Chapter 3 - The Scent of Pine and Gunpowder
The west wing of the estate was built in 1912 by an anthracite coal baron who believed the Bolsheviks were coming across the Hudson in rowboats. The exterior walls were twenty-two inches of solid Pennsylvania blue granite; the interior doors were two-inch quarter-sawn white oak hung on ball-bearing hinges with five-inch lag bolts.
Adrian didn't run.
To run was to invite panic, and panic was what killed men in hallways. He moved with a long, rhythmic stride, Clara tucked firmly into the crook of his left arm, her small face pressed against the rough wool of his jacket.
"Keep your eyes on my collar," Adrian told her. "Don't look at the doors. Don't look at the floor."
"Is Barnaby here?" she whispered.
"Not yet."
He reached the end of the lower service corridor, where the wine cellar transitioned into the original carriage house foundations. Here, behind three stacks of empty Bordeaux crates, was a steel fire door with a numeric keypad.
Adrian punched four numbers: *1-0-1-2.*
The date Julian had supposedly died. He had set the code six years ago when he rebuilt the safe rooms; he had never changed it because the pain was the only thing that kept him sharp.
The door unlatched with a dull hydraulic thump.
The room inside was small, four paces by four, lined with lead-core drywall and ventilated by an intake pipe that drew air from the stone chimney seventy feet above. On the small wooden table sat a landline phone connected to a hardwired copper circuit that ran three miles through private conduit directly into the central switchboard of the state police barracks in Morristown.
Adrian set Clara down on the cot in the corner.
"Stay here," he said.
She looked at the walls. "It smells like iron."
"It’s safe," Adrian said. "No one comes through that door unless they have my hand in their pocket."
He pulled the heavy Colt .45 from his holster, racked the slide once to ensure the Federal Hydra-Shok was seated in the chamber, and placed the weapon on the table where she could not reach it, then immediately thought better of it, holstered it, and pulled a smaller .380 backup from his ankle.
He slid the .380 into the pocket of his trousers.
"Do you know how to sing?" he asked her suddenly.
She blinked at him. "The song about the frog?"
"Sing it," Adrian said. "In your head. Don't stop until I open that door."
He didn't wait for her to answer. He stepped back into the corridor, pulled the door shut until the magnetic locks clicked home with the sound of a falling guillotine, and turned toward the stairs.
The house was no longer quiet.
Above him, the sharp, dry *crack-crack-crack* of nine-millimeter fire rattled through the air ducts, followed instantly by the heavier, percussive *thud* of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Marco was at the top of the kitchen stairs.
Adrian took the concrete steps three at a time, staying low, his back pressed against the brick foundation. When he cleared the doorway into the kitchen pantry, the smell hit him—not the chicory coffee or the dried rosemary Teresa kept in bunches above the sink, but the sharp, acrid reek of burnt potassium, shredded drywall, and the unmistakable copper tang of fresh arterial blood.
Teresa was kneeling behind the island, holding an ancient double-barreled hammer gun that Adrian’s grandfather had brought through Ellis Island in 1908. Both hammers were down; the barrels were smoking.
Ten feet away, sprawled across the blue Portuguese tiles, a man in a black nylon jacket lay face down, his heels drumming a slow, dying rhythm against the refrigerator door.
"Teresa," Adrian said.
"Three through the patio glass," the old woman said, her voice shaking only slightly as she broke the shotgun open and dropped two fat red shells into the chambers with fingers that had rolled pasta three hours ago. "Marco is in the formal room. He hit two. One went toward the library."
Adrian didn't check the dead man. He stepped over the spreading pool of dark fluid and moved through the swinging door into the dining room.
The house was dark now. Marco had hit the main breakers at the first sound of glass.
Rain was pouring through the shattered French doors at the far end of the long mahogany table. The wind whipped the heavy velvet curtains into the room like black sails, bringing with it the smell of wet lawn and the harsh chemical stink of an idling truck engine outside.
A figure detached itself from the shadow behind the grand piano.
A tall man, moving with a limp, his silhouette broken by the long barrel of an automatic carbine.
He didn't see Adrian. He was looking toward the main staircase, his weapon raised, expecting someone to come down from the bedrooms.
Adrian didn't shout a warning. He didn't demand a surrender.
He raised his Colt with both hands, aligned the tritium front sight with the back of the man’s neck, and squeezed the trigger twice.
The shots were deafening in the enclosed space. The muzzle flash lit the mahogany table for a fraction of a second, reflecting in the silver fruit bowl and the gilt-framed oil paintings of dead ancestors.
The man dropped as if his strings had been severed, his carbine clattering across the oak floorboards.
"Clear," Marco’s voice called from the shadows of the vestibule.
Adrian moved forward, his boots crunching on glass. "How many?"
"Four came in," Marco said, appearing from the darkness near the hall clock. He had a ragged tear across the shoulder of his tweed jacket, and blood was dripping from his left ear where a bullet had clipped the door frame near his head. "Two down here. Teresa got one. The driver is still in the second rig by the tennis court."
Adrian walked over to the man he had just killed.
He reached down, grabbed the collar of the nylon jacket, and hauled the body over onto its back.
The man was young—not more than twenty-five—with the hollow, graying cheeks of a city kid who lived on energy drinks and bad cocaine. Across his right forearm, visible where the jacket sleeve had ridden up, was the crude red outline of a diving hawk with three talons spread wide.
"Moretti’s scavengers," Marco spat, wiping his ear with a handkerchief. "They're getting sloppy. Bringing this trash into *this* house?"
"They weren't sent to kill me," Adrian said, his eyes scanning the dead boy’s pockets.
He pulled out a heavy zip-tie, a roll of duct tape, and a small, laminated card with a color photo of Clara Vance.
Beneath the photo was an address: *414 Cherry Lane, Port Penn, Delaware.*
And at the bottom, written in grease pencil: *BRING THE GIRL ALIVE. LEAVE THE REST FOR THE CRABS.*
"They didn't know I was here," Marco realized, his breath catching. "They thought the house was empty because of the season. They tracked the kid here from Route 9."
"No," Adrian said, standing up. "They didn't track a six-year-old through four miles of marsh in the middle of a nor'easter."
He walked toward the broken French doors, looking out into the rain.
Across the lawn, three hundred yards away, the headlights of the second Suburban suddenly snapped on. The high beams cut through the driving rain, blinding for an instant, illuminating the torn sod where the heavy tires had chewed through Adrian’s immaculate turf.
The truck didn't charge the house.
It reversed hard, the transmission whining in protest, then swung around toward the broken perimeter fence, its tires throwing rooster-tails of mud into the hemlocks.
"Let him go," Adrian commanded as Marco raised his rifle.
"Boss?"
"Let him go," Adrian repeated, his voice dropping into that terrifying, flat register. "He has to tell Salvatore where the child went."
"And where did she go?"
Adrian looked down at his right hand. The black onyx stone was wet with rain that had drifted through the broken glass.
"To see her father," Adrian said.
He turned back toward the dark house.
"Get the medical kit for your ear. Tell Teresa to pack Clara’s bag. We leave in twenty minutes."
"In what?" Marco asked. "The roads will be blocked if Moretti has the state police on the payroll down in Jersey."
Adrian reached into his pocket and pulled out the brass key he had carried on his ring for twenty-two years—the key to the boat house at the mouth of the cove.
"The water doesn't have roadblocks," Adrian said. "And the *San Matteo* hasn't been out of the slip since Julian died."
May you like
He walked back toward the cellar stairs, his boots leaving dark red smears on the white wood, but his mind already twenty miles south, where the marsh grass met the salt water and a dead man was waiting for his daughter.
---
