Chapter 14 - The Reckoning of Victor Marino
The wooden planks of the secondary pier shook beneath Nico Marino's boots as he pursued his uncle through the swirling fog.
Fifty yards ahead, Victor Marino was scrambling down the aluminum gangway toward a thirty-eight-foot midnight-blue offshore speed boat.
The boat’s twin supercharged engines were already idling at high RPMs, their exhausts bubbling violently in the churning black water.
Victor held a heavy leather briefcase stuffed with bearer bonds and false European passports in his left hand.
In his right, he gripped his chrome-plated .45 pistol, firing wildly behind him as he fled.
A round splintered a wooden piling inches from Nico’s shoulder, spraying sharp cedar shrapnel across his cheek.
Nico did not slow down; he discarded his empty rifle, drawing his Sig Sauer sidearm as he closed the distance.
Victor reached the deck of the boat, slamming the throttle levers forward with a frantic push.
The high-speed craft surged away from the dock, the powerful propellers chewing the water into white foam.
Nico reached the edge of the pier, launched himself across ten feet of open water, and crashed heavily onto the fiberglass stern.
The impact knocked the breath from his lungs, but his gloved fingers clamped around the stainless-steel grab rail with unbreakable resolve.
He hauled himself over the transom as the boat accelerated past forty knots into the choppy bay.
Victor spun around at the helm, his face twisted in a mask of primal, cornered desperation.
He raised his pistol, but Nico drove his shoulder straight into Victor’s midsection, tackling him onto the padded leather deck.
The handgun discharged harmlessly into the morning sky before tumbling over the gunwale and disappearing into the black depths of the river.
The boat, devoid of a helmsman, banked hard to port, slamming into the concrete pilings of an abandoned railroad bridge with bone-crushing force.
The fiberglass hull shattered, water rushing into the lower compartment as the craft grounded itself on a shallow granite reef.
Nico rose from the wreckage, blood trickling from a cut above his left eyebrow, his dark eyes fixed on his uncle.
Victor scrambled backward across the listing deck, spitting blood and seawater onto his ruined shearling coat.
"Nico! Listen to me!" Victor gasped, holding up both trembling hands.
"I am your father's brother! We are the same blood!"
"My father died believing this family stood for something," Nico said, stepping toward him with cold, measured strides.
"You turned our name into a slaughterhouse for innocent girls."
"It was business!" Victor shrieked, his voice cracking against the wind.
"The old rackets were dying! Digital surveillance was squeezing our bookmakers! We needed cash flow that federal agents couldn't trace!"
"And Elizabeth?" Nico asked, his voice dropping into a terrifying whisper that cut through the roaring wind.
"Did Elizabeth need to die for your cash flow?"
Victor’s eyes darted frantically toward the distant shoreline, where police sirens were converging on the water’s edge.
"She wouldn't take the payoff!" Victor confessed, his jaw trembling with cowardice.
"I offered her half a million dollars to walk away and forget what she saw in that wine cellar!"
"She had more honor in her little finger than you had in your entire wretched life," Nico snarled.
"She was a tutor!" Victor spat, his face contorting in bitter resentment.
"A nobody from Queens! She was going to destroy everything we built over three generations!"
"And you ordered the sniper to shoot her on that fire escape," Nico stated, his voice flat and absolute.
"Yes!" Victor screamed, knowing he had no cards left to play.
"I hired the contractor through Vance! We were supposed to drop her in the river, but you showed up and ruined the play!"
Victor lunged forward, pulling a concealed ceramic boot knife from his ankle sheath, aiming straight for Nico’s throat.
Nico did not step back.
He caught Victor’s wrist with his left hand, pivoting his hips and applying immense downward leverage on the joint.
The sickening sound of Victor’s radius bone snapping echoed across the water.
Victor wailed in agony, the ceramic blade dropping from his limp fingers onto the wet fiberglass deck.
Nico drove his right fist into Victor’s jaw, knocking the older man flat onto the splintered wood.
He pressed his knee into Victor’s sternum, holding the cold steel barrel of his Sig Sauer directly between his uncle's eyes.
Victor lay pinned, coughing up bloody foam, staring into the dark, merciless eyes of the nephew he had tried to destroy.
"Kill me then," Victor wheezed, his defiance crumbling into pathetic despair.
"Finish it, Nico. That's what a Marino boss does."
Nico’s finger rested on the trigger.
Every mafia tradition, every drop of ancestral blood in his veins screamed at him to pull it and leave the traitor’s corpse for the crabs.
Then, through the morning fog, a sleek harbor patrol launch cut through the waves, stopping twenty yards from the reef.
Sophie Reed stood on the bow of the police launch, her hair whipping in the sea spray, her service weapon held ready.
She did not shout.
She did not raise her rifle to shoot.
She simply looked at Nico across the open water, her clear, honest eyes pleading with him to choose a different path.
Elizabeth wouldn't want another murder to balance her scales.
The thought struck Nico with the force of a physical blow.
He looked down at his broken, groveling uncle, feeling not triumph, but a profound, cleansing pity.
Nico slowly eased his finger off the trigger and lowered the hammer of the pistol.
"No, Victor," Nico whispered, standing up and stepping away from the fallen man.
"You don't get to die like a soldier on the battlefield."
May you like
Nico turned toward the approaching police boat, tossing his empty weapon onto the deck.
"You are going to spend the rest of your miserable life in a concrete box in Colorado, knowing that the little girl you terrified owns everything you ever stole."
