Fifth Ave 02 - Running of the Bulls by Christopher Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    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