Chapter 8 - Night of the Wolves
Gabriel Cruz watched through the small, bulletproof observation window as Tony and Dominic dragged an industrial oxyacetylene torch and two heavy canisters of welding gas down the cellar stairs.
The arrogance on Cruz’s face began to crack.
"Vincent?" Cruz’s voice crackled through the intercom speaker, the sneer entirely gone, replaced by a sharp, rising tremor of panic. "Vincent, what are you doing? That ventilation pipe leads directly into my air scrubber! If you burn the intake, the toxicity will flood the intake manifold!"
"I know," I said quietly, lighting an unfiltered cigarette with a silver lighter.
"That's a war crime!" Cruz screamed, his face pressing against the small observation window, his eyes wide and bloodshot. "You're trying to gas me like a rat! The Commission will execute every member of your family for this! Vincent, talk to me! I have forty million in bearer bonds in these bags! Half of it is yours! Take the shipping docks in Montreal! Take the pharmaceutical routes in New Jersey! Just turn the gas off and let me walk to the Feds!"
I took a slow drag of my cigarette, exhaling a thick plume of blue smoke against the titanium door.
"You should have thought about the air in small rooms three days ago, Gabriel," I said. "When you told Marco to run over a little girl so your forty million wouldn't get complicated."
Tony sparked the torch with a loud *clack-clack*. A roaring, four-inch cone of brilliant blue flame hissed to life.
Tony didn't cut the vault door. He stepped up to the main copper gas pipe that fed into the ventilation intake of the panic room, turned the master valve completely open, and sliced through the copper manifold with the blue flame.
The sweet, nauseating smell of raw commercial propane began to hiss violently into the intake duct.
Inside the panic room, the emergency sirens began to shriek. The bright white lights switched to flashing amber hazard strobes.
Cruz dropped his paper cup of scotch. He lunged toward the ventilation unit mounted to the back wall of the vault, frantically trying to slap the manual shut-off dampers closed, but the heavy pressure of the propane was already forcing its way through the carbon filters.
Within sixty seconds, Cruz was coughing violently, clawing at his throat, his eyes streaming with tears as the unbreathable gas displaced the oxygen inside the sealed room.
He staggered back to the observation window, pounding his fists against the glass.
"Open it!" he shrieked, his voice muffled by the thick pane. "I can't breathe! I'm choking! Open the door!"
"The door only opens from the inside, Gabriel," I said, my voice carrying cleanly through the intercom microphone. "You hold the master key. You either open that latch and face what’s waiting for you on this floor... or you lie down on your piles of dirty money and go to sleep forever."
Cruz collapsed against the door, his face turning an alarming shade of mottled purple. He looked at the forty million in cash. He looked at the computer servers containing his offshore empires. None of it could produce a single molecule of oxygen.
With a desperate, choking sob, Cruz reached up with a trembling hand, punched the emergency release bar on the interior wall, and turned the heavy mechanical wheel.
*CLANK-CLANK-HISS.*
The six-inch titanium deadbolts retracted with the sound of a guillotine dropping.
The heavy vault door swung open two inches, spilling out a cloud of choking propane and the sound of a man gasping desperately for air.
Cruz tumbled out of the vault on his hands and knees, vomiting violently onto the damp concrete floor of the cellar, sucking in the cool, wine-scented air of the basement like a drowning man breaking the surface of the ocean.
"Don't... don't shoot," Cruz wheezed, his face pressed against the stone floor, his expensive suit soaked in his own sweat and bile. "I surrender. I surrender to the family. Take the money... take everything..."
I didn't draw my gun.
I took two steps back and looked down at the dog sitting patiently at my side.
Bruno hadn't taken his eyes off Gabriel Cruz since the titanium door swung open. The dog’s lips were pulled back so far his gums were exposed, glistening in the dim cellar light. A low, rolling rumble resonated in his chest—a sound so full of primeval retribution that even Tony took an instinctive step backward.
"Bruno," I whispered.
The dog didn't sprint. He didn't rush. Despite the pain in his flank, despite the black nylon sutures holding his shoulder together, Bruno walked toward Gabriel Cruz with the slow, deliberate certainty of an executioner climbing the steps of the scaffold.
Cruz looked up.
When the silver-haired kingpin saw the hundred-and-twenty-pound mastiff standing three feet away, his jaw dropped in sheer, paralyzing horror.
He recognized the dog.
He remembered the beast that had leapt through the SUV window at the rail yard. He remembered the animal that had stayed beside Elena Vasquez’s broken body in the freezing rain while he and Marco sped away into the night.
"No..." Cruz whimpered, frantically trying to scramble backward on his elbows across the cellar floor. "No, keep that monster away from me! Vincent, call him off! Shoot me! Just shoot me with the gun!"
"A bullet is too clean for a man who preys on children, Gabriel," I said, standing with my hands folded behind my back.
Bruno stepped forward. He placed one massive, heavy paw squarely in the center of Gabriel Cruz’s chest, pinning the grown man to the cold stone floor as easily as a lion pins an antelope.
Cruz let out a high, squealing cry of pure panic as the dog lowered his massive head until his bared fangs were two inches from Cruz’s throat.
The dog didn't bite immediately.
Bruno simply stared into the man’s terrified, bulging eyes. He let Cruz smell the iron in his breath. He let Cruz feel the hot, ragged exhalations of an animal that had survived his bullets, his knives, and his treachery.
Then, Bruno reached down with his jaws.
He didn't tear Cruz’s throat out.
Instead, Bruno’s teeth clamped down with surgical, bone-crushing precision on Cruz’s right hand—specifically, on the delicate, manicured fingers that had held the scalpel, the fingers that had signed the orders to destroy the Vasquez family.
*CRUNCH.*
The sickening sound of every metacarpal bone and knuckle in Cruz’s hand being pulverized into chalk echoed through the cellar, accompanied by a shriek of agony that tore the lining of the man’s vocal cords.
Bruno held the crushed hand in his jaws for three long seconds, feeling the man’s spirit completely disintegrate beneath his fangs, then released it and took one step back, sitting down beside me once more.
Cruz lay curled in the fetal position, cradling his destroyed hand to his chest, sobbing so violently he could barely draw breath, broken beyond any hope of repair.
I looked over at Marco Ricci, who was still tied to the iron pipe, his trousers soaked in his own urine, his face white as salt.
"Dominic," I said.
"Yes, Boss?"
"Untie Marco."
Dominic cut the zip-ties with his knife. Marco slumped to the floor, too terrified to stand.
"Get up, Marco," I commanded.
Marco scrambled to his feet, swaying like a reed in the wind, clutching his bitten wrist.
"Here is your choice, Marco," I said, pointing toward the open vault door. "Inside that panic room is forty million dollars in cash and a secure satellite phone. In four minutes, the FBI tactical team will enter this basement. You can either stay here, take the federal charges alongside Gabriel Cruz, and spend the rest of your natural life in a concrete box in Florence, Colorado..."
I paused, letting the silence hang in the air.
"...or you can walk out that back cellar door right now, take your chances in the woods, and see if Bruno decides to hunt you through the trees."
Marco looked at the open vault. He looked at Cruz sobbing on the floor. He looked at Bruno, whose dark eyes were fixed upon his jugular.
Marco didn't even hesitate for a second.
He turned, sprinted into the titanium panic room, grabbed the heavy wheel, and slammed the four-ton vault door shut behind him, locking himself inside the concrete tomb to await the federal agents. He chose twenty-five years of solitary confinement over ten seconds with my dog.
A distant siren began to wail through the rainy night—the first wave of State Police cruisers hitting the bottom of the Sands Point driveway.
"Tony," I said, turning toward the stairs. "Burn the command van. Erase the traffic cameras from the highway. We're done here."
I looked down at the dog. Bruno was breathing heavily, his tail giving a slow, steady wag against my knee.
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"Come on, Brun," I said, my voice softer than it had been all night. "Let’s go home."
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