Chapter 6 - The Garage Encounter
Two days later, the rain was coming down in relentless sheets over Manhattan, turning the asphalt of the downtown parking garage into a dark, oil-slicked mirror.
Daniel had managed to secure bail.
It hadn't come easily. His uncle Richard had refused to take his calls, and the firm’s partners had shunned him completely. In the end, Daniel had pawned his mother’s heirloom jewelry and drained a secondary offshore trust he had hidden under his deceased grandfather's name to pay a predatory bail bondsman.
He was out on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bond, wearing an ankle monitor that blinked with a sinister green light under his damp trousers.
I had just walked out of Marcus Vance’s accounting firm on 3rd Avenue, carrying a digital storage drive containing the completed liquidation reports. As I pressed the key fob to unlock my silver Mercedes SUV in the subterranean garage, a dark figure lunged from behind a concrete pillar.
"Claire!"
I didn't scream. I didn't flinch.
My hand moved smoothly into the side pocket of my trench coat, resting firmly against the textured grip of the Kimber PepperBlaster II I had carried since my days prosecuting violent felons.
Daniel stood five feet away. His expensive coat was soaked, his designer stubble overgrown into an unkempt, desperate beard. His eyes were hollow, rimmed with dark, bruised circles. He looked like an addict who had gone three days without a fix—addicted to status, power, and wealth that had vanished into thin air.
"You have an active restraining order, Daniel," I said, my voice echoing off the low concrete ceiling. "Step back, or you will be back in the Tombs before your clothes dry."
"Claire, just listen to me for one minute!" he begged, taking a half-step forward, his hands raised in a pathetic gesture of supplication. "You have to call off the DA! You have to retract Vanessa’s statement! She’s lying, Claire! She’s a sociopath who manipulated both of us!"
"Is that why you signed an affidavit saying she was the sole perpetrator?" I asked coolly. "She signed her cooperation agreement yesterday, Daniel. She gave them the audio files from your weekend in Miami. The ones where you discussed how much powder to use so the coroner would mistake it for an accidental overdose."
Daniel’s face twisted into an expression of sheer, unadulterated venom. The mask of the charming, refined husband completely fell away, exposing the rotted, entitled core beneath.
"You ruined me!" he hissed, his voice dropping into a guttural snarl. "I built that firm! I gave you ten years of my life! You were a cold, sterile, joyless bitch who sat on millions while my family struggled to maintain our position! That money belonged to us! You didn't earn it—your father did!"
"And you tried to murder me to take it," I said, my voice deadpan.
"You drove me to it!" he shouted, taking another aggressive step forward, his fist clenching at his side. "You think you're so smart? You think you've won? Those loan sharks in New Jersey—they don't care about your grand jury! When they realize the collateral on those loans is gone, they aren't coming after me. They’re coming after the Montgomery estate! You’ll be paying off my debts for the rest of your miserable, lonely life!"
I pulled the PepperBlaster from my pocket, leveling the dual-barreled red unit directly between his eyes.
Daniel stopped dead, his jaw working silently.
"Those debts were incurred under a fraudulent corporate identity using forged signatures," I told him, each word landing like a lead weight. "Marcus Vance spent the last forty-eight hours with the state attorney general's financial crimes unit. The loan agreements have been declared legally void under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The syndicate leaders were rounded up in Newark four hours ago."
Daniel’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.
"They won't be coming after me, Daniel," I said with a faint, razor-sharp smile. "And when they find out you were the informant who provided the banking routing numbers that led the FBI to their laundering hubs... well, you’d better hope the judge gives you the maximum sentence in federal prison. Because in federal prison, there are guards. In the real world, you wouldn't survive a week."
"What... what did you say?" he whispered, his skin turning gray. "I didn't rat on them! I never gave them those numbers!"
"No," I replied, opening the driver's door of my SUV and stepping inside. "I gave them the numbers. But I used your private email account to deliver the tip. The press will report your 'valuable cooperation' with the feds in the morning edition of the *Wall Street Journal*."
I slammed the door and locked it.
Daniel lunged at the glass, banging his fists violently against the reinforced window, screaming obscenities that were muffled into pathetic squeaks by the heavy soundproofing.
May you like
I turned the ignition, reversed out of the stall without looking at him, and drove up the ramp toward the sunlight, leaving him screaming in the damp, dark shadows of the underground.
***
