Chapter 10 - The False Victory at Joliet
The white stock car was screaming down the rain-slicked Joliet front straightaway at over a hundred and forty miles per hour, less than seven seconds away from slamming head-on into the unpadded concrete retaining wall at the end of Pit Lane with a terrified Brielle Sutton strapped inside the passenger cage.
Up on the roof of the track control tower five hundred yards away, the rotor blades of Chase Whitaker’s chartered escape helicopter were already spinning at full pitch to lift him into the low November clouds the second the car exploded below.
"There is no time to intercept that car on the track with the Maybach, she is going to hit the concrete at full throttle in six seconds," Luca shouted as he leaped from the front seat.
I did not run for cover behind the concrete wall.
Instead, I bolted straight to the steel pit-crew telemetry console mounted beneath the starter’s stand ten feet from the track fence, flipped open the rain cover, and plugged Danny Vance’s master diagnostic cable from my laptop satchel directly into the trackside fiber-optic loop.
"What are you doing, Vivian, Chase locked out the standard pit-wall kill switch when he jammed the throttle servo," Matteo said as he vaulted onto the steel platform beside me to shield my body from the approaching impact with his own frame.
"Chase locked out the standard radio channel, Matteo, but he never knew that after his brain injury two years ago, I hardwired a hidden medical emergency override frequency directly into the engine control unit of every car in his fleet in case he ever suffered a blackout at two hundred miles per hour," I shouted over the deafening roar of the approaching engine.
At four seconds to impact—with the white stock car less than three hundred feet away and Brielle’s eyes wide with silent terror behind the windshield—my fingers hammered the nine-digit hospital admission date of Chase’s 2024 stay into the trackside keypad and hit the red Master Medical Override key.
Instantly, a high-output encrypted radio pulse shot from the pit-lane antenna straight into the white car’s onboard computer, overriding Chase’s jammed throttle servo, cutting the fuel injectors dead, deploying the roof drag flaps, and locking all four carbon-ceramic disc brakes at maximum anti-lock pressure.
Screaming across the wet asphalt in a blinding cloud of steam and burning tire smoke, the three-thousand-pound race car fishtailed violently, spun one hundred and eighty degrees along the painted pit wall, and slid to a dead, smoking halt with its rear bumper twelve inches from the concrete barrier.
Inside the silent cockpit, Brielle slumped forward against her harness, sobbing hysterically as she realized the woman whose home and marriage she had helped destroy had just saved her life with one second to spare.
Up on the roof of the control tower, Chase stared down at the intact white race car in disbelief as he scrambled into the cabin of the waiting helicopter clutching a briefcase of stolen bearer bonds, only for two unmarked black helicopters from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Illinois State Police tactical unit to drop out of the clouds directly above the tower and force his aircraft back onto the roof at gunpoint.
Matteo had alerted the United States Attorney’s organized crime task force the moment we left DeSantis Tower at five-forty-five that morning, having them track Chase’s cellular signal from the air while we kept him focused on the pit lane below.
Ten minutes later, as morning sunlight broke through the storm clouds over the racetrack, four federal marshals marched a handcuffed, weeping Chase Whitaker down the iron tower stairs right past the pit wall where I stood beside Matteo and his younger brother Eli.
With Brielle signing a complete federal confession in the police command bus to save herself from a life sentence—handing over the original notarized proof that cleared my name of the four-million-dollar Baron loan and testifying under oath that Chase had intentionally cut Eli DeSantis’s brake line at Indianapolis two years ago—every single weapon Chase had forged against me was shattered forever.
My Highland Park estate and my brother Noah’s clinic were restored one hundred percent to my sole ownership, Whitaker Motorsports was legally dissolved into DeSantis Motorsports with me as Managing Director, and as Chase was shoved into a federal prison van facing thirty years behind bars, Matteo pulled me into his arms on the sunlit pit lane and kissed me as if he would never let me go.
For twenty glorious minutes, as I walked inside Matteo’s luxury mobile command coach parked behind the paddock to sign the final restitution papers while Matteo stepped outside to speak with the federal prosecutor, I truly believed the nightmare was over and that the most feared man in Chicago had been my salvation.
Looking for a pen to sign the release form, I pulled open the bottom titanium drawer of Matteo’s desk—which Luca had accidentally left unlatched during the midnight raid on Dario’s files—and saw a thick, fireproof black leather binder stamped with a classification date from two years ago.
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With my heart suddenly pounding in my ears, I lifted the cover of Matteo’s private binder and froze in bone-chilling horror as I stared at dozens of covert surveillance photographs taken of me sleeping beside Chase’s hospital bed two years ago, clipped alongside a signed fifty-thousand-dollar payment receipt proving that Matteo DeSantis himself had secretly bribed Chase’s neurosurgeon at Northwestern Hospital to medically induce Chase’s three-month memory loss.
And pinned to the final page of the binder was the unredacted crash report of my own late father—who I had been told died in a solo highway accident on the exact night of Eli’s qualifying wreck—with a handwritten note from Matteo’s late father to Matteo that read: "Keep Chase Whitaker alive and seduce his wife Vivian until you get the silver key she doesn’t know she inherited, because if she ever opens her father’s vault in Geneva, she will learn that we were the ones who forced her father’s car off the bridge, and she will burn the DeSantis empire to the ground."
