Chapter 9 - The Courthouse Steps
Ahead of us in the pouring rain, my cousin Chief Deputy Arthur Miller racked a twelve-gauge shell into the chamber of his shotgun and shouted over his cruiser's bullhorn for Luke to shut off the engine and step out with his hands up.
Behind our rear bumper, the high beams of Victor Vance's two remaining black SUVs closed the distance at seventy miles an hour, trapping us on the elevated riverfront causeway between a corrupt sheriff's blockade in front and a syndicate hit squad behind.
In the backseat of the Escalade, Mark's breathing was growing shallower by the second beneath my blood-soaked hands, and if we stopped on this wet asphalt for even five minutes, Mark would bleed to death before Victor Vance's men finished off the rest of us.
"Hold onto Mark and brace your feet against the bulkhead!" Luke commanded in a voice of pure iron, reaching down to shift the six-ton armored Escalade into four-wheel low gear instead of touching the brake pedal.
Fifty yards before Chief Deputy Miller's roadblock, Luke wrenched the steering wheel sharply to the left, jumping the ten-inch concrete median curb at fifty-five miles an hour and driving straight through the rusted chain-link fence of the unfinished municipal floodwall construction site running parallel to the raging James River.
Deputy Miller fired two shotgun blasts that spider-webbed the outer layer of the Escalade's two-inch ballistic glass as Luke steered the massive truck along the narrow, muddy steel sheet-piling catwalk overhanging the river rapids.
When one of Vance's pursuing SUVs tried to follow us onto the saturated clay embankment behind the floodwall without knowing where the subterranean concrete pilings were anchored, the muddy bank gave way beneath their heavy tires with a thunderous splash, flipping the pursuit vehicle sideways into the shallow retention basin while Luke ramped our Escalade back up onto the downtown expressway ramp and left the blockade stranded behind a wall of concrete barriers.
Four minutes later, Luke skidded to a halt beneath the bright emergency awning of St. Mary's Hospital, where waiting trauma surgeons and armed hospital security guards rushed out with a gurney to pull Mark straight into the operating theater for an emergency thoracotomy.
Leaving my brother Michael handcuffed to a hospital security pipe in the custody of two honest city detectives so he could neither run nor be murdered by Vance's cleaners, Luke, my father, and I drove six blocks east to the Main Street Bus Terminal.
Using the bloodstained brass key I had pulled from Mark's pocket, I unlocked Locker Three-Twelve and retrieved a heavy waterproof pelican case containing Mark's encrypted solid-state drive alongside three years of handwritten notebooks in which Mark had documented every single threat Denise had made against my life—and taped inside the front cover of the notebook was an unsent birthday card addressed to me for every year we had been apart.
Pressing the back of my hand against my mouth to hold back a sob, I walked between Luke and my father up the wide granite steps of the United States Federal Courthouse at eleven-thirty at night, where Luke's brother-in-law—Assistant United States Attorney Thomas Ward, the younger brother of Luke's murdered wife Sarah—had convened an emergency midnight grand jury warrant team on the fourth floor.
Inside the secure federal war room, surrounded by six armed United States Marshals, Ward plugged Mark's solid-state drive into the Justice Department mainframe while simultaneously loading the fragile micro-cassette tape that my mother had hidden in the false bottom of the walnut box six years ago.
Within ten minutes, Mark's meticulous accounting files lit up the wall monitors with over ninety million dollars in narcoterrorism and contraband port bribes flowing through Vane Development, prompting the federal judge on video link to sign immediate no-knock arrest warrants that sent forty FBI SWAT agents roaring across Richmond to seize Victor Vance, Denise, and Chief Deputy Arthur Miller.
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Then Thomas Ward pressed the play button on the digital audio enhancer to listen to the micro-cassette recording my mother Helen had recorded on the morning of her death six years ago—and as my mother's familiar, gentle voice filled the quiet federal office, I reached out to hold my father's hand, only for the words coming out of the speaker to turn the blood in my veins to solid ice.
"If you are listening to this tape, Luke, then I didn't make it home from River Road today," my mother's voice said clearly through the static of six years, "and you need to protect my daughter Claire from the person who truly founded Vane Development thirty years ago—because Victor Vance is only a front man, and the real monster who ordered the Pier Four fire that killed your wife Sarah is standing right inside my own house."
