Blood risk

"A flaw in your reasoning," Harris said. "This is already a police affair. The guard you shot makes it that."

"Bullshit, and you know it," Tucker said. "Baglio will get his own doctor to fix his boy up."

Harris knew that, but he still wouldn't let go of it. "I can't afford to go to ground for a year, dammit."

Because he had to get Harris off the subject, Tucker said, "Maybe by the time we leave here you'll have a bankroll to last you for a year or even longer."

"How?"

"Wait," Tucker said, because he had no real answer.

They left Deffer's room, turning off the lights and closing the door behind them.

Jimmy Shirillo was waiting with the Halversons. He was standing just inside their door, while they were sitting up against the brass headboard of their bed, bound and gagged, their hands tied to the brass bars behind them. She was thin and somewhat pretty, though with the sagging look about the eyes that indicated a woman wearied and almost beaten by life. Her husband, a tall, thin, sallow-faced man with bushy eyebrows and ears that looked as if they had been grafted from a hound, had been weathered even worse by the years, servile and eager to please. And terrified.

"Questions?" Shirillo asked.

Tucker looked at the Halversons again and saw exactly what Keesey had meant. "No questions. If they even know what Baglio is, I'd be amazed. I have a feeling our man could have been kept in this house for the last month without these two ever being aware of it,"

Shirillo nodded. "They were so obliging, I thought they were going to tie each other up."

"Let's check out the rest of the rooms on this side," Tucker said. "Just to be safe."

In the last two rooms in that smaller of the mansion's two wings, they found proof that both Keesey and Deffer had lied to them: two used bedrooms with full closets. A cursory examination of each was enough to convince Tucker that two more gunmen were up and about and currently unaccounted for.

"I wouldn't have guessed the cook would lie to us," Harris said. He had pocketed his Lüger and was using his free hand to caress the sleek lines of the machine gun.

"He did, though," Tucker said. "And when Deffer mentioned more than two guards, I thought he was lying."

"But where are they?" Harris asked. Anxiously he turned to face the unlighted stairwell, the long arm of the corridor, then the short one.

Shirillo said, "They have to be outside yet." He wasn't ruffled at all. He had surprised himself, and Tucker, with the degree of his adaptability. If Harris became unreliable, Tucker would still be able to count on Shirillo.

"They must have seen us," Harris insisted. His voice was coarse, unsteady. "The way we've been turning the lights off and on in this place, anyone outside would-"

"We haven't, really," Shirillo said. "We've mostly used the flashlight, and the draperies would block that much from a man outside. The only places we used ceiling lights were the art room, storage room and the Halversons' bedroom. The first two don't have any windows, and the third alone wouldn't necessarily arouse suspicion. I think the guards must be behind the house; that's why I'm eliminating what lights we turned on in the front rooms."

Good. Clean, reasoned thought. Tucker knew, if they got out of here, he'd use Shirillo again, on another job. To Harris, whom he knew he would never use again, he said, "I agree with Jimmy."

"Well, friends, even if this is true, it doesn't change anything. Even if those two loose guards don't know we're in the house, they're still down there, below us. Any time now they might go off duty or step inside for a cup of coffee, and when they do it's over." The last couple of words came out of his throat like juice squeezed through a fine-web strainer.

"On the other hand," Tucker said, "we might get finished before they know anything at all."

"Unlikely," Harris said. He revised that opinion: "Impossible."

Tucker said, "Just the same, our best chance is to be quick, to get this done and call in the copter. Let's go see Mr. Baglio."

They turned off the lights in the Halversons' room and closed the door, went quickly to the main stairs, where Tucker stopped and turned to Harris. "Stay here with the Thompson. You're in a good position to guard the stairs-even the back stairs if anyone enters the corridor from those."

"Give me a walkie-talkie?"

"You won't need one," Tucker said. "Not if there's trouble. We'll hear the Thompson chatter no matter where we are."

"Okay," Harris said.

He stepped back into the shadows. For such a big man he was able to conceal himself well, was all but invisible.

Quickly, then, Tucker and Shirillo split up and explored all of the remaining rooms except the one in which — according to Keesey-Baglio and Miss Loraine were sleeping. Finding nothing worthwhile in any of those rooms-certainly not a sign of Merle Bachman-they met before the last door, tried the knob, twisted it, pushed the door inward and flicked on the beam of the flashlight.

For a long moment Tucker thought that the bedroom was uninhabited and that Keesey had been lying to them again, for everything there remained in sepulchral silence. Then the mound of jumbled bedclothes, cut across with an intricate lacework of shadows, convulsed and was flung outward from the huge bed as the woman reacted to the light, rolled, bounced onto her feet, her face taut, not unlike a groggy fighter coming out of a delirium with the sudden realization that he's on the verge of unconsciousness and may lose the match.

"What the hell's this?" she asked.

She was wearing a floor-length flannel nightgown, rumpled and worn and obviously comfortable. It was a sign that her relationship with Baglio was more than a temporary one. If she'd merely been a bed partner, she'd have slept nude or in a frilly bikini outfit calculated to make a man like Baglio keep her around awhile longer. The flannel nightgown was a symbol of her independence and her security within the Baglio household. She didn't need to advertise her sexuality. She was confident that Baglio was always aware of it and that something more than that was what made her interesting to him.

Her hands were out at her sides, as if she were trying to gauge her position and the chance she had of running past them.

"No chance at all," Tucker said.

Shirillo said, "Watch Baglio!"

The strongman had gotten out of bed on the far side and was reaching into the top drawer of the night stand. As he came up with a small, heavy pistol, Tucker placed a shot in the general direction of his hand. He didn't care if he ruined Baglio's golf grip for life; but as it happened, he didn't hit flesh. The silenced shot snapped off the pistol case. Baglio cried out and dropped the gun.

The woman was still unconvinced and took a couple of steps toward the door. When Tucker put two more bullets in the floor a foot in front of her, she stopped cold, having more fully assessed the situation, and she satisfied herself with glaring at him.

Even in the yellow flannel she was a spectacularly lovely woman, and she reminded him of Elise Ramsey. The resemblance wasn't really one of looks or measurements; but Miss Loraine had Elise's way of standing, her attitude of self-control, an air of confidence and competence that was undeniably attractive. It was this about her which had temporarily mesmerized him so that he hadn't noticed Baglio going for the gun.

On the other side of the bed, Baglio, dressed in only a pair of blue shorts, was rubbing his numbed hand. He said, "You could have hit me, you idiot." He sounded like a schoolteacher reprimanding a thoughtless and irresponsible child.

"No chance," Tucker said. "I'm an excellent shot." He did not know if Baglio would believe that anyone could have planned to hit the gun in that dark room, with that much space between them, with a silenced pistol, but he didn't think it would hurt to puff himself. "Don't get the idea I'm shy about putting one through your hand if you reach for anything else."

"I don't know what you're after," Baglio said, unaffected by Tucker's bravura. "But you've made a mistake breaking into my house. Have you any idea who I am?" A real schoolteacher.

"The famous Rossario Baglio," Tucker said. "Now, come along with us."

Baglio was responding to the situation with admirable aplomb, not at all frightened by the hooded, greasepainted specters carrying silenced pistols and not the least humiliated at being caught in his shorts. He'd already figured out who they were, in a general sense, and knew the threat they posed wasn't mortal. And he had less to be ashamed of about his body than most men fifteen years his junior: from his wide shoulders to his loose-skinned but relatively flat stomach he was in good shape; evidently he made use of the swimming pool, sauna and gymnasium in the basement. Too, the Loraine woman would give him a strong motivation for staying fit. It was also the woman, Tucker decided, who helped Baglio meet the situation with so much cool: a man hated to be made a fool of in front of a woman he'd been bedding.

Baglio said, "Come along with you-where?"

"Across the hall."

"As soon as I dress," Baglio said, starting for the closet. He carried himself well, his back straight, head high. If he had had time to drag a comb through his silvery hair, he would almost have been presentable enough for a stint on nationwide television-perhaps as a Presidential candidate.

"No time for that," Tucker said.

In the study across the hall, Shirillo pulled out two sturdy straight-backed chairs and placed them side by side in the middle of the room, indicated them with the barrel of his Lüger and stood out of the way as the couple sat down.

"You still haven't explained yourselves," Baglio said. He continued to be the schoolteacher: lips tight, eyes grim, nostrils flared a bit in indignation. He was going to give them detention minutes if they didn't shape up damn soon.

"We're looking for a friend," Tucker said.

"I don't understand."

Miss Loraine laughed slightly, though Tucker couldn't tell whether the laugh was directed at him or Baglio. Or at herself.

"He was in the car Tuesday morning," Tucker said. "The driver."

Miss Loraine looked up and smiled, not nastily, not as a friend either but as if in remembered pleasure of that collision, as if the excitement still lingered and still touched all the right pleasure centers in the brain.

"I'm sorry you came this far for so little," Baglio said.

"Oh?"

"Yes. The driver's dead."

Tucker smiled. "Of old age?"

Baglio said, "He was banged up pretty badly." His voice had a note, almost, of indifference. "He died yesterday."

"The body?"

"Buried."

"Where?"

"I've a whole graveyard here," Baglio said. His diction was excellent. Either he had gone to the best schools as a boy or he had hired private tutors in his middle age. The last was far more likely than the first. He seemed to take pride in his word choices, his conscious wit, his clear pronunciation, much in the same way a college boy might. "The pine trees are the markers, suitably engraved." He looked at the woman and grinned winningly, elicited a chuckle from her.

Though he forced himself to react emotionally, Tucker's next move was guided solely by intellect. It was clear that neither Baglio nor the woman expected any harm to come to them and that neither of them would make a good subject for interrogation so long as he was comforted by this assumption. Grunting, then, Tucker leaned in and raked the barrel of the Lüger across Baglio's face, using the sight point, gouging him from temple to chin. Blood popped up in a bright line.

"It's time to stop playing games to impress the lady," Tucker said. "It's time to come to grips with your decidedly disadvantageous position." He wondered if Baglio understood, by his choice of words and tone, that Tucker was mimicking him.

Baglio touched his bleeding face, stared at his carmined fingers in disbelief. A long minute later he looked at Tucker, the humor in his face metamorphosed into hatred. "You've just bought yourself one of those pine-marked graves," he said. His voice had not deteriorated. Schoolmaster meting out punishment to the bad boy.

Distasteful as he found this, Tucker swung the Lüger again and scored a red ribbon on Baglio's undamaged cheek.

The strongman started out of his chair, head lowered like a bull ready to ram, yelped and crumpled backward as Shirillo delivered another brutal blow from behind with his own pistol on Baglio's right shoulder. He clutched at the bruised and spasming muscles, hunched forward as if he might be sick. Gradually he'd begun to look his age.

The girl looked older too.

She licked her lips and shifted her gaze around the room as if she thought she'd see something that would unexpectedly turn the tables. That fantasy lasted a brief moment, because she realized, as she must have done often before, that her best weapon was herself-her body and her wits. She looked up, aware of Tucker's eyes on her, and without being obvious about it she shifted inside her tentish yellow gown to mold it at strategic points to her. An offering. But poisoned.

He smiled at her, for he had the vague idea that he might need her cooperation later, then turned back to Baglio. "We were talking about a friend of mine."

"Go to hell," Baglio said.

Shirillo, unbidden, stepped forward and, judging the position of Baglio's kidneys through the slatted back of the chair, jammed the barrel of his Lüger hard into the man's left side. Ordinarily this sort of tactic was beyond him. Now, he kept thinking of his father. And his brother. The shoe shop. His brother's limp.

Baglio grunted, sucked breath, reared up, then crumpled under Shirillo's second, swift chop to his shoulder. He fell off the chair, to the floor.

"My friend?" Tucker asked.

Baglio got his hands under himself and, feigning more weakness than he felt, started up, shifted toward Tucker's feet. That was a stupid move for a man in his situation, the first indication that he'd been frightened and that he was acting on a gut level. Tucker back-stepped and kicked him alongside the head. When he went down this time he stayed down, unconscious.

"Get a glass of water," Tucker told Shirillo.

The kid went after it.

Miss Loraine smiled at Tucker.

He smiled back.

Neither spoke.

Shirillo returned with the water, but before he could throw it in Baglio's face Tucker said, "No vendetta, kid. We can't afford it." He had remembered Shirillo's monologue when they'd first met several weeks ago, remembered the worn-out father and the brother who'd been badly beaten.

"I'm finished," Shirillo said. "I thought at first I wanted to kill him. But I've decided I don't want to pay him back in his own coin; I don't want to be like he is."

"Good," Tucker said. "Think he'll recognize you?"

"No. He saw me once for five minutes, a year and a half ago."

"Wake him, then."

Shirillo tossed the water into the bruised and bloody face, went around behind the two chairs again.

Baglio blinked, looked up.

"We were talking about my friend," Tucker said.

Baglio's lips were swollen, but that could not account for the change in his voice. Behind the slurred words there was a different tone, no more haughtiness, the tone of a man suddenly brought down from a high place and made to see his own mortality. "I told you, he's dead."

"Why does your cook tell a different story?"

"I wouldn't know."

"And Deffer?"

Baglio looked up. The hate was still in his eyes, though it had been veiled now, as if he knew it would be dangerous to show any sort of resolve. "What did they say?"

"An ambulance came and took him away."

"It did. To a grave in the woods."

"Bullshit."

"Again on the shoulder?" Shirillo asked from behind Baglio. "Or another kidney punch?"

"Wait," Tucker said, smiling. He apologized pleasantly to Baglio for his partner's overeager attitude. He said, "I'm sure our friend's in this house. Otherwise everyone's story would match. Otherwise-a lot of things. Now, where is he?"

"No," Baglio said.

Tucker nodded, looked at Shirillo. "Tie him to the chair, then go keep our friend company at the stairwell. You could cover the back stairs while he watches the main ones."

"Expecting trouble?" Shirillo asked.

"It's going to take longer than I thought," Tucker said. "And Mr. Baglio may be screaming loud enough to attract his boys outside before I'm done with him."

Shirillo nodded, used a letter opener to cut down the cords of the draw drapes and expertly lashed Baglio to the straight-backed chair. The older man offered no resistance.

"What about her?" Shirillo asked.

"I can handle her."

"Sure?"

"Positive."

Shirillo left to join Harris at the stairs.

Tucker looked at his watch: 5:10 in the morning. Shortly the dawn would come. Would the two men stationed outside the house leave their posts when the sun had fully risen?

Tucker shook off the thought and directed the woman to move her chair away from Baglio, which she did, putting it down so that it faced him from the side. When she was seated again, like a spectator at a sporting event, Tucker stood behind her, watching Baglio, tracing his fingertips along her warm neck.

Baglio laughed out loud, even though that must have hurt his face.

"Something funny?" Tucker asked. He let his hand become more sure, lying full against her throat, feeling her pulse. He hated himself for trying to get to Baglio through whatever relationship he enjoyed with the woman. He kept thinking how it would be if things were reversed, if he were in the chair and Baglio were caressing Elise.

"That won't work," Baglio said.

Tucker moved his hand, traced the edge of her jaw-line, tenderly tilted her head up. She responded to his touch, or he imagined that she did.

Baglio said, "I've always got a different woman around. Women are nothing to me, nothing at all. I've got nothing special with her. I wasn't the first with her, and I know I'm hot going to be the last, so go ahead, be my guest." All that talking made a tiny stream of thick blood run from the corner of his mouth, down his blackening chin. He made no attempt to lick it away, perhaps because his tongue was cut and swollen-or perhaps because he didn't notice it, his entire attention riveted on Tucker's proprietary hand.

"I think you're lying," Tucker said.

"Think what you want."

"It would get to a man like you if a stranger walked into his house and made him watch, powerless, while-"

"Powerless" was the word that did it. Baglio flared up again, inwardly, hatred rising in his eyes and burning brightly a moment before he veiled it again. "See if I care."

Tucker turned her face toward him, tilted it higher, looked into her green-blue eyes. "If I were to pistol-whip her?" he asked Baglio. "Put a couple of scars on her face — say, from the hairline straight down to the chin-break a few of those perfect teeth?" If Elise could hear him now, what would she say? It wouldn't be good.

But Baglio laughed again, more genuinely this time, or with his act more under control.

The girl stiffened, looked worriedly up at Tucker, shifted her eyes sideways, straining to see Baglio. She hadn't expected this. And in her eyes was a hatred more intense than Baglio's, not for Tucker but for her lover. Her former lover. She'd been made aware, in one brutal instant, that though there might be more between them than just sex, the old man found her expendable. Watching her now, as her face set into grim lines, Tucker knew she would perform a vendetta far better than any Sicilian ever could.

Now that her circumstances were clear, she adjusted quickly, recovered her composure; and decided what she must do. Earlier, Tucker had imagined that she reacted favorably to his caress, but now the reaction was real and not imagined at all. His hand slid down her throat until it lay just above her heavy breasts; and she sat up straighter, leaning into his hand, trying to accommodate him, tempting.

Baglio noticed.

She smiled at Tucker, turned to Baglio and smiled at him too, though differently.

Something was building here, maybe something quite useful, though Tucker didn't see how it could help him just yet.

His watch read 5:20. Time was passing too swiftly.

What next? How could Baglio be broken? Or how could the woman be persuaded to tell him what he wanted to know? She was on the verge of that, he knew, and she needed only the slightest push to… His concentration was broken by the bark of an unsilenced revolver shot echoing in the confines of the second-floor corridor. That single explosion was answered by the furious chatter of Pete Harris's Thompson submachine gun. A man screamed, but not for long, his voice fading out into an unintelligible gasp of meaningless words, and that into silence. Pete Harris mouthed a string of obscenities; they were all blown.

Down at the far end of the corridor, by the rear stairs, Jimmy Shirillo located a panel of switches and flooded the second-floor hallway with startlingly white light. That didn't matter any longer, because there was no hope of keeping their presence a secret from the men who were standing guard outside the house. Harris's burst of mar chine-gun fire had tossed the cards into the air, and the only way to be sure the cards landed in the right suits was to move fast and cover all the contingencies.

Tucker pushed the woman ahead of him, not rudely but firmly, as he hurried toward the main stairwell. He didn't bother to keep the pistol trained on her. Alone, she had nothing to gain by a grandstand play for escape, and she knew it.

Pete Harris sat against the wall, just this side of the entrance to the stairs, the Thompson lying on the carpet beside him. He was trying to work the trouser leg up over his right knee without touching the wound he'd suffered. His greasepainted face glistened with sweat that had popped through the black cover and had streaked it.

Shirillo waited at the back stairs, on guard for attack from that direction.

"You okay?" Tucker shouted.

"Yeah!" Shirillo called back.

Halfway between Shirillo and Harris, against the rear wall, lay a dead man. He was stretched out on his back, one leg twisted up under his buttocks, his arms thrown above his head, nearly cut in half by the burst of machine-gun fire. A lot of blood decorated the walls and spread darkly over the expensive carpet.

"How is it?" Tucker asked Harris.

Harris looked up as he finally rolled the trouser leg above his knee. "He got me in the calf. It hurts like hell, but I don't think it's really too bad."

Tucker bent and looked at the wound, squeezed it to force blood out of it, peered intently into the jagged slash before it could fill with new blood. "It seems to be just a graze," he said. "Just a crease. You'll live, I believe."

"Thanks, friend," Harris said. "Christ, the shit has hit the fan, has it not?" He didn't seem to notice Miss Loraine.

"We've still got the advantage," Tucker said.

Too much white showed around the irises of Harris's eyes, giving him an expression of shocked horror, no matter what his lips were doing. "Sure, friend," he said, none too enthusiastically.

"Where'd he come from?"

Harris looked at the dead man, cleared his throat, spat on the rug. "I can't figure that one."

"Up the steps?"

"No," Harris said. "And he couldn't have come up the back way without knocking Jimmy down to get a shot at me. My friend, he simply popped up like a ghost between the two of us. I was hit before I saw him. When I caught his outline, I didn't waste time." He was upset. He had mentioned Shirillo's first name in front of the girl-as he had mentioned it in front of Keesey, the cook-and he looked on the edge of hysteria. He patted the Thompson, though, and forced a weak grin.

"You think he was already upstairs?" Tucker asked.

"I know it."

"Where was he hiding?"

"In one of those rooms."

"Couldn't have been. We searched them all."

"Not well enough, friend."

Was that possible? They'd looked in closets, under beds, been most professional about it. No. They hadn't overlooked anything. Tucker stood up and looked at Miss Loraine. "Where would he have been?"

"Who?"

"Don't be funny. The dead man."

"I wouldn't know."

He moved quickly, grabbed her arm, twisted it, levered it up behind her back, forcing her to bend and grunt in pain. "Remember what I told Baglio about your face?"

"You wouldn't do that to me."

She was right, but he couldn't afford to strengthen her certainty, so he pushed harder on her arm.

"I don't know where the hell he was!" she snapped, jerking straight up and breaking his hold. He hadn't applied full pressure, not what he would have used against a man. The ease with which she'd pulled away from him was a warning not to misjudge her again.

"Keep her covered," Tucker told Harris. "You feel up to it?"

"Sure, friend," he said, lifting the machine gun.

Tucker went to talk with Shirillo and found that the kid didn't know where the gunman had come from. "I didn't know he was here until he shot Pete. Then I fell flat and stayed flat to keep out of the way of ricochets from the Thompson."

Tucker looked at his watch. He examined the corridor again, stared at the corpse, tried to imagine where he'd come from. He said, "Did you look in the closets in the Halversons' room?"

"You know I did."

"What about those rooms you checked out on your own, down there in the other wing?"

"Give me some credit."

"Dammit, he came from somewhere.'"

Shirillo grimaced and said, "He came from the same place they're holding Bachman."

Tucker wiped at his face as if there were cobwebs over it. The greasepaint made his skin feel sticky. His vision was blurry, his mouth hot and dry. He said, "How do you get that notion?"

"It's logical."

"The attic?" Tucker said.

"We can go look. But I doubt that's it, because I seem to be standing under the attic door." He pointed to a trap in the ceiling directly overhead, reached up and gripped the chromed handle, pulled down a set of folding metal steps that led up into darkness.

Tucker went up and came back in less than five minutes. "Empty," he told Shirillo. "And this is the only door in or out." He left the stairs unfolded because, according to the plan, they'd need to use them later.

"Now?" Shirillo asked. He was in complete control of himself, holding it all together.

Tucker took a roll of lime-flavored Life Savers from the pocket of his windbreaker, offered one to Shirillo, popped one into his own mouth when the kid declined, sucked on the candy. He said, "How do you go about finding a hidden room?"

Shirillo blinked, wiped a hand over his hooded head as if he wanted to run fingers through his hair, said, "Isn't that a bit much?"

"You're the one who sold me on the idea that the Mafia is melodramatic, remember?"

"But a hidden room?"

"Bachman's in this house somewhere. I know it. But we've looked in every room and closet from the basement to the attic." He jammed his hands into his trouser pockets and worked at the ring of sweetness in his mouth. "A man like Baglio might find a hidden room very useful. For one thing, he could store the money there every other Monday night-and anything else he might think is too hot to leave out in the open or put into a safe-deposit vault that federal agents could get a court order to open." He cracked the Life Saver in two.

Shirillo said, "But a safe would do it. A hidden room is a grandiose way of-"

"A safe wouldn't do, say, for a large drug shipment. And if cops showed up at the door with a warrant, they'd be empowered to open a safe, whereas they'd bypass a hidden room altogether."

"Maybe."

"So how would you go about looking for a hidden room?"

Shirillo considered it awhile and finally said, "I guess you'd have to compare partitions from the corridor and from inside the rooms, try to find a discrepancy somewhere."

Tucker nodded, looked at his watch.

5:36.

"I better get moving then," he said.

Shirillo nodded.

"Our missing guard is either in the hidden room, somewhere between you and Pete, or he was outside the house when he heard the shots."

"If he was outside," Shirillo said, "we would have heard from him by this time."

"Unless he decided not to come in here after us."

"Why wouldn't he?"

"Maybe he knows he's outnumbered."

"He couldn't know."

Tucker finished the candy. An unpleasant possibility had occurred to him, and he didn't want to have to talk about it, though he knew that Shirillo had a right to hear what he was thinking. Of course Harris had the same right, though he'd never tell Harris. The kid, he felt sure, would be able to think about it without panicking. Harris might break. "Maybe he was outside, heard the shots, knew he wouldn't do any good rushing in here alone. Maybe he opened the garage door, got out the limousine, managed to drift it down the drive and out of earshot, started it and went after help."

"Christ." For the first time during those long evening hours Shirillo looked scared.

"Don't worry about it," Tucker said. "It's just a thing I thought we should keep in mind."

"Sure."

"We'll be a long time gone before he beats it back here with the reinforcements." He smiled and slapped Shirillo's shoulder, feeling like an older brother. "If he went away after anyone."

"He did."

"We can't be sure."

"Yes, we can. It's the worst thing that could happen-and that's been par for this whole operation." Despite his sincere pessimism, the kid wasn't ready to run for it.

Tucker knew what Shirillo said was true, and he felt the hard, emotional intolerance of failure that had driven him this far. He thought of his old man, of Mr. Mellio at the bank, of the trust monies held up in the long court battles, and he knew he wouldn't louse this up. He couldn't fail like that.

"Anyway," he said, "who's going to shoot at a state-police helicopter?"

"If they fall for it," Shirillo qualified.

"They did before."

"That's why they might not fall for it a second time. Familiarity breeds suspicion."

"Contempt, I believe it is."

"Not with these guys."

"The old Iron Hand, huh?"

Shirillo smiled.

Shirillo was correct, of course, no matter how much Tucker might attempt to minimize their problems. Still, Tucker couldn't see any good in standing together, depressing each other with speculations on the nature of their imminent demise. Soon they'd be in as bad a way as Pete Harris, jumping at the slightest noise, overreacting to every imagined movement in the shadows.

"Got to go," Tucker said.

He turned away from the kid and began to check the partitions between the rooms, searching for any obvious disparity.

The time was 5:41 in the morning, well after dawn of a new day.

Five minutes later Tucker knew where the hidden room lay and where, by extension, Merle Bachman was being kept. He entered the back room in the short wing where a guard-either the dead man, the wounded man or the missing gunman-slept, and he removed the clothes from the closet. He wasn't worried about wrinkling what he tossed out of the way, and he'd begun to examine the closet walls with the beam of his flashlight when he heard the Thompson start to chatter again in the corridor.

He went to see what was wrong, went to Harris, who stood at the head of the stairs with the big weapon aimed down at the landing wall.

"Tried to come up," Harris said. His wounded leg didn't seem to be bothering him as much as before That could be good or bad; it might mean the wound was as shallow as it looked and had stopped bleeding, or it might mean that Harris was too afraid to register pain. "It was the same bastard we tied up downstairs. I thought I put him out for a good long while."

"Get him?"

"No."

At least the missing guard hadn't high-tailed it off the estate, as he'd feared. Instead, the man had come inside and revived his workmate and was probably now trying to figure a way to get upstairs.

Down at the end of the hall Shirillo shouted something unintelligible. When Tucker turned he saw the kid shooting into the narrow confines of the rear stairs' shaft, though his silenced Lüger made very little sound.

"Any luck?"

"No!" Shirillo called.

"There are only two of them," Tucker said. "They can keep harassing us, but they can't very well rush us."

"There's the cook," Harris said.

"Keesey may lie, but he doesn't fight," Tucker said. "Besides, one more man isn't enough to put us on the defensive. We could stand off a dozen from here."

Harris stepped away from the head of the stairs so he could not see or be seen by anyone coming up. He remained facing the steps, though, with the machine gun at his hip, but his attention was on Tucker. His face was a mess of sweat, greasepaint, deeply carved lines of fatigue, and when he spoke he didn't have to whisper: his voice was hoarse with fear. "Let's get the hell out of here. Bachman isn't here. There's nothing here we want."

"Bachman's here," Tucker corrected him.

"Yeah?"

"Definitely."

"I don't see him," Harris said, grinning. The grin was malicious, and it threatened a further breakdown, one that would permit him to disregard Tucker's orders and call his own shots.

Harris was no longer trustworthy. Tucker did not let him see that he'd reached that conclusion, and he said, "Bachman's in a concealed room." He took two large steps to the back wall and rapped on the plaster with his knuckles. "Doesn't it seem odd there's all this wall space and no rooms behind it?"

Harris blinked at the long expanse of unmarred plaster, looked right and left at the nearest doors. "I thought those two rooms accounted for it."

"You've been in the one in the short wing. The one adjacent to this empty space in the long wing is about the same size. There's something in between them."

Harris squinted, thought about it. He would have preferred to get out of there; he didn't want to have to think about anything besides running, hiding, staying alive. However, he said, "Okay. How do we get him?"

"I think it's through a closet in one of the two adjacent rooms, but I haven't found the door yet."

"Make it fast," Harris said.

He turned back to the stairwell, waiting for something to happen, for something to shoot at.

"Hold the fort," Tucker said, turning back toward the room from which the stuttering Thompson had called him.

The walls of the closet were featureless plaster, too smooth to contain a secret doorway. He got down on his hands and knees and gave the quarter round a careful inspection to see if any of it was loose or movable. None of it was. Satisfied that the entrance was in the other room in the long wing, he went to raid a second closet.

Passing Harris and the woman, he said, "We'll have him out in a couple of minutes."

"Wait," Miss Loraine said.

He almost didn't hear her. When she called again he turned and said, "Yeah?"

"I want to talk to you."

"No time," Tucker said.

"I want to make a deal." She spoke softly, but her voice carried well. "I can help you."

"Too late for that."

"No, it isn't."

"Sorry."

"I could save you half an hour finding Bachman."

He said. "I doubt that. The entrance to that hidden space has to be in the closet in that room. I'll have it worked out in…" He suddenly realized that she'd used Bachman's name, that both he and Harris had given it to her. What the hell. Was he losing his edge? He said, "Christ!"

She walked toward him and held out her hand as if to take his. "You can buy Bachman, and my silence, if you want to."

"It'd be easier for Bachman to change his name," he said.

"Untrue. Besides, Ross would find him sometime."

That was right enough. But he said, "Buy your silence? With what?"

"Money."

"We haven't any." He sounded angry and bitter, but he couldn't help it. He'd had to keep up his renowned facade too long already.

"You will if you deal with me," the girl said. She dropped the offered hand, waiting. She looked even more like Elise now, a secret smile of self-satisfaction tinting her lovely face.

Tucker said, "What's the deal?"

She pursed her lips, licked them. She said, "Okay, you're going to find this Bachman on your own, I see that. You're going to make a fool out of Ross like no one's ever done before. He won't want me around once I've seen him humiliated, so I haven't any reason to stick around here. The deal is-I get twenty percent of whatever's in those three suitcases, plus a free ride out of here."

Tucker blinked, felt his legs grow momentarily weaker, then smiled. "I'll be damned," he said. "The Tuesday shipment?"

"That's it."

"The cash?"

"Yes."

"I didn't think it'd be here yet."

"It wasn't sent out a second time, for reasons I'll explain if you'll deal."

He shook his head ruefully. "Now that I know it's here, why do I need to deal at all?"

"Because you could waste hours hunting for it. There are a thousand places in a house this size that three suitcases could be hidden. And from the way you've been acting, you can't spend much more time in here-you've got someone coming to pick you up."

He admired her despite the fact that she'd started out on the other side of the fence. When she saw that the circumstances had gotten beyond her control, she maneuvered to increase the range of her power. He could see why Baglio had respected her. The old man's only mistake was in not respecting her even more than he had. He was also pleased with her demands. They were eminently reasonable if she could supply what she boasted.

"Okay," he said.

"Deal?"

"Deal."

She frowned and said, "It's not as easy as that, though. We'll have to talk some more."

"Talk," he said. He reached into his pocket and took out the roll of Life Savers, popped one into his mouth.

"Not here."

"Where?"

"In the room you're on your way to."

Tucker looked at his watch: 6:06. He didn't feel much like finishing the operation in broad daylight, though it appeared as if they were going to have to do just that. He said, "We can't take long bargaining. It's getting damn late."

"I'll need two minutes," she said.

"Come on, then."

She stepped over the corpse on the corridor floor, her pretty bare toes squishing in the damp carpet, went with Tucker to the guard's bedroom. Behind them, Harris fared another burst down the main stairwell.

In the bedroom she sat down on the corner of the mattress and tucked her long legs under her, now very demure and innocent in the flannel gown. She said, "How do you expect to get out of here?"

He hesitated, then said, "A helicopter."

She made a face. "I'm serious."

"So am I."

She said, "I don't want to make a deal if you're really a bunch of clowns who didn't think this thing through."

He explained, in detail but as rapidly as possible, about Norton and the helicopter with the state-police markings.

"I'm impressed," she said.

"Now," he said, "impress me. Do you know what happens to people who upset Ross Baglio?"

"I know."

"But you're willing to risk it?"

"A girl has to provide for herself," she said. She sounded like an earnest, homely high-school freshman deciding to take the sensible secretarial program to prepare to meet the bills four years hence. She was delightful.

"Baglio knows your name. It'll be easy to track you down."

"A name can be changed," She was implying that Loraine wasn't her real name anyway.

"You can't change the way you look. Every man who sees you is going to remember you."

"You're exaggerating my appeal," she said. "Besides, I know something about makeup and disguise." She got off the bed and said, "Are you trying to talk me out of helping you?"

"No," he said. "I just want to understand exactly why you're doing this so I have a better idea of what's going to happen later. For instance, I wouldn't want you to go through with this with the idea of bringing your twenty percent back to Baglio and telling him all you learned about us while you were counted as a friend."

"I'd have to be a fool," she said.

"I know."

"But I'm not."

He sighed. So much like Elise. "I know that too."

"Well?"

"Deal," he said again.

She went to the closet and started tossing out suits, trousers and dress shirts. When everything was cleaned out of the way, she asked him to step back and to direct the flashlight on the floor between them. Kneeling, she studied the floorboards a moment, got her nails into the cracks on both sides of one of them, tugged at it, let it go. She tried the one beside it, which looked identical to the first, sighed when it rattled and came away in her hands, a two-inch-wide and four-foot-long strip of wood. She put it out of the way, revealing a lever that lay under the tightly fitted but unnailed board.

"I'd have found that in no time," he said.

"Of course," she said. "And you'd have gotten Bachman too. But I'm along to help you get the money, which you didn't even know was here."

"Go on," he said.

She pressed the lever down with the heel of her hand. On Tucker's right the entire back wall of the closet swung inward, a feature that negated the need for a telltale seam in the middle of the wall where an ordinary secret door might have been.

He said, "Is Baglio a chronic paranoid?"

"Among other things."

The wall swung wider open.

"Don't feel you have to catalogue them."

The room beyond the closet was nearly as large as the guard's bedroom on the other side, lighted by fluorescent ceiling strips, windowless. Merle Bachman was strapped in the bed against the far wall, looking their way and trying to grin.

Tucker saw at once why Bachman had not been forced to tell Baglio what he knew, why he was still alive and why they still had a chance to keep their identities intact. The crash in the Chevrolet had ruined the small man's lovely smile by breaking loose eighty percent of his teeth and splitting both his lips. The upper lip was split clear to his septum and swollen four or five times larger than it should have been. He had to breathe through his mouth, since the lip closed off his nostrils, and his breathing was so noisy Tucker wondered why that hadn't been audible even through all these walls.

Bachman made a gagging sound that was apparently some sort of greeting, though it didn't succeed any better than his smile.

"You can't talk?" Tucker asked.

Bachman made chortling sounds.

"Then don't try," Tucker said. "You sound disgusting. And while you're at it, wipe that-smile? — off your face."

Bachman didn't try to speak again, but he kept smiling. His left eye was puffed shut and his right was blackened, though not swollen like the other. Several fingers on both hands had been splinted and bandaged by Baglio's doctor. Otherwise, he looked well enough.

"No broken legs or arms?" Tucker asked, kneeling at the bed. "Just shake your head."

Bachman shook his head no.

"Can you walk?"

Bachman shook: no.

"Why not?"

It was a badly phrased question. Bachman looked earnest and began to make gagging noises again, trying to explain.

"Forget it," Tucker said. "You're drugged, aren't you?"

Bachman sighed and nodded yes.

Miss Loraine said, "Shall we get on with the second part of it-the money?"

"It's here?" Tucker asked.

"Yes. But he doesn't know it," she added, nodding to Bachman.

"Get it, then."

She walked away from the bed to the back of the room, where she opened the door of a white metal storage cabinet bolted to the wall.

He stepped up beside her and said, "What gives?"

"The wall." She slid away the metal back of the cabinet, revealing another lever exactly like the one in the closet floor, pressed it down. The cabinet which was bolted to the wall beside this one swung into the room, revealing a narrow storage space large enough for a few suitcases, or for a body. Right now it contained just suitcases.

"A hidden room inside a hidden room," Tucker said, amazed.

"He's a clever man," she said.

Tucker said, "Then why didn't he take this into town? Why'd he leave it here?"

"Ross didn't know who'd hit him," she explained. "He thought it might be someone inside his own organization, and he left the cash here because he didn't trust sending it into town again-not until he could get Bachman to talk."

"A careful man."

"This time he was too careful," she said. "Let's get it out of here." She hefted the smallest suitcase and carried it back to Bachman, while Tucker muscled the other two out of the niche and followed her.

They put the cases on the low table next to the bed and opened them one at a time. The two largest were packed with tightly wrapped bills, while the smaller was half full and padded out with butcher's paper.

"Ahhh," Merle Bachman said. He seemed surprised that the cash had been in the room with him; apparently Miss Loraine was telling the truth when she said he hadn't known about it.

Tucker said, "We scored after all."

While Miss Loraine went to find suitable clothes to wear for an airborne escape, Tucker explained the situation to Shirillo and Harris. The kid accepted it, trusting Tucker, but Harris, more agitated than ever, had some questions.

"She's a woman," he said. "Can she keep her mouth shut when we get out of this?"

"As well as you can," Tucker said. Then, to soften that, he added, "Or as well as I can."

Harris said, "She'll run out of money fast. She'll squander it, and then she'll start making plans."

"I don't think so."

"If she does, though, she'll come back to one of us, some way, and want more."

"She won't."

"Okay, she'll run back to Baglio."

"He'd kill her."

"Maybe she's too dumb to know that."

"She's not. She knows the risks, and she knows how to handle herself. We can trust her; we have to."

"Not necessarily," Harris said. He looked ugly. Maybe his wound was hurting him again-or maybe it had nothing to do with that look.

Tucker said, "We can't kill her, if that's what you mean."

"Why not?"

"I made a deal with her."

"So?"

Tucker said, "Is that the way you'd have me do business? Remember, I've made a deal with you, too. If I can give my word to her, then kill her, what's to keep me from working the same thing with you?" Before Harris could answer, he said, "No, we can't do business that way. Besides, killing her would make the whole caper too hot. Baglio can cover up the death of one of his gunmen easily enough. But that woman's got a family somewhere, a life outside of the organization, and her death would probably mean the police getting into the act sooner or later."

Harris wiped at his face. His gloved hand came away black, and some of his disguise was gone. "I hope you're right about her," he said.

"I am. And cheer up. Now you can retire, like you want."

Tucker went back to the hidden room, leaving Harris and Shirillo to guard the stairs, and unstrapped Merle Bachman, helped him out of the bed, tried to get him to stand on his own feet. As Bachman had warned with a shake of his head, that proved impossible. Evidently he hadn't been permitted on his feet during the last couple of days, hadn't eaten anything in all that time-couldn't have because of his ruined mouth-and had only drunk what he was forced to drink to keep from dehydrating. His weakened condition, magnified by the pain killers that the doctor had prescribed, had turned his legs to rubber which bent and twisted under him. Finally, though, Tucker got him to the end of the corridor under the attic door and left him with Shirillo.

Five minutes after that he'd transferred all three of the money-stuffed suitcases to the same spot. "Anything happening here?" he asked Shirillo.

"No. They're too quiet down there."

Before Tucker could respond, Miss Loraine came up behind him and said, "I'm ready."

She was wearing white levis and a dark-blue sweater, all of it cut to fit like second skin, both functional and sensual. Tucker remembered how she'd looked the day of the robbery in the miniskirt and tight sweater, and he wondered why, with that canny head of hers, she still was so careful to keep her sex honed as a bargaining tool.

As if reading his mind, she said, "It always pays to be prepared for anything."

"It does," he agreed. He looked at his watch: 7:02.

It was full daylight outside.

He'd told Norton that the operation would be concluded by dawn at the very latest. Paul would be chewing his nails and wondering how much longer he should hold on. Tucker hoped he'd wait another ten minutes, until they could put a call through on the walkie-talkie. No, he wasn't just hoping for that-he knew Norton would wait. He would wait. He was sure of it. Damn, damn, damn.

He slipped a new clip into his Lüger, pocketed the depleted clip and relieved Shirillo of his watch over the pear stairs.

"Get the suitcases up first," he said.

The kid nodded, picked up the largest piece of luggage and struggled with it to the top of the metal steps, muscled it overhead and slid it onto the attic floor. He didn't have the physique for heavy work, but he wasn't complaining. By the time he'd taken the second case from Miss Loraine and worked it through the trap door overhead, his face glistened, his black makeup streaked. When he shoved the third bag into place above, he leaned into the steps and let out a long wheeze of exhaustion.

"Want me to get Bachman up?" Tucker asked.

"No. I will."

The time was 7:10.

Norton would be waiting.

Shirillo examined Bachman, helped the battered man to his feet, found an acceptable hold on him and went sideways up the narrow collapsible steps. Near the top he had to let go of his burden. Bachman gripped the top steps, his weakened hands clumsy with the splinted and bandaged fingers. Shirillo scrambled quickly into the attic, turned, reached down, took Bachman by the wrist and, with a little help from Merle himself, got him through the trap door and into the upper chamber.

"Ready up here," Shirillo called down.

"Good work."

"Just plenty of motivation," Shirillo said, grinning.

7:14.

"Move," Tucker told the woman.

She went up the ladder fast, took Jimmy's hand and was gathered into the overhead room.

7:15.

Harris looked up the hall, saw that most of the work was done, nodded in response to Tucker's hand signal.

We're going to make it, Tucker thought. He'd done it. He'd made a botched job into a success; he'd persevered.

Turning, he started up the steps-but got no farther than the third rung as the window shattered beside him and two closely spaced slugs struck him hard on the left side.

He fell and struck his head on the last rung of the metal ladder before he rolled up against the corridor wall. Strangely, the moment he'd been hit, he thought: Iron Hand, recalling the nightmare. Then he was too numbed from the shock of being wounded to think of anything. When pain began to replace the paralysis, seconds later, he thought the man at the bottom of the back steps had shot him, but then he realized, as he sat up in the middle of all that broken glass, that the shots had come from outside the house.

The shots were a signal to the man downstairs to try to come up now that their attention was diverted. Harris was prepared for that strategy, and he let out a long chatter of machine-gun fire down the main stairwell.

Shirillo came off the attic steps fast, drawing another shot from outside as he moved quickly past the window. "How is it?"

"The nerves are still mostly deadened from the impact, but it's starting to hurt pretty badly. I got it twice, I think, close together. Damn hard punch."

"Rifle," Shirillo said. "The garage roof connects with this end of the house. I saw him standing out there when I went by the window just now." As he spoke he removed the shattered walkie-talkie from Tucker's arm and threw it into the middle of the hallway. "I was going to tell you that you'd overprepared by bringing two of these, since we never needed to use them between us. Now I'm glad I kept my mouth shut."

"The damn thing didn't take both shots, did it?"

"No," Shirillo said. "There's blood." He probed the wound with a finger until Tucker was sweating with pain. "You only stopped one bullet," he said. "It passed through the back of your arm and out the top of your shoulder, right through the meaty part, then out again. At least, by the way your jacket's all ripped up, I'd say that's how it is. But I wouldn't want to swear to it until we have you in the copter and can get your clothes off. There's a good bit of blood."

Tucker winced at the pain, which, having held off for several minutes, now throbbed relentlessly, and he said, "It's easy enough to come down that ladder fast. But going up again is another thing altogether. He'll have enough time to pick us off like painted targets."

"Clearly true," Shirillo said. Even now he did not appear to be shaken. Tucker thought he could see in the kid's manner, however, his own kind of bottled-up terror below a facade of calm maintained at only the greatest expenditure of nervous energy.

Tucker said, "Now don't shout for him, but get Pete. Walk down there and ask him to come up here. I think, as long as there's one man on the garage roof, there isn't anyone else down there to come up the steps. Not unless they untied Keesey, which I seriously doubt."

"Be right back," Shirillo said.

He returned with Harris, who listened to Tucker explain the situation, which he had figured out on his own anyway. He assured them that he could use the rapid-firing Thompson to clear the garage roof while running little risk of getting hit himself.

"Just be damned careful," Tucker said. "You deserve your share after making it this far."

"Don't worry your ass, friend," Harris said, grinning. He got up and flattened himself against the wall next to the shattered window. He let a long minute pass, as if one unknown moment were better than another, then suddenly whirled around, facing the open window, the Thompson up before him, chattering away at the rifleman. No one screamed, but a moment later Harris turned to them and said, "He's finished. But one thing: it wasn't one of the gunmen. It was Keesey."

"The cook?"

"The cook."

"Shit," Tucker said. "Then there's still one of them downstairs, and he knows you're no longer guarding the stairs."

He got to his feet despite the thumping invisible stick that seemed to be trying to drive him down again. The pain in his arm lanced outward, crossed his entire back, over to his other shoulder, down to his kidneys.

"You make the stairs yourself?" Harris asked.

"I can. But Jimmy has to go first."

Shirillo began to protest, realized he was the one carrying the last walkie-talkie, nodded and scrambled upward into the attic.

"Follow me closely," Tucker said.

"Don't worry about that, friend."

Tucker gripped the stair railing with his good hand and climbed toward the square of darkness overhead which framed Jimmy Shirillo's anxious face. He felt as if he were with some Swedish mountaineering 'team, but he finally made it, with the kid's help.

"Move ass!" he called down to Harris.

The big man started up the steps.

Tucker looked at his watch.

7:28.

Norton would be waiting. He would.

After Harris drew up the attic steps, made certain the bottom plate was closed firmly over the trap opening and threw the bolt back to keep it that way, Jimmy Shirillo got out his walkie-talkie and, following Tucker's instructions, attempted to call up Paul Norton, the copter pilot.

The open frequency hummed distantly, an eerie sound in the warm confines of the attic.

Shirillo repeated the call signal.

"Why doesn't he answer?" the woman asked.

Tucker felt the future seeping away from him. He began to think of Elise, of the peace and quiet of the Park Avenue apartment.

Abruptly, Norton's voice crackled over the walkie-talkie, strange and yet familiar, acknowledging the summons.

"Thank God!" Harris said, his voice weak.

"How long will it take him to get here?" Miss Loraine wanted to know. She was sitting between the two largest suitcases, one arm draped over each of them, as if she were daring Tucker, or any of them, to leave her behind.

Tucker said, "Less than five minutes."

She laughed and said, "Hell, then we're home free." Despite her good humor, she hung onto the pair of suitcases.

"Hold the celebrations," Tucker said.

"You okay?" Shirillo asked.

"Fine," Tucker said. In reality, he felt as if he'd been dragged several miles from the back of a horse, aching in every muscle, exhausted, the pain in his arm spreading out until it was no longer localized but hard and hot throughout his body. To get his mind off the pain, he considered their situation and decided what must be done next. "You better go find the door that leads onto the roof," he told Shirillo. "According to those photographs your uncle took, it's down at the other end of the house."

Shirillo nodded, got up, hunched down somewhat to keep from cracking his head against the bare rafters and went down that way to have a look around. In a couple of moments he located the overhead door, worked it loose of its pinnings, shoved it out of the way and called back to the others.

"Let's go," Tucker said.

He felt as if he were always telling someone to move, in one way or another. It would be good to get home again, to pay back the ten-thousand-dollar loan and to relax, to take a couple of months off before seriously considering any proposals that were forwarded to him by Clitus Felton out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Maybe if he could set up a few good deals on some of his artwork he could take as much as half a year off, and he'd hardly have to move at all.

Pete Harris helped Merle Bachman the length of the low-ceilinged attic, while Tucker was able to make it on his own. He had a strong urge to grip his wounded arm and to stop the rapidly vibrating pain that made his bones sing, but he knew that would only make the pain worse. He let his arm hang at his side, and he tried not to think about anything but getting out of there.

The woman carried the smallest suitcase, while Harris went back to fetch the last two after depositing Merle Bachman under the door to the mansion roof.

Tucker stood over Bachman, swaying, needing to sit, refusing to allow himself that much. They were close, too close to stop being alert and prepared.

In the distance the sound of a helicopter rattled through the still morning air.

"Got to hurry," Tucker said.

It had occurred to him that the gunman downstairs would hear the copter and might go outside where he could, at such close range, make an attempt to kill the pilot.

Shirillo was the first onto the roof, making the move with little trouble, and, with Harris assisting him from below, managed to get Merle Bachman outside just as Norton brought the chopper in low over the house. The girl went next, looking back only once at the three bags full of money, and she did not require any aid. Tucker followed her, his shoulder blazing with pain as he bumped it on the beveled rim of the trap door, requiring Shirillo's help to make the last part of the trip. Pete Harris handed out the suitcases one at a time, almost as if they were filled with nitroglycerin, then followed them.

The time was 7:38.

"Fantastic!" the girl said, looking up at the chopper.

Tucker said nothing.

An automatic rope ladder wound slowly out of the passenger door of the helicopter, a feature which Paul Norton had installed for the benefit of his string of less than legitimate customers. In a half minute from the time it had begun to unroll, the ladder's final hemp rung scraped against the mansion roof.

"Who first?" Shirillo asked, grasping the ladder and turning to look at the others. He wasn't having any trouble keeping his balance on the gently slanted roof, though to Tucker the angle seemed precipitous and the shingles seemed to move under them.

Harris said, "I'll take Merle up first. I don't think any of the rest of you can manage him on that ladder."

"Go," Tucker said.

He longed to sit down and rest, even to sleep, but he knew that sleep was a dangerous desire right now.

Harris gave Shirillo his Thompson submachine gun and said, "If you need it, do you know how to use it?"

The kid checked it out, nodded, said, "Yes."

Harris turned, gathered up Merle Bachman as if the smaller man were a child, slung him over his shoulder and held onto him with his left hand. He wasn't even bowed by the weight. Now, Tucker realized, despite the danger he'd posed throughout the operation, Harris was doing his share and had become as valuable as any man on the team. He gripped the rope ladder with his right hand, stepped onto the bottom rung and held tight as Norton drew them up toward the open copter door.

A gentle wind swept over the mansion and, in conjunction with the copter's wallowing motion, caused the ladder to swing back and forth in a wide arc that threatened to dump both of the men clinging to it. However, Harris held on, and the sway declined as the ladder shortened. Then the ladder stopped; Harris climbed the last few steps, worked Bachman into the open door and followed the wounded man.

The ladder raveled downward once again.

"You next," Tucker told the woman.

She was on the ladder the instant it fell before her, and she didn't wait to ride it while it retracted. As it pulled up into its mechanism, she climbed and gained the copter door in short order. Tucker wondered what Norton would think, whether he'd be nonplused by her unexpected appearance. He was relieved when, after she'd been inside the craft a moment, the ladder dropped swiftly again.

The copter bobbed but stayed pretty much in one spot, riding the back of the wind.

Shirillo shouted, "What about the suitcases?"

Tucker looked at them. "Give me the 'Thompson. You take the bags up one at a time."

Shirillo handed over the gun, lifted the smallest case, gripped the ladder and rode upward as it retracted. Harris, who was waiting for him, took the suitcase out of his hands. S'hirillo started back down.

A rifle cracked from below, the sharp noise muffled by the heavy thumping of the chopper's blades but nonetheless frightening and recognizable, like an ax splitting wood.

Tucker edged farther down the sloping roof until he could see the gunman on the lawn. Bracing the Thompson between his knees, weaker than ever now, his head swimming back and forth and his vision too blurred to take good aim, he clenched his teeth and let go a long, rattling burst of fire.

Down there, where bullets were plowing up the grass like rain, the gunman turned and ran, dived for cover behind a cement flower planter a hundred yards out from the house.

Tucker looked at Shirillo, saw the kid was just stepping onto the ladder with the second suitcase in hand.

"Move!"

Shirillo couldn't make the ladder operate any faster than it was doing now, and he couldn't very well climb it while carrying the luggage, but Tucker couldn't repress the shout. His calm facade was cracking, his carefully cultured composure slipping away. It had been one hell of an operation, and it mustn't go bad now because of one gorilla with a rifle, one punk out to impress the boss with his bravery.

The man behind the concrete planter stood up long enough to aim and take a shot at Tucker.

The bullet tore across the shingle two feet on Tucker's right, spraying chips of tarry fabric.

He loosened a chatter of machine-gun fire, chipping the cement all to hell.

Shirillo picked up the third suitcase and started up the ladder again, jerked as the man behind the planter got him in the thigh.

Son of a bitch, Tucker thought. His weariness and dizziness flopped over and were anger on the other side, anger enough to bring him into sharp, fast movement. He pulled hard on the Thompson's trigger and was rewarded with the sight of the gunman stepping frantically backward out of the way of a line of dancing bullets.

The man turned and ran, the rifle on the lawn where he'd dropped it, darting this way and that, seeking the shelter of shrubbery.

You dumb bastard, Tucker thought. I could have killed you, and what percentage would have been in that?

Everyone seemed anxious to die, as if they couldn't wait for it, like this man and the man he'd wounded on the promenade earlier in the evening. And like Baglio, ready to take a beating rather than tell where Bachman was. Of course, in this business you took a blood risk, because you worked with dangerous men at dangerous times. But a risk should be reasonable, the chances of success greater than the chances for failure. Otherwise you were no better than a fool.

"Hey!" Shirillo called down, breaking Tucker's reverie. He'd gotten the last suitcase into the chopper and had followed close behind it.

Strapping the Thompson around his chest, Tucker got to his feet, almost fell, almost lost it all right there, grabbed desperately for the rope ladder, caught it, jerked as the device began to draw up into the hovering aircraft.

A blood risk: he'd taken it, and he'd won.

Harris leaned out of the open door, reaching for him, grinning broadly. He said, "Been waiting for you," and he took Tucker's hands to pull him the rest of the way. Tucker noted that Harris hadn't added "friend."

Dr. Walter Andrion was a tall, slim, white-haired gentleman who wore tailored suits and fifty-dollar shirts, drove a new Cadillac and traveled in the fastest social circles. He was married to Evanne Andrion, a black-haired, blue-eyed lovely thirty years his junior, a young lady with incredibly expensive tastes. When Junior called him, he dropped everything and came out to the airfield right away, carrying two heavy bags instead of one, for he had long ago learned that he should meet any such call as fully prepared as he could be. This was not orthodox medicine by any means. He worked fast and was clean, bored out wounds, flushed away clotted blood and dirt, stitched the men up as well as they could have been in a hospital. He didn't speak, and no one spoke to him as he worked. He had made it abundantly clear to Tucker three years ago that he did not want to have to hear anything about the origins of such wounds and that he wanted these sessions to be terminated as rapidly as possible. When he was done, he insisted on taking Merle Bachman back to his clinic for a couple of weeks' rest and recuperation, enough time to have his entire mouth rebuilt as well. He accepted two thousand dollars from Tucker in fifties and hundreds, tucked this into an already fat wallet, helped Bachman into his Cadillac and drove away.

"We'll take the doctor's fees from the suitcases," Tucker said. "Before we decide on a split."

Everyone was in agreement on that, except Miss Loraine, who didn't like it but didn't argue either.

While Simonsen, Paul Norton's partner in the airfreight business, was conveniently out having supper, they opened the three suitcases in Norton's office and counted the money, which they found totaled $341,890. Estimating Bachman's additional medical bills at more than four thousand dollars, they settled on splitting $335,000.

Which wasn't bad, either.

Miss Loraine looked at her $67,000, frowned and said "I thought it was going to be a lot more than this."

"It'll keep you," Tucker said.

"Not for long."

"A girl of your talents? You'll build it into a fortune before the year is out."

"Does anyone have something I can put this in?" she asked.

Norton said, "Paper bag do?"

She took the brown paper bag from him and tucked her cash away inside it, not having bothered to respond to Tucker.

Harris said, "I want to know what you're going to do, what your plans are."

"That's my business," she said.

"It's all of our business," Harris said.

She looked around, saw them watching her, set her lips tighter and said, "Will each of you tell me what you intend to do when we split?"

"Of course not," Harris said. "You're the intruder. You're the one we've got to be sure about."

Paul Norton, sitting behind his dilapidated desk, tilted back in his chair and drinking a bottle of India Pale Ale, had thus far maintained a low profile. Now, however, he said, "You could stay here with me for a while, Miss."

She looked at him, her face unreadable, her eyes cold, and she said, "I don't even know you."

Norton blushed, his face reddening except for the white scars on his cheeks, and he said, "Well, I sure didn't mean there were any conditions on the offer, if that's what you mean. I've got a nice apartment here on the field with two bedrooms, and the guest room has its own private bath, real snug. You wouldn't have to see me at all for days if you didn't want to."

Tucker said, "I thought you never wanted to know anything about my business or the people I deal with."

"I don't," Norton said, raising both hands, his big palms flat, and pushing them off. "I wouldn't listen to her even if she tried to tell me, and I'd throw her out the first time she got in a talkative mood. I'm just trying to help her, that's it, that's all."

She stared hard at the pilot, obviously on the verge of turning him down, then seemed to catch a glimpse of the shyness behind his tough-man front, knew that he hadn't anything in mind but helping her. She said, "Well, I guess that'd be all right. I need to go to ground for a while and think."

"It still doesn't answer my question," Harris said impatiently. "What will you do when you leave here?"

The woman turned, her face tight, anger boiling up.

Before she could say anything Norton said, "Well, Mr. Harris, that's a long way off, don't you think? She'll need time to consider that. You can't expect an answer this instant."

Pete looked at the pilot and knew there would be no arguing with him. He shrugged and said, "The hell with it. I'm going to use my split to buy into a little business, and I'm retiring. What do I care what she does?" He turned and walked out of the office.

It was 5:29 p.m. on Thursday.

At 9:04 that same evening, his arm in a sling, carrying a small, cheap suitcase and slightly whoozy from pain killers, Tucker entered his tenth-floor Park Avenue apartment. He was dressed in a new black suit which didn't exactly fit him, in a new shirt, new tie, new shoes. Despite his wounds he was feeling well.

He went directly to the closet, opened it, stepped inside, opened the small wall safe. He tossed his Tucker credentials inside and took out his real papers, pocketed those. He opened the cheap suitcase and lifted out a large number of money bricks, depositing them one at a time in the safe. When that was done, he closed the safe, spun the dial, shut the suitcase and shelved that.

In the hallway he stopped and looked at his Edo shield, touched the beaten copper, the flared silver rim, the hand-carved ivory inlays, and the coolness of the materials, their worn edges, calmed him.

In the bedroom he found Elise sitting up watching television, dressed in her favorite old quilted robe, ravishing. She said, "How'd it go with the bells?"

"I got the seller a price he was satisfied with and the buyer a price he could accept. But it wasn't easy. How'd your pickle commercial go with Plunket?"

"Marvelous," she said. "I seemed to have this fantastic talent for it." Then, as he shrugged out of his suit jacket, she said, "What's that? What happened to your arm?"

He had already gone over, to himself, the story he would have to tell her. He said, "I was shot." When she started up from the bed, he motioned her back and said, "Don't make me feel like an invalid, because it's only a flesh wound."

"But how, why?" she asked.

He said, "It was nothing more serious than an average all-American mugging, when I was on my way to my hotel."

"A mugging? In Denver?"

"What's so strange about a mugging in Denver?" he asked. "We're living in dangerous times, honey. The world's full of dangerous men."