Chapter 3 - The Abductor in the Alley
The alley behind O’Leary’s Pub smelled of stale beer, damp trash, and exhaust fumes. Rain had begun to fall around two in the morning, slicking the red brick walls and creating oil-sheened puddles on the cracked asphalt.
At 2:40 AM, the back door of the tavern swung open, throwing a rectangle of dull yellow light into the dark alley.
Darren Cole stumbled out into the cool rain, cursing under his breath. He had lost twelve hundred dollars on a digital blackjack machine, his tab was maxed out, and his head was thumping from cheap bourbon. He pulled his leather jacket tighter around his broad shoulders and reached into his pocket for his car keys.
"Stupid, useless broad," Darren muttered to himself, thinking of Maggie. "Should’ve made her give me her credit card before I left the apartment."
He took four steps toward his Dodge Charger parked under a broken street lamp.
He didn't hear the tires of the dark grey Mercedes sprinter van coasting silently up the alley without headlights.
Before Darren could insert his key into the car lock, two men over six feet tall clad in black raincoats stepped out from the shadows of a industrial dumpster.
"What the—" Darren started, spinning around, his fist cocking back in an intoxicated surge of bravado.
Marcus, a former collegiate wrestler turned Calder operative, moved with terrifying speed. He blocked Darren’s wild punch with a forearm, drove a knee deep into Darren’s solar plexus, and seized him by the throat before the larger man could drop to his knees.
At the same moment, Paulie slipped a thick black canvas hood over Darren’s head, pulling a drawstring tight around his neck, while Frank stepped up and bound his wrists behind his back with heavy-duty industrial zip-ties.
The entire ambush took precisely four point two seconds.
Darren thrashing wildly, trying to scream through the canvas hood, but a heavy hand slammed against his mouth through the fabric, muffling his cries into pathetic, guttural grunts. They hauled him into the side door of the van, slammed the slider shut, and the vehicle accelerated smoothly out of the alley, disappearing into the Philadelphia night.
Inside the van, the air was cold and smelled of ozone and fresh leather.
Darren was dumped hard onto the steel floorboards. He kicked his legs out blindly, his voice muffled under the dark canvas hood. "Who the hell are you?! Do you know who I am?! Tommy Riga is gonna kill you for this! You got the wrong guy!"
From the dark leather captain's chair at the front of the van, a calm, deep voice spoke over the hum of the engine.
"You are Darren James Cole," the voice said. "You owe forty-two thousand dollars to Thomas Riga. You drive a Dodge Charger with a dented rear bumper. And three days ago, you broke two ribs on the woman who cares for my son."
Darren froze on the floorboards. The intoxicating fog of alcohol evaporated from his brain in an instant, replaced by a sudden, razor-sharp spike of primal terror.
"Who... who are you?" Darren gasped through the cloth.
The hood was violently yanked off his head.
Darren blinked against the harsh LED strip lights mounted to the van’s ceiling. Sitting five feet away from him in a pristine dark suit was Vincent Calder.
Darren had lived in South Philadelphia his entire life. He knew the faces that appeared in local newspapers, and he knew the faces that people only talked about in whispered tones in the back booths of neighborhood bars. He recognized Vincent Calder immediately.
Darren’s face drained of all color. His knees began to shake so violently they knocked against the steel floor.
"Mr. Calder..." Darren stammered, his breath coming in fast, hysterical gasps. "Mr. Calder, I... I didn't know! I swear to God I didn't know Maggie was connected to you! She... she never said anything!"
Vincent leaned forward in his chair, resting his hands on his knees, his face an unreadable mask of dark stone.
"She is not connected to me, Darren," Vincent said softly. "She is under my protection. There is a difference."
"I’m sorry!" Darren wept, dropping his head to the floorboards, pulling at his zip-tied wrists. "I'll leave her alone! I'll move out of the apartment tonight! I'll never speak to her again! Just don't kill me! Please, Mr. Calder, don't kill me!"
Vincent looked down at the weeping man writhing on the floor of his van.
Every instinct honed in the brutal street wars of his youth told him to finish it—to have Frank drive the van to a private scrapyard in New Jersey, put a small caliber round into the back of Darren's skull, and drop the body into an industrial shredder. It was clean. It was permanent. It was how his father would have handled it.
Dependencies. Consequences.
Vincent looked at his gold watch. It was 3:15 AM.
He looked back down at Darren Cole.
"Killing you would be easy, Darren," Vincent said, his voice dropping into a register colder than the September rain outside. "It would take two minutes, and no one in this city would ever find a single fingernail belonging to you."
Darren sobbed, pressing his forehead against the metal floor.
"But if you vanish into a marsh in Jersey," Vincent continued, "Maggie will spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. She will jump every time a car door slams outside her window. She will live in fear that you are going to return from the dark."
May you like
Vincent leaned in close, his dark eyes fixing onto Darren's terrified soul.
"I am not going to kill you, Darren," Vincent whispered. "I am going to give you a fate far worse. I am going to turn you into a man who is terrified to exist."
