Chapter 8 - The Price of Redemption
The crack of a suppressed rifle round shattered the freezing silence of the harbor.
The bullet struck the wooden piling inches from Lorenzo’s ear, sending a spray of splintered cedar into the air.
Lorenzo didn't panic.
In a fraction of a second, the broken, exhausted man who had been weeping in the snow vanished. What replaced him was the apex predator of Chicago.
Lorenzo dropped instantly to the deck of the pier, rolling to his left as three more rounds stitched through the timber where he had been standing a heartbeat before. He kicked hard off the wet wood, throwing himself over the low gunwale of the old trawler just as a burst of automatic fire ripped through the fiberglass cabin.
"Get around the slip!" one of the shooters yelled in a thick South Side Chicago accent. "Moretti said don't let him leave the dock!"
Elena didn't stop running.
She wasn't a soldier. She had never fired a gun in her life. But she knew this harbor. She had spent the last two weeks studying the blueprints of these docks in Clara's architectural salvage archives.
She sprinted toward the pump house—a squat brick building ten yards to the left of the shooters’ Suburbans.
Inside the pump house was the emergency fuel shut-off valve for the commercial fishing fleet.
The shooters were so focused on pinning Lorenzo down on the boat that they didn't see the girl in the canvas work coat slip through the rusted iron door of the pump house.
Inside, the smell of diesel fuel and old grease was suffocating. Elena grabbed the heavy iron wheel of the auxiliary discharge manifold—the line used to flush contaminated fuel out of the storage tanks during winter maintenance.
She braced her boots against the concrete wall and pulled with all her strength.
The wheel groaned, rusted iron shrieking against iron, and then spun freely.
Outside, a heavy, pressurized black stream of high-octane marine diesel surged out of the relief pipe on the dock wall, washing over the gravel turnaround, flooding the tires of the two Suburbans, and rushing straight toward the feet of the four gunmen.
"What the hell is that smell?" one of the shooters yelled, turning around.
From the deck of the trawler, Lorenzo saw the black slick spreading across the snow.
He saw the open door of the pump house.
And he saw Elena's face through the grease-stained window.
*She came for me,* the thought slammed through his mind, powerful enough to stop his heart. *She didn't run. She came for me.*
Lorenzo reached into his boot.
He hadn't brought his usual custom Kimber .45 from Chicago. But he had kept the small, stainless-steel snub-nosed revolver his father had given him on his eighteenth birthday—the one weapon he never registered, the one weapon he never left behind.
Lorenzo stood up on the deck of the trawler, fully exposing himself to the shooters.
"Hey!" Lorenzo roared across the dock.
The two lead shooters spun back toward the boat, raising their automatic rifles.
Lorenzo didn't aim for their chests.
He pointed the snub-nosed revolver straight down at the gravel six inches in front of their feet, right into the center of the diesel slick, and pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flash ignited the atomized fuel vapor instantly.
A ten-foot wall of orange fire erupted across the gravel with a deafening *WHOOSH*.
The shockwave knocked the two front gunmen off their feet, their parkas catching fire as they screamed and rolled frantically into the snow drifts. The heat was blinding, a roaring curtain of flame that cut the dock completely in half.
The third gunman, coughing through the thick black diesel smoke, raised his weapon toward the pump house door where Elena was just stepping out.
"No!" Lorenzo yelled.
Lorenzo didn't think about tactical positioning. He didn't think about cover.
He launched himself off the deck of the trawler, clearing the six-foot gap between the boat and the burning pier, his boots hitting the flaming planks. He charged straight through the wall of smoke, his coat catching the sparks, his body slamming into the third gunman with the force of a freight train.
The two men hit the frozen gravel together.
The rifle clattered across the ice. Lorenzo had his hands around the man’s throat before they even stopped sliding, his thumbs driving with lethal, brutal pressure into the shooter's carotid artery.
The fourth gunman—the team leader—stepped out from behind the burning Suburban, his 9mm pistol leveled directly at the back of Lorenzo’s head.
"DeMarco!" the man screamed over the roar of the fire.
Elena didn't hesitate.
She scooped up a heavy, two-foot length of rusted iron dock chain lying beside the pump house door and swung it with both hands, using the entire momentum of her body.
The heavy iron links caught the gunman across the side of his helmet and neck with a sickening, metallic *CRACK*.
The man staggered sideways, his shot firing harmlessly into the grey sky, before he collapsed face-down into the slush, unconscious.
Silence fell over the harbor.
The only sound was the crackle of the burning Suburbans, the hiss of melting snow, and the heavy, ragged breathing of two people standing in the smoke.
Lorenzo slowly got to his feet from the body of the third shooter.
His face was streaked with soot and blood from a gash on his temple. His canvas coat was singed at the hem, his hands raw and blistered from the heat.
He looked at Elena.
She was standing five feet away, the rusted dock chain still clutched in her red, trembling hands, her chest heaving as she stared at the unconscious man at her feet.
The chain slipped from her fingers. It hit the gravel with a dull, heavy clink.
She looked up at Lorenzo.
For ten seconds, neither of them moved.
Then Lorenzo’s knees buckled.
He didn't fall because he was groveling this time. He fell because a round from the first volley had caught him high in the right shoulder, and the adrenaline that had kept him upright was finally draining out into the snow.
"Lorenzo!"
Elena was across the gravel before he could hit the ground.
She caught him under his arms, sinking to her knees with him, bracing his heavy frame against her chest. Her hands went immediately to his shoulder, pressing hard against the dark, spreading stain of crimson blooming across his torn coat.
"I'm fine," Lorenzo wheezed, his teeth gritted against the agony, his head resting against her neck. "I'm fine... Elena..."
"Shut up," she cried, tears finally breaking free, cutting clean tracks through the soot on her cheeks. "Shut your stupid, arrogant mouth, Lorenzo!"
Lorenzo looked up at her through his half-closed eyes. Even through the blood and the smoke and the blinding pain in his shoulder, a faint, crooked smile touched the corner of his lips.
"You used a chain," he whispered, his voice weak but filled with an awe that bordered on worship. "My girl... took out a Moretti capo with a rusty dock chain."
"You're an idiot," she sobbed, pressing her woolen scarf against the bullet wound to stop the bleeding, feeling the violent, ragged thud of his heart beneath her palms. "Why didn't you stay in Chicago? Why did you come here?"
Lorenzo reached up with his uninjured hand, his bare, bloody fingers gently touching her jaw, his thumb brushing away a tear.
"Because the city doesn't have a soul without you, Elena," he murmured, his vision blurring around the edges as the sirens began to wail in the distance from Havenport. "And neither do I."
May you like
His hand slipped from her face, and Lorenzo DeMarco surrendered to the dark.
***
