Blood risk (15 page)

    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.