Chapter 20 - The Fire on the Mississippi
The heavy steel side door of Warehouse Four hung open on broken hinges, groaning against the howling river wind.
When I crossed the threshold, the heat hit me instantly.
A wall of thick, oily black smoke rolled across the corrugated iron ceiling. Toward the center of the vast building, near the towering rows of wooden archive shelving, pools of burning kerosene were creeping across the cracked concrete floor. Stacks of antique cardboard boxes and thirty years of river freight records were already crackling, sending showers of red sparks leaping toward the wooden rafters.
Through the haze of smoke, a figure stood near the iron safe embedded in the concrete foundation.
Marcus Vance was on his knees, his expensive overcoat smeared with soot and ash. He was frantically shoving thick, leather-bound ledgers into a nylon duffel bag, his face illuminated by the dancing orange flames. A crowbar lay discarded beside the battered door of the open safe.
"Marcus!" I roared, my voice cutting through the hiss of the fire.
Marcus jumped as if shot, dropping a handful of singed documents. He spun around, clutching the duffel bag against his chest. His hair was disheveled, his eyes wild and bloodshot, completely devoid of the slick, arrogant composure he had displayed in federal court just hours earlier.
"Stay back, David!" Marcus shrieked, backing toward the raging flames. "Stay the hell back! This whole place is going up! There won't be a single piece of paper left for Holbrook's marshals to dig through!"
"You're committing arson on federal maritime property, Marcus!" I took slow, deliberate steps toward him, keeping low beneath the rising ceiling of suffocating smoke. "There are federal agents two minutes behind me! Drop the bag!"
Marcus let out a hysterical, cracked laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping over stone.
"You think this is about the money? You think this was about fifty million dollars to Sterling?" Marcus spat, gesturing wildly toward the burning archive shelves. "You were always the favorite! Thomas always looked at you like you were made of gold, while I spent thirty years scraping grease off the barges!"
"My father gave you half the shipping contracts!" I countered, closing the distance between us step by step. "He gave you everything, Marcus! And you gambled it away and forged his name to save your own neck!"
"He didn't give me the dirt!" Marcus screamed, his voice raw with decades of poisoned jealousy. "He didn't leave the riverfront to me! He didn't even leave it to you! He left the entirety of Terminal One—every slip, every crane, every square foot of industrial waterline—directly to your little bastard girl!"
The words hung in the scorching air between us.
I stopped in my tracks. "What did you say?"
Marcus smiled—a grotesque, soot-streaked grin of pure malice. He reached into his coat and pulled out a singed, legal-sized envelope with an unbroken wax seal bearing my father’s initials.
"Evelyn knew," Marcus chuckled, his voice dropping into a sinister whisper. "She read the will before Thomas’s body was even cold in the funeral home. She knew that if Thomas's final codicil was filed, the Vance name, the entire fortune, the family seat—everything would belong to Lila the day she turned eighteen. Evelyn couldn't stomach it. She couldn't bear the thought of a child born to a woman from the trailer parks owning the Vance empire."
"So you buried it," I whispered, the full depth of their treachery falling into place like heavy iron links.
"We buried it," Marcus sneered, holding the envelope over the licking flames of the kerosene puddle. "And for nine years, Evelyn made sure that little girl grew up feeling like a stray dog. Every holiday dinner, every family gathering—Evelyn starved her of pride, starved her of dignity, just to remind herself who held the leash!"
"Give me the letter, Marcus," I said, my voice shaking with an anger so deep it terrified even me.
"Never," Marcus hissed. "If I go to prison, you get nothing. The girl gets nothing. The docks belong to the state liquidation board."
He lowered his hand, the paper inches from the fire.
*CRACK.*
A deafening sound tore through the burning warehouse—not the pop of burning timber, but the sharp, concussive report of a high-caliber firearm.
A bullet struck the concrete inches from Marcus's polished shoe, spraying sharp chips of stone into his face.
Marcus shrieked, dropping the envelope and tumbling backward into the ash.
Through the thick wall of rolling black smoke near the shattered loading bay doors, a silhouette stepped forward into the glow of the fire.
The figure held a smoking Colt .45 in one gloved hand. As the wind whipped the smoke aside, the emergency lights from outside illuminated a familiar, weathered face—someone nobody in Dubuque had seen in seven long years.
It was William Vance—my father’s estranged older brother, the decorated river captain whom Evelyn had driven out of the state a decade ago.
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"Step away from the child's birthright, Marcus," Uncle William said, his voice like iron grinding against granite, the barrel of the revolver leveling directly between Marcus's eyes.
Behind him, through the burning doorway, the red and blue flashing lights of a dozen federal cruisers lit up the falling sleet, and from somewhere in the dark warehouse, the structural support beam gave a terrifying, groaning snap—