Chapter 13 - Blood on the Meat Hooks
The word had barely left Ryan’s lips when the world inside the meatpacking warehouse erupted into pure, violent chaos.
Ryan didn’t throw the music box toward the trough; he hurled the heavy brass cylinder straight at the high-powered halogen floodlight.
The heavy brass smashed through the glass bulb with a violent, concussive POP, shattering the illumination into a million flying sparks.
Instant, impenetrable darkness swallowed the cavernous concrete room, broken only by the dim red glow of distant emergency exit signs.
Marcus Hayes opened fire on full automatic, spraying a sweeping arc of lead toward the spot where Ryan and Olivia had stood.
Bullets chewed through the concrete floor, kicking up chips of stone and hot ricochets that shrieked off the overhead meat rails.
Ryan had already tackled Olivia sideways into the cover of a massive stainless steel carcass-splitting station.
The heavy industrial steel absorbed the incoming gunfire with dull, ringing thuds that vibrated through their skulls.
“Get Samuel!” Ryan barked into Olivia’s ear over the deafening roar of the submachine gun.
“I’ll take Marcus!”
Before Olivia could answer, Ryan vaulted over the edge of the steel prep table, drawing his suppressed Glock in mid-air.
He fired three rapid double-taps into the muzzle flashes across the darkness, forcing Marcus to dive behind an industrial refrigeration unit.
Olivia didn't hesitate; the training her father had drilled into her memory took over every instinct in her body.
She dropped to her hands and knees, crawling through the cold ammonia mist toward the center drainage trough.
Above her head, bullets continued to tear through the rusted sheet metal and hanging hooks, ringing like tolling church bells.
She reached the base of the hoist where Samuel Vance hung, his breathing ragged and shallow in the gloom.
“Samuel!” she hissed, reaching up to grab the cold, rusted chain links.
Samuel lifted his bruised head, his swollen eyes focusing on her through a veil of blood and sweat.
“Olivia… get out…” Samuel wheezed, his voice rattling in his throat.
“They rigged… the basement… with thermite…”
“Not without you, Uncle Sam,” Olivia swore, using the childhood nickname she hadn't spoken in eight long years.
She pulled the tactical knife Ryan had given her from her belt, but the iron chains binding Samuel’s wrists were secured with a heavy master padlock.
She reached down to the body of Victor DeMarco lying dead in the drainage trough beneath her boots.
Swallowing her nausea, she thrust her trembling hands into Victor’s soaked velvet pockets until her fingers wrapped around a heavy brass key ring.
Across the slaughterhouse, the battle between Ryan and Marcus Hayes had turned into a brutal, close-quarters war of attrition.
Ryan had closed the distance, tackling Marcus through the glass partition of the foreman’s elevated observation booth.
Shattered safety glass rained down like ice onto the concrete floor below as the two men crashed onto the metal walkway.
Marcus was faster and heavier, using the butt of his empty submachine gun to smash into Ryan’s ribs with cracking force.
Ryan grunted in agony, the Kevlar vest absorbing the blunt trauma, but the force drove all the air from his lungs.
Marcus drew a serrated combat knife from his chest rig, lunging downward toward Ryan’s exposed throat.
“You should have stayed in school in Zurich, boy!” Marcus snarled, his scarred face twisted into a demonic grin.
“I put your father’s pet auditor in the dirt, and now I’m going to bury the DeMarco heir right beside him!”
Ryan caught Marcus’s descending wrist with both hands, the razor-sharp blade stopping less than an inch from his jugular vein.
The branded serpent on Marcus’s wrist was blazing with sweat under the dim emergency light, inches from Ryan’s face.
With a ferocious, guttural roar, Ryan drove his forehead forward, headbutting Marcus squarely between the eyes with bone-crushing force.
Marcus’s nose shattered with a wet crunch, blood spraying across his face as he staggered backward onto the iron railing.
Ryan didn’t give him a fraction of a second to recover.
He drove his knee into Marcus’s groin, grabbed the killer by the collar of his tactical vest, and spun him around.
With every ounce of rage and grief he had carried for eight long years, Ryan hurled Marcus Hayes over the guardrail.
Marcus fell twenty feet through the air, screaming as his body slammed violently onto an upturned industrial meat hook below.
The heavy iron barb tore through his chest plate, pinning him suspended in the air above the bloody concrete floor.
Marcus gasped twice, his eyes rolling back into his head, before his body went completely limp, swaying gently in the damp draft.
Down at the trough, Olivia jammed the third key from Victor’s ring into the padlock around Samuel’s chains.
The iron mechanism clicked open with a heavy snap.
Samuel collapsed forward into Olivia’s arms, his dead weight driving her to her knees in the cold drainage water.
“I’ve got you,” Olivia choked out through her tears, wrapping his scarred arm over her shoulder and hauling him upright.
“I’ve got you, Sam.”
Then, from the shadows near the southern emergency exit, the distinct click of a revolver hammer cocking back echoed through the silence.
Olivia froze, slowly turning her head toward the sound.
Standing ten feet away, holding a small pearl-handled .38 revolver pointed directly at Olivia’s forehead, was Helena DeMarco.
Helena’s immaculate ivory coat was splattered with drops of Victor’s blood, but her expression remained chillingly composed.
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“You really are Daniel Reed’s daughter,” Helena whispered, her finger tightening against the curved trigger.
“Persistent, annoying, and entirely incapable of understanding when you have lost.”
