Chapter 5 - Blood in the Diner
The breaking news alert showing Howard Ellis’s unconscious body being loaded into a Manhattan ambulance burned into Nathaniel’s retinas for half a second before the kitchen swinging doors burst inward under the kick of the lead gunman’s boot.
Howard had not betrayed him after all; someone inside Whitfield Holdings had forged Howard’s notary seal to drain the Zurich vault and had just tried to murder his best friend when Howard discovered the theft.
The masked intruder raised his suppressed nine-millimeter pistol toward Clara as she slammed the lid of her forensic laptop shut on the stainless-steel prep table.
He expected to find a helpless small-town waitress and a frightened, out-of-shape billionaire who had spent his whole life behind a mahogany desk.
He did not know that Nathaniel’s late father had sent him to Culver Military Academy for four years and made him box golden-glove heavyweights in Brooklyn gyms every summer until he was twenty-two.
Before the gunman’s barrel could level at Clara’s chest, Nathaniel snatched the heavy twelve-inch cast-iron skillet resting on the warm burner beside his hand and swung it horizontally with every ounce of torque in his six-foot-two frame.
The solid iron pan struck the gunman’s right wrist with the sound of a baseball bat cracking a timber post, shattering the radius bone instantly and sending the suppressed pistol skittering beneath the walk-in freezer.
As the first thug dropped to his knees howling in agony, the second masked attacker lunged around the stainless-steel island swinging a three-foot steel crowbar straight at the back of Nathaniel’s skull.
Clara moved with the razor-sharp muscle memory of her federal law enforcement training at Quantico, grabbing the full glass carafe of scalding two-hundred-degree black coffee from the warmer and hurling it squarely into the eye slits of the second man’s ski mask.
Blind and shrieking as the boiling liquid soaked through the wool fabric, the attacker swung the crowbar wildly into the tiled wall just as Nathaniel stepped inside his reach, hooked a booted heel behind the man’s knee, and drove a devastating right cross straight into his jaw that knocked him out cold on the grease mat.
While Clara quickly bound both men’s wrists to the cast-iron radiator pipe with industrial zip-ties from her tool drawer, the injured first attacker’s burner phone began to vibrate inside his leather jacket pocket.
Nathaniel pulled the phone out, ripped the ski mask off the man’s sweating face, and held the glowing screen in front of his nose—where an encrypted text message had just arrived from a Manhattan number reading, Make sure the server drive is crushed and Whitfield signs the suicide note before you open the kitchen gas lines.
Recognizing the sender’s private Manhattan exchange code before the thug even opened his mouth, Nathaniel felt a cold tremor of disgust run down his spine: the number belonged to Eleanor Caldwell, Vivian’s aristocratic mother and the society matron who had spent the past year calling Nathaniel her favorite son.
Vivian and her mother had not come up to Millbrook an hour ago just to gloat over an apron or ask for a three-hundred-acre timber deed; they had come to visually confirm that Nathaniel was isolated in the diner alone so Julian Mercer’s hit squad could stage a fatal gas explosion that looked like a disgraced, bankrupt mogul taking his own life.
Clara grabbed her waterproof laptop case and a canvas go-bag from under the counter, telling Nathaniel that if Howard was still breathing in New York Presbyterian Hospital, the people who cut his elevator cables would send a second cleaner to finish him off in the ICU before midnight.
Ten minutes later, as dusk settled over the pine trees of upstate New York, Nathaniel and Clara were speeding south toward the interstate at eighty miles an hour in Clara’s beat-up blue Subaru station wagon, bypassing the main town road where the corrupt local bank had sent repo trucks to padlock her diner.
Yet just as they approached the narrow steel truss bridge spanning the Hudson River tributary at the county line, two red-and-blue police light bars flared to life out of the dark tree line ahead, blocking both lanes of the bridge.
May you like
Nathaniel breathed a momentary sigh of relief and slowed the wagon down, thinking the state police had finally responded to Clara’s nine-one-one call about the diner attack.
Instead, four heavily armed deputies stepped out from behind the cruisers with tactical shotguns raised at the windshield, dragging Nathaniel out of the driver’s seat onto the wet asphalt and locking steel handcuffs around his wrists—announcing that he was under federal arrest for the forty-million-dollar embezzlement of the Whitfield employee pension fund and the attempted murder of Howard Ellis, based on an emergency eyewitness affidavit signed in Manhattan thirty minutes ago by his grieving fiancée, Vivian Caldwell.
