Chapter 7 - Blood in the Library
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Lorenzo was already moving before Marcus’s barrel cleared the fireplace mantel.
With a flick of his wrist, the two-shot Derringer slid from Lorenzo’s spring-loaded coat sleeve into his palm. He fired twice across the desk—Crack! Crack!—putting both .38 rounds straight through Marcus’s right shoulder and collar bone before the traitor could squeeze the shotgun’s trigger.
The twelve-gauge blast tore harmlessly into the plaster ceiling, raining shattered crystal from the chandelier across the Persian rug as Marcus slammed backward into the bookshelves.
"Take the woman alive!" Vittorio Drago bellowed to his capos as gunfire erupted across the library.
Two of Marcus’s surviving estate turncoats burst in from the hallway outside, spraying automatic fire with compact MAC-10s to cover Genevieve as she dove through the private servant’s door behind the partner’s desk.
Lorenzo flipped the heavy mahogany table onto its side, diving behind the two-inch oak top right beside old man Drago as bullets chewed into the leather encyclopedias lining the walls. Drawing the 9mm Beretta from his waistband, Lorenzo leaned around the corner of the desk and dropped both hallway gunmen with three precise headshots.
When the gun smoke cleared ten seconds later, three of Marcus’s men lay dead in the doorway, two of Drago’s bodyguards were nursing flesh wounds, and both Genevieve and a bleeding Marcus had vanished through the servant’s passage behind the bookshelves!
Wait.
Lorenzo’s blood turned to ice as he looked at the open panel behind the desk.
The servant’s passage on the second floor connected directly to the central maintenance stairwell—the exact same route that led down to the wine tunnel and the greenhouse where Clara, Rico, and five-year-old Lily were waiting for him!
"They’re heading for the greenhouse tunnel!" Lorenzo snarled, vaulting over the overturned desk and snatching up a fallen MAC-10 from the floor.
"My granddaughter is in that tunnel?!" Vittorio Drago gasped, surprising Lorenzo with his speed as the old Don drew a heavy nickel-plated Colt .45 from beneath his coat and barked orders to his four uninjured capos: "With him! Now! Anyone who lets that bitch near the child answers to me in pieces!"
Down in the damp, brick-lined wine tunnel beneath the conservatory, Clara stood pressed against the iron grille gate at the base of the chimney ladder, holding the compact Glock 43 in both bandaged hands while Rico worked frantically to hotwire the electronic keypad of the blast door that Marcus had remotely locked from the security office ten minutes ago.
Sitting behind Clara on an overturned wooden wine crate, Lily held her white rabbit tightly against her chest, her wide hazel eyes fixed on the dark tunnel ahead without making a single whimper.
"Almost got the bypass jumper across the relay, Miss Clara!" Rico muttered, sparks spitting from the exposed wiring box beside the heavy steel door that led out to the greenhouse garage. "Thirty more seconds!"
Suddenly, the heavy iron fire door at the opposite end of the hundred-foot wine tunnel burst open.
Stumbling through the doorway, clutching his bleeding right shoulder with his left hand while holding a pistol in his teeth, came Marcus Gallo—and right behind him, carrying a sleek silver automatic pistol and a heavy red canister of lawn mower gasoline she had snatched from the maintenance closet, came Genevieve.
"Rico, behind us!" Clara shouted, stepping squarely in front of Lily’s crate and raising the Glock 43.
Rico spun around from the wiring box, drawing his sidearm—only for Marcus to fire three blind shots down the narrow brick vault. One round ricocheted off the stone archway and caught Rico high in the thigh, dropping the young bodyguard to one knee with a grunt of pain before he returned fire, pinning Marcus behind a stack of oak wine barrels fifty feet away.
"You stubborn little cockroach!" Genevieve’s voice echoed shrilly off the vaulted brick ceiling from behind the barrels. "Four months I had to smile at Lorenzo across the dining table while waiting for those probate papers—and you had to go digging behind that cellar wall for a dead whore’s jewelry!"
"You murdered my sister on the Bear Mountain Bridge!" Clara shouted back, firing a shot into the oak barrel six inches from Genevieve’s head to keep her pinned down while Rico limped back to finish twisting the two red ignition wires together on the blast door keypad. "And you locked me in a tomb for three days while a five-year-old cried outside my door!"
"And now I’m going to finish the job right before I take the speed-boat across the Hudson!"
From behind the oak wine racks, Genevieve uncapped the red plastic canister, heaved it down the sloping stone drainage trough that ran right down the center of the tunnel floor toward the blast door, and fired a single tracer round into the pooling gasoline.
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WHOOSH!
A wall of blinding orange flame roared down the stone floor, cutting off the tunnel and filling the narrow brick vault with thick, choking black smoke!
