Chapter 12 - The Train at 3:18
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Evelyn and Julian stepped through the rusted steel door into the vast, shadowy interior of Warehouse 9.
The air inside smelled of old blood, rusted iron, and freezing river damp. Above their heads, fifty-foot steel roof trusses groaned in the wind, while shafts of gray winter light slanted through broken clerestory windows onto the cracked concrete floor.
Forty feet ahead of them, in the cleared center of the slaughterhouse floor, Arthur Sterling sat bound to the central iron pillar with heavy steel logging chains wrapped around his chest. His white dress shirt was torn and stained crimson from the gash over his left eye, his wrists raw where he had strained against the links.
Standing around him in a semicircle were Marc Conti, Ricky Vane, Luan Krasniqi, and ten gunmen armed with suppressed assault rifles—while Valerie stood right in front of Arthur, wearing a brand-new black mink coat she had taken from Luan’s truck over her torn red evening gown.
When Arthur looked up through his swollen eye and saw Evelyn walking across the concrete floor beside Julian, the hardened fifty-four-year-old Don looked as if someone had driven a knife straight through his ribs.
"Evelyn, get out of here!" Arthur roared, straining violently against the iron chains despite the rifle barrel Marc Conti slammed against his shoulder. "Julian, take your mother out the door right now! Don't give them the shares—they’re going to kill all of us anyway!"
"Shut him up," Valerie snapped at Ricky, who stepped forward and shoved a rag into Arthur’s mouth with a vicious sneer.
Valerie turned back toward Evelyn and Julian, stopping twenty feet away as Julian halted on the concrete floor—positioning himself and his mother squarely beside a four-foot-high reinforced concrete butcher’s loading platform, and well within the forty-foot radius of the silent electronic frequency jammer now humming invisibly inside his leather briefcase.
"Look how the tables turn in twenty-four hours, Aunt Evelyn," Valerie gloated, twirling the matte-black pistol around her index finger while her brother Ricky grinned beside her. "At noon today in Bridgeport, you told Luan to strip my coat off in the snow and leave me on the sidewalk like trash. And now here you are, standing in the dirt with four hundred million dollars in a briefcase, begging me to spare the husband who cheated on you in front of the whole city!"
Evelyn looked at Valerie without a trace of fear, anger, or haste.
"Actually, Valerie," Evelyn said, her calm, cultured voice echoing clearly off the brick walls, "I didn't come down here this afternoon to pay a ransom for Arthur. If you had only taken Arthur to Montreal and kept him, I might have sent you a thank-you note."
Valerie’s smirk faltered by a fraction of an inch. Behind his gag, Arthur froze.
"I came down here," Evelyn continued smoothly, taking one slow step closer so the jammer’s field completely blanketed the wireless detonator clipped to Marc Conti’s belt, "because when Julian audited the 1998 Montreal files at two o’clock today, we realized that for twenty-eight years, your mother Claire and your cousin Marc lied to you about why your father, Victor Conti, died outside Boston."
Beside Valerie, thirty-five-year-old Marc Conti stiffened, his eyes narrowing sharply. "Don't listen to her stalling, Valerie! Open the briefcase, Julian!"
"Why don't you want her to hear what’s in the 1998 file, Marc?" Julian asked silkily, setting the leather briefcase down on top of the concrete butcher’s block and popping the gold brass latches so the lid rose to block the gunmen’s line of sight to his hands. "Valerie thinks Dad killed her father in 1998 to steal Grandpa Lorenzo’s crown. Tell her whose signature was actually on the Montreal bank account that received the two million dollars Victor stole from Grandpa’s union fund."
Valerie glanced sideways at her older cousin Marc in sudden confusion. "Marc? What is he talking about?"
"Victor Conti wasn't murdered because Arthur wanted the throne, Valerie," Evelyn said, her dark eyes locking onto Marc Conti’s sudden sweat-beaded forehead. "In 1998, Victor Conti and Marc’s father—Uncle Henri in Montreal—were caught skimming two million dollars from my father’s pension fund to buy heroin from the French Connection in Marseille! My father, Don Lorenzo, ordered Arthur to execute Victor in Boston for treason—and spared Marc’s father in Montreal only because Marc’s father gave up Victor’s location!"
"That’s a lie!" Valerie gasped, her gun hand wavering two inches toward Marc as Ricky stared at their older cousin in shock. "Marc told us Arthur framed my dad!"
"Marc told you that so you’d spend a year whoring yourself out to a fifty-four-year-old man in Chicago to help Marc steal a four-hundred-million-dollar company!" Julian said coldly.
At that exact second—3:18 PM—outside the rusted corrugated steel rail doors at the rear of Warehouse 9, the deafening dual-chime air horn of a two-hundred-ton diesel switching locomotive blasted across the 43rd Street crossing!
BLAAAAAAARE!
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And before Marc Conti could shout an order, the heavy yellow refrigerated boxcar rolling silently down the indoor rail siding burst straight through the wooden loading bay doors at the back of the warehouse!
The ten-foot steel sliding doors on both sides of the boxcar slammed open simultaneously—and Damon, Lucas, Big Sal, and sixteen heavily armed strike operatives poured out of the car behind ballistic riot shields, opening up with a blinding, deafening storm of automatic gunfire and flashbang grenades!
