’t Luca who reached her first.
It was a blur of torn red silk.
Vanessa—who had been first out the right-side passenger door while Luca came around the driver’s side—kicked off one silver heel on the slick stone, threw herself forward across the wet pavement, and shoved nine-year-old Lily hard into Elena’s open arms by the brass doors.
The side mirror of the speeding van clipped Vanessa’s shoulder, spinning her around and slamming her down onto the wet granite steps as the van’s tires shrieked across the sidewalk.
Marco fired three times into the van’s rear tire.
The rubber blew in a shower of sparks, sending the green vanfishtailing violently into a cast-iron lamppost fifty yards down Canal Street.
“Lily!” Luca roared, skidding to his knees beside the brass doors where Elena was curled over their daughter like a lioness, shielding Lily’s head with both arms.
“We’re okay! We’re okay, Luca!” Elena cried, her face wet with rain and tears as she looked up at her husband for the first time in four years.
Luca grabbed both of them—his wife in her damp blue coat and his daughter in her oversized catering uniform—pulling them against his chest with a sound that was half-sob, half-prayer. For three seconds, the world stopped on the steps of Union Station as Luca buried his face against Elena’s scarred cheek while Lily held onto both their necks.
I ran straight to Vanessa on the lower step.
She was lying on her side in a puddle, her expensive red gown ruined, blood seeping through the torn silk at her right collarbone where the heavy truck mirror had caught her. Yet in her right fist, she still clutched Julian’s black onyx rosary.
“Vanessa!” I dropped down beside her, pressing my folded white apron hard against her bleeding shoulder to stem the flow. “Don’t try to sit up—your collarbone might be broken.”
Vanessa looked up at me through wet lashes, her lips trembling in the yellow glare of the streetlights.
“Is she… did I push her far enough?” Vanessa whispered.
“You saved her life,” I said fiercely, holding pressure on the wound. “She doesn’t have a scratch on her.”
Down the block, the driver’s door of the wrecked green van kicked open.
Matteo didn’t run away down the street into the loop.
Instead, holding a snub-nosed revolver in his bandaged left hand, he sprinted through the pouring rain straight into the lower street-level doors of Union Station—heading directly for the subterranean baggage concourse.
“He’s not giving up the locker!” Elena said, scrambling to her feet with Luca’s arm supporting her waist. “Luca, if he gets into the baggage vault and blows Locker 418 open, he won’t just destroy the bank ledgers—he’ll get the bearer bonds and the federal immunity agreement Julian signed the day before he died!”
My mother had already hurried out of her Honda carrying her emergency medical bag from the trunk. She knelt beside me on the steps, taking over pressure on Vanessa’s shoulder with practiced trauma-nurse hands.
“Go with them, Claire!” my mother ordered me, pulling a sterile gauze pack open with her teeth. “You have the claim ticket, and I’ve got this girl right here. Go!”
Luca looked at Marco. “Stay on the steps with Claire’s mother and Vanessa until the police arrive. Nobody comes through this door behind us.”
“Daddy, don’t leave Mommy again!” Lily cried, clutching Elena’s wet coat with both hands.
“Nobody is getting separated tonight, baby,” Luca said grimly. He scooped Lily onto his left hip, took Elena’s hand in his right, and nodded to me. “Claire—stay right beside Elena.”
The four of us burst through the brass doors into the marble grandeur of the Union Station Great Hall.
It was ten-thirty at night. Only a handful of late travelers sat on the long wooden benches beneath the soaring barrel-vaulted skylight and the massive hanging station clock.
Ahead of us, the heavy steel gate to the private baggage storage rooms had been forced half-open, its electronic latch shattered by a gunshot.
We hurried down the wide marble corridor behind the old wooden ticket booths. Row after row of tall, olive-green steel lockers stood under flickering fluorescent tubes.
“Aisle Four,” Elena breathed, her hand tightening on Luca’s sleeve as we heard the metallic clang of a crowbar echoing off the tile walls ahead. “All the way at the back.”
Luca set Lily down behind a solid marble pillar at the end of Aisle Three and pressed Elena safely behind her. He drew his nine-millimeter and stepped around the corner into Aisle Four.
I stepped right behind him, clutching the blue ticket in my palm.
Matteo was standing in front of Locker 418 with a heavy iron tire iron wedged into the brass keyhole. The steel door was bent, the hinges groaning, but the old pre-war railway steel hadn’t given way.
When he heard Luca’s shoes on the terrazzo floor, Matteo spun around and leveled his revolver—not at Luca, whose bulletproof vest was visible beneath his open tuxedo shirt, but straight toward the marble pillar where Elena and Lily were standing.
“Drop it, big brother!” Matteo snarled, sweat and rainwater dripping from his jaw. “Or I put two rounds right through the corner of that plaster wall and finish what the river didn’t!”
Luca froze, his gun barrel lowering two inches.
“You killed Julian Bellini,” Luca said, his voice echoing down the narrow steel corridor. “You tried to drown my wife with my daughter’s dollhouse money under the seat. And tonight you tried to run down a nine-year-old child in the street.”
“Because you treated me like a dog since the day Dad died!” Matteo shouted back, his eyes wild and bloodshot. “Everything went to Luca! The shipping lines, the real estate, the respect! Arthur and I built a forty-million-dollar pipeline while you were playing the respectable family man!”
“With fentanyl that killed kids on the South Side!” Elena stepped halfway out from behind the pillar before I grabbed her blue coat and pulled her back. “Julian found out a shipment went bad in Pilsen and killed four teenagers, Matteo! That’s why he came to me!”
Matteo laughed harshly, keeping his revolver pointed toward the pillar while extending his bleeding left hand toward me.
“You. The maid,” Matteo barked at me. “The station master’s night key is hanging inside the glass box on the wall right beside you, and you’ve got the stamped blue release slip in your hand. Walk over here, unlock 418 with the master key, and hand me the leather satchel inside. Then I walk out the track doors onto the Amtrak platform, and everyone lives to see tomorrow.”
Luca didn’t look at me, bust his quiet voice reached my ears clearly.
“Do what he says, Claire. Nothing in that box is worth Lily or Elena.”
My hands were steady as I broke the little glass panel on the wall with my elbow, took down the heavy brass master key, and walked slowly down the fluorescent-lit aisle toward Matteo.
“Keep your hands where I can see them, maid,” Matteo hissed, stepping back two paces so he could cover both Luca and me. “Turn the lock.”
I slipped the brass key into Locker 418 alongside the bent steel edge and turned it hard until the heavy bolt clicked back.
The olive-green door swung open with a metallic squeak.
Wait.
There was no leather satchel full of money or accounting books on the top shelf.
Resting on the middle steel shelf was a child’s Tin lunchbox decorated with yellow daisies, a stack of sealed federal envelopes—and sitting right on top of them was a silver-plated revolver with a pearl grip.
May you like
Elena’s father’s service pistol. Fully loaded, with the hammer already half-cocked.
And taped to the inside of the locker door was a yellowed Polaroid photograph that made my breath stop in my throat.
