Christopher Smith - Running of the bulls

The laser beam flashed across Hayes’ face in a brilliant streak of scarlet. Thrilled, Carmen watched it disappear into the man’s hairline before darting out and appearing in the center of his forehead. There, it wavered like a flame.

“Do you always betray your best friends, Mr. Hayes?”

Hayes, who had been expecting an answer to his own question, looked at her as if he didn’t understand.

Carmen opened her jacket, reached inside for her gun and stood. She pointed it at him. “Wolfhagen was one of your closest friends and you betrayed him,” she said. “You told all his secrets in court, you sent him to prison for three years and you’ve never regretted it. Did you really think he’d let you get away with it forever?”

Hayes straightened in his chair and stared at the gun. He seemed neither frightened nor surprised. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Carmen came around his desk and motioned for him to stand.

But Hayes made no effort to rise. He was twice her size and he knew it.

“On your feet,” she said firmly.

But Hayes didn’t move. He continued looking at the gun, his eyes narrowing, doubting she would shoot. Carmen cocked the trigger and pressed the cool metal barrel hard against his temple. “Move,” she said. “Or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

Hayes pushed back his chair and stood, rising to his full height of six feet four inches. He was just drunk enough to believe he was invincible. He looked down at her and said, “You think you can come in here and threaten me? You think you can intimidate me with a gun?” His voice rose in anger. “Your face is on every video camera in this building. Touch me and your ass will be in jail for the rest of your life.”

Carmen leaned back against the edge of his desk. Beside her was a heavy marble paperweight the size of a baseball. She put her hand over it and said, “Mr. Hayes, I’ve killed drug lords, politicians and religious leaders. I helped murder the Coles and Mark Andrews. I’ve been doing this for seven years without fear or interruption. Surely, I can do the same to an old man like you and get away with it.”

She swung her arm around and threw the paperweight against the side of his head. The blow took Hayes by surprise and he collapsed to the floor, his left temple crushed, his body jerking as though he had been electrocuted. Blood vomited from his mouth in a brilliant fan of crimson. His eyelids fluttered. A sound came from his mouth that wasn’t human.

Carmen holstered the gun, stepped over his body and was happy to note that the building was so old, the windows opened. And so she opened one. The air was warm and humid and smelled faintly of salt. She looked out but saw no traffic on Wall Street. At night, lower Manhattan became a ghost town.

She glanced over at the building facing her and saw only the cleaning woman pushing her vacuum, oblivious to the murder next door.

But Carmen knew Spocatti was watching.

She turned to Hayes and was startled to find him on his knees. His mouth was open and working, dripping blood and saliva on the gleaming hardwood floor. His eyes were bulging and he was breathing heavily. The gurgling in his chest was growing deeper. His lungs were filling with blood and he was trying to stand while he literally drowned. He was dying, but he was too dazed to know it.

Carmen was seized by a sudden urge to do something different from what she and Spocatti had planned.

At the bar, there were cloth napkins. She rushed to it, grabbed a few and wiped her prints from the window. Then, she went over and helped Hayes to his feet. He was confused and disoriented and looked at her as though they’d never met. He leaned on her shoulder as she led him to the window. She could smell alcohol on his breath and expensive cologne on his skin. He murmured something in her ear though she wasn’t sure what. Blood spooled from the corner of his mouth. Her own heart hammered.

They reached the window and she pressed his finger tips against the glass. She took his hands and pressed them down on the window sill and then on the lip that lifted the window. Carmen looked again for the cleaning lady, didn’t see her, and lowered Hayes’ bleeding head to the warm night air. With a supreme effort, she shoved him through.

He made no sound as he tumbled through the air. His arms flailing at his sides, his feet wavering as though detached from his body, he simply fell, head first, into the darkness.

There was no time to hear him hit the concrete.

Carmen rushed across the room and into Hayes’ private bath. She retrieved a pale blue towel from a wide bar, wiped her prints from the marble paperweight, replaced it on the desk, then cleaned the blood from the floor with a special fluid she had in her briefcase case. The blood vanished. It couldn’t be traced.

She looked around the office and knew she had touched nothing else. She hurried around the desk and retrieved her briefcase from beside the leather chair. She opened it, tossed the bloody towel onto several large stacks of cash and removed a pair of white gloves, which she put on.

She crossed to the bar. Hayes had been drinking Scotch. She grabbed the half-empty bottle and brought it back to the desk. From her inside jacket pocket, she removed the suicide note Spocatti wrote that morning and drenched it with the alcohol, blurring the handwriting that had been a perfect match to Hayes’ own slanting scrawl.

With a last look around, she dropped the note and the bottle of Scotch onto the desk, reached for her briefcase, left the room.

Time was running out.

With the $100,000 in her briefcase, Carmen had a security guard to bribe.

From the opposite building, Spocatti watched in disbelief as Gerald Hayes fell to the concrete pavement. None of this was part of the plan. Carmen intentionally deviated from it and he was furious with her given the potential situation she’d just put them in.

He filmed the man dropping to his death, filmed his cart-wheeling hands and wide-open eyes, filmed his last few moments of life before his head exploded on the sidewalk and his body collapsed on top of it in a broken heap.

For Wolfhagen’s sake, he held the shot for a lingering moment before he jerked the camera back to the open window, where Carmen was hurrying about the room, covering her ass.

Why did she go against the plan? She was supposed to have knocked Hayes unconscious, wipe her prints from the gun and then place it in his hand while firing a bullet into his brain. It was simple. It had been her idea. So, why did she change her mind? Why did she deliberately take this chance?

The fool was going to get caught.

He watched her move quickly and efficiently, her eyes missing nothing. When she was finished, she grabbed her briefcase and left the room. Thirty-five seconds, maybe forty. Though he hated to admit it, Spocatti doubted whether he could do better.

Still, she had to get out of the building.

He adjusted his earphone and listened to her run down the hallway to the bank of elevators. His mind like a camera, he imagined her stepping into the car, punching the button marked “L” and composing herself in the reflection of the mirrored doors as the elevator plummeted twenty floors.

“That one was for you, Vincent,” she said into the microphone. “I would have given him a kiss on the lips before showing him to the window, but I didn’t want to make you blush.”

Spocatti was having none of it. She’d taken a stupid, unnecessary risk. If she didn’t get out of the building safely, if she somehow got caught, the police would know that the deaths of the Coles and Mark Andrews were related, leaving Spocatti with a far more difficult task when it came time to kill the other men and women on Wolfhagen’s list.