Fifth Ave 02 - Running of the Bulls (2 page)

Cole forced himself to focus, pushed himself into a sitting position.

Bebe shook her head at him, tried to spit out the gag, but couldn’t.
 
She struggled to release herself from the rope that bound her hands and legs to the antique chair, but it was impossible.
 
She turned her head to the left.
 

Cole followed her look.
 

There, sitting in the shadows beneath van Gogh’s White Roses was a man Cole had never seen before.
 
He was handsome, athletic, wore black pants and a fitted black turtleneck.
 
In his hand was a gun.
 

The man rose from his seat, nodded at Edward and stepped beside Bebe, who followed his every move with her terror-filled eyes.
 
“It’s about time you woke up,” he said to Cole in a relaxed voice.
 
“We’ve been waiting hours for you.”
 
He kissed the top of Bebe’s head.
 
“Haven’t we, dear?”

She jerked away from him and looked to Cole for help.

But Cole couldn’t move--fear had rooted him to the floor.
 
Powerless, he watched the man remove the gag from Bebe’s lipstick-smeared mouth, press the gun against her temple and cock the trigger.
 

Bebe started.
 
Her shoulders drew in and she looked imploringly at her husband, whose own lips had parted in shock.
 
The gun, Edward saw, had a silencer.
 
The four video cameras surrounding Bebe hummed.

“Your wife needs you and yet you sit there,” the man said with disappointment.
 
“After everything she’s done for you, after the way you’ve used and humiliated her in this marriage, couldn’t you at the very least do something to help her?”

Edward rocked to his knees, pushed himself to his feet.
 
He stumbled and leaned against a wall.
 
His entire body ached.
 
He was aware of his coat falling open, exposing his fat nakedness, the bandages at his chest, but he didn’t care.
 
The man was running the barrel of a gun along the bloated curves of his wife’s bruised face.

“I want you to think of all your sins,” the man said evenly, turning one of the cameras on Cole.
 
“I want you to think about every one of them.
 
Right now.
 
Think.”

“Who are you?” Cole asked.

 
“I want you to think about betraying your friends,” the man said with anger.
 
“I want you to think about selling out to the SEC, taking that witness stand and sending one of your best friends to prison when you yourself should have been rotting there in his place.”
 
The man cocked an eyebrow at him.
 
“Mr. Cole, I want you to think about all of it.”

Bebe moved her head slowly, carefully away from the gun.
 
In a quiet, barely restrained voice, she said to her husband:
 
“It’s Wolfhagen.”

The man kissed her on the cheek.
 
“The canary sings.”

“He’s hired this man to kill us.”

“So he has,” the man said, and fired a bullet into her brain.

Edward’s whole body went tense with disbelief.
 
Bebe’s unseeing left eye was blinking, her upper lip quivering, mouth working, foot twitching, yet she was dead, had to be dead.
 
Part of her head was on the floor.

A hand gripped his arm.
 

Cole turned and saw the woman just as she jammed the gun into the small of his back and urged him forward, toward his bleeding wife, the man in black, the humming cameras.
 
“Fight me,” she said, “and I swear to God you won’t die as quickly as your wife.”

She came around and pulled him across the foyer with a hand far steadier than his own.
 
The man had dragged Bebe off to one side and now was placing a matching chair where she had sat.
 
Cole was led to the middle of Bebe’s spilled blood.
 
Now, the cameras surrounded him.
 

“Are you thinking about those sins, Mr. Cole?”

They’d murdered his wife.
 
They’d do the same to him.
 
If he broke now, it would be over for him.
 
He forced himself to think, to somehow remain calm.

“Are you thinking about taking that witness stand?
 
Do you remember the look on Wolfhagen’s face when you burned him?”

He ignored the man, looked at the woman.
 
Tall and attractive, thick brown hair framing an oval face of cool intelligence, her eyes the color of chestnuts and just as hard.
 
She wore black leggings and a black shirt, no jewelry.

The man moved behind her, his face partly concealed behind the video camera now poised in front of him.
 
“Get rid of his coat,” he said to the woman.

She got rid of it.

“Now the bandages.”

She ripped them from Cole, who stared into the camera’s opaque lens and saw his own ruined face floating up at him from the dark, rounded glass.
 
And he knew--Wolfhagen would be viewing these tapes.

The woman took a step back, looked with revulsion at Cole’s bloody chest, then turned that look on him.
 
“So, it’s starting again?” she said.
 
“You were there last night?
 
You let them do this to you?”
 
She shook her head at him in disgust.
 
“How could you let them do this to you?”

"Because he asked for it to get off on it," the man said.
 
"Isn't that how it works, Mr. Cole?
 
You and your wife asked for it, but this time, it got a little out of hand."

Cole held their gaze and said nothing.
 
He willed himself to believe that he could get through this.
 
It wasn’t too late for him.
 
Everyone had a price, everyone could be bought.
 
Hadn’t Wolfhagen taught him that much?
 

“I have money,” he said to them.
 
“Millions.
 
I’ll triple whatever Wolfhagen’s paying you.
 
Both of you can walk out of here right now and never have to do this again.
 
You’ll be set for life.
 
Just let me live.”
 

The woman’s lips, rouged red, broke into a half-smile.
 
“Did you really think he’d let you get away with it forever?”

Cole shook his head as if he didn’t understand, but he understood.
 
He knew this day would come.
 
Still, his belief in the power and the influence of money galvanized him.
 
They would not kill him if he offered enough.
 
“Millions,” he said.

She lifted the gun.

*
 
*
 
*

Pamplona, Spain

Six Months Later

Ever since he was a child, Mark Andrews had longed to run with the bulls.

As a boy in Boston, he would sit on his grandfather’s lap and listen to the old man’s stories of his days in Spain, when he was still young and single, and traveling the world on the trust fund his father gave him upon graduating from Yale.
 

Mark would marvel at the man’s retelling of La Fiesta de San Fermin, the week-long orgy of bull worship that honored Pamplona’s patron saint San Fermin, who was martyred when bulls dragged his body through the city’s narrow, dusty streets.
 

Mark’s grandfather had run with the bulls.
 
He had stood among the thousands of men in white shirts and red sashes impatiently waiting for the first rocket to signal their release.

Even then, some thirty years ago in his parents’ home, Mark could hear the thunderous clacking of hooves as the twelve beasts came crashing down Calle Santo Domingo, through Plaza Consistorial and Calle Mercaderes, their horns sharp and deadly, their murderous rage focused on those foolish young men running blindly before them.

Now, at thirty-nine, Mark Andrews himself stood among fools in white shirts and red sashes, the early morning sun beating down on his face, the delicious anticipation of the impending event flooding his senses.

Pamplona was a city gone mad.
 

All week long, fifty thousand people from around the world had participated in La Fiesta de San Fermin, known to the locals as Los Sanfermines.
 
They paraded drunkenly through the streets with towering, colorful
gigantes
, went to the afternoon bullfights, drank gallons of wine, made love in alleyways, and rose each morning from brief catnaps to watch the spectacular running of the bulls.
 

Earlier in the week, the mayor had kicked off the festivities at noon by lighting one of many rockets from the Ayuntamiento’s balcony.
 
And now, as Mark waited along with nearly a thousand other men for the rocket that would signal the beginning of
el encierro
, he watched and listened to the cheering crowd that looked down at him from open windows, wrought-iron balconies, the Santo Domingo stairs, as well as the Plaza de Toros itself.
 

Never had he felt more alive.
 
He would run as his grandfather had.

He felt a hand on his arm.
 
Mark turned and faced a stranger.

“Do you have the time?” the man asked.
 
“I left my watch at the hotel.
 
They should be firing the first rocket any minute now.”

Mark smiled at the man, delighted to be in the company of a fellow American.
 
He checked his watch and said:
 
“In a few minutes, we’ll be running like hell from twelve very pissed off bulls.”
 
He extended a hand, which the man shook.
 
“I’m Mark Andrews,” he said.
 
“Manhattan.”

The man’s grip was firm, his teeth bright white when he smiled back.
 
“Vincent Spocatti,” he said.
 
“L.A.
 
What brings you here?”

“My grandfather,” Mark said.
 
“You?”

The man looked surprised.
 
“Hemingway,” he said, in a tone that implied there could be no other reason why he had traveled thousands of miles to be at this event.
 
“I even brought Lady Brett with me.”
 
He pointed down the barricaded street, toward a building where a young woman stood at a second-story balcony, her dark hair and white dress stirring in the breeze.
 
“That’s my wife, there,” he said.
 
“The one with the video camera.”

Mark looked up and caught a glimpse of the woman just as the first rocket tore into the sky to signal that the gates of the corral had been opened.
 

He felt a rush.
 
The sea of young Spaniards and tourists lurched forward.
 
A cheer went through the crowd and rippled down the narrow streets, reverberating off the stone walls, finally blooming in the Plaza de Toros itself.
 
Moments later, a second rocket sounded, warning the crowd that the chase--which usually lasted only two minutes--had begun.

Mark ran.
 
He heard the bulls galloping behind him, felt the earth trembling beneath his feet and he ran, knowing that if he stumbled, if he fell in the street, he would be trampled by the men running behind him and then by the 1,800-pound beasts themselves.