Chapter 30 - The Fire on Main Street
By the time the blue-and-red flashing lights tore down the shoreline access road, the perimeter of the pavilion was in chaos.
The two remaining gunmen outside had realized their breach had failed. Seeing the approaching convoy of town cruisers, they retreated toward the Suburbans, firing several bursts from their automatic rifles into the squad cars to cover their escape.
Sheriff Thomas’s cruiser swerved hard, tires screeching against the asphalt as bullets shattered his front grill and radiator, steam billowing into the night.
Inside the smoke-filled diner, I kicked open the heavy rear service door and helped David onto the loading dock. The bitter lake wind hit our faces, carrying the smell of wet pine, gunpowder, and cordite.
"Sheriff!" I yelled into the darkness, waving an emergency flare I had grabbed from the galley kit. The crimson light painted the wet dock in deep, bloody red. "Over here! Behind the pavilion!"
Sheriff Thomas leaped from his ruined cruiser, his service revolver drawn, backed by three deputies who immediately took defensive positions behind the stone seawall.
"Benny! Stay down!" Thomas roared, his breath pluming in the freezing air.
One of the black Suburbans reversed violently, its rear bumper smashing through the diner’s wooden signpost—the hand-carved cedar sign bearing my name that the town carpenters had hung just two weeks ago. The sign snapped with a loud crack, tumbling into the gravel.
Before the SUV could swing around toward the highway, the roar of a heavy diesel engine shook the pier.
A massive, rusted Ford F-350 groundskeeper truck plowed straight off the main road at fifty miles per hour, barreling through the wooden guardrail without slowing down.
"What the hell is that?" David shouted, pulling me back against the brick wall.
The truck slammed broadside into the lead Suburban with the sound of a freight train derailment. The impact lifted the heavy SUV off its tires, rolling it twice before it smashed upside-down into the stone riprap of the lake breakwater.
The driver’s door of the Ford truck kicked open, and Grace Vance stumbled out, coughing from the deployed airbag, a heavy steel tire iron clutched in her right hand.
"Grace!" I shouted, sprinting across the gravel toward her.
"Benny!" She turned, her face smudged with soot and a cut bleeding across her forehead, but her eyes were fierce, burning with an intensity I had never seen in my little sister before. "Get back! Eleanor’s enforcers—they're not alone! Sergei Volkov himself is in town!"
The second Suburban spun its tires, spraying gravel as it executed a frantic J-turn to avoid the wreckage, speeding away into the darkness toward the north ridge of the lake.
Deputies swarmed the overturned vehicle, weapons drawn, pulling two dazed, bleeding men from the crushed chassis and shoving them facedown onto the wet stone.
Sheriff Thomas hurried toward us, his weapon lowered but his eyes wide with disbelief as he looked from me, to Grace, and finally to the silver-haired man standing under the crimson light of my flare.
Thomas froze. His gun hand dropped to his side.
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"David?" Thomas whispered, his voice cracking like dry wood. "David Miller? You... you died in the foundry fire in ninety-four. I helped carry the closed casket."
"It was an empty box, John," David said softly, his voice trembling as he stepped forward into the flashing police lights. "Julian Vance bought my disappearance for three million dollars. And I was coward enough to sign the papers."
