184 When Manhattan’s Most Feared Crime Boss Found His Traumatized Daughter Asleep in My Waitress Apron, He Thought I Was a Stranger—Until He Discovered My Secret Past Was the Only Key to Saving His Missing Wife / Chapter 64 / 100

Chapter 64 - The Ambush on Cheever Place

The penlight was still in my pocket, but I didn't need light to know the layout of the cellar. Marcus Vance had designed this house with escape routes that only someone who had studied his architectural drafts would understand.

"I’m coming up," I called out, my voice deliberately shaking to sound compliant. I slipped the forensic evidence bag and the audio cassette into the inner pocket of my heavy jacket, snapping the zipper shut. The metal lockbox went back into the wall cavity, and I shoved the false cinder block flush against the mortar.

"Hands on your head, Miss Vance!" the man shouted from the stairs. The beam of his tactical flashlight bounced down the wooden steps, revealing the silhouette of an operative wearing unmarked black tactical gear—no badges, no agency patches, just body armor and a suppressed submachine gun.

Julian wasn't using the NYPD. He was using off-the-books private security, paid through municipal slush funds. Men who left no official paper trail.

I stepped toward the bottom of the stairs, raising my hands slowly.

"Where is the girl?" the operative demanded, descending the last three steps. He kept his weapon leveled at my chest, his finger resting lightly on the trigger guard.

"She’s in the car," I lied smoothly. "With my mother. You don't need to hurt them. I have what Julian wants."

"The Mayor wants everything," a second voice echoed from behind the first man. A second operative appeared at the top of the landing, speaking into a radio headset. "Team Two, we have the sister in the basement. Secure the perimeter."

"Copy that," the radio crackled back, loud enough to cut through the damp cellar air. "Sedan is contained. Older woman and child are secured in the back of the transport van."

A surge of blind panic threatened to choke me, but I forced my breathing to stay steady. Clara and Sofia were alive. If they had killed them immediately, they wouldn't have bothered reporting them secured. Julian needed them leverage to ensure every copy of the ledger was destroyed.

"Turn around and face the wall," the first operative ordered, stepping off the last stair onto the concrete floor. He pulled a pair of heavy plastic zip-ties from his tactical vest.

I didn't turn around. Instead, I took half a step backward, positioning my heel directly over the cast-iron valve cover of the old boiler drainage line.

"I said turn around!"

"You should ask Julian why he had our father killed," I said softly, locking eyes with the operative behind his polycarbonate eye shield. "Because once you do his dirty work today, you're the next loose end."

The man hesitated for half a second. In that fraction of time, I stomped down with all my weight on the cast-iron valve handle protruding from the floor.

The emergency pressure release of the ninety-year-old steam boiler blew with a deafening screech.

A blinding cloud of scalding, superheated white steam erupted from the rusted pipes behind the operatives, instantly filling the narrow cellar stairwell.

The first man screamed, dropping his weapon as the burning vapor scorched his exposed neck and face. The second man fired blindly into the steam, the suppressed rounds thudding harmlessly into the stone foundation behind me.

I dropped to the floor, where the air was cooler and clearer. Crawling beneath the cloud of hissing steam, I swept the fallen submachine gun across the concrete, kicked the operative’s legs out from under him, and struck him squarely across the jaw with the heavy steel frame of the weapon. He collapsed like a sack of stones.

The second man was coughing violently at the top of the stairs, his vision completely obscured by the billowing fog.

I didn't try to fight him on the stairs. I scrambled toward the rear of the basement, where the old coal chute opened into a subterranean delivery tunnel that connected to the brownstone next door. Marcus had purchased both properties in 1980 under shell corporations specifically for this contingency.

I popped the iron latch on the coal hatch, pulled myself up through the narrow opening, and slid into the cold, dry air of the adjoining cellar.

Within two minutes, I was bursting through the ground-level tradesman’s exit of 44 Cheever Place, three doors down from my father's house.

The street was deceptively quiet.

At the intersection of Cheever and Kane Street, a black commercial transport van with tinted windows and municipal fleet plates was idling, its brake lights glowing red in the crisp autumn air. Behind it, Carlo’s sedan sat abandoned, its driver’s side door swinging open.

I sprinted down the sidewalk, keeping low behind the parked vehicles.

Inside the transport van, I could see two figures through the rear glass: Clara, holding Sofia tightly against her chest, surrounded by two armed men in plainclothes.

The driver slammed the van into gear. The tires squealed against the pavement as it accelerated toward Atlantic Avenue.

I didn't have a car. I couldn't outrun a four-ton transport on foot.

Then, from around the corner of Kane Street, an old, dented green Lincoln Town Car surged forward, cutting across the yellow double lines with an ear-splitting screech of rubber. The heavy American sedan slammed directly into the side of the transport van’s front quarter-panel, shoving it violently into a row of steel trash receptacles.

The impact spun the transport van ninety degrees, stalling its engine in a cloud of radiator steam.

The driver’s door of the Lincoln flew open.

Pendelton stepped out onto the asphalt. The eighty-year-old lawyer was wearing his tailored three-piece suit, his gold pocket watch chain swinging against his vest, but his hands held an ancient, short-barreled Colt .45 revolver pointed straight at the transport van’s windshield.