Chapter 5 - The Glass and the Lead
The impact sounded like a spade hitting wet clay.
The silver dome—four pounds of solid, hand-hammered plate—struck Vane directly across the bridge of his nose with a wet, splintering crunch. The boiling saffron risotto exploded across his chest, splashing his eyes and soaking into the lapels of his tuxedo in a yellow, steaming wave.
Vane screamed—a high, piggish squeal of pure shock and scalding agony—as his chair tipped backward onto the parquet floor.
The pistol he had been drawing from his shoulder holster—a snub-nosed .38 with the serial numbers ground smooth—flew from his greasy fingers, skittering across the floorboards like a black beetle until it struck the baseboard of the service sideboard.
The entire dining room went dead silent for half a heartbeat.
The seventy guests froze, forks suspended between plates and lips, wine glasses tilted at sixty-degree angles, their brains struggling to process the sight of the head maid standing over the representative from Montreal with an empty silver tray in her hands.
Then the French doors behind Table Four blew inward.
The tall panes of leaded glass didn't merely break; they disintegrated under the impact of two twelve-gauge shotgun blasts from the dark veranda outside.
A wall of green glass shards, cold rain, and shredded drapes swept into the room, cutting through the linen of Table Four and peppering the plaster ceiling with hundreds of lead pellets.
"Down!" Dante roared.
His voice cut through the explosion with the volume of an artillery piece.
I didn't take two steps back. I dropped where I stood, hitting the slick floorboards beside Vane’s thrashing body, pulling my knees to my chest as the room detonated into violence.
Marco’s men didn't draw handguns; they pulled short-barreled automatic weapons from beneath the service sideboards and opened fire toward the shattered veranda.
The noise inside the enclosed space was catastrophic.
The chandeliers overhead began to weep crystal prisms, raining sharp, heavy triangles onto the mahogany table as the plaster moldings were torn away by incoming fire. Women shrieked—not polite, social screams, but the raw, guttural shrieks of animals being slaughtered in a pen. Men in five-thousand-dollar suits dove beneath the long table, knocking over crystal decanters, silver platters of beef, and gold candelabras that set the heavy damask cloths ablaze.
Through the smoke and the strobe of muzzle flashes, I saw the men on the veranda.
There were four of them, wearing wet black slickers and tactical respirators.
And behind them, standing on the sodden lawn in the pouring rain with a heavy trench coat slung over his shoulders, was Julian Moretti.
He looked like Dante’s ghost.
He had the same high, sharp cheekbones, the same long, predatory nose, but his mouth was twisted into a permanent sneer, and his left shoulder was bound tight with gray duct tape over a bloody dressing where Bruno had torn him open three hours earlier.
Julian stepped through the shattered frame of the French doors, stepping over the bleeding body of one of his own gunmen who had taken a burst through the throat.
In his right hand, Julian carried an antique Colt revolver—the service weapon that had belonged to his father.
"Dante!" Julian screamed over the roar of the automatic fire. His voice was cracked, wet with the phlegm of a man who had spent six hours crawling through stormwater culverts. "Where is the ledger, brother? Where did you put the old man's books?"
Dante did not answer with words.
He stepped out from behind the heavy mahogany head table, completely upright, holding a semi-automatic rifle he had retrieved from a hidden compartment behind the portrait of his grandfather.
He did not duck. He did not flinch as a line of drywall dust exploded from the column three inches from his temple.
Dante fired three rounds with mechanical rhythm.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The gunman to Julian’s right flew backward through the veranda railing, his chest caved in by thirty-caliber rounds. The second gunman dropped his weapon and fell to his knees, clutching a shattered femur.
Julian did not run.
He looked straight past his brother, past the burning tablecloths, past the screaming guests crawling through the spilled risotto and broken glass, and his eyes found mine where I lay against the base of the sideboard.
A terrible, yellow smile split his face.
"Elena," Julian called out, his voice cutting through the ringing in my ears. "Did Miguel ever tell you where he hid the key to the boat slip? The one with your daughter’s name on the hull?"
My heart stopped.
"He didn't tell you, did he?" Julian laughed, stepping toward me over the wreckage of Table Four. "He thought if he kept you ignorant, Dante would let you live. But Dante doesn't leave witnesses, little girl. He never has."
Julian raised the heavy Colt, pointing the four-inch barrel directly between my eyes.
I couldn't move. My apron was pinned beneath the leg of an overturned mahogany chair, and my hands were slick with saffron grease and spilled wine.
A black shadow crossed the light of the burning chandelier.
It did not come from the veranda.
It came from the high balcony overlooking the dining room—the musicians’ gallery that had been dark all evening.
Bruno hit Julian Moretti at forty miles an hour.
The ninety-pound dog did not bark. He descended from the six-foot drop like a sack of wet iron, his front paws striking Julian’s chest with the concussive force of a sledgehammer.
The revolver discharged into the ceiling, blowing a three-foot hole through the plaster fresco of Diana and her hounds, as Julian went down hard beneath the beast’s weight.
The floor shook with the impact.
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Bruno’s jaws clamped onto Julian’s uninjured right forearm, the sound of bone giving way like green branches beneath the dog’s four hundred pounds of jaw pressure.
Julian shrieked—a high, thin sound that was cut short as Dante’s boot stepped onto his throat.
