Chapter 5 - The Escort
"Step away from the windows, Clara!" Briggs’s voice boomed through the wooden door, dropping all pretense of polite conversation.
A split second later, the front door didn't just open—it shattered inward off its hinges as Briggs drove his massive combat boot through the lock. He burst into our small entryway like an armored truck, wearing a heavy ballistic vest beneath his dark trench coat, a short-barreled shotgun gripped in his massive hands.
Behind him were two other men in charcoal suits, their faces set in stone, weapons drawn and held tight against their chests.
"Mom!" I screamed, breaking out of the bathroom and running straight for her.
Mom scooped me off the floor, shielding me with her entire body as she backed into the kitchen corner. "Don't touch her! Please!"
"We’re not here to touch you, lady, we’re here to keep you breathing," Briggs growled, stepping past her toward the living room window.
He didn't pull back the curtain; he used the barrel of his weapon to nudge the edge aside by half an inch. Down in the alleyway, three men in dark hoodies were climbing the rusted metal fire escape, their silhouettes sharp against the sodium streetlights.
"They're coming up the east ladder," Briggs spoke into a small radio clipped to his shoulder. "Two on the ground, three on the stairs."
"Liquidate the threat on the fire escape," Vincent Kane’s smooth, terrifying voice came back over the radio frequency, clear as ice. "Bring the mother and the girl to the high-rise. Do not allow them to be touched."
"Copy that, Boss," Briggs said.
He racked the slide of his shotgun with a heavy, mechanical clack.
"Cover the girl's ears, Ms. Carter," Briggs ordered without turning around.
Mom slammed her hands over my ears, pulling my face hard into her collarbone, but the vibrations shook the entire apartment anyway.
BOOM.
The shotgun roared, blowing the living room window and its frame out into the night in a blizzard of splintered wood and sparkling safety glass. A scream tore through the alley below, followed by the heavy, sickening thud of a body hitting the industrial dumpsters three stories down.
The two guards behind Briggs opened fire with suppressed submachine guns, a rhythmic, terrifying chuff-chuff-chuff that sent spent brass casings dancing across our worn linoleum floor.
Gunfire snapped back from the street—sharp, high-pitched cracks that punched jagged holes through our plaster walls, sending clouds of chalky white dust billowing through the air. The floral pictures Mom had bought at the thrift store shattered against the wall.
"Move! Move! Down the front stairs!" Briggs yelled, grabbing Mom by the elbow and hoisting her forward while the other two men kept up a wall of suppressing fire toward the shattered window.
We tumbled into the narrow hallway of our apartment building.
Neighbors were screaming behind locked doors, dogs were barking, and the fire alarms began to shriek, their red strobes painting the peeling wallpaper in pulses of bloody light.
Briggs took the stairs three at a time, moving with an impossible speed for a man his size. When we burst through the rear service exit into the back parking lot, a matte-black armored Cadillac Escalade was already idling, its heavy steel bumper idling inches from the doorway.
The rear door flew open.
A hand reached out—broad, strong, with long fingers and a vintage gold signet ring.
Vincent Kane pulled Mom and me inside the vehicle in one fluid motion, slamming the heavy reinforced door shut behind us.
The glass of the SUV took two direct impacts from high-caliber rounds as we accelerated into the street. The bullets didn't penetrate; they left white, spider-webbed impact rings on the four-inch ballistic glass.
The tires squealed, smoke billowing from the wheel wells as the driver ripped the steering wheel, throwing the massive vehicle around the corner of Clark Street and rocketing toward Lake Shore Drive at eighty miles an hour.
Mom collapsed onto the leather floor of the cabin, hyperventilating, her fingernails digging into my shoulders. "They’re going to kill us... they’re going to kill us..."
Vincent Kane remained seated in the deep leather bench across from us. He hadn't spilled a single drop of the black coffee resting in the cup holder beside him.
He bent down, his hands resting on his knees, looking directly into my mother's terrified face.
"Frank Moretti is not going to kill you, Ms. Carter," Vincent said softly, his baritone steady enough to anchor a ship in a hurricane. "Frank Moretti is going to spend the next forty-eight hours realizing that he made the single greatest mistake of his life by bringing weapons onto my street."
He looked down at me. I was sitting on Mom’s lap, my red hoodie dusted with white plaster powder, still clutching the little box of worn crayons in my small fist.
"You alright, Rory?" Vincent asked.
I wiped a streak of white drywall dust from my nose with the back of my hand.
"They broke our window," I said, my voice shaking just a little bit. "And my mom just paid the rent."
Vincent stared at me for three long seconds.
May you like
Then, for the first time, a slow, genuine smile spread across his face—a cold, terrifying, beautiful thing.
"Don't worry about the window, little girl," Vincent Kane murmured, looking out into the neon blur of the Chicago rain. "I'm going to buy you a whole new building."
