Chapter 11 - Blood on the Harbor and the Fall of Victor Vance
The snap of the holster was the only warning before the warehouse exploded into violence.
Vance drew his weapon with frantic, clawing speed, his eyes locked on Cole’s throat.
Cole did not draw his gun.
He did not need to.
With the blinding, explosive reflex that had kept him alive through thirty years of street warfare, Cole’s left hand struck like a striking cobra, slamming down onto Vance’s forearm and driving the barrel of the pistol straight into the mahogany tabletop.
The weapon discharged with a deafening crack, splintering the polished wood and sending a nine-millimeter slug through the floorboards into the water below.
Before Vance could cycle the slide, Cole’s right fist struck the underboss across the bridge of his nose with the force of an iron sledge.
Bone shattered with a wet, sickening crunch.
Vance’s head snapped back, blood spraying across his pristine silk tie as he was lifted out of his leather chair and thrown onto his back across the concrete floor.
"Drop your weapons!"
Danny Reese roared from the head of the table, his tactical automatic leveled directly at the chests of Vance’s six personal guards.
From the catwalks eighty feet above, red laser dots appeared on the foreheads of every single one of Vance’s men.
Six of Cole’s elite marksmen stepped into view on the overhead iron gantries, their rifles trained with surgical precision on the bodyguards below.
Don Falcone drew his own nickel-plated revolver and pointed it at the lead guard's temple.
"Drop them now, boys," Falcone snarled, his voice trembling with ancient Sicilian rage.
"Or you die for a rat who sold this family to the feds."
The six guards looked up at the laser sights painting their chests, looked at the five district captains drawing their weapons, and immediately unbuckled their holsters.
Six heavy handguns clattered onto the concrete floor, kicked away into the shadows by Danny Reese.
On the floor, Victor Vance was scrambling backward like a crab, smearing a trail of blood across the floor as he clawed toward the open loading bay facing the water.
He pulled a second, smaller derringer from his boot sleeve and fired blindly behind him.
The bullet whined off an iron stanchion, missing Cole’s shoulder by inches.
Vance scrambled to his feet, lunged through the plastic strip curtain of the loading dock, and bolted out onto the wet wooden catwalks suspended over the freezing harbor basin.
"Stay here, Danny," Cole commanded, his voice cold as arctic ice as he drew his black automatic from his shoulder holster.
"Keep the captains at the table.
This debt belongs to Marcus."
Cole stepped through the plastic curtains into the driving harbor wind.
The morning tide was crashing violently against the massive green pylons beneath Pier 14, throwing white spray twenty feet into the air.
Vance was running along the narrow wooden catwalk leading to the automated fuel dock, clutching his shattered face, slipping on the wet algae-covered planks.
He reached the edge of the fuel terminal where a high-speed offshore launch was tied to the iron mooring ring, its twin inboard motors idling with a low, rumbling hum.
Vance reached out to grab the mooring line, his fingers clawing at the wet hemp rope.
A single gunshot rang out over the roar of the surf.
The mooring line severed instantly, sliced in half by a hollow-point bullet that threw up a spray of hemp fibers.
The offshore boat drifted outward on the outgoing tide, caught by the current and pulled ten feet, then twenty feet away from the wooden pier.
Vance spun around, his back pressed against the rusted iron safety railing, his hands raised in terror.
Cole Hargrove walked out onto the catwalk, his heavy blue overcoat billowing in the freezing wind, his footsteps unhurried and absolute.
The rain had started to fall again, mixing with the salt spray that whipped across the wooden planks.
"Cole!"
Vance screamed over the wind, his voice broken and pleading.
"Listen to me!
Marcus was going to push me out!
He was going to give the docks to the union!
He was too soft for this business!
You would have done the same thing!"
"Marcus gave you his loyalty for ten years, Victor," Cole said, stepping onto the fuel platform, his weapon held at his side.
"He brought you into this family when you were running cheap numbers on the docks.
He treated you like a brother."
"I was second best!"
Vance shrieked, tears of rage mixing with the blood pouring down his mouth and chin.
"He was always your golden boy!
You gave him the logistics division!
You gave him the maritime charter!
I did all the dirty work while Marcus got to go home to his pretty wife and play the innocent family man!
Why did he get to have a clean life while we drowned in the mud?!"
Cole stopped five paces from Vance.
He looked at the miserable, broken man cowering against the rusted iron rail—a man who had traded his honor, his brothers, and six years of human lives for paper money and an empty title.
"Marcus did not have a clean life, Victor," Cole said softly, his voice cutting through the howl of the ocean wind.
"He fought every single day to keep the filth of this city from touching his wife and his child.
He took two bullets that night so Nora could get out of the apartment before your dogs arrived.
He died like a man."
Cole raised the pistol, leveling the sights directly between Vance's terrified, bloodshot eyes.
"And you are going to die like trash."
"Cole, please!"
Vance sobbed, dropping to his knees on the wet wood, clutching his hands together in desperate prayer.
"I have eight million in Switzerland!
I will transfer the routing codes right now!
Take the money!
Let me take the launch and disappear!
You will never see my face again!"
Cole looked down at him, his finger resting lightly against the curved metal of the trigger.
"There is not enough money on this earth to buy one warm night for that little girl," Cole whispered.
A sudden gust of wind caught the fuel dock, spraying cold sea foam across Vance's shivering shoulders.
From the distance, the wail of sirens began to echo along the harbor road.
Danny Reese stepped onto the catwalk behind Cole, holding up a radio.
"State police just raided Councilman Miller’s residence downtown, boss," Danny announced over the wind.
"Federal prosecutors have the banking logs.
Miller is in cuffs.
The Marino crew is being rounded up across three precincts as we speak."
Vance looked up, the last glimmer of hope extinguishing in his eyes like a spark dropped into black water.
Cole did not fire.
He lowered his weapon, stepped forward, and grabbed Vance by the collar of his ruined three-piece suit with an iron grip that lifted the man completely off his knees.
Cole dragged him to the edge of the platform and shoved him against the railing, pointing down toward the churning, freezing black current of the channel sixty feet below.
"Death is too quick for you, Victor," Cole said into his ear, his voice deadly and cold.
"You are going to spend the next forty years in a concrete cell at the state penitentiary in Walpole.
The men inside those walls were put there by Councilman Miller's prosecutors and your port betrayals.
Every single day, you are going to wake up cold.
You are going to eat cold food.
You are going to stare at cold gray walls."
Cole stepped back, shoving Vance down onto the wet boards.
"And every night, you will remember the woman who carried cardboard boxes home to keep her baby alive."
May you like
Two state troopers and four port police officers burst through the plastic curtains of the pier, their weapons drawn, led by a federal agent holding a signed federal warrant for Victor Vance’s arrest.
Cole turned his back on the screaming, weeping man, put his pistol back into his shoulder holster, and walked into the clearing morning light without looking back once.
