Chapter 4 - The Predator's Cleaners
Inside the penthouse suite of the Vance Tower, seventy floors above the glittering city skyline, Richard Vance stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror.
A private physician was carefully picking microscopic shards of crystal glass from his bruised cheek with silver forceps. Vance’s face was swollen, mottled purple and yellow, his split lip held together with surgical butterfly bandages. Every muscle in his body burned from being slammed into the stone fountain and thrown through forty square feet of oak and glass.
Yet the physical agony was entirely eclipsed by the terror burning behind his sunken eyes.
Standing behind him in the immaculate marble office was a tall, skeletal man dressed in a razor-sharp charcoal suit. His name was Victor Crane. In the public registry, Crane was listed as Vance’s senior corporate legal counsel. In the shadows of the city's underworld, Crane was known as the Eraser—a former intelligence operative who managed the syndicate’s wetwork.
"The physician will step outside," Crane said calmly.
The doctor didn't ask questions. He quickly packed his instruments and vanished through the mahogany doors, closing them silently behind him.
"Tell me you have them," Vance said, his voice raw, turning toward Crane with wild, bloodshot eyes. "Tell me my extraction team has the child."
Crane didn't display emotion. He merely adjusted his gold cuffs. "The team lost them at the junction of Route 9. The woman, Maya Cross, is not a simple civilian, Richard. You should have consulted her file before you laid hands on her brother’s family."
"I don't care about her file!" Vance bellowed, sweeping a set of crystal decanters off his desk, sending Scotch crashing across the hardwood. "Do you have any concept of what happens to us if that drive is decrypted? Daniel Cross had access to the master ledger of the Tartarus account! My signatures are on every single bill of lading for the harbor shipments! If the Department of Justice sees that file, the men above us won't hire lawyers, Victor. They will skin us alive and throw our bodies into a concrete mixer!"
"The Department of Justice will never see it," Crane replied evenly. "Because Maya Cross has no allies left."
Crane walked to the desk and opened a sleek leather portfolio. He turned a high-resolution tablet toward Vance.
"Fifteen minutes ago, I placed a call to Deputy Commissioner Hayes. The media narrative is already live. Maya Cross is currently wanted for an armed home invasion, the aggravated assault of Richard Vance at a charitable gala, and the violent kidnapping of her sister-in-law, Clara, and her five-year-old nephew, Leo."
Vance stopped pacing. A slow, sinister smile began to stretch over his bruised, stitched lips. "A kidnapping."
"Precisely," Crane said, a thin, cruel smirk touching his mouth. "Every state trooper, city cop, and private security firm in the tri-state area is hunting a dangerous, mentally unhinged former investigator who snapped after her brother’s suicide. When our tactical units locate them, there will be no handcuffs. Maya Cross will 'resist arrest' and be eliminated on sight. The mother will suffer a tragic, fatal breakdown. And the boy..."
Crane paused, his cold eyes locking onto Vance.
"The boy will be returned to our custody. Along with the bear."
Vance walked over to the panoramic window, staring down at the labyrinth of city lights beneath his boots. The terror that had paralyzed him at the party began to crystallize back into cold, murderous arrogance.
May you like
"Find them, Crane," Vance whispered, pressing his bruised palm against the cold glass. "Put a two-million-dollar bounty on Maya’s head through the private channels. Tell every hunter in the city: bring me the drive, and kill the woman. Do not let them see tomorrow’s sunrise."
***
