Chapter 8 - THE CRASH AT THE CONSULATE
Chloe didn't hesitate for a second.
She threw open the driver’s side door of the 1978 Mercedes and slid behind the leather steering wheel.
It was a two-door convertible with a tiny rear jump-seat area. Beatrice climbed into the narrow back space with surprising agility, wedging herself safely behind the passenger seat and bracing her hands against the leather headrests. Gabriel got into the passenger side, slamming the heavy door shut and locking his seatbelt with his right hand.
Outside, Detective Miller’s voice boomed over the megaphone again.
“Thirty seconds, Costello! Put the weapon down!”
Through the windshield glass, Chloe could see three State Police cruisers parked nose-to-tail across the narrow brick alley, blocking the exit. Behind the cruisers stood Detective Miller with a shotgun raised—and standing twenty feet back in the shadows of a doorway was Dante, watching with a cell phone pressed to his ear.
“If I hit the center cruiser, the airbags will trap us,” Chloe said, her foot hovering over the clutch as she turned the key in the ignition.
The classic V8 engine roared to life inside the closed garage like a waking beast.
“This car was built in 1978, sweetheart,” Gabriel said calmly, bracing his good hand against the dashboard. “There are no airbags. And the bumper is solid West German steel. Aim for the rear axle of the cruiser on the left—it’s parked over the wet cobblestones by the storm drain. It’ll spin right out of the way.”
Chloe glanced at him. “Do you always know physics, or just when people are shooting at you?”
“Only on Tuesdays,” Gabriel replied, his dark eyes locked on hers. “Floor it.”
Chloe slammed the gearshift into first, popped the clutch, and stomped on the gas pedal.
The green Mercedes surged forward, smashing straight through the wooden carriage house doors in an explosion of splintering pine and flying glass.
Outside in the alley, Detective Miller shouted and raised his shotgun—Wait! He froze for a fraction of a second when he saw a twenty-four-year-old waitress behind the wheel of Antonio Costello’s ghost car.
That half-second cost him everything.
Chloe shifted into second gear as the tires bit into the cobblestones. She aimed the heavy steel nose of the Mercedes straight at the rear left quarter-panel of the end police cruiser.
“Hold on!” she yelled, and signed a single Fist-S—Brace!—in the rearview mirror for Beatrice.
CRUNCH.
The impact rattled Chloe’s teeth in her skull. The vintage German steel plowed into the lighter modern aluminum of the cruiser’s trunk, spinning the police car sideways across the wet drainage grate like a toy top.
Sparks showered across the brick walls as Chloe wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right, scraping through the gap with two inches to spare.
In the side mirror, she saw Dante pull a gun from his jacket and run into the middle of the alley behind them.
Chloe didn't slow down. She shifted into third gear, hurtling down the narrow historic lane toward the bright sunlit iron gates at the end of the block.
Right in front of them, bathed in October sunlight on the steps of the Italian Consulate, stood the Mayor of Boston, the U.S. Attorney, and a wall of news vans with live broadcast satellites pointed at the podium.
Chloe hit the horn—and kept her hand pressed down on it as the battered green Mercedes burst out of the alley, jumped the curb onto the brick plaza, and skidded to a dramatic, smoking halt ten feet in front of forty live television cameras.
Screams echoed across the plaza. Uniformed Capitol Police and Secret Service agents drew their weapons, surrounding the convertible instantly.
“Nobody move!” a federal marshal shouted.
Detective Miller’s remaining two cruisers came screaming out of the alley seconds later, sirens wailing, with Dante running right behind them before realizing—too late—where the alley had led them.
Chloe turned off the ignition, kicked open the driver’s side door, and stood up on the leather seat of the convertible so every camera lens in New England had a clear shot of her face.
In her left hand, she held up Antonio Costello’s leather ledger. In her right hand, she held up Leo’s open sketchbook and the bent, blue-painted license plate.
“My name is Chloe Bennett!” she shouted at the top of her lungs into the wall of microphones. “Two years ago, my deaf sixteen-year-old brother, Leo Bennett, was murdered on Route 9 because he drew a picture of State Police Detective Richard Miller and Dante Moretti smuggling fentanyl through Pier 4!”
The reporters went wild, cameras flashing furiously as every live news feed in Boston zoomed in on the pages she held aloft.
Miller stopped dead in his tracks ten feet away, his face turning gray as the U.S. Attorney on the podium turned to stare at him.
Then, Beatrice Costello stood up in the back of the convertible.
With her snow-white hair gleaming in the sun and her pearls resting over her black dress, the silent matriarch of the Costello family looked directly into the lens of the nearest Channel 5 camera.
She raised her hands. And as she signed with slow, regal dignity, Chloe translated every single word at the top of her lungs for the entire city to hear.
“My name is Beatrice Costello!” Chloe’s voice rang out across the silent plaza. “Four years ago, my husband Antonio tried to hand these exact ledgers over to the federal prosecutor! Detective Miller and Dante Moretti murdered my husband in his hospital bed, threw me down a flight of stairs when I caught them framing my son for that boy’s death, and drugged me for six months to keep me silent!”
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Beatrice pointed a steady, trembling finger straight at Dante, who was backing slowly toward the crowd at the edge of the plaza.
“And you can check the pockets of the woman lying in my cellar right now,” Chloe finished, her voice fierce and unbroken, “because she’s carrying the dead man’s lighter!”
