Chapter 3 - The Black Lincoln Outside My Window
The interior smelled of hand-stitched leather and gunpowder.
The door sealed with a heavy, pressurized thud.
The city vanished outside the soundproof glass.
Adrian slid into the front passenger seat.
The driver was a man I hadn't seen at the diner.
Older.
Scars carving across his temples.
Hands like iron vices gripped at ten and two on the steering wheel.
"Go, Leo," Adrian commanded.
The Lincoln surged forward with brutal torque.
My spine slammed back into the leather upholstery.
Through the tinted rear window, I saw the two silhouettes on 4th Avenue.
They fired twice.
Two dull thwacks sounded against the rear glass.
The reinforced glass didn't even spiderweb.
Bulletproof.
"Keep your head down," Adrian said through the rearview mirror.
I was already curled into a tight ball on the floorboards.
My hands still gripped Danny’s open pocketknife.
My heart was beating in my teeth.
"Put the knife away," Adrian added. "You'll cut the leather."
"Pull over," I rasped out.
"No."
"I said pull over!"
I lunged forward, pressing the tip of the blade against the back of his
headrest.
Two inches from his ear.
The driver, Leo, reached down toward his hip.
"Easy, Leo," Adrian said softly.
He didn't move an inch.
He didn't flinch away from the steel blade.
"You're shaking, Emily," Adrian murmured.
"Tell your driver to stop this car or I swear to God—"
"Or what?"
He turned his head slowly.
The blade was now an inch from his cheekbone.
His gray eyes were entirely devoid of fear.
They were calculating machines.
"You saved my life forty minutes ago," he said smoothly.
"I didn't save you," I lied through chattering teeth. "I just gave you the
bill."
"You wrote 317."
"It's a table number!"
"The Blue Anchor only has twenty-two tables."
The silence in the vehicle became suffocating.
He held my gaze.
I couldn't look away.
"Who taught you that sequence?" Adrian asked.
His voice wasn't threatening.
It was something worse.
It was patient.
"My brother," I whispered before I could stop myself.
"Danny Rivers," Adrian stated.
It wasn't a question.
It was an undeniable fact.
"You knew him," I said, the realization hitting me like cold water.
"I did."
"He was an accountant!" I shouted, tears finally stinging my eyes. "He worked
for an import firm in Philadelphia! He had nothing to do with people like you!"
Adrian looked at me through the rearview mirror with something resembling pity.
"Is that what he told you?"
"Stop the car!" I slammed my fist against the partition.
"He was an auditor, Emily. For the port authority."
Adrian adjusted the cuff of his charcoal jacket.
"He audited my shipping containers for eighteen months."
"Then why did they kill him?"
The question hung in the air like poison gas.
The Lincoln turned sharply onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The yellow lights of the highway flashed rhythmically across Adrian’s stone
face.
"Because he found something in container forty-two that wasn't mine," Adrian
said.
My breath hitched.
"What does that mean?"
"It means Danny was an honest man in a dishonest city," Adrian replied quietly.
"He found a syndicate shipment from Montreal. Heroin. Unmarked weapons."
He paused, his jaw tightening slightly.
"They thought Danny worked for me. They thought I was stealing their route."
"So they executed him," I choked out.
"They tried to execute both of us," Adrian corrected.
He reached into his breast pocket.
He pulled out a small, tarnished silver coin.
He held it backward between his fingers so I could see it.
Engraved on the silver surface was a crude, hand-stamped number:
317.
My breath left my lungs in an agonizing rush.
"Danny gave me that three days before he died," Adrian said.
"He told me that if his system was compromised, he would use that code."
"He said if anyone ever showed me that number... it meant the executioners were
already in the room."
I stared at the coin.
It was real.
The same stamping tool Danny kept in his garage workshop.
The same dented edge.
"He never mentioned your name," I whispered.
"Because Danny wanted you to survive," Adrian said.
The car descended an off-ramp into an industrial district.
Tall corrugated metal fences.
Darkened warehouses lined with barbed wire.
Security gates swung open automatically as the Lincoln approached.
Floodlights washed the hood in blinding halogen glare.
"Where are we?" Panic surged back into my throat.
"My private terminal," Adrian said.
"Take me back to my apartment."
"Your apartment is already burned out, Emily."
My body went cold.
"What?"
"Leo," Adrian instructed.
The driver picked up a tablet mounted to the dash.
He passed it back to me.
On the screen was a live feed of a street in Crown Heights.
My street.
My three-story brownstone building.
Flames were licking through the second-floor windows.
Black smoke billowed into the night sky.
Fire trucks with flashing red lights blocked the intersection.
My bed.
My clothes.
My mother's old photo albums.
Everything gone.
Reduced to ash in forty-five minutes.
"They didn't just want Danny silenced," Adrian said, turning fully in his seat.
"They want the entire Rivers bloodline erased."
"Why?" I sobbed. "I don't know anything! I'm a waitress!"
"Because Danny left behind a ledger," Adrian replied.
"And they think he gave it to you."
The Lincoln came to a smooth stop inside an cavernous hangar.
Four armed men stepped into the perimeter lights, rifles held low.
Adrian opened his door and stepped onto the concrete floor.
He held his hand out toward me.
Not as an order.
As an offer.
"You have two choices, Emily Rivers."
"You can walk out those gates and survive for approximately twelve hours."
"Or you can step inside, tell me what Danny hid, and let me kill the men who
murdered your brother."
I looked at the open gate behind the Lincoln.
Rain falling on empty asphalt.
Then I looked at the burning image on the tablet.
I looked at Adrian's outstretched hand.
I closed my pocketknife.
I slid it into my pocket.
I placed my hand in his.
His grip was solid iron.
As my feet touched the cold concrete of the warehouse, a shadow moved on the
catwalk seventy feet above us.
May you like
A red laser dot appeared on the center of Adrian’s chest.
"Sniper!" Leo roared.
