Chapter 104 - The Shadow of the Second Shooter
Vance didn't answer with words. He threw a smoke grenade—one of the tactical canisters he’d pulled from the trunk of his Crown Victoria before we hiked the ridge. A thick, blinding cloud of sulfurous white fog erupted between the tree line and the catwalk, billowing out over the churning waters of the gorge.
"Go! Go!" Vance’s boots pounded across the wet planks as he sprinted back to us, grabbing Julian under his uninjured arm and hoisting him upright in one brutal, fluid motion.
I scrambled ahead, my boots slipping on the frozen river mud. The weir powerhouse was an ominous relic of 1930s masonry, built of heavy river basalt and reinforced iron that had withstood eighty years of spring floods. The heavy oak-and-iron door leading into the sub-dam trench was swollen with dampness, but the ancient latch hung loose.
Behind us, through the veil of white smoke, the distinctive thump of a semi-automatic shotgun joined the rifle fire.
"That wasn't Melissa's rifle," Vance said, shoving Julian through the door into the pitch-black corridor of the powerhouse. He turned back, his gun raised, scanning the fog-choked timber.
"What do you mean?" I asked, panting as I braced Julian against the cold stone wall.
"The rhythm of the shots. That’s heavy gauge buckshot," Vance replied, his voice grim. "Bradley didn't just break Melissa out of the transport van. He brought muscle. The brothers from the scrap yard on Route 9—the ones Evelyn paid to keep the eviction notices quiet."
A voice echoed through the iron grating of the weir exterior, deep and guttural: "Bradley said twenty grand if we bring back the girl’s phone and whatever’s in the lawyer’s pockets! Flush 'em out!"
"They aren't trying to capture anything anymore," I whispered, the realization striking me like an icy bucket of river water. "They know the federal indictment can't be stopped. They just want to eliminate the witnesses before they hit the border."
"They won't get the chance," Vance said, reaching into the darkness and slamming the four-inch iron deadbolt across the inside of the door. The heavy timber shuddered almost instantly as buckshot peppered the exterior, digging into the oak with the sound of snapping bone.
Inside, the silence was suffocating, broken only by the steady, deep hum of thousands of gallons of water vibrating through the concrete floor beneath our feet.
Julian slid down the wall until he sat on the damp flagstones. He looked up at me through the shadows, his face illuminated only by the faint green glow of Vance’s tactical flashlight.
"The brass key in your pocket, Katherine," Julian whispered, clutching his chest. "Look at the stem. Look at the numbers stamped near the barrel."
I pulled the key from my pocket with trembling fingers. Vance angled the narrow beam of light downward.
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Stamped into the tarnished metal were not letters, nor a bank box number. It was a single set of geographic coordinates followed by a date: *42.8864° N, 73.3211° W — 04.18.1974.*
The day Melissa was born.
