Chapter 37 - The Iron Gate of Pier 42
The rain had returned with a vengeance by the time I emerged from the subway grate onto the cracked asphalt of the Queens waterfront.
It wasn't the gentle gray mist of the morning. It was an icy, torrential downpour driven by gale-force winds whipping off the East River, turning the industrial shoreline into a landscape of churning black water and rusted iron.
I didn't take a cab. A woman in a blood-smeared apron carrying a heavy military sidearm would have triggered a nine-one-one call before the wheels turned twice. Instead, I stole an idling delivery van parked behind a commercial fish market—the keys swinging from the ignition while the driver was inside arguing over wholesale cod prices.
Ten minutes later, the tires of the van hydroplaned across the slick cobblestones of Pier 42.
The pier was an industrial graveyard. Huge shipping containers were stacked three high like gigantic, rusted dominoes, blocking the view of the open river. At the end of the long wooden dock, moored against heavy wooden pilings, sat *The Northern Star*—a four-hundred-foot commercial cargo freighter, its deck cranes swinging slightly in the rising surge, diesel exhaust chugging dark and thick from its twin funnels.
Two black Suburbans sat near the gangway, their running lights dimmed, windshield wipers sweeping rhythmically. Four men stood under the corrugated metal overhang of the warehouse, long coats pulled tight over tactical vests, submachine guns resting casually against their forearms.
They were Carlo’s private guard. Not the street trash Croft had recruited from the Brooklyn chop shops, but seasoned, professional killers who had survived three decades of syndicate warfare.
I parked the delivery van behind a stack of rusted steel coils fifty yards away, killing the engine and the lights.
My mind was running with a cold, unnatural clarity. For twenty years, I had believed that hiding behind a Formica counter with a coffee pot was my penance for the sins of our family. I had thought that if I kept my head down, poured enough refills, and smiled at the neighborhood beat cops, the violence that had destroyed my parents would pass me by.
I was wrong.
You don't escape a fire by standing in the ashes. You escape it by burning hotter than the timber around you.
I reached under the driver's seat of the fish van and found what I was looking for: an emergency flare kit and a five-gallon plastic jug of industrial cleaning kerosene used for scouring the fish scaling tables.
I didn't have Dante's muscle. I didn't have Croft's private army. But I knew the layout of commercial piers better than Carlo’s imported muscle—my father had unloaded freight on these exact docks when Vittoria and I were still wearing knee socks.
I unscrewed the cap of the kerosene jug, soaking a bundle of burlap sacks from the back of the van. Then, slipping Dante’s nine-millimeter into my right hand and the flare into my left, I slipped out into the freezing deluge.
The rain masked the sound of my boots against the wet timber. I moved through the narrow canyons between the shipping containers, staying low, keeping beneath the sightlines of the men by the gangway.
Ten yards from the lead Suburban, I popped the cap off the emergency flare and struck the striker against the head.
A brilliant, screaming magnesium flame erupted into the gray downpour, spewing thick red smoke into the howling wind. I hurled the flare directly into the bed of the pickup truck parked beside the Suburbans—a truck loaded with wooden pallets and dry cardboard packing crates.
The kerosene-soaked burlap followed a second later.
An instant later, a towering wall of orange fire roared into the freezing air, the sudden thermal explosion shattering the rear window of the nearest Suburban with a deafening *boom*.
"Fire! The fuel line's blowing!" one of the guards screamed, his voice carrying over the wind.
Shouts erupted in Italian and English. The guards broke formation, two of them rushing toward the blaze with chemical extinguishers, while the other two backed toward the freighter's gangway, weapons raised, scanning the shadows.
That was the mistake.
They looked high, looking for snipers. They didn't look down.
I stepped out from behind a rusted container ten feet away, leveled Dante’s pistol with both hands, and squeezed the trigger twice.
The suppressed shots were swallowed by the crackle of the kerosene fire and the roar of the river wind. The guard on the left collapsed instantly, his legs buckling beneath him. The second man spun around, his submachine gun coming up, but I didn't wait. I fired three more rounds into the center of his chest plate, the kinetic impact throwing him backward off the wooden dock and into the freezing black churn of the East River.
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I didn't stop to breathe. I didn't stop to look at what I had done.
I sprinted up the metal gangway of *The Northern Star*, my waitress shoes slipping on the wet steel treads, the heavy iron door of the ship's superstructure looming ahead like the entrance to hell.
