Chapter 6 - Blood on the Tide
""Shoot her,"" Ciro said.
The silence that followed was louder than the crashing sea. Paolo hesitated, his gun hand wavering by a fraction of an inch as he stared at his cousin. Elena didn't flinch, but her grip on the notebook tightened until the cardboard covers bowed inward.
""Shoot her,"" Ciro repeated, stepping slightly to the side to give Paolo a clear line of sight, his voice utterly flat, empty of all emotion. ""Then explain to the South Boston syndicate why you brought them an unreadable book with no key. Arthur Vance didn't leave the substitution key in his head, Paolo. He left it in his daughters' names. Without Elena, that book is just kind of kindling.""
Paolo's eyes darted between Ciro’s cold face and Elena’s unflinching gaze. The uncertainty was like poison in the cold air. One of the thugs behind him shifted his weight on the gravel, muttering, ""Paolo, the tide's coming up through the floor grates. If the girl drowns down there before we get the numbers, we don't get paid.""
""Shut up!"" Paolo snapped, his head jerking back toward the bunker.
That half-second distraction was all Ciro needed.
He moved with an explosive, terrifying violence that Elena had never witnessed in an ordinary man. He did not draw his gun; he closed the ten-foot gap like a greyhound, his shoulder slamming into Paolo’s chest with a sickening crunch of ribs. The silver revolver discharged into the mud with a muffled roar as both men hit the concrete apron.
""Elena! The grate!"" Ciro roared as he rolled, his forearm locking around Paolo’s throat.
The two hired men lunged forward with their bats, but Elena didn't look at them. Clutching the notebook like a shield, she sprinted past the flailing bodies on the concrete and plunged into the dark mouth of the pump station.
The smell inside was suffocating—stagnant sea sludge, rust, and the oily reek of old diesel pumps. Below her feet, through an iron mesh walkway, black water surged and gurgled with the incoming tide.
""Theresa!"" she screamed into the gloom.
A weak, choking sob answered from the lower cistern, twenty feet below the main deck. ""Elena? Elena, my feet are tied! The water's at my knees!""
Elena dropped to her knees on the slippery iron grating. At the bottom of an iron ladder bolted to the wet brick wall, Theresa was lashed to an overflow pipe with heavy yellow nylon rope. The black marsh water was already swirling around her waist, foaming white where it sucked through the drainage valves.
Above, the deafening crack of a handgun echoed through the concrete bunker, followed by the heavy, wet impact of a body falling against sheet metal. Elena froze on the ladder, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Footsteps pounded on the iron walkway above her. A figure appeared at the top of the ladder, silhouetted against the green doorway light.
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It was not Ciro.
It was the second thug, his baseball bat dripping with dark water, a jagged switchblade clicking open in his left hand. ""Drop the book down the shaft, sweetheart,"" he grunted, descending the first rung. ""Or I cut the rope and let the tide take her out to the bay right now.""
