Chapter 13 - The Butcher’s Bill
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"Kill them all! Blow the columns!" Marc Conti screamed over the thunderous roar of flashbangs exploding across the concrete floor, grabbing the wireless detonator from his belt and mashing the red firing button three times!
Nothing happened.
Julian’s military-grade ECM jammer inside the open briefcase on the concrete block had completely fried every radio and cellular frequency within a hundred feet!
"Drop, Mom!" Julian barked, pulling Evelyn down behind the four-foot-thick reinforced concrete butcher’s platform as he drew dual suppressed Glock 19s from beneath his charcoal coat and opened fire into the flank of the Montreal mercenaries!
Across the warehouse floor, chaos erupted into a one-sided slaughter.
Caught in a three-way crossfire between Julian in the front and Damon and Lucas’s armored strike team pouring out of the boxcar in the rear with HK416 assault rifles, Marc Conti’s ten Montreal gunmen and Luan Krasniqi’s traitorous crew were cut to pieces in less than twenty seconds!
Luan Krasniqi tried to sprint toward the side loading dock door—only for Damon Sterling to step out from behind a steel support beam and drop the double-crossing Albanian boss with a single twelve-gauge combat shotgun blast to the center of his chest!
By the center iron pillar, seeing his Montreal crew disintegrating around him in a hail of brass casings and blood, Marc Conti didn't try to save Valerie or Ricky.
Instead, Marc grabbed Ricky Vane by the collar of his jacket, yanked the terrified twenty-four-year-old squarely in front of his own chest as a human shield against Lucas’s advancing rifle, and fired two blind shots over Ricky’s shoulder as he backed toward the subterranean drainage staircase!
"Marc, let go of me—!" Ricky screamed—right before Marc Conti put a bullet through the back of Ricky’s own leg to drop him onto the stairs and delay Lucas’s pursuit!
"Ricky!" Valerie shrieked, watching her own cousin shoot her brother and leave them both behind as Marc dove down the cellar stairs toward the sewer tunnel!
"Damon, take the cellar outlet at the river—he doesn't leave the yard!" Lucas roared, vaulting over two fallen gunmen as he charged toward the center pillar.
Blinded by rage, terror, and the complete collapse of her twenty-eight-year revenge fantasy, Valerie Vane spun around by the iron column where Arthur Sterling was bound—and instead of surrendering, she leveled her Heckler & Koch pistol straight over the concrete block at Evelyn’s head as Evelyn rose to check on Julian!
"If I don't get the Conti money, nobody does, you old bitch—!" Valerie screamed, her finger whitening on the trigger from fifteen feet away.
Two things happened at the exact same tenth of a second.
Bound to the iron column three feet behind Valerie, Arthur Sterling—who had spent the last ten minutes sawing his raw, bleeding wrists back and forth against a rusted, jagged iron bolt on the meat-hook column behind his back—finally snapped the steel padlock link holding his right chain!
With a roar that tore the gag from his mouth, Arthur lunged forward to the end of his left chain and slammed his heavy boot squarely into the back of Valerie’s knee—just as Evelyn calmly raised her late father’s ivory-gripped .32 Beretta from her coat cuff and squeezed the trigger once!
CRACK!
Evelyn didn't shoot to kill.
Her bullet struck Valerie dead center in the fleshy muscle of her right palm—the exact right hand Valerie had used to slap Evelyn across the face at the Palmer House the night before—shattering the metacarpal bones and blowing the Heckler & Koch pistol out of her hand in a spray of crimson!
Valerie collapsed onto the concrete floor, howling in agony as she clutched her mangled, bleeding right hand against her chest!
Before Valerie could even roll over, Lucas reached the center pillar and planted his boot on the hem of her stolen mink coat, pinning her to the freezing floor while Julian walked up beside his mother, smoke curling faintly from the tiny barrel of Evelyn’s Beretta.
Down in the subterranean sewer stairwell at the back of the warehouse, two heavy shotgun blasts echoed up the concrete shaft—followed thirty seconds later by Damon walking calmly back up the steps, wiping a fleck of mud off his peacoat sleeve.
"Marc Conti won't be catching his flight back to Montreal," Damon reported evenly.
Silence fell over Warehouse 9, broken only by the hiss of steam from the idling locomotive outside and the ragged, sobbing whimpers of Valerie Vane writhing on the concrete floor at Evelyn’s feet, her shattered right hand useless forever.
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Slowly, Evelyn walked past her three sons and stopped three feet above Valerie.
"Last night in the ballroom, I told my sons nobody touches you," Evelyn said softly, looking down at the girl who had tried to steal her life and murder her children. "Because in this family, I clean up my own messes."
