Chapter 11 - Settling the Tab
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Moving silently through the dark water along the granite pilings, Jade reached the rusted iron dock ladder thirty feet landward of the moored Scarab powerboat.
Up on the rain-slicked concrete pier apron, coughing through the thick black smoke pouring out of the shattered warehouse garage doors, came Rocco—holding a heavy leather duffel bag in his burned, bandaged right hand and a cocked Glock 19 in his left—clearing the path toward the boat for Grigori Volkov and two surviving Russian bodyguards who were backing out of the building firing toward Enzo’s loyal perimeter guards rallying from the main gatehouse!
"Start the engines, Rocco!" Grigori Volkov barked in heavily accented English from twenty yards back, blood streaming down his scarred cheek where flying shrapnel from the exploding SUV had cut him. "Bellini’s helicopters will be over the water in five minutes!"
Rocco sprinted to the edge of the concrete slip to untie the stern mooring rope of the forty-foot boat.
Right as Rocco reached for the cleat, Jade pulled herself silently up the top rung of the iron ladder behind a stack of lobster traps fifteen feet behind him.
She didn't shoot him in the back.
She picked up an empty glass quart bottle lying on the dock and tossed it so it shattered on the concrete six feet to Rocco’s right—on the exact side that forced him to spin his back completely away from the bow of the boat!
"Who’s there?!" Rocco snarled, swinging his Glock toward the lobster traps—and freezing as he saw the soaked, shivering waitress from The Rusty Anchor standing ten feet away in the smoke with a suppressed pistol leveled squarely between his eyes.
"Here’s your change from booth six, sweetheart," Jade said softly.
Rocco tried to jerk his gun three inches to the left to fire.
Jade squeezed the trigger once.
Thwip!
The 9mm round took the traitor dead center in the forehead, dropping him backward off the concrete pier edge into the dark water between the hull and the pilings.
Fifty feet back by the warehouse door, Grigori Volkov saw Rocco fall—and saw her standing under the sodium dock light, the wet hair plastered back from her left ear where the scarred Roman numeral IX gleamed in the glare of the burning garage!
"Number Nine!" Grigori hissed, a psychotic, fanatical gleam lighting his one good eye as his two bodyguards raised their Kalashnikovs to cut her in half. "Take her legs off—bring her to me breathing!"
At that exact instant, Enzo Moretti vaulted silently over the high bow rail of the Scarab powerboat behind them, bracing a waterproof Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun he had pulled from the boat’s cabin locker against his wet shoulder!
BRRRRRRT!
A blistering twenty-round burst of armor-piercing 4.6mm rounds tore across the pier apron from the boat deck, scything down both of Grigori’s bodyguards in two seconds flat—and putting two rounds straight through Grigori Volkov’s right knee and left hip!
The monster of the Catskills collapsed onto his back on the wet concrete, screaming in Russian as his gold-plated Stechkin pistol skittered ten feet away across the dock into a puddle of oil.
Enzo vaulted off the side of the boat onto the pier, caught Jade around the waist with one arm as she stumbled slightly from the freezing cold in her legs, and walked slowly over to stand directly above the bleeding Russian boss.
Grigori glared up at the two of them through the falling rain and drifting black smoke, spitting blood onto Enzo’s wet boots as he looked at Jade standing beside the Italian Don.
"Look at you, Anya," Grigori wheezed with a twisted, bloody grin. "Eighteen years running in the dark pretending to be a clean little American girl... and you still ended up as a hound on another mobster’s leash."
Jade looked down at the man who had haunted every nightmare she had suffered since she was five years old.
Seeing him lying broken on the concrete in the rain, he didn't look ten feet tall anymore. He just looked like an old, rotting piece of meat.
"I'm not on anyone’s leash, Grigori," Jade said, her voice completely calm as she reached into her wet denim jacket just far enough to show him the corner of the rusted olive-oil tin. "And before you bleed out—who else besides Salvatore Bellini was in that room in 2008 when you sold out the twelve kids in the Catskills?"
Grigori’s one eye flickered with sudden, malicious triumph. "Read the last page of my book, Number Nine... and ask your new protector why his own father never looked for your mother!"
Before Jade could ask what the hell he meant, Grigori Volkov bit down violently on a false molar in the back of his jaw.
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Wait—cyanide?! No, old KGB-trained syndicate bosses from the nineties still carried glass ampoules of potassium cyanide in their crowns rather than face torture at the hands of an Italian family!
White foam bubbled at the corners of Grigori’s scarred lips, his body arching once on the wet concrete before going completely, permanently still as the wail of sirens and the roar of Enzo’s reinforcing soldiers finally broke through the compound gates!
