Chapter 7 - THE CLEANUP AND THE CONFESSION
At 3:00 AM, the blizzard began to ease, leaving the city buried beneath two feet of pristine, silence-inducing snow.
In an abandoned boatyard on the edge of the Calumet River, a heavy steel shipping container sat illuminated by the headlights of Gabriel’s Lincoln Town Car.
Inside the container, Evan Cross sat tied to a steel chair. His leg had been wrapped tightly with a medical tourniquet, stopping the bleeding, but his face was ghastly pale from shock and cold.
Gabriel sat across from him on a wooden crate. Marcus Vance stood by the open container door, holding a thick Manila folder.
“Why, Evan?” Gabriel asked quietly, his hands resting on his knees. “That’s the only question I have left. I gave you twenty percent of Rowan Freight. You were a multimillionaire. You had a home in Lake Forest, a yacht in the harbor, equity in every legal port we opened. What could Moretti possibly give you that I hadn't already provided?”
Evan let out a wet, bitter laugh, shaking his head as tears cut clean trails through the grime on his cheeks.
“Twenty percent?” Evan spat, his voice cracking with built-up poison. “Twenty percent of your empire, Gabriel! Everywhere I went in this city, people looked at me and saw your lapdog! 'There goes Gabriel’s lieutenant.' 'There goes the guy who holds Gabriel’s coat.'”
Evan leaned forward against his restraints, his eyes wild with resentment.
“I built that company too!” Evan screamed. “I took the bullets! I bribed the judges! I did the dirty work while you played the dignified CEO in your five-thousand-dollar suits! And then what do you do? You decide to go clean! You start putting everything into charitable trusts for the city! You were going to give away the fortune we bled for!”
Gabriel listened in silence. The puzzle pieces finally clicked into place. It wasn't just about the eighty million dollars. It was about ego. It was the ancient, festering poison of a second-in-command who believed he was destined to be king.
“I was giving it away to protect us, Evan,” Gabriel said softly. “I built those trusts so the federal government could never seize our assets. I was building something that would outconceal our past, so our children wouldn't have to live with blood on their hands.”
“I don't care about your clean future!” Evan roared. “I wanted what was mine!”
Gabriel stood up slowly. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out the blue-chipped key that Lucy had found beneath the service staircase, and tossed it into Evan’s lap.
“That key cost you everything, Evan,” Gabriel said. “Not a rival gang. Not the FBI. An eight-year-old girl who noticed a squeak in a shoe.”
Evan stared down at the little brass key, his chest heaving, a broken, defeated groan escaping his throat.
Gabriel turned to Vance. “Where are the federal prosecutors?”
“Assistant US Attorney Miller is waiting at the federal building downtown,” Vance replied. “I sent him the decrypted audio files of Evan and Moretti arranging the RICO frame-job, along with the offshore account ledgers Moretti used to fund his hitmen.”
Gabriel looked back at Evan.
“You’re not going to die tonight, Evan,” Gabriel said. “That would be too merciful. Instead, you are going to spend the next thirty years in a maximum-security federal prison for conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, and corporate fraud. Moretti’s men who survived tonight are already being processed. They will testify against you to save themselves.”
“Gabriel, no!” Evan pleaded, the defiance instantly evaporating from his voice, replaced by hysterical terror. “Not federal prison! Moretti’s crew has people inside! They’ll kill me the second I step onto the block!”
“Then you’d better start praying, Evan,” Gabriel said quietly. “Because I won't be there to pull you out of the fire this time.”
Gabriel stepped out of the shipping container. Vance slid the heavy steel door shut, the latch locking into place with a loud, final CLANG.
Gabriel walked out into the crisp, cold air of the morning. The sky over Lake Michigan was beginning to turn pale pink with the dawn.
May you like
The fourteen-year lie was over. The war had been won.
Now, he had a promise to keep.
