Chapter 14 - The Bullet and the Blade
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"Clara!" Julian roared.
Before Victor’s finger could pull the trigger from twenty feet away, two things happened in a blur of motion.
Julian vaulted clean over the four-foot marble balustrade of the stage without touching the stairs, throwing his six-foot-three frame straight through the air between Victor’s gun barrel and Clara!
At the exact same instant, Lorenzo Morelli—realizing that if Victor shot a witness in front of four federal marshals inside a locked atrium, the marshals would open fire on both of them—shoved Victor’s arm sideways to clear a path for himself to run toward the kitchen service doors!
CRACK!
The single .380 round tore through the left shoulder of Julian’s black tuxedo jacket as he hit the marble floor in front of Clara, knocking her safely behind the massive base of the stone balustrade while Dante fired a single suppressed round from the mezzanine balcony above—putting a bullet straight through Uncle Victor Vance’s chest and dropping the traitorous lawyer dead beside Table One!
Screams erupted across the Grand Atrium as two hundred wealthy guests dove beneath the white-tablecloth tables!
"Julian!" Clara gasped on the marble floor behind the balustrade, her hands pressing frantically against the warm crimson blood blooming across the left shoulder of his white tuxedo shirt where he had taken the bullet meant for her heart!
"Through and through—it missed the collarbone," Julian gritted out between his teeth, his arctic-blue eyes blazing like twin blowtorches as he shoved himself up onto one knee and saw Lorenzo Morelli and two of Morelli’s unarmed bodyguards kick open the swinging stainless-steel doors at the back of the atrium leading into the main banquet kitchen—where knives, meat cleavers, and the private freight elevator down to the 61st Street alley were waiting!
"Dante, lock the lobby doors and keep the marshals on the main floor!" Julian barked, drawing his suppressed Heckler & Koch with his uninjured right hand and sprinting through the swinging kitchen doors after Morelli.
"Wait—Julian, your shoulder is bleeding!" Clara didn't stay under the table with the screaming society wives.
Remembering the exact blueprint of the sixtieth-floor and second-floor catering kitchens she had memorized over the past forty-eight hours, Clara kicked off her silver heels, snatched a heavy twelve-inch forged-steel French chef’s knife off the carving station by the buffet line, and darted through the side sommelier pantry passage—the narrow shortcut corridor that bypassed the main dish pit and came out directly beside the rear freight elevator vestibule!
Inside the brightly lit stainless-steel cavern of the main banquet kitchen, the panicked chefs and busboys had already fled out the fire exit.
Lorenzo Morelli’s two massive bodyguards had armed themselves with heavy iron meat cleavers and boiling stockpots from the stove line—ambushing Julian from both sides of the central prep island as he burst through the swinging doors with blood soaking his left sleeve!
The first bodyguard hurled a gallon pot of scalding veal stock at Julian’s face while swinging a twelve-inch butcher’s cleaver at his injured left arm.
Julian ducked beneath the scalding liquid, caught the bodyguard’s wrist with his right hand, and fired twice upward through the bottom of his gun hand—dropping the first man onto the tiles—only for the second two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bodyguard to slam a heavy stainless-steel sheet pan across Julian’s injured left shoulder from behind, knocking Julian’s pistol skittering under the commercial walk-in freezer ten feet away!
While Julian locked in a brutal, lethal hand-to-hand grapple with the second giant across the stainless-steel prep table—driving the man’s face into the marble pastry slab until the bone cracked—Lorenzo Morelli reached the rear freight elevator vestibule twenty feet down the hall, picked up a fallen security guard’s dropped 9mm Glock from the floor by the loading ramp, and turned back down the hallway to shoot Julian in the back while his hands were full!
Morelli never saw the side sommelier pantry door click open three feet to his left.
Clara stepped out of the pantry doorway barefoot on the white tiles.
Seeing Lorenzo Morelli raising the stolen Glock with both hands aimed straight down the kitchen aisle at Julian’s exposed back, Clara didn't shout a warning that would make Morelli pull the trigger faster.
Instead, she grabbed the handle of the rolling six-foot-tall stainless-steel pastry rack sitting beside the pantry door and shoved it with all her weight straight into the side of Morelli’s knees while swinging the flat of the heavy twelve-inch chef’s knife across his gun wrist!
CLANG!
The rolling steel rack slammed Morelli sideways into the tile wall, knocking his shot into the ceiling tiles, and as he tried to bring the gun barrel back around toward Clara’s face with a snarl, Julian finished snapping the second bodyguard’s neck in the kitchen, snatched up a twelve-inch steel sharpening rod from the butcher block, and hurled it thirty feet down the narrow tiled corridor like a javelin!
Wait—no, Julian didn't throw the rod—he scooped up his fallen Heckler & Koch from beside the freezer door and fired a single, pinpoint shot down the thirty-foot corridor over the fallen pastry rack!
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BANG!
The bullet took Lorenzo Morelli straight through the center of his forehead, dropping the Newark boss flat onto the kitchen tiles at the base of the freight elevator doors.
