Blood risk mt-1 Page 3

  The driver came back, stood beside his companion and looked very disgusted with himself. He had a right. However, unlike the other gorilla, he didn't try to tell them that they wouldn't get away with it. He looked at his dusty shoes, wiped each of them against the back of a trouser leg and did a good job of pretending boredom.

  "Where's this road go?" Tucker asked. While he held the shotgun on them, Harris went downslope to the place where he'd climbed the bank, gained the road again and walked back up toward them.

  "Nowhere," the driver said.

  "It's a dead end?"

  "Yeah."

  The smaller of Baglio's men, the one who hadn't had enough sense to keep quiet before, looked at the driver quizzically, then smiled and looked up at Tucker. His face might as well be a blackboard with a huge, chalked message on it. "You're never going to get out of here. Mr. Baglio will get you sooner or later, 'cause this is a dead end."

  The driver looked scornfully at the other man, spat on the road and sighed, leaned back against the shale wall,

  "Is he Baglio's son-in-law, or something?" Tucker asked the driver.

  "No," the driver said. "But help's not easy to get these days."

  The smaller gorilla blinked stupidly, looked from one to the other. "Son-in-law?" he asked.

  When they were all in the Mustang and Jimmy Shirillo had pulled away from the wreck and the two gunmen, Harris said, "Obviously, it's not a dead end at all."

  "Go to the front of the class," Tucker said.

  Harris's goblin mask hung below his chin like a second face in the middle of his chest, bobbing when he talked. "A dead end would be bad, but this is something worse, so why go on?"

  "Because we can't go back," Tucker said. "Obviously Baglio knows we're on this road and has the other end sealed up. But we might come to something else before we run into the roadblock."

  "Like what?"

  "I couldn't say, but I'll know it when I see it."

  At the beginning of May, when the trees were just greening and the summer ahead seemed devoid of any job possibilities, a letter had arrived at Tucker's midtown Manhattan mail drop, sealed in a white envelope with no return address. He had known that it was from Clitus Felton before he opened it, since he was accustomed to receiving letters like it on the average of ten times a year. Half that often they contained something worthwhile. Clitus Felton, despite his unlikely name, earned his way as a contact point between freelancers on the East Coast, operating out of a small specialty bookshop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Once he had been in the business himself, expertly planning and executing two or three substantial jobs a year. But age had gotten to him-as had his wife, Dotty, who was afraid that the amazing Felton luck was soon going to be stopped by a cop's bullet or a long stretch behind walls. However, a bookshop wasn't enough to keep Felton interested in life. He was only six months behind the counter when he began to contact old friends and offer his middle-man service. He kept names, aliases and addresses all in his head, and when someone contacted him about a perfect job with a need for the proper partners, Felton considered the possibilities, wrote a few letters and tried to help out. For a percentage. Usually five, if the job worked out as expected. Vicarious crime. He lived for it.

  This latest letter had intrigued Tucker. He placed a couple of telephone calls, got the information that couldn't be trusted to the mails and flew to Pittsburgh, from Kennedy International, to meet with Jimmy Shirillo.

  When Shirillo welcomed him at the airport, Tucker almost said thanks-but-no-thanks, almost got right the hell out of there before he had heard anything more about the job. Shirillo looked far too young, seventeen at the most, and he didn't look any better to Tucker when he said he was actually six years older than that. Despite the Italian surname, he was fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, with sandy brown hair. He was only about five feet four, perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds. A well-placed bullet wouldn't just kill him; it would knock him a couple of blocks if there was any breeze moving at all.

  Tucker wasn't such a big man himself, standing five feet nine and weighing a hundred and forty-odd pounds. He supposed, too, that he didn't look the way a man in his profession should look. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with high cheekbones, a thin-boned nose, an air of the aristocrat, and he had been told, at different times, that he was somewhat fey. However, he looked like a bruiser compared to the kid; he looked a thousand times more experienced and cautious and capable. The kid inspired no confidence at all, and he made Tucker feel like a father meeting his son.

  Shirillo, smiling, reached out and took Tucker's single suitcase with one hand while he offered the other to be shaken. His handshake was surprisingly firm, though unforced, the handshake of a man who was certain of himself. It was enough to make Tucker hold his initial judgment in check.

  As Shirillo drove them into and then across the city during the first wave of morning rush-hour traffic, handling his new Corvette with caution but with no restraint whatsoever, making better time than Tucker would have thought possible, he was forced to junk his first evaluation of the boy and come up with a different one altogether. Beneath that somewhat fragile exterior was a man of competence and-as he proved again and again in that freeway war-not just a little daring.

  "Why you?" Shirillo had asked, weaving around a large beer truck, squeaking back into the proper lane with no more than a thickness of paint to spare.

  "Excuse me?"

  The boy grinned. "You've been sizing me up ever since I took your suitcase in the arrivals lounge, and you seem to have decided to trust me."

  Tucker said nothing.

  "Now," Shirillo said, "I'd like to size you up. Why did Felton think you were especially right for this job?"

  Tucker leaned back in the bucket seat, found the roll of lime-flavored Life Savers he usually carried in a pocket, offered one to Shirillo, took one for himself and sucked on it. He said, "I only steal from institutions. I guess that's why Felton thought of me."

  "Institutions?"

  "Yes. Banks, insurance companies, department stores, diamond brokers, that sort of thing. I've never taken anything from an individual, from anyone who could be hurt by the loss."

  Shirillo mulled that over for a moment, then said, "You call the Mafia an institution?"

  "One of the oldest," Tucker said.

  "But there are differences between the Mafia and-and a bank or an insurance company."

  "A few," Tucker admitted. Already he felt at ease with the kid, despite the brief time he'd known him, despite the glittering cars that they sailed past and dueled with, despite the angry honking of horns, squeal of brakes. "Though there are fewer differences than you might think."

  "One difference," Shirillo said, tramping hard on the accelerator to take advantage of an opening in traffic, "is that a bank, if it catches up with you, will have you tossed in jail-while these boys we're talking about will simply weight you down and drop you off a bridge somewhere."

  Tucker smiled, sucked his lime Life Saver, watched the hurtling death machines around him as if they were playful animals. "They still do things like that?"

  "Worse," Shirillo said. "I don't want anyone in this who doesn't understand the risks."

  "Do you?" Tucker asked.

  "I was raised in the Hill section of Pittsburgh," Shirillo said. His manner was no longer childlike. It was grim. His face set into tight lines, pinched up by bad memories. "That's mostly a black neighborhood-substandard housing, bad garbage pickup so you get rats running in the streets like dogs, hardly any police patrols, streets that haven't been paved in my lifetime, no family counseling or city services like in the white neighborhoods. It's the kind of place where pressures build up and up until, one summer night every couple of years, they just rip out through the top."

  "Riots?"

  "You been keeping up with the news," Shirillo said. "But I prefer to think of them as nervous collapses; it's not a physical thing but a psychological one. Everyone clucks about it for a few days; all the upst
anding white citizens rush out and buy a lot of guns they don't know how to use; in a month it's forgotten, and nothing's changed. Nothing at all. If you're not black or Spanish, you've got to be shit-poor to live in the Hill section. And that's why we were there. My father tried to keep ends together with a shoe-repair store, and did, too, until he kicked off at fifty-six from too much damn work. My father has had to pay Rossario Baglio's collectors for the last fifteen years, simply for the privilege of remaining in business. An old Italian custom." He snorted, but wasn't amused by his own joke. "Before Baglio, it was someone else who got the weekly installments. I've seen what they do to people who miss a week or who come flat out and say no to extortion. One of the rebels was a brother of mine, and ever since he said 'No' he limps. Badly. He's lucky that he walks at all."

  "So you know the risks," Tucker said.

  "Too well."

  "I know them too. But I also know that, in a job like this one, you gain advantages along with the risks. For my part, I think the advantages outweigh the additional risks."

  "For instance?"

  "For instance, you don't have to worry about organized police, the state or federal apparatus, fingerprint experts or any of the rest of it."

  "That too," Shirillo admitted.

  Out of the city, moving east on the superhighway, the traffic thinned out considerably. Shirillo put the Corvette up around seventy and held it there. Neither of them spoke again until he braked, slowed and drove off into a roadside picnic area fifteen minutes later.

  "On foot from here," Shirillo said. He looked at his watch. "And we'll have to make it fast." He picked up two pairs of field glasses from the back seat, handed one to Tucker and got out of the car.

  Twenty minutes later, having tramped a considerable distance through a pine woods, moving silently most of the time, they reached the vantage point Shirillo had chosen, in the trees to the side of the private road, halfway down the mile-long straightaway that fed into Baglio's driveway. They stood well back in the shadows under the pines, watching the big white mansion.

  "Some house," Tucker said.

  "Twenty-nine rooms," Shirillo said.

  "Been inside?"

  "Once," the boy said. "When I was eighteen, I was a numbers runner for one of Baglio's Hill operatives, a man named Guita. Guita thought I was a smart kid destined for big things in the organization, and he brought me here with him once to meet Mr. Baglio."

  "What happened to your big career in the underworld?" Tucker asked.

  "Guita got himself killed."

  "Police?"

  "No-Baglio."

  "What for?"

  "I never knew."

  Tucker said, "Some action up there at the house. Is this it?"

  Shirillo had not been using his binoculars for a few minutes, but he lifted them and peered up the slope. "Yes," he said. "That's Henry Deffer, Baglio's personal driver, that old bastard there. Walking beside Deffer, the dandified one, is Chaka, Baglio's accountant and trouble-shooter. He's the second most powerful man in the local organization."

  "The other two?"

  "Just hoods."

  "That the money, in those suitcases?"

  "Yes."

  "How much, do you think?"

  "I've asked around. No one could say for sure except Baglio and Chaka. But it's likely to be somewhere between two hundred and five hundred thousand, depending on what kind of two weeks it's been."

  "Where's it come from?" Tucker asked.

  "Baglio's suburban gambling operations, the small stuff — punchboards in a couple of hundred gas stations, small numbers operations out of laundromats and newsstands and beauty parlors, small sports betting from maybe sixty or seventy barrooms. Each one of them's a tiny situation in itself. Multiply a small stake by two thousand situations, and it turns into big money."

  "Why only a twice-a-month collection?"

  "Because it is so little compared to inner-city numbers running, organization hookers, protection money, the dope take from both suburbs and inner city. It isn't enough to warrant all those rounds every week. Besides, these situations with the punchboards and the dollar bets are mostly legitimate businesses copping a little dirty money on the side that they don't have to report on the income-tax returns. They like holding onto Baglio's share, interest free, for a couple of weeks; sometimes, it might help a guy make a payment he'd otherwise be a few days late on. Baglio doesn't mind that so long as they turn in an honest percentage and don't get behind."

  A black Cadillac limousine had pulled out of the driveway and was on its way toward them down the narrow lane. They stepped even deeper into the shadows and watched it go past.

  Shirillo said, "Baglio has about fifty collectors for the suburbs. Every second and fourth Monday of every month they hit the road, picking up the small change from these situations. They deliver it here starting midafternoon, until dinner. Monday night it's counted, packaged and put in suitcases for the trip into town Tuesday morning."

  "What's done with it then?"

  "Baglio owns a good piece of a bank in town, one of the big ones on Forbes. Deffer parks the Caddy in the garage under the bank, while Chaka and one of the bodyguards use the bank president's private elevator to take the suitcases to the president's sixteenth-floor office. What happens to it then, I don't know. I imagine that it's all very cleverly laundered and made clean again."

  "Do you have a spot picked out to stop the car?"

  "Yes," Shirillo said. "Let's go look at it."

  They spent that afternoon tramping the woods along the private lane, scouting prospective sites for the execution of the robbery. That done, they drove into the city again, where Tucker took a room in the hotel at Chatham Center. In his room, for the rest of the afternoon and evening, they discussed the fine points of the plan, argued alternatives and got it worked out to their mutual satisfaction. It looked good.

  Back in Manhattan, Tucker needed only two weeks to locate and interest Bachman and Harris. The four of them had met in Pittsburgh this past Sunday, had gone over the details until they were exhausted. They monitored the delivery of the cash on Monday, went over everything one last time on Monday night in Tucker's hotel room, pulled the job off well. Quite well. Except for that damned woman in the Cadillac. That damn unexpected Cadillac.

  Tucker hated failure more than he hated losing the money, more than the possibility of violence and death. He meant to see that the job did not end here.

  "If Baglio's men are in front of us and behind us," Jimmy Shirillo said, "what do we do next?" He'd slowed the Mustang to a crawl, and he felt like stopping it altogether. If he could freeze them here, stop time, fix this instant for eternity, they'd not have to face Baglio at all; nothing bad could happen to them. For his first major job he'd held up quite well, in the face of almost total failure, but he had his limits. He remembered his brother, the weeks in the hospital, the limp, and he didn't want to go on with this. Tucker traced circles on the shotgun stock with his index finger and wondered how to answer the kid's question. His own reaction to failure was different from Shirillo's; his resourcefulness was increased, his determination magnified. He said, "I've noticed branch roads leading from this main track. We must have passed a dozen of them since we turned off the macadam."

  Shirillo nodded quickly. "I saw them too. They were narrower than this, more rutted than this, grown full of weeds, and absolute disaster for anything less formidable than a Land Rover."

  "I didn't pretend to mean we'd get all that far on one of them," Tucker said patiently. He didn't like this dawning note of pessimism in the kid, but he didn't comment on it. The best way to bring Shirillo around was to be calm, lead him by example. He said, "At least we ought to make a mile or so before we have to start walking."

  "I don't like it," Shirillo said.

  "You like facing Baglio's roadblocks any better?"

  Shirillo didn't answer.

  Tucker said, "By now they know that we have a man with a machine gun, and they won't be overpo
wered again."

  Shirillo thought a moment and said, "Why don't we just abandon the car here and go into the woods, away from any trails they might watch?"

  "Because we'd never find our way overland; we'd be lost in ten minutes. Unless we can find that macadam road again, we won't know where we are. None of us is a woodsman."

  "That's damn straight," Harris said, clutching his Thompson tighter than before, his own pessimism bottled up inside of him, behind a mask of stoic indifference that was not as good as Tucker's own carefully maintained facade. Harris's gloom was not based on inexperience, as was Shirillo's, but on a growing certainty that he had been too long in this business and that he was nearer than ever to a big payment of dues. He remembered his short time behind bars, and he knew he wouldn't go that route here-this would be worse, much worse, and painful. Baglio wouldn't send him to a cell but to a grave.

  "Okay, then," Shirillo said, resigned to the worst. "But you pick the road, okay?"

  A thousand feet farther along, Tucker pointed to a narrow gap in the almost solid wall of thick pine trunks, said, "That one, on the right, ought to lead in the general direction of the mansion."

  Shirillo drove into the weed-choked track with all the caution of a man who fully expected it to be generously laced with land mines. The Mustang sighed, sank down in the damp earth with its thick carpet of pine needles, the springs singing unpleasantly. It trembled coltishly, bounced into and out of a muddy hole, making a grinding noise as it pressed brambles, grass and milkweed plants out of the way, moving slowly but deliberately forward.

  They rode in silence for more than a mile and a half before the compact car settled abruptly into a pool of black muck and refused to come out of it again, even though Tucker and Harris assisted with a push.

  Shirillo finally shut off the engine and got out of the car. He said, "She's wedged in there until someone brings a wrecker after her."

  "We'll walk now," Tucker said.

  Actually, Shirillo was feeling better than he had fifteen minutes before, because he had never expected a Mustang to get this far over that kind of terrain. That it had lasted as long as this seemed to be some sort of omen that the job wouldn't turn out so bad after all.