Chapter 4 - SHADOWS IN THE DARK
The darkness was instantaneous and absolute.
A woman screamed near the window tables.
Glasses shattered against tile.
Chairs scraped violently across the hardwood floor as patrons panicked.
"Stay down!" Julian’s voice barked with military command.
I dropped to my knees beside table twelve.
The smell of ozone and burning plastic drifted from the ceiling vents.
The emergency backup lights did not turn on.
Someone had cut the primary power and disabled the generators.
"Father, stay under the table," Julian ordered in the dark.
"I’m an old man, Julian, not an idiot," Arthur muttered from beneath the linen cloth.
Footsteps echoed from the kitchen doors.
Heavy, tactical boots.
Not the rubber soles of line cooks.
I reached out blindly in the dark.
My fingers brushed against a heavy stainless steel soup ladle on the serving tray beside table twelve.
I gripped the handle tightly.
A beam of bright white LED light sliced through the darkness from the back corridor.
Two figures moved through the kitchen swinging doors.
They wore black tactical jackets, ball caps pulled low, and masks covering their faces.
In their hands were suppressed handguns.
"They're not here to talk," Julian whispered.
I felt Julian shift beside me, drawing something sleek and metallic from his inside jacket pocket.
A suppressed Glock 19.
The CEO of a hospitality empire was moving with the lethal grace of a combat veteran.
"Lily," Julian whispered directly into my ear.
His breath was warm against my temple.
"Can you get to the basement service hatch behind the pantry?"
"Yes," I whispered back, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
"I know every floorboard in the kitchen."
"Take my father. Get him down to the wine cellar."
"What about you?"
"I’m going to make sure Charles Price's clean-up crew never leaves this floor."
The beam of flashlight swept across the carpet, inching closer to table twelve.
"Now!" Julian hissed.
Julian lunged out from behind the booth, firing two rapid, muffled shots into the darkness.
Pfft. Pfft.
Sparks flew off the brass chandelier above the intruders' heads.
One of the masked men grunted, stumbling sideways into the hostess counter.
"Move, Lily!" Arthur urged, grabbing my wrist with surprising strength.
We crawled on our hands and knees through the narrow space between the booths.
Broken glass bit into the palms of my hands, but I didn't feel the pain.
Adrenaline roared through my veins like wildfire.
Behind us, another muffled gunshot echoed, followed by the sound of bone breaking and a heavy body hitting the floor.
Julian was fighting in the dark.
I pushed open the swinging kitchen door with my shoulder.
The smell of roasting garlic and cold grease filled the air.
The kitchen was empty; the prep cooks had fled through the back alley door.
"The pantry is over here," I whispered, guiding Arthur by his coat sleeve.
We slipped into the dry storage room, surrounded by fifty-pound sacks of flour and shelves of canned tomatoes.
In the corner lay the iron trapdoor leading down into the old 1920s coal cellar.
I grabbed the iron ring and pulled with all my strength.
The heavy door groaned, opening into a dark, stone staircase.
"Go, Mr. Calder," I urged.
Arthur stopped on the top step.
He reached into the lining of his frayed coat cuff.
He pulled out a small, flat brass key wrapped in black electrical tape.
He pressed it firmly into my bleeding palm.
"What is this?" I asked, staring at the tarnished metal.
"This is the key to safety deposit box 412 at the Chestnut Street Depository," Arthur said.
His eyes burned with fierce intensity in the faint light filtering through the door.
"It contains the original handwritten ledger."
"The proof that Charles Price laundered fifty million dollars for the Russian mob through my hotels."
Footsteps pounded on the kitchen tile outside the pantry door.
Slow. Deliberate.
The brass doorknob began to turn.
Arthur pushed me behind a shelf of olive oil crates.
The pantry door creaked open.
A man stepped into the threshold, holding a flashlight attached to the barrel of a pistol.
The beam landed squarely on Arthur Calder’s chest.
"Found you, old man," a cold voice sneered.
It was Greg Holloway.
In his trembling hand, the manager held an unregistered revolver.
His face was drenched in sweat, his eyes bulging with manic desperation.
"You should have died in the river, Arthur," Greg cried, raising the gun.
"Charles will kill me if you walk out of here!"
My vision flashed red.
I stepped out from behind the crates.
I swung the heavy stainless steel soup ladle with every ounce of rage and desperation in my body.
CRACK.
The solid metal slammed into the side of Greg’s wrist.
The revolver flew from his hand, clattering across the concrete floor and tumbling straight down the open cellar chute.
Greg howled in agony, clutching his broken wrist.
Before he could lunge at me, a large hand clamped onto his collar from behind.
Julian Calder stepped out of the shadows.
His face was streaked with soot and blood.
He slammed Greg’s face into the steel shelving unit with bone-crunching force.
Greg went limp and slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Julian looked down at his father, then at me holding the bent soup ladle.
A rare, wolfish smirk touched Julian’s lips.
"Remind me never to send back my soup when you're working, Lily."
"We need to get out," I breathed, dropping the ladle.
"The back alley is blocked by Price's men," Julian said, checking his magazine.
"We have to take the coal chute into the subway tunnels."
Suddenly, my cell phone vibrated violently against my hip.
I pulled it from my pocket with shaking fingers.
A text message lit up the cracked screen.
It was from Mason.
Lily, don't come home. Charles Price's men are outside our apartment. They have guns.
May you like
My breath stopped in my throat.
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