Chapter 6 - Staring Down the Barrel
"Arthur, don't do this!" Richard yelled, freezing in place. "That’s murder! There's no coming back from this!"
"I'm already facing twenty-five years because of you two!" Arthur screamed, his hand shaking violently as the barrel of the revolver remained locked onto my eyes. "Give me the recorder and the files, Richard! Put them on the desk, or I swear to God I'll put a bullet through his brain!"
I didn't flinch. I looked directly down the dark cylinder of that barrel, into the eyes of the man who had raised me, the man who had taught me how to throw a baseball, and I saw nothing but an empty, rotting shell of greed. The fear that had paralyzed me when I walked into my living room earlier today was completely gone. In its place was a cold, pure stillness.
"Go ahead, Dad," I said, my voice flat, eerie, and unwavering.
Arthur blinked, caught off guard. "What?"
"Pull the trigger," I said, taking half a step forward.
"Mark, stop! Don't provoke him!" Richard shouted from behind.
"Pull it!" I roared, taking another step. "Shoot your own son like you beat my wife! Shoot me! Because if you don't kill me right here, right now, I am going to make sure every single inmate in state prison knows you pimped out your own daughter's name to loan sharks and tried to murder your own grandson in the womb! Pull the damn trigger!"
Arthur’s finger twitched on the trigger shoe. Sweat poured down his temples, stinging his eyes. His breathing came in shallow, frantic gasps. For all his posturing, all his arrogant talk of family honor and ruthless business tactics, Arthur Vance was an absolute coward when stripped of his money and his lawyers. He had never faced consequences in his life. He was a bully who beat women and relied on forged paper to steal from the vulnerable.
His hand began to wobble.
"You... you think I won't?" Arthur stammered, his voice cracking.
"I know you won't," I whispered.
In that fraction of a second when his hesitation turned into panic, Richard moved. With the speed of a seasoned street fighter, Richard whipped the steel tire iron across the desk, slamming it down across Arthur’s right forearm.
The sound of bone snapping echoed over the hum of the fire.
Arthur screamed in agony, dropping the revolver onto the thick wool rug. Before he could reach for it with his left hand, I lunged over the desk, grabbing him by the lapels of his suit, and drove my forehead violently into the bridge of his nose.
The crunch was sickeningly satisfying. Arthur crashed backward over Marcus's swivel chair, hitting the floor in a tangled heap, clutching his broken face and sobbing in the dust.
Marcus scrambled backward on his knees, his hands held high in the air. "Don't hit me! I confess! I have all the backups on an encrypted flash drive! The real trust documents, the forged notarizations, the text messages from Arthur telling me to forge the dates—everything! Just don't hurt me!"
"Get the flash drive, Richard," I breathed heavily, wiping the blood from my knuckles onto Arthur's expensive curtains.
Richard kicked the revolver under the desk, grabbed Marcus by the back of his collar, and shoved him toward his laptop. "Plug it in. Transfer every single byte to my cloud server right now, Marcus. If you miss a single text, I will personally make sure you share a bunk with the Aryan Brotherhood."
Marcus sobbed, his fingers flying across the keyboard with frantic speed. "It's transferring! It's all there! The bank routing numbers, the communications with the offshore brokers—Arthur was planning to liquidate the entire twelve million into cryptocurrency and flee to Dubai by the end of the week!"
My stomach curdled. Dubai. He was going to leave Chloe to take the fall for the union debts, leave Emily and our son dead or destitute, and disappear into the desert with twelve million dollars of stolen money.
Suddenly, the wail of sirens outside grew deafening. Four police cruisers screeching into the alleyway blocked the exit, their headlights illuminating the second-floor windows. Footsteps thundered up the fire escape stairs.
"Police! Nobody move!" Detective Miller burst through the door with three uniformed officers, weapons drawn.
Miller took in the scene: the burning barrel, the crying lawyer at the computer, Arthur bleeding on the floor with a broken arm and nose, and Richard calmly holding up a digital recorder.
"Detective Miller," Richard said with a grim smile. "We have the forged instruments, a full voluntary confession from the notary, and the suspect's illegal firearm. You might want to call the FBI's financial crimes division—this just graduated from state assault to federal racketeering."
Miller holstered his weapon, shaking his head in sheer disbelief. "Arthur Vance, you're under arrest. Again."
As two officers hauled Arthur to his feet, my father looked at me through swollen, blackened eyes, his lip split and bleeding. "You're dead to me, Mark. You have no family left."
"I have a wife and a son fighting for their lives in an ICU," I replied, staring through him like he was made of glass. "You're just a ghost in an orange jumpsuit."
I turned on my heel and walked out of the office, jogging down the stairs into the cool night rain. I pulled out my phone to call the hospital, desperate for any update on Emily.
May you like
The phone rang twice before the head of the neonatal unit picked up.
"Mr. Vance?" the doctor's voice was tight, crackling with urgency over the line. "You need to get back to the hospital immediately. Your wife is waking up from the coma, but there’s a severe neurological crisis with your son. His heart rate is plummeting."
