Chapter 43 - The Key in the Handle
I reached into my heavy wool coat.
Every day since that humiliating morning in the diner—when my father had handed me that splintered, grease-stained tool while Grace received the deed—I had carried the broken head of the spatula in my toolbox, and the wooden handle in the pocket of my coat. I had kept it as a reminder of the insult, an engine of spite that fueled my twelve-hour days at the iron foundry across the street.
I pulled out the scarred piece of hickory wood. It was barely five inches long, blackened by decades of grease and fire, wrapped at the base with frayed copper wire.
Klausner’s pale assistant stepped forward, his long fingers reaching out greedily. "Give it to me."
"David," I said without looking back.
"Yeah, Benny?"
"Duck."
I didn't hand the handle to the assistant. I twisted the copper wire with all my strength.
The aged hickory wood split along a hidden seam, revealing a three-inch cylinder of machined brass, tipped with an antique percussion cap. But instead of offering it to Klausner, I jammed the brass cylinder directly into the emergency conduit socket built into the bulkhead wall—a socket Grandfather Elias had designed to look like an ordinary grounding bolt.
"No!" Klausner screamed, lunging forward with his silver cane raised like a club.
David lunged faster. The heavy iron crowbar smashed into Klausner’s knees with a sickening crack, sending the old aristocrat crashing onto the wet stone floor.
The assistant drew a suppressed pistol from beneath his coat, but before he could clear leather, a deafening crack shook the chamber.
Grace stood in the doorway of the vault, grandfather's Winchester smoking in her hands. The assistant took the round in the shoulder, spinning around and collapsing against the bulkhead, his gun clattering into the drainage ditch.
"Nobody touches my brother," Grace said, racking another heavy round into the rifle’s chamber, her eyes blazing with absolute fury. "And nobody threatens my father in this town."
The brass cylinder locked into the conduit with a mechanical click. Deep behind the iron wall, eighty-year-old relays engaged with a series of heavy, pneumatic thuds.
May you like
The whole mountain shuddered.
***
