Chapter 8 - The Gary Rail Yards
The industrial corridor of Gary, Indiana, resembled the skeletal remains of an ancient steel civilization.
Acres of rusted corrugated iron, abandoned locomotive repair sheds, and weed-choked rail tracks stretched endlessly beneath a gray, weeping sky.
The black Mercedes S-Class navigated the cracked concrete access road, its luxury suspension absorbing the jagged ruts.
In the front seat, Thomas Reed kept both hands clamped onto the steering wheel at the ten-and-two position.
His knuckles were bone-white.
His eyes darted constantly toward the rearview mirror, where Luca sat in absolute stillness, reading a printed logistics dossier under the soft interior dome light.
"We are approaching the south junction, Mister Moretti," Thomas said, his voice tight as a piano wire.
"The transponder is pinging Vance's relay station at the entrance."
"Maintain your speed at twenty miles per hour, Thomas," Luca instructed without lifting his eyes from the paper.
"Do not brake suddenly, and do not look around."
"Act as though you are delivering a condemned sheep to the slaughterhouse."
"Yes, sir," Thomas whispered.
Ahead of them, the cavernous entrance of Locomotive Shed Number Four yawned like the mouth of a dark cavern.
Inside the gloom of the massive hangar, six black pickup trucks were parked in a wide semicircle, their headlights aimed directly at the shed’s central entrance.
Standing in the center of the illuminated zone was Julian Vance’s most vicious lieutenant, Sal Calderone.
Calderone was a hulking, scarred veteran of Chicago’s dock wars, wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and smoking a thick cigar.
Behind him, twelve heavily armed mercenaries in tactical gear held semi-automatic shotguns and assault rifles at the low ready.
They had spent three hours preparing this ambush.
They had plastic sheeting laid across the dirt floor to contain the blood.
They had an industrial furnace roaring in the rear workshop, preheated to twelve hundred degrees to incinerate every trace of Moretti’s remains.
The Mercedes glided into the shed, its tires crunching over decades of accumulated coal dust and gravel.
Thomas brought the vehicle to a halt precisely in the center of the headlights' glare, exactly thirty feet from where Calderone stood smiling.
Thomas put the transmission in park and shut off the ignition.
The sudden silence inside the shed was oppressive, broken only by the distant dripping of rainwater from the vaulted ceiling rafters.
Calderone took a long puff of his cigar, blew a thick cloud of blue smoke into the air, and stepped toward the driver's door.
"Good work, Tommy boy," Calderone shouted, his voice echoing off the corrugated iron walls.
"Vance told me you'd fold the second we mentioned your little girl's hospital room."
"Step out of the car with your hands on your head so my boys don't mistake you for a hero."
Thomas did not open the door.
He sat frozen in his seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield.
Calderone frowned, his smile fading into an irritated snarl.
"I said get out of the vehicle, you stupid mick, before I ventilate that door!"
In the back seat, Luca calmly folded his dossier, slipped it into the leather pocket of the front seat, and unlocked the rear door.
The door swung open with effortless, engineered smoothness.
Luca Moretti stepped out onto the dust of the locomotive shed.
He stood at his full height, impeccably dressed in his charcoal wedding tuxedo, his posture completely relaxed, his hands resting lightly in his trouser pockets.
He looked around the decrepit warehouse with an expression of mild, aristocratic distaste, as if he were inspecting a substandard horse stable.
Calderone’s eyes widened slightly in surprise, but he quickly barked a loud, mocking laugh.
"Well, look at the handsome groom!" Calderone sneered, gesturing with his cigar toward the twelve mercenaries behind him.
"Dressed up for church, and you end up in a Gary furnace!"
"Where is Julian Vance, Salvatore?" Luca asked, his voice carrying effortlessly across the cavernous room without a hint of fear.
"Mister Vance doesn't waste his Saturday mornings watching garbage get burned, Luca," Calderone replied, resting his hand on the grip of the shotgun slung over his shoulder.
"He's sitting in his private club in the Loop, drinking twenty-year-old scotch."
"He's waiting for my phone call to confirm that you and your little brother Marco are officially fertilizer."
"Then he's heading over to Holy Name Cathedral to comfort your grieving little bride."
Luca tilted his head, his gray eyes fixing on Calderone with the cold detachment of a pathologist examining a cadaver.
"Vanessa Bellini was always remarkably poor at mathematics," Luca murmured softly.
Calderone’s brow furrowed.
"What the hell are you babbling about?"
"She calculated that four men from the East Chicago docks could snatch my brother from a university campus protected by Daniel Ricci," Luca explained.
"She calculated that fifty thousand dollars would buy the soul of a father whose dying daughter I had already flown to Switzerland."
"And she calculated that you and twelve second-rate dock thieves were enough to corner me in an enclosed space."
Calderone’s grin vanished entirely.
An uncomfortable prickle of cold sweat broke out along his collar.
"Shoot him," Calderone commanded, stepping backward toward his trucks.
"Put two slugs in his chest right now!"
None of the twelve mercenaries fired.
Above their heads, in the crisscrossing steel catwalks seventy feet in the air, high-powered red laser dots suddenly rained down from the shadows.
Twelve crimson beams danced across the chests, throats, and foreheads of Vance’s strike team.
Simultaneously, the massive corrugated blast doors at the rear of the locomotive shed groaned open.
Two armored personnel carriers, painted matte black and bearing no municipal markings, rolled into the shed, blocking the rear exit entirely.
From the catwalks and the vehicles, twenty elite Moretti tactical operators emerged, their carbines locked onto Calderone’s men.
Before Vance’s mercenaries could even raise their weapons, a single high-caliber sniper round cracked from the upper rafters.
The heavy slug struck the lead mercenary's shotgun barrel, shearing the weapon clean from his hands in an explosion of sparks and shattered metal.
"Drop your weapons!" a voice boomed through the shed's industrial public address system.
"Drop them now, or the furnace burns all of you!"
The twelve mercenaries looked at the red dots covering their bodies, looked at the armored carriers blocking the doors, and dropped their rifles onto the coal dust with a chorus of clattering steel.
They raised their hands above their heads, dropping to their knees in absolute surrender.
Calderone stood alone in the center of the illuminated floor, his cigar falling from his agape mouth into the dirt.
He reached frantically for the radio on his tactical vest.
Luca moved with shocking, explosive speed.
He closed the twenty feet between them in three massive strides.
Luca’s left hand shot out like an iron clamp, grabbing Calderone by the throat and slamming him backward against the hood of the nearest pickup truck.
With his right hand, Luca drew his Sig Sauer and pressed the cold, hollow muzzle against the bridge of Calderone’s nose.
Calderone gasped for breath, his eyes bulging as the steel dug into his skin.
"Your phone, Salvatore," Luca whispered, his tone terrifyingly polite.
Calderone trembled violently, his former bravado completely shattered.
"In... in my breast pocket..." Calderone wheezed.
Luca reached into the sheepskin coat and retrieved the heavy, encrypted satellite phone.
He brought up the recent call log.
The last incoming call was from Julian Vance, labeled with a skull icon.
Luca pressed the speakerphone button and dialed the number.
The line clicked after two rings.
"Is it done, Sal?" Julian Vance’s smooth, cultured voice drifted through the speaker into the freezing air of the shed.
"Is the groom dead?"
Luca leaned down until his lips were two inches from the phone’s microphone.
"I am still breathing, Julian."
A long, suffocating silence fell over the line.
On the other end, in his luxury penthouse in the Loop, Julian Vance’s breath caught in his throat.
"Luca..." Vance whispered, the confidence draining from his voice like water through a sieve.
"Your mathematics were flawed, Julian," Luca said, his voice cold as absolute zero.
"Your snatch team in Evanston has been liquidated."
"My brother Marco is currently putting on his boutonnière."
"And Salvatore is currently choosing whether he wants to be buried in Gary or dumped in the Calumet River."
Calderone began to sob against the hood of the truck, begging for his life in muffled whimpers.
"Luca, wait... we can settle this like businessmen," Vance stammered, panic finally cracking his polished veneer.
"Alberto’s debt—I can write it off! We can split the southern rail lines fifty-fifty!"
"You sent men to execute my twenty-two-year-old brother, Julian," Luca interrupted, his tone chillingly final.
"There are no ledgers left to balance."
"There are no percentages left to negotiate."
"I am returning to Chicago to attend my wedding."
"Be at Holy Name Cathedral in thirty minutes, Julian."
"Because if you attempt to run to the airport, Daniel will ensure your private jet never clears the runway."
Luca ended the call and crushed the satellite phone beneath the heel of his polished dress shoe, grinding the circuits into powder.
He looked down at Calderone.
"Tie them to the locomotive chassis," Luca commanded his operators, who were already swarming the warehouse floor with zip ties.
"Leave them in the dark until Monday morning."
Luca turned and walked back toward the black Mercedes.
Thomas Reed stood outside the car, tears streaming down his face as he held the rear door open.
May you like
"Get behind the wheel, Thomas," Luca said calmly, brushing a speck of dust from his tuxedo lapel.
"We have a twenty-minute drive to Holy Name, and I refuse to make the Cardinal wait."
