Chapter 10 - The Trap on Michigan Avenue
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"Check the GPS tracker on the phone in Dad’s pocket!" Julian ordered, his hands flying across the keyboard to ping Arthur’s personal cell.
"After I left him at the Bridgeport garage at twelve-thirty," Lucas said rapidly, "Valerie was sitting on the curb crying in her torn red dress after the Albanians took Ricky. If Dad walked out of that garage with no car and no bodyguards, and saw Valerie sitting in the snow pretending to be a helpless victim whom we just threw to the wolves—"
"He’d take her back to his hotel room at the Four Seasons," Damon finished grimly, "or go wherever she told him she had spare cash hidden!"
"His phone GPS just pinged!" Julian pointed at the red blinking dot on the downtown map grid—not at the Four Seasons on Michigan Avenue, and not in Bridgeport.
The red dot was stationary inside the abandoned, snow-covered industrial meatpacking rail yard in the Stockyards district on 43rd Street—the exact spot where the old 1990s syndicate crews used to hold secret sit-downs!
And ten seconds ago, a burner phone registered in Milwaukee had just sent a single text message accompanied by a live video stream link directly to Evelyn’s private cell phone!
Evelyn tapped the link on her screen.
A grainy, live camera feed opened up inside a freezing, cavernous brick slaughterhouse warehouse lit by cracked skylights.
Bound to a rusted iron meat-hook support column in the center of the concrete floor, stripped of his overcoat with blood running from a pistol-whip gash across his forehead, was fifty-four-year-old Arthur Sterling!
And standing six feet in front of him—no longer crying, no longer acting like a ditzy twenty-six-year-old bimbo, wearing a black wool tactical coat over her torn scarlet dress and holding a matte-black Heckler & Koch pistol with steady, two-handed professional precision—was Valerie Vane.
Around her stood eight heavily armed men in dark winter parkas—not Albanians, and not Chicago street thugs, but French-Canadian syndicate mercenaries brought down from Montreal by her older cousin, Marc Conti, who stood beside Valerie holding a satellite phone!
"Hello, Aunt Evelyn," Valerie’s voice came through the live audio feed—completely devoid of the shrill, nasal whine she had faked for the last twelve months. Her voice was ice-cold, educated, and razor-sharp. "I have to thank Lucas for putting on such a convincing show with Luan Krasniqi in Bridgeport at noon. Paying Luan two hundred grand to pretend to kidnap Ricky so Arthur would feel sorry for me and climb into my backup car outside the alley worked like a charm."
Behind Evelyn, Lucas swore violently, his knuckles turning white on the grip of his gun. "Luan was working with Montreal?! That dirty bastard—!"
"Don't blame Luan, Cousin Lucas," Valerie purred into the camera, walking slowly around the bleeding Arthur Sterling and pressing the barrel of her pistol against his temple. "For twenty-eight years, my mother watched Arthur Sterling sit on Great-Uncle Lorenzo’s throne in Chicago while sending us hush-money scraps every December so we wouldn't give the Commission the recording of him ordering the car bomb that killed my father in 1998. When my mother died two years ago, Ricky, Marc, and I decided we didn't want hush money anymore. We wanted everything Arthur stole from our branch of the family."
On the screen, tied to the iron column, Arthur lifted his bloody head and stared at the camera lens.
"Evelyn—don't listen to them!" Arthur shouted hoarsely before Marc Conti struck him across the jaw with a rifle butt. "It’s a trap for the boys—they want the three of you to come down to the Stockyards so they can wipe out Lorenzo’s direct line and claim the trust under the 1994 survivorship clause!"
Evelyn’s heart turned to solid ice—not for Arthur, who was reaping the blood he had sown behind her back twenty-eight years ago, but at the last five words Arthur had just shouted:
Claim the trust under the 1994 survivorship clause!
If Evelyn and her three biological sons—Julian, Damon, and Lucas—all died in an ambush in the Stockyards today, who was the next surviving blood relative of Don Lorenzo Conti on the 1994 family tree?!
The children of Lorenzo’s nephew, Victor Conti—Valerie and Ricky!
Valerie hadn't slapped Evelyn at the anniversary party just to separate Arthur from his guards!
Valerie had slapped Evelyn in front of three hundred witnesses to bait Julian, Damon, and Lucas into hunting her down today—knowing that once she grabbed Arthur as bait and revealed the 1998 truth, family pride and blood honor would force the three Sterling brothers and their mother to rush down to the Stockyards warehouse where twenty Montreal hitmen and C4 structural charges were waiting to wipe out the entire direct Conti bloodline in a single afternoon!
"You have forty-five minutes to bring the signed bearer-share transfer certificates for Sterling Global Holdings down to Warehouse 9 on 43rd Street, Aunt Evelyn," Valerie said coldly into the camera. "Come alone with Julian, Damon, and Lucas. If we see a single dock union truck or a single cop within six blocks, I put a bullet through Arthur’s eye on live video and detonate the support columns."
The video feed cut to black.
In the quiet Lake Forest library, all three sons turned to look at their mother.
"He cheated on you, Ma," Lucas said fiercely, though his voice was tight with the impossible war between hating what his father had done last night and thirty-five years of blood loyalty. "And he lied to all of us about 1998. If you say we leave him in that warehouse to rot, none of us will say a word."
Evelyn looked at her three sons—the three men she and Arthur had raised from diapers, the three men who had stood up as one the second a hand touched her cheek last night.
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Then she looked up at the portrait of her father, Don Lorenzo, above the fireplace.
"Arthur Sterling broke his vows to me last night, and when this afternoon is over, he will never sleep under my roof again," Evelyn said, her voice ringing with cold, absolute authority as she walked to the hidden weapons vault behind the bookshelves and spun the combination dial. "But for thirty-two years he was the father of my sons—and nobody comes down from Montreal, slaps my face in my own city, and tries to extort the Conti family with my husband’s blood! Damon, call Big Sal. We aren't bringing share certificates to the Stockyards—we’re bringing the train."
