Chapter 6 - THE GHOSTS OF PIER 40
The rain started as they drove toward Pier 40, a cold, driving downpour that washed the grit of the city into the storm drains.
In the back seat, Adrian was systematically loading his grandfather’s silver-handled Colt revolver. The rhythmic click-clack of the cylinder spinning was the only sound in the car besides the wipers.
His legs were entirely numb again, not from the poison, but from the sheer trauma of bearing his weight at the bank. He had collapsed back into the wheelchair before they left the vault. He couldn’t walk. Not yet. Not for a fight.
But his mind had never been sharper.
“Silas,” Adrian said, snapping the cylinder shut. “When we get to the warehouse, you stay in the car with Lily. Keep the engine running. If I don’t come out in twenty minutes, you drive her to the FBI field office and you give them the tape. You trade it for witness protection.”
Silas gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. “He has Maria, boss. My wife. I can’t just sit in the car.”
“If you come in with me, he’ll kill her the second he sees you,” Adrian said calmly. “Marcus wants me. He wants the man he thinks murdered his family. I’m the only one who can talk him down.”
Lily reached over from her car seat and touched Adrian’s arm.
“Are you going to shoot the fire man?” she asked softly.
Adrian looked at the small girl who had unknowingly unraveled a three-year conspiracy. “I’m going to tell him a story, Lily. Sometimes, the truth is a better weapon than a gun.”
The old Rossi warehouse loomed out of the fog like a decaying leviathan. It had been abandoned since the night Adrian’s father massacred the Rossi family twenty years ago. The windows were shattered, the corrugated metal siding rusted and groaning in the wind.
Silas parked the sedan in the shadows of a crumbling overpass.
He helped Adrian out of the car and into the wheelchair, his large hands shaking slightly.
“Bring her back, boss,” Silas choked out.
“I will,” Adrian promised.
Adrian wheeled himself through the rain, his coat soaked, the silver Colt resting heavily in his lap under a fold of fabric.
He reached the massive sliding iron door of the warehouse. It was slightly ajar. He pushed himself inside.
The interior was cavernous, lit only by a few harsh construction lamps hooked up to a portable generator. Shadows stretched long and distorted across the concrete floor.
In the center of the room, tied to a wooden chair, was Silas’s wife, Maria. She was gagged and terrified, but alive.
Standing ten feet away, holding a suppressed submachine gun, was Marcus Vale. Or rather, Marcus Rossi.
Marcus looked at Adrian in the wheelchair and smiled. It was a broken, manic expression.
“You actually came,” Marcus echoed, his voice bouncing off the high steel rafters. “I thought you’d send your men. But you always did have a twisted sense of honor, Adrian.”
Adrian wheeled himself forward, stopping twenty feet away.
“Let Maria go, Marcus,” Adrian said, his voice carrying easily over the hum of the generator. “This is between you and me. She has nothing to do with it.”
“Neither did my mother!” Marcus snapped, his composure breaking instantly. “Neither did my brothers! Your father slaughtered them in this exact room twenty years ago while you were busy playing the princeling!”
“And to get revenge for your family, you killed mine,” Adrian said softly. “You planted the bomb that took Claire and Sophie.”
Marcus’s face twisted in sudden, violent agony. He turned away for a second, his hand gripping the barrel of his gun so hard his knuckles popped.
“I didn’t want to kill the little girl,” Marcus whispered, a tear tracking through the grime on his cheek. “I swear to God, Adrian, I didn’t. The bomb was wired to the driver’s seat. It was only supposed to trigger when your weight hit the cushion. I didn’t know you were going to take the family out that day. I didn’t know you would let Claire drive on the way home because you were tired.”
Adrian’s heart stopped.
Claire had been driving.
He had fallen asleep in the passenger seat after feeding the ducks. Claire had taken the wheel to let him rest.
The bomb hadn’t been a random explosion. It had been triggered by Claire’s weight.
A wave of nausea so profound it almost blinded him washed over Adrian.
“But you lived,” Marcus said, turning back, his eyes hollow and dead. “You survived. And I realized that killing you wasn’t enough. I wanted you to suffer exactly like I suffered. I wanted you trapped in that chair, helpless, watching your empire crumble while I took everything you built. Just like your father took mine.”
Adrian reached into his coat.
Marcus immediately raised the submachine gun, aiming it at Adrian’s chest.
“Don’t do it, Adrian.”
“I’m not pulling a gun,” Adrian said.
He pulled out the audio cassette tape and tossed it onto the concrete floor between them.
It skittered and stopped at Marcus’s feet.
“What is that?” Marcus demanded.
“That’s a recording of my father, the old Don, giving Thomas the lawyer a direct order,” Adrian said perfectly calmly. “An order to allow you to survive the massacre twenty years ago. An order to bring you into the family. And an order to let you plant the car bomb three years ago.”
Marcus stared at the plastic rectangle as if it were a venomous snake.
“You’re lying,” Marcus whispered.
“My father played you, Marcus,” Adrian continued, his voice ringing with absolute certainty. “He used your grief to do his dirty work. He wanted me crippled so I couldn’t dismantle the syndicate. He knew you would build the bomb. He let you do it. And then, when you had outlived your usefulness, he ordered Thomas to burn down the St. Jude orphanage.”
Marcus froze. His eyes widened in absolute horror.
“How… how do you know about St. Jude’s?”
“Because Lily survived,” Adrian said. “Your daughter is sitting in the car outside, Marcus.”
Marcus dropped the gun. It clattered loudly against the concrete.
He fell to his knees, his hands covering his face as a soul-tearing sob ripped from his throat. The realization that he had been a pawn, that his entire life of vengeance had been orchestrated by the very man he hated, shattered him completely.
“I thought I was saving her,” Marcus wept into his hands. “I hid her there so your father wouldn’t find out I had blood left. I didn’t know…”
Adrian slowly drew the silver Colt from his lap.
He aimed it directly at the weeping man’s head.
Marcus looked up, seeing the barrel. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, accepting his execution.
“Do it,” Marcus whispered. “I deserve it.”
Adrian’s finger tightened on the trigger. He thought of Sophie’s yellow dress. He thought of Claire’s laugh. He thought of three years of agony and poison.
But before Adrian could pull the trigger, a red laser dot suddenly appeared on the center of Marcus’s forehead.
Adrian barely had time to shout a warning.
A heavy sniper bullet tore through the corrugated metal roof—CRACK!—and struck Marcus high in the right shoulder, spinning him violently to the ground in a spray of blood.
Adrian threw himself out of the wheelchair, hitting the concrete hard and rolling behind a massive rusted steel pillar as a second bullet shattered the wheelchair’s backrest.
High up on the warehouse catwalk, a shadow moved.
“Well done, Adrian,” a raspy, amplified voice echoed from a bullhorn in the rafters. “You figured it out faster than I anticipated. But you always were the smart one.”
Adrian peered around the pillar.
May you like
Standing on the catwalk, surrounded by heavily armed mercenaries, was his Uncle Paulie. The old Don’s brother.
“Your father sends his regards from the penthouse, nephew,” Paulie called out, smiling down at the carnage. “He said it’s time to finally clean the house for good.”
