Chapter 19 - The Last Rattlesnake
"Get Elena, Mia, and Lucia back down to the bunker right now!" I barked at Rocco as he burst into my study two seconds after the gatehouse alarm sounded. "Lock the steel doors and don't open them for anyone except me!"
"Wait, Boss!" Rocco shouted, pulling up the live police scanner feed on his tactical tablet as we ran down the main staircase. "If Matteo is in FBI custody on the helicopter and the Vance family is locked in federal holding, who the hell ambushed Sofia’s transport van on Route 9?!"
I stopped dead at the bottom of the grand staircase, staring at the burned doorway of the conservatory—and then my eyes shifted toward the quiet, unassuming figure standing by the front ambulance bay holding a medical bag.
Sister Agnes.
Wait.
My heart stopped cold in my chest.
Last night at two in the morning, when Julian Vance walked into my mother’s bedroom with the paralytic syringe, I had ordered Sister Agnes to stand outside the door with my two guards and let no one inside.
Yet Julian Vance had walked right through that door without a sound while Sister Agnes was supposedly standing two feet away!
And three months ago, when my mother had her "stroke," who had been the private nurse hired to oversee her twenty-four-hour care after the hospital discharged her?
I spun around toward the front doorway shouting at the top of my lungs:
"DR. MORETTI, GET AWAY FROM THAT AMBULANCE!"
Outside on the gravel driveway, Sister Agnes—or the woman who had impersonated a sixty-year-old missionary nurse after the real Sister Agnes retired in Rome—wasn't getting into the ambulance with my mother at all.
She had just pulled a suppressed Beretta from inside her white medical habit, shot the state trooper standing behind the ambulance in the leg, and grabbed Elena’s mother Lucia at gunpoint by the open back doors of the paramedic van while a hijacked black Corrections SUV screeched up the smoke-filled driveway with Sofia Conti behind the wheel!
"Get in the truck, Mother!" Sofia screamed out the window of the hijacked SUV, her hands still cuffed together in front of her as she steered wildly across the scorched lawn.
Mother.
The fake nurse wasn't a hired hand. She was Marcella Conti—Enzo Conti’s sixty-year-old widow, the woman everyone thought had committed suicide in Marseille twenty-six years ago!
She had lived inside my house for three months dressed as a nun, watching my mother suffer every single hour while feeding her own daughter intelligence from the inside!
"Let the old woman go, Marcella!" I roared, sprinting out onto the front stone steps with my Glock raised, unable to take a clean shot because she was holding Lucia tightly against her chest as a human shield.
"Your father burned my husband alive in 1998, Lorenzo Duca!" Marcella Conti shrieked, her wrinkled face twisted with twenty-six years of psychotic vengeance as she dragged Lucia backward toward Sofia’s idling SUV. "And before Sofia and I cross the border, I'm going to kill the widow of the sailor who betrayed my husband to the police!"
Inside the doorway behind me, Elena screamed in horror as Marcella raised the suppressed Beretta straight toward Lucia’s temple.
From the ambulance gurney five feet to Marcella’s left, my mother—Isabella Duca, strapped to an IV pole with oxygen tubes in her nose—saw that neither Rocco nor I had a clear angle to shoot without hitting Lucia.
With a surge of sheer matriarchal fury, my mother ripped the oxygen mask off her face, grabbed the heavy stainless-steel IV pole standing beside her gurney with both hands, and swung it with everything she had straight into the back of Marcella Conti’s head!
CLANG!
The heavy steel pole struck Marcella across the temple, knocking her aim sideways as Lucia dropped safely to the gravel.
In that split second, Rocco and I fired simultaneously.
Bang! Bang!
Marcella Conti collapsed onto the driveway steps, her gun sliding harmlessly across the stone.
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Behind the wheel of the hijacked SUV, Sofia screamed in horror at the sight of her mother falling, slammed the truck into reverse, and floored the gas pedal blind through the smoke—crashing full-speed backward into the massive marble base of the courtyard fountain, rupturing the SUV’s fuel line in a towering fireball of orange flames before the federal agents dragged her, burned and screaming, from the wreckage.
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