Chapter 5 - The Culvert Shortcut
In the narrow beam of Luke's tactical flashlight, my brother Michael's eyes were wide with sheer, paralyzing terror as the two black-clad gunmen stepped over the kitchen threshold with suppressed automatic rifles leveled toward the dining room.
Michael had not opened the back door to help us escape; he had unbolted the deadbolt to let the killers inside before they shot through the walls, hoping to trade the scorched walnut box for his own skin.
"Give them the box, Claire, for God's sake just throw it into the kitchen!" Michael screamed, his voice breaking as the lead gunman shoved him roughly against the refrigerator door and swept a green laser sight across the dark dining room archway.
My father tried to push himself up from the floor behind the overturned mahogany table, cursing his own son in a ragged whisper, while I gripped the scorched walnut box against my ribs with one hand and felt the cold, worn edges of my mother's silver half-dollar coin inside my pocket with the other.
Luke did not waste a fraction of a second arguing with the gunmen or waiting for them to clear the doorway.
Aiming two inches above the refrigerator door where the heavy cast-iron ceiling radiator pipe ran down from the second-floor bathroom, Luke fired two deafening nine-millimeter rounds that ruptured the pressurized hot-water main and shattered the glass globe of the kitchen's antique gas lamp fixture.
Scalding rust-colored water and blinding white steam instantly erupted downward across the kitchen doorway like a boiling waterfall, searing the face mask of the lead shooter and knocking his rifle barrel wild as bullets chewed harmlessly into the dining room ceiling moldings.
Before the second gunman could step around the curtain of scalding steam, Luke grabbed my father under his uninjured right arm, hauled the seventy-nine-year-old man to his feet with effortless strength, and shoved both of us backward through the narrow oak door beneath the front staircase that led down into the nineteenth-century brick root cellar.
"Come on, Michael!" I shouted back through the swirling haze of steam and gunsmoke as my brother cowered on the kitchen linoleum beside the stove.
Instead of running toward us, Michael scrambled on his hands and knees into the dining room, lunging for my dropped handbag to search for the walnut box before the gunmen recovered their vision.
Luke slammed the heavy iron-reinforced cellar door shut in the face of a burst of rifle fire, dropped the solid steel crossbar into its stone brackets, and hurried my father and me down the damp earthen tunnel that connected our basement coal chute to the storm-drainage ravine behind the old corner church.
Two minutes later, soaked to the bone by the pouring October rain and covered in red Virginia clay, we burst through the overgrown ivy grates behind the church parking lot where Luke had wisely parked our rented black SUV out of sight of the main house.
Luke lifted my trembling father into the rear passenger seat, tossed the scorched walnut box into my lap in the front seat, and slid behind the wheel just as the two gunmen and a third driver in the black Cadillac roared out of Hawthorne Road to cut off the main avenue toward the interstate.
As the Cadillac's high beams swept across the rear bumper of our SUV and submachine-gun fire sparked off the wet asphalt behind our tires, the dashboard navigation screen barked at Luke to turn left onto the main boulevard—where a second black SUV was already pulling across both lanes to trap us in a crossfire.
Without touching the brakes at sixty miles an hour, Luke yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, smashing straight through a wooden municipal sawhorse barrier painted with yellow Road Closed signs and hurtling down the flooded, condemned concrete incline of the old Elm Street culvert—the exact shortcut he had known was closed earlier that night.
"Hold onto the grab bar!" Luke shouted over the roar of the engine as the flooded drainage creek raged four feet below the crumbled right lane of the culvert bridge.
While the pursuing Cadillac slammed on its brakes and skidded violently into a stone retaining wall rather than risk the collapsed bridge, Luke kept our left tires balanced with millimeter precision along the six-inch reinforced steel box-girder underneath the west curb, carrying us safely across the gap onto the industrial riverfront highway.
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As I turned around in my seat with my heart pounding in my throat to check on my father's bleeding arm, I noticed that the emergency burner phone clipped to my father's belt—a phone I had never seen him use before—was glowing with an active, muted voice call that had been transmitting every word spoken inside our car for the past four minutes.
When I snatched the phone off my father's belt and held it up to the dashboard light, the name on the screen was not ninety-one-one, and it was not the police—it was an active patch to my ex-husband Mark's private cell phone, and through the speaker, I heard Mark scream in agony as a cold male voice told my father that they now had both of his children's husbands and sons at the Pier Four lumber shed, because Michael had just been dragged into their van alongside Mark.
