The Fifth Avenue Series Boxed Set (87 page)

Thank you again.

Christopher

RUNNING OF THE BULLS

A novel by

Christopher Smith

For my great friend, Margaret Nagle.

Thank you for everything.

Copyright and Legal Notice:
This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights.

Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if we use one of these terms.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the author.

First ebook edition © 2011.

Book design by Brandi Doane.

For all permissions, please contact the author at:
mailto:[email protected]

Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction.
 
Any similarity to persons living or dead (unless explicitly noted) is merely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 Christopher Smith.
 
All rights reserved worldwide.

http://www.christophersmithbooks.com

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For their help with this book, the author is particularly grateful to Erich Kaiser, Ross Smith, Ann Smith, Margaret Nagle, Matt Bialer, Brandi Doane, Jon McCann, Ted Adams, Antonio Gragera, Constance Hunting, Deborah Rogers, Suzie Irby, R.J. Keller, Laura Baumgardner, Martine Bound, Jamie Clark, David H. Burton, Misty Rayburn, Sandy Phippen, Keri “The Book Heroine” Rico and Mathy Matturro Terrill.
 

The author also would like to thank the amazing team at the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City; the City of Pamplona, Spain (and the bulls the author ran with which were kind enough not to trample him); Ivan Boesky for his inspiration, however unintended it was on his part; for supportive readers everywhere who send along the best, most encouraging mail; to those men and women who introduced the author to the real Wall Street while he researched this book; and to friends, old and new, all of whom either helped to shape this book or who offered support as it was written.

Thank you.

BOOK ONE

PREFACE

New York City

Bebe Cole was an apparition that moved forward without sound, an enigma in the center of the dim foyer, where she turned on unsteady feet, unbuttoned her full-length cashmere coat, and let it fall to the gleaming marble floor.
 

She was naked, bloody, bruised.

“They’ve killed us,” she said.

Still stunned from the beating, Edward Cole stared at his wife from the doorway of their Fifth Avenue apartment, unable to answer her, unable to speak.
 

The bandage they’d wrapped around his chest was too tight for him to breathe with any comfort; the drugs they’d pumped him full of were too much of a chemical blow for his body to handle.
 
He brought a hand to his ruined face and felt its altered shapes and swollen cheeks.
 
He smoothed his fingertips along the uneven curve of his broken nose and wondered how he’d ever explain this to a public who would want to know.

“You said they’d show restraint.”

Her voice sounded as though it came from the far end of a winding tunnel, and Cole had to concentrate to hear it.
 
He tried to focus on the petite figure that was his wife, but she was disappearing, vanishing, becoming one with the darkness rapidly unraveling along the edges of his vision.
 

“You promised we would be safe.”

He shook his head at her in frustration, took a step toward her and was not aware that he’d fallen until he lifted his head from the cool marble floor and tasted the fresh surge of blood rushing into his mouth.
 

Again, he tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come.
 
And so he lay there, listening to the shallowness of his own breath, watching with fading eyesight as Bebe’s shoes turned toward the dark library, stopped, and then backed up quickly as shoes that weren’t hers raced forward.
 
Too weak to comprehend or to even care, Cole slipped into unconsciousness.

When he woke, he saw his wife first.

Strapped to a Queen Anne chair in the center of the foyer, her carefully dyed blonde hair tousled and hanging in her face, Bebe was surrounded by four tripods, each holding a digital video camera trained on her.
 
She was naked, shivering, gagged.
 
There was a scrape on her forehead, cuts and bruises on her breasts.
 
She locked eyes with him and moaned.

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.”