Chapter 13 - The Poison in the Well
We left LaSalle Street before the city street sweepers began their midnight routes.
The victory in the rotunda should have brought relief, but the knot in my stomach only tightened as our convoy turned onto Lake Shore Drive.
The snow had begun to fall again, thin white flakes dancing across the frozen surface of the lake.
Mateo sat beside me in the rear seat, his eyes scanning the side mirrors with relentless scrutiny.
“It was too easy,” I said, looking out at the black water.
“Costa is a cornered dog, but he is not stupid.”
“He knew he couldn't win the legal vote before the Commission.”
Mateo nodded slowly, his fingers tapping an uneven rhythm against the silver cane resting between his knees.
“Costa didn't come to LaSalle Street to win the vote,” Mateo said, his voice grim.
“He came to ensure we were both inside the city.”
My blood turned to ice.
“Salvatore.”
Mateo grabbed the tactical radio from the center console, keying the secure channel.
“Gianni! Report!”
Only static answered.
A high-pitched, metallic squeal hissed through the speaker, followed by the dull, rhythmic thumping of an open microphone bouncing against floorboards.
“Gianni, respond!” Mateo barked, his calm facade shattering into raw, violent urgency.
Through the static came the sound of three ragged breaths, followed by a voice that sounded like it was drowning in blood.
“Ambush... through the boat cove... Dr. Valenti...”
The line went dead.
“Turn the cars around!” Mateo roared at the driver, slamming his fist against the partition.
“Interstate 94, north! Run every red light between here and the border!”
The engine screamed as the heavy SUV leaped forward, swerving through the slush on Lake Shore Drive.
The forty-minute drive to the Kenosha compound was an agonizing descent into hell.
Neither of us spoke.
Mateo spent the miles field-stripping his sidearm with one hand, checking the firing pin, slamming fresh magazines into tactical pouches, his jaw clenched so hard a small vein pulsed at his hairline.
I sat with my fingers dug into the velvet of my coat, praying the ancient Sicilian prayers Nonna Chiara had taught me during the cold Wisconsin blizzards.
“Santa Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis...”
When our convoy crashed through the splintered wooden gates of the Kenosha estate, the sight made my breath catch in my throat.
Two of our security patrol vehicles were burning in the circular gravel driveway, thick black smoke rising into the snow-covered pines.
Bodies in dark winter parkas lay scattered across the pristine white lawn like discarded rag dolls.
Mateo was out of the vehicle before it had even come to a complete stop.
He moved like a phantom through the blizzard, his weapon drawn, his eyes checking every window and blind corner of the timber lodge.
I followed two steps behind him, refusing to stay in the armored car.
The front doors of the lodge were hanging off their hinges, splintered by high-explosive breaching charges.
Inside, the great room was a charnel house.
The stone fireplace was still roaring, its orange flames illuminating the bullet-riddled timber walls and the shattered glass of the panoramic windows.
Gianni lay slumped against the base of the massive fieldstone chimney.
His tactical vest was shredded by buckshot, his shotgun lying empty beside his outstretched hand.
I dropped to my knees beside him, pressing my fingers to his neck.
A faint, thready flutter answered my touch.
“Gianni,” I breathed, pulling a roll of gauze from my pocket and pressing it against the tearing wound in his upper chest.
The scarred bodyguard opened one swollen eye, coughing weakly as blood bubbled between his teeth.
“The doctor...” Gianni rasped, his fingers clawing at the sleeve of my coat.
“Valenti wasn't... wasn't a hostage...”
Mateo knelt beside us, his eyes widening in rare, horrific shock.
“Valenti?”
“He opened the boat slip door from the inside,” Gianni wheezed, his head lolling backward against the stone.
“Costa promised him... the clinical research trust in Switzerland...”
“Where is my father?” Mateo demanded, his voice shaking with a terror he had never shown on the roofs of Chicago.
Gianni’s trembling hand pointed toward the hallway leading to the master bedroom.
“The old man... he had the small pistol under his pillow, boss...”
“He didn't go down... without making them pay...”
Mateo sprang to his feet, sprinting down the hallway like a man racing against the judgment of God.
I followed him into the master bedroom.
The room was completely still.
The IV poles had been knocked over, bags of clear saline ruptured across the hardwood floorboards.
Dr. Valenti lay dead near the foot of the bed, his gold-rimmed glasses shattered, a neat, black-rimmed hole centered between his eyes.
On the bed, propped against his pillows with the blankets pulled up to his waist, sat Salvatore Vitiello.
In his right hand, resting on the duvet, was an antique pearl-handled .32 caliber revolver, its cylinder clicked open and completely empty.
His head was tilted toward the window, looking out over the dark, turbulent waters of Lake Michigan.
His eyes were open, cloudy, and completely still.
Mateo stopped three feet from the bed, his arms dropping limp to his sides.
The gun in his hand slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the hardwood floor with a dull, hollow thud.
“Papa,” Mateo whispered.
It was the voice of a young boy lost in a dark forest.
I walked slowly to the bedside, my footsteps splashing softly in the spilled saline.
I reached out with trembling fingers and gently closed the old patriarch’s eyelids, smoothing the white hair back from his cold, waxy forehead.
On the nightstand, resting beside his empty water glass, was a single sheet of paper written in Salvatore’s jagged, failing cursive script.
I picked it up.
“The ledger is closed, Tessa,” the letter read in the archaic mountain dialect.
“Take the boy. Burn the docks. Let the Vitiello name die with me, so that Chiara’s children may finally live in the sun.”
A single tear slipped down my cheek, dropping onto the faded ink.
From behind me came the sound of Mateo falling to his knees beside his father’s bed.
He did not weep.
He did not shout at the ceiling.
He simply buried his face in the coarse wool of his father’s blanket, his shoulders shaking with the silent, tectonic agony of a son who had spent his entire life protecting a king who could not be saved.
I turned and placed my hand on Mateo’s bowed head, letting my fingers thread through his thick dark hair.
“He didn't lose, Mateo,” I murmured softly into the cold room.
“He held the line until we got here.”
Mateo raised his head.
The grief in his eyes had turned into an abyss of black, unholy vengeance.
“Where is Dominic Costa?” Mateo asked, his voice dead, flat, and colder than the ice forming on the lake outside.
Gianni’s voice drifted down the hallway, weak but persistent.
“The... the old shipping terminal... at Navy Pier...”
“Valenti told Costa... the emergency cash vault... was hidden under Warehouse Nine...”
May you like
Mateo rose from the floor, picking up his weapon and sliding the fresh magazine into the grip with a sound like a guillotine falling.
“Then we end it where it began.”
