Chapter 10 - The Reckoning in the Snow
The halogen beams of the lead Suburban blinded me for a fraction of a second before the vehicle skidded to a halt forty yards from the porch.
The doors flew open simultaneously, four men in heavy tactical parkas stepping out into the snow, their submachine guns pointed directly at the cabin.
Frank Moroni stepped out from the passenger side of the second vehicle, wearing a long fur-collared leather coat, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth.
He didn't draw a weapon; he walked with the leisurely arrogance of a man who believed the board had already been cleared of opposition.
“Arthur!” Frank’s gravelly voice bellowed above the whistling wind.
“Drop the twelve-gauge, Arthur!”
“You are sixty miles from the nearest precinct, your banks are frozen, and your high-priced lawyers are currently having their homes raided by federal agents!”
“Give me the girl and the encryption passkeys, and I will let you walk down to the highway with your boots on!”
I stood on the top step of the porch, the freezing wind whipping my hair across my face, the heavy shotgun resting casually across my forearm.
“You are too late, Frank,” I called back, my voice steady, carrying clearly over the roar of the surf.
“The encryption keys are currently sitting in the bottom of that cast-iron stove as a pile of melted plastic.”
“There are no accounts left.”
“There is no maritime syndicate.”
“There is nothing left in this cabin except cedar logs and cold air.”
Frank paused, his heavy brow furrowing in suspicion beneath his knit cap.
He gestured to the two men on his left, who began fanning out through the deep snow toward the eastern corner of the house.
“Do not play games with me, Sterling!” Frank snarled, his patience snapping.
“Clara Hughes does not burn thirty million dollars!”
“She is a bean counter! She is an accountant who calculates the cost of every bullet your boys fired on the south side!”
“Where is she?”
“She resigned, Frank,” I smiled, a cold, genuine smile that confused the seasoned killer across the snow.
“Her contract with the Sterling Corporation ended on Wednesday night.”
“And my contract with this life ends whenever you have the guts to pull that trigger.”
Frank’s eyes widened slightly as he recognized the dead, empty calm in my posture.
It was the posture of a man who had already divested himself of every earthly fear, a man who had nothing left to protect except the time it took for a woman to reach an ice shelf.
“Take him alive!” Frank barked to his enforcers.
“Shoot him in the legs! He knows the offshore routing numbers!”
Before the words had completely left Moroni’s lips, I brought the stock of the shotgun to my shoulder, aligned the iron sights with the engine block of the lead Suburban, and squeezed the trigger.
The roar of the twelve-gauge shattered the winter silence.
The slug punched through the radiator grille with a shower of sparks and hissing steam, triggering an electrical short that killed the halogen headlights in an instant.
The clearing plunged into chaotic darkness, illuminated only by the faint red glow of the vehicle taillights and the yellow lantern in the cabin window.
Muzzle flashes erupted from three automatic rifles, bullets chewing through the cedar logs of the porch, sending splinters of pine flying like shrapnel.
I threw myself flat against the frozen floorboards, rolling behind the fieldstone chimney that formed the exterior base of the house.
Slugs whined off the granite, chipping fragments of rock into my collar.
I racked the slide of the shotgun, leaned around the stone corner, and fired twice into the silhouettes advancing through the snowdrifts.
A man screamed, dropping his weapon and collapsing into the knee-deep powder.
The second man scrambled for cover behind the wheel well of the second SUV.
“Flank the back!” Frank screamed from behind the protection of his armored door.
“Cut off the cliff path! She’s heading for the water!”
My heart dropped into my stomach.
If they reached the rear of the cabin before Gregory got Clara beneath the ice shelf, they would catch her in the open on the slippery granite descent.
I abandoned the stone chimney, broke cover into the open clearing, and charged toward the eastern tree line, firing the remaining two rounds from the shotgun into the windshield of the command vehicle.
The glass shattered into spiderweb patterns, forcing Frank to duck inside the cab.
A burst of automatic fire caught me in the right thigh.
The impact felt like being struck with an iron sledgehammer, sending my leg out from under me and throwing me hard onto the packed ice.
The shotgun flew from my grip, sliding five yards away into a snowdrift.
Pain flared up my spine, hot and nauseating, the blood soaking through my wool trousers and freezing instantly against the snow.
I dragged myself toward a fallen birch trunk, my fingers digging into the frozen dirt beneath the snow.
Footsteps crunched heavily across the ice.
Frank Moroni stepped out from behind the SUV, his heavy leather coat flapping in the wind, a chrome-plated .45 automatic gripped in his right hand.
He walked slowly toward me, stopping four feet away, looking down with a sneer of pure, vindictive triumph.
“Ten years you looked down your nose at me in the Chicago athletic clubs, Sterling,” Frank hissed, pointing the barrel directly between my eyes.
“You thought you were a gentleman because your father had an oil company and your secretary wore tailored skirts.”
“Look at you now.”
“Bleeding out in the dirt like a stray dog on the Canadian border.”
I leaned my back against the fallen log, breathing heavily, the cold air burning in my lungs.
I looked up into the black bore of the .45 and let out a quiet, raspy laugh.
“You still don't get it, Frank.”
“Get what, you miserable bastard?”
“The company was never mine,” I whispered, looking past him to the black horizon where the first faint, indigo sliver of dawn was beginning to pierce the blizzard clouds over the lake.
“It was hers.”
“And she already beat you.”
Frank’s face twisted in rage.
His finger tightened on the trigger of the .45.
A single, sharp rifle crack echoed from the granite bluffs behind the cabin.
Frank’s head snapped back violently, his eyes rolling upward as a neat, dark puncture appeared in the center of his forehead.
The chrome pistol slipped from his lifeless fingers, falling into the snow.
The heavy body of the south-side boss collapsed like an empty sack of grain, face down in the drift at my boots.
Twenty yards away, standing on the high ledge of the black rocks, silhouetted against the rising winter dawn, stood Gregory.
He was holding a scoped hunting rifle he had pulled from the grandfather’s gun rack in the cabin, the barrel smoking in the sub-zero air.
The remaining two Moroni enforcers threw their weapons into the snow, raised their hands above their heads, and turned to sprint down the logging road toward the distant safety of the state highway.
The clearing fell into an absolute, ringing silence.
The blizzard had passed, leaving behind a sky of crystalline, freezing blue and a lake that shimmered like polished obsidian beneath the morning sun.
Gregory scrambled down the rocks, his boots sliding on the ice, dropping to his knees beside me.
“Arthur!”
“Clara...” I gasped, my vision tunneling as the blood pooled beneath my leg.
“Is she... is she safe?”
Gregory reached down, his heavy hands applying a tourniquet to my thigh with brutal efficiency.
“She’s in the SUV, boss.”
“The bleeding is bad, but the bone isn't shattered.”
“I’m taking you both to the medical center in Grand Marais.”
Two pairs of footsteps approached through the crust of snow.
Clara emerged from the shadow of the cabin, wrapped in her grandfather’s heavy canvas hunting coat, her boots leaving uneven tracks in the fresh powder.
She didn't look at the dead men scattered across the clearing.
She didn't look at the shattered vehicles or the smoking ruins of the porch.
She fell to her knees beside me, her trembling hands framing my bloodied, freezing face, pulling my head into her lap.
Her tears fell onto my forehead, warm and clean, washing away the grime of the night.
“You idiot,” she whispered, her voice breaking into a thousand fractured pieces of love and sorrow.
“You absolute, arrogant idiot.”
“You burned the world down for me.”
I reached up with a hand that had lost all its feeling, my bloody thumb gently tracing the curve of her cheekbone.
May you like
“I told you, Clara...” I managed a faint, broken whisper as the blue sky began to fade into a peaceful darkness.
“I could never... replace you by Tuesday.”
