Chapter 4 - The Iron Collar
The sound of Marco’s voice sent a wave of icy fury through Vincent’s chest.
Marco was more than an employee; he had sat at Vincent’s dinner table.
He had attended Vincent’s mother’s funeral.
He had been given five percent of the family’s downtown transport revenue as a loyalty bonus just three months ago.
Now, he stood outside in the Adirondack snow, leading a squad of hired hitmen to slaughter an old woman.
"He took the money from the Marcones," Margaret whispered from the dark corner of the shed.
"Marco was always greedy, Vincent."
"Your father never trusted his family."
"Stay down," Vincent ordered in a barely audible whisper.
Outside, the crunch of heavy boots on snow grew closer.
"Vincent, don't make this messy," Marco shouted again.
"The whole mountain is cordoned off. You have an injured girl with you."
"We saw the blood and the drag marks up on the switchback."
"You can't carry dead weight down to the ranger road through this blizzard."
Lily flinched at the words 'dead weight.'
She looked down at her immobilized ankle, tears of frustration gathering in the corners of her eyes.
She reached out and grabbed the sleeve of Vincent’s coat.
"Give me a gun," Lily whispered urgently.
Vincent looked down at her in surprise.
"What?"
"Give me a gun," she repeated, her voice remarkably steady despite her shivering frame.
"If they breach the door, I won't let them take Mrs. Romano."
Vincent looked into Lily’s eyes.
There was no hysteria in them now.
There was only a cold, desperate resolve that didn't belong to an ordinary household maid.
"You know how to shoot?" Vincent asked quietly.
Lily hesitated for half a second.
"My father was a combat mechanic in the Marine Corps," she said softly.
"He taught me before he died."
Vincent pulled his secondary weapon—a compact SIG Sauer P365—from an ankle holster on his left leg.
He checked the magazine, chambered a round, and placed the cold steel into Lily’s trembling fingers.
"Safety is off," Vincent instructed.
"Anyone who comes through that door who isn't me, you empty the magazine into their chest."
Lily wrapped both hands around the grip, her knuckles white, and pointed the barrel toward the doorway.
Vincent turned his attention to the structure of the shed.
The front door was a death trap.
If Marco’s men sprayed the thin tin walls with automatic fire, they would all be torn to pieces within seconds.
Vincent looked down at the floor beneath the tool benches.
In the back corner, half-buried under rusted engine parts and rotting burlap, was a square iron hatch set into the stone foundation.
It was the gravity-fed coal chute that fed the old water heater during the 1970s.
Vincent crept across the room on his hands and knees, brushing aside the heavy debris.
He grabbed the iron ring of the hatch and pulled.
With a groan of rusted hinges, the hatch lifted open.
A blast of cold, damp air rushed upward from the darkness below.
Vincent clicked his flashlight onto its lowest red-light setting and shined it down the shaft.
The chute descended at a steep forty-five-degree angle through the granite bedrock for twenty feet before opening onto a rocky drainage gully behind the shed.
"Grandma," Vincent whispered.
Margaret crawled over, moving with surprising agility for her age.
She looked down the dark shaft without a word of complaint.
"Slide down on your back," Vincent told her.
"Keep your feet forward to brake yourself."
"Wait for us in the drainage ditch beneath the stone outcropping."
Margaret gripped his shoulder tightly.
"Don't die for an old woman's mistakes, Vincent."
"Go," he urged gently.
Margaret swung her legs over the rim of the chute and slid down into the black abyss.
A soft thud and a quiet scuffle followed three seconds later.
"I'm down," her voice drifted up like a ghost from the pipe.
Vincent turned back to Lily.
Outside, Marco was losing patience.
"Five seconds, boss!" Marco yelled.
"Then we light this shed up with incendiary rounds!"
Vincent moved to the workbench and scooped Lily into his arms before she could protest.
"Vincent, the chute is too narrow for both of us," she gasped.
"I'm sending you down first," Vincent said, positioning her at the edge of the opening.
"Keep your injured leg straight. Don't let your boot catch on the rusted rivets."
"What about you?" she asked, clutching his jacket collar with desperate strength.
"I have to buy us forty seconds," Vincent said grimly.
He reached over to the Motorola radio station on the wall.
He ripped the heavy twelve-volt battery from its bracket, connecting the positive and negative terminals with a bare copper wire.
The wire instantly began to glow bright orange, spitting sparks against an open canister of industrial kerosene left on the shelf.
"Vincent, no!" Lily cried.
"Slide, Lily!" Vincent barked.
Lily released her grip and dropped into the coal chute, sliding rapidly down into the dark stone shaft.
Vincent turned back to the front door.
Through the wooden cracks, he saw two men in tactical gear flanking Marco, raising short-barreled rifles.
Vincent aimed his Glock through the thin pine boards and squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession.
The thunderous cracks of the gunshots echoed inside the tin shed.
Outside, one of the gunmen shrieked in agony, dropping his weapon and collapsing into the snow with a shattered pelvis.
"Fire! Tear it down!" Marco roared.
A deafening hail of automatic gunfire ripped through the tin walls of the shed.
Bullets punched through the rusted metal like paper, shattering glass jars, tearing through wooden cabinets, and ricocheting off the stone bedrock.
The glowing copper wire struck the pooled kerosene on the shelf.
A brilliant orange fireball erupted across the interior of the shed with a concussive blast.
The explosion blew the front door outward off its hinges, sending a wall of flame into the faces of the advancing hitmen.
In that split second of chaos and blinding smoke, Vincent dove headfirst into the coal chute.
He slid down the slick, icy stone channel, using his elbows and the heels of his boots to control his descent.
He shot out the bottom of the shaft, tumbling into a deep snowdrift at the base of the drainage gully.
Margaret and Lily were huddled beneath an overhang of frozen black granite ten feet away.
Above them, the utility shed was fully engulfed in roaring orange flames, illuminating the falling snow like burning embers.
Gunfire continued to chew through the burning ruins above as Marco’s men fired blindly into the inferno.
Vincent scrambled to his feet, coughing out black smoke, and scooped Lily up into his arms once more.
"Move," Vincent whispered hoarsely to Margaret.
May you like
"The fire will give them light, but the smoke will mask our heat signatures."
They plunged down the jagged drainage gully, following the frozen bed of the mountain creek into the pitch-black wilderness.
