Fifth Ave 02 - Running of the Bulls (56 page)

But what of Marty?

She shook and wiped off Wolfhagen's remains.
 
She turned the corner and sprinted into the other room.
 
She screamed for Jennifer to get herself and Mark outside.
 
She could see Marty glowing from the fire at the far end of the room.
 
Next to him, the piano was snapping, crackling.
 
Marty was in a heap.
 
The building was going up quickly.
 
Too quickly.
 
If she didn’t hurry, either the second floor would collapse on top of them or the smoke would kill them.

She stopped beside Marty, pulled him away from the heat and saw that her bullet had hit him in the chest.
 
He wasn’t moving or breathing.
 
She could hear Jennifer rolling Mark forward.
 
They were coughing.
 
She called to Jennifer and told her to get an ambulance.
 

With a chest wound, she knew the procedure of reviving him had to be done differently and so she lowered her mouth to his, covered the wound with the palm of her hand and forced air into his lungs while Roberta’s words rolled through her head:
 
You’re going to shoot him, my friend is going to die and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

But the dead could be brought back.

Applying more pressure to the wound and aware of the sound of sirens coming near them, Maggie spoke to Marty between breaths.
 
She knew he was dead but she wouldn’t stop.
 
She breathed air into his lungs and was aware of the blood seeping up through his chest each time she did so.
 

And she knew.
 
His lungs were filling with blood.
 
He was drowning.

Before each breath, she spoke to him.
 

“Don’t die,” she said with a raised voice.
 
“You come back.
 
I know you can see me.
 
Jennifer is safe.
 
You don’t have to leave.
 
Come back.”

All around her, the walls were starting to give.
 
Chunks of the ceiling gave way and smashed to the floor while fire on the second floor started to reveal itself and tumble down from above.
 
Jennifer and Mark were at the door now.
 
They stopped to look inside and then Jennifer started to run toward Marty.

“Go!” Maggie said.
 
“Get him out of here.
 
Don’t come back--you won’t have a second chance if you do.
 
Marty’s fine, Jennifer.
 
I’m getting him out of here now.
 
Wait for us across the street on the sidewalk.”

Reluctantly, Jennifer stopped.
 

“Come with us, Maggie.”

It was Mark.
 
She found him and now she was certain she'd lose him again.
 
The building was going to give way.
 
She knew it.
 
She felt it.
 
It took everything she had within her to say, “Just go.
 
We’re right behind you.
 
I promise.”

"I love you," he said.

"I love you, too."

They left.

She gave Marty another shot of air, but nothing was working.
 
She increased pressure on the wound and then, in her despair, she realized she was crying.
 
All around them, pieces of the ceiling continued to fall.
 
The house was shifting, weakening.
 
The walls were alight with flame.
 
The heat was intense.
 
She leaned over him and held his face in her hand.
 
She gently shook him.
 
“Come back.”

The police, fire department and EMTs broke into the building.
 
Maggie looked at them as they raced toward her.
 
She turned back to Marty.
 
“You’re not going to die,” she said.
 
“Your girls need you.
 
Do you hear me?
 
Your girls need you.
 
You can’t do this to the girls.”

And then, in spite of the smoke closing down on her, she pressed her scarred cheek to the hot floor, took a lungful of clean air and breathed whatever life was left inside her straight into him.

EPILOGUE

SIX MONTHS LATER

AMSTERDAM

Smelling of cannabis and feeling a bit high because of it, Vincent Spocatti left the Speak Easy Coffeeshop on Oudebrugsteeg, where pot was smoked as freely as the coffee was poured, and took a right on Warmoesstraat, a narrow street whose origins began in the 13th century.
 

As such, surrounding him was a bizarre hive of the old and the new.
 
This was a popular street and now, on the tip of dusk, it was teeming with clutches of people walking close and in the midst of chatter.
 
He listened to them as they passed--a cacophony of Dutch voices lifting and lilting.

He loved it here.

It was February, he was bundled against cold, there was a loaded gun in his pocket and his two marks were walking ahead of him.
 

One was an international banker pushing sixty, the other was his international mistress pushing thirty.
 
Back home in the States, the banker's longtime American wife was pushing to have each murdered by nightfall.

He could smell the Amstel river in the distance and he could hear the familiar clatter of the Central railroad, which occasionally made the pavement tremble when a train passed.
  
And then, in his pocket, he felt a vibration of another sort--his cell phone.
 

He reached for it, saw that it was an email and opened it to a photograph of Carmen, who was in Bora Bora resting in a hut that reached into the South Pacific deep.
 
She was on a deck, in a bikini and looking tan and fit.
 
Beneath the photo were a few words:
 
"Paradise ending.
 
New job tomorrow.
 
This one's big.
 
You might hear from me."

He turned off the phone and looked ahead of him, where his marks were walking arm-in-arm, her head on his shoulder.
 
She was blonde and she was pretty, with a smooth complexion that was just this side of pink given the chilly air.
 
He heard her laugh and, as she turned her head to whisper something in the man's ear, he saw just how delicate she was, just how fine her jaw line.
 

He had orders to get a photo of her face after he'd blasted it into nothingness.

Carmen.
 

The last time he'd seen her was in New York, when they decided to be nobody's fool and turn the tables on Carra Wolfhagen and Ira Lasker when it was revealed that they lied to them and put them at risk.
 
And so, just for fun, they found rope, put nooses around their necks and strung each up by their throats above the bar.

Wolfhagen and the reporter joined them.

When they left them behind, scrambling and gagging and choking as they fought to stay conscious, there was a sense of redemption.
 
Maybe they’d live, maybe they'd die--neither he nor Carmen cared.
 
What mattered is that Carra and Ira have time enough on those nooses to know why they were there.
 
They'd think about their mistakes and wish they’d been straight with them from the start.

Later, Spocatti read in the Times how the scene unfolded.
 
Carra Wolfhagen was caught by the police when she ran out of the building and down the street.
 
The next day, Mark Andrews identified her and Lasker as the masterminds behind framing Wolfhagen.
 
She now was facing prison.
 
Spocatti read that Lasker died in the fire, as did Wolfhagen, who was burned so deeply beyond recognition, his remains were identified by his crowded set of teeth.
 
All in all, a good ending in which he and Carmen learned valuable lessons while pocketing millions for their trouble.

Now, the day had tipped into night.
 
Storefront windows illumined the stone sidewalks.
 
Above them, street lamps flashed and created warm umbrellas of amber light.
 
Tonight, he would end this job, likely by busting into their apartment and taking them by surprise, and then he’d move back to New York City, where another job was waiting for him.

Two years ago, he had been involved in a coup to take down the billionaire George Redman and his family, among others.
 
Things hadn't gone as planned and now Spocatti was being brought back to finish the job thanks to a provision provided by a man’s will.
 
He was so intrigued by the situation--at the sheer freshness of it--that he agreed on the spot to take the job.
 

He would finish what should have been finished, and in the absence of one man's ego and unwillingness to listen, he'd be free to kill in ways that were efficient, precise and, if he was in the mood, likely creative.

*
 
* *

NEW
 
YORK

The cat, Baby Jane, walked across the piano keys to the sound of her own music.
 

She stopped in the middle of the keyboard, reached out her paw and pressed down on one of the keys.
 
Curious, she did so again, this time more firmly.
 
And then, delighted that she possessed the gift of music, the cat reared up on her hind legs and crashed down in an eruption of sound.

Maggie Cain swept into the room and hooked the cat with one arm.
 
"You're no Chopin," she said.
 
"You do, however, have the aggression of a young Rachmaninoff.
 
But do me a favor and work it out later, when I'm not writing."
 
She scratched the cat’s chin.
 
“Okay?”

Unfazed, the cat squirmed out of Maggie's arm and ran across the room to the window.
 
She leaped onto the sill and looked out at the falling snow.
 
New York was in the midst of a Nor’easter.
 
They were predicting eighteen inches, but as Maggie moved behind the cat and looked out at the barren street, she knew they were in for more because the snow already was that deep.
 
But she didn't mind it--right now, everywhere she looked was bright and white and seemingly brand new.

She went back to her office and stared at the words on her computer monitor.
 
Her new novel, a thriller, was nearly finished.
 
She'd never attempted the genre before but given what she'd experienced six months ago, she felt uniquely qualified to give it a shot.
 
And she was enjoying it.
 
Three more chapters, a second and a third draft to hone the text, and then it was off to her agent Matt, who encouraged her to write it.

The phone rang.
 
She glanced over at the lighted dial and saw that it was Mark.
 
She weighed whether she wanted to be interrupted by him, and decided that she didn't.
 
She let him slip into the gray world of voice mail and waited for him to leave a message.