Chapter 8 - THE UNION JACKET ON THE PIER
Total darkness swallowed the boathouse as the overhead halogen floodlights died with a loud clack.
In the same heartbeat, the two-ton steel spreader bar of the boat hoist dropped five feet on its greased chain with a deafening metallic shriek, slamming straight into the rifleman named Marco and knocking him headfirst off the concrete apron into the freezing black water of the slip.
Muzzle flashes lit the dark like strobe lights as Clara and the second guard fired wildly toward the doorway where Luca had been standing.
Look up here! I shouted silently in my head, grabbing a heavy brass marine fire extinguisher mounted to the catwalk rail and hurling it down onto the fiberglass canopy of the boat right behind the second mercenary.
The guard spun around toward the noise just as Luca came out of a low roll across the concrete floor, tackling the man behind the knees and driving his head into a steel mooring cleat. The mercenary went limp, his rifle clattering across the wet cement.
“Nobody move!” Clara shrieked from the stern deck of the cruiser.
My eyes adjusted to the dim green glow of the boat’s dashboard instruments.
Clara had backed up onto the swim platform of the yacht, holding Enzo’s weeping daughter directly in front of her like a human shield, with the silver revolver pressed tight against Vanessa’s temple. Inside the cabin, Enzo Bellini had lunged for the boat’s throttle controls, trying to throw the twin engines into reverse to back out into the open lake.
“Back away from the dock, Luca, or I swear to God I’ll pull the trigger!” Clara screamed, her manicured hand trembling furiously on the grip of the revolver.
“Dad, stop the boat! She’s going to shoot me!” Vanessa cried out in terror as the yacht’s propellers churned the water into white foam, straining against the thick nylon bow line still looped around the concrete bollard on the pier.
Enzo didn’t stop. Blinded by panic and desperate to escape the federal prison sentence waiting for him onshore, Vanessa’s own father shoved the twin throttles hard into reverse without even waiting to untie the bow line.
The sixty-foot cruiser lurched backward with violent force.
The nylon bow line snapped taut like a guitar string—and the sudden, brutal jerk of the deck threw both Clara and Vanessa off balance on the wet fiberglass swim platform.
Vanessa tumbled sideways onto the concrete pier just as Clara’s revolver went off with a deafening bang that echoed through the rafters.
Down below, Luca staggered back a step, clapping his right hand over his left shoulder as dark blood bloomed through his white dress shirt.
“Luca!” I screamed from the catwalk, scrambling down the iron maintenance ladder so fast my palms burned on the rungs.
Before Clara could level the gun for a second shot at Luca, the headlights of Frank Marino’s old 2012 Buick roared right through the wooden double doors of the boathouse service bay, blinding Clara and pinning the yacht’s stern line under the car’s front bumper so the boat couldn’t clear the slip.
And right behind the Buick, red and blue federal strobe lights exploded across the water from two Coast Guard interceptor boats blocking the harbor mouth, while six FBI agents with tactical shields burst through the main boardwalk entrance.
“FBI! Drop the weapon! Drop it now!”
Clara stood frozen in the glare of the Coast Guard searchlights on the rocking stern of the trapped boat, her trench coat soaked with lake spray, the smoking gun hanging uselessly in her hand as federal laser sights painted red dots across her chest. Slowly, her fingers opened, and the silver revolver fell onto the deck.
Within thirty seconds, federal agents were swarming the yacht, snapping handcuffs onto Clara and dragging a weeping, broken Enzo Bellini out of the wheelhouse.
I didn’t look at them. I dropped to my knees on the concrete pier beside Luca, where Frank Marino was already stripping off his old blue union jacket and pressing the thick, clean lining hard against the bullet wound near Luca’s left collarbone.
“Hold still, kid,” Frank grunted, applying steady pressure with his strong, square hands while I tied my apron strings tightly over the folded jacket to hold the compress in place. “Went clean through the top of the shoulder muscle. Missed the artery. You’re too stubborn to bleed out over a Bellini.”
Luca let out a ragged breath, leaning his head back against the concrete piling as he looked up at the two of us—an eighty-year-old warehouse foreman and a twenty-nine-year-old housekeeper kneeling in the oil and rain to save his life.
Ten feet away, Vanessa crawled across the wet cement on her hands and knees, her diamond engagement ring scraping against the concrete as she reached for Luca’s boot.
“Luca,” she sobbed, her voice raw and broken. “Luca, you’re hurt—I’m here, darling, I’m right here! You saw what my father did—he tried to leave me behind! I’m on your side now, I’ll testify against both of them!”
Luca looked down at her slowly. There wasn’t an ounce of anger left in his dark eyes—only a deep, quiet finality.
With his good right hand, he reached down, took the three-carat diamond engagement ring off her trembling left finger, and dropped it into Frank Marino’s metal lunch pail sitting beside us on the dock.
“You aren’t on my side, Vanessa,” Luca said softly. “You were only ever on the side of whoever was winning. Tomorrow morning, my lawyers will pay for your defense attorney because I don’t punish women for the sins of their fathers—provided you tell the federal grand jury the truth about how you abducted Arthur Reed and an eight-year-old child tonight. After that, I never want to hear your name under my roof again.”
As two female federal marshals lifted Vanessa to her feet and led her away in handcuffs toward the waiting squad cars for kidnapping charges, Inspector Miller crouched beside Luca with an evidence bag.
“We got the tape, the blueprint, and the offshore banking drive out of Clara’s purse, Luca,” the inspector said quietly. “Paramedics are pulling up right now.”
I breathed a huge sigh of relief, wiping the rain from my forehead with the back of my wrist—until Frank Marino reached down to pick up his father’s old union jacket where it had slipped halfway off Luca’s shoulder.
The heavy brass bullet that had passed through Luca’s shoulder and lodged in the thick quilted lining of the old jacket fell out of a torn seam inside the breast pocket—along with a folded, waterproof piece of blue union credit-union paper that had been stitched inside the jacket’s inner lining for twenty years without even Frank knowing it was there.
May you like
Frank picked up the slip of blue paper, unfolded it under the glare of the ambulance lights, and his jaw dropped open.
“Wait a minute,” Frank whispered, staring from the paper to me, and then down at Luca. “Michael didn’t stitch this into my spare jacket at the warehouse. Arthur Reed did.”
