Chapter 9 - The Symphony of Gunpowder
For five agonizing seconds, nobody moved beneath the humming industrial floodlights of Pier Forty-Two.
Don Falcone stood paralyzed on the wet concrete, staring up at me as if gazing upon an avenging archangel risen from the harbor mud.
Beside him, his lead enforcer—a hulking Sicilian named Rico—was the first to break the psychological freeze.
“Shoot him down!” Rico screamed, raising his fully automatic machine pistol toward the catwalk railing.
Before Rico’s finger could complete the trigger pull, I fired both Kimbers in a synchronized double-tap from forty feet above.
BANG. BANG.
The acoustic roar of the heavy .45 rounds was deafening, bouncing violently off the corrugated steel walls of the warehouse.
The first round struck Rico directly in the center of his forehead, snapping his neck backward with brutal, hydraulic force.
The second round cored through his chest cavity, lifting his two-hundred-pound frame off his feet before slamming him dead against the Suburban’s hood.
Chaos erupted across the concrete floor like an overturned hive of hornets.
The remaining seven bodyguards scattered behind the armored vehicles, opening fire toward the catwalk in a frantic, uncoordinated barrage.
Rounds tore through the thin steel floorplates beneath my boots, sending bright orange sparks spraying into the darkness.
In the past, I would have had to rely entirely on visual muzzle flashes to track their firing positions.
Now, my newly awakened auditory perception turned the dark warehouse into a transparent three-dimensional grid.
I could hear the precise mechanical cycling of every pistol slide.
I could hear the brass casings bouncing against the wet concrete, telling me their exact distance behind each tire.
I could hear the frantic, ragged breathing of two shooters reloading behind the rear bumper of the lead SUV.
I didn't stay on the catwalk.
I vaulted over the safety railing, dropping twenty feet onto the wooden roof of an interior office container, absorbing the impact smoothly through my knees.
From there, I dropped to the main floor behind a stack of industrial shipping pallets, moving like a shadow through the mist.
Above us, Frank Delgado and his tactical team opened fire from the high perches, raining controlled, suppressed bursts into Falcone’s perimeter.
The sharp thwip-thwip-thwip of suppressed submachine guns was punctuated by the wet thuds of bullets finding flesh and bone.
Two more of Falcone’s shooters collapsed beside the fuel tanks, their weapons clattering uselessly against the stone.
I stepped out from behind the shipping pallets, walking steadily down the center aisle of the warehouse with both Kimbers raised.
A shooter leaned out from behind the middle SUV, aiming toward the catwalk where Frank was suppressing the line.
He never heard my footsteps approaching from his flank.
I fired once into his hip, dropping him to his knees, and put a second round through the base of his skull before he hit the ground.
Another bodyguard panicked, breaking cover to sprint toward the small pedestrian exit near the loading dock.
I adjusted my stance, tracking the sound of his heavy rubber soles splashing through a standing puddle twelve yards away.
BANG.
The hollow-point round caught him between the shoulder blades, driving him forward into the corrugated wall like a broken puppet.
In less than ninety seconds, all eight of Salvatore Falcone’s elite protectors lay motionless across the blood-soaked floor.
The warehouse fell back into a terrifying, dripping silence, broken only by the hiss of steam escaping from a punctured SUV radiator.
Don Falcone stood alone beside the front bumper of his vehicle, his silver cane abandoned in a pool of standing water.
His camel-hair coat was splattered with Rico’s blood, and his chest heaved as he struggled to draw air into his aged lungs.
I walked slowly toward him, my boots crunching over spent brass casings that carpeted the concrete like lethal gravel.
Each metallic crunch was music to my ears—the sound of retribution arriving on schedule.
Arthur Vance remained strapped to his chair ten feet away, sobbing hysterically behind his duct tape as he watched the massacre unfold.
Dr. Mercer had passed out entirely, his head slumped forward against his chest in shock-induced unconsciousness.
I stopped five paces from Falcone, letting the twin barrels of my smoking pistols drop toward the floorboards.
“You have a good ear for business, Salvatore,” I said, my voice echoing off the high steel beams overhead.
“Tell me... how does the sound of your empire dying compare to the silence you bought for me thirty years ago?”
Falcone swallowed hard, his hands trembling as he slowly lifted them to chest height in a desperate plea for quarter.
“Vincent... wait... listen to me...” Falcone gasped, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, pathetic rasp.
“You think Arthur and I were the only ones? You think this was just a local dock squeeze?”
I took two slow steps forward, closing the distance until Falcone could see the absolute, merciless vacancy in my grey eyes.
May you like
“I am listening, Salvatore,” I replied, thumbing the hammer back on my right Kimber with a crisp, terrifying click.
“Make your confession worthy of the thirty-seven years of silence I endured.”
