Blood risk mt-1 Page 9

  He could not shake off the insane conviction that the same hand was behind him now, that it had already disposed of Harris in a most brutal fashion, that it was wrapping around Shirillo at that very moment and would be gripping him in cold iron fingers any time now.

  He ran, then walked, then ran some more, listening to the matching steps of the two men behind him.

  Twice they stopped to rest for exactly two minutes at a stretch, but they did not speak to each other. Drawing breath was all they cared about. They stared at the ground, wiped sweat out of their eyes and, when their time was up, moved on again. Harris's breathing was the most labored, whether from exhaustion alone or from fear as much as weariness Tucker couldn't say. A life of crime wasn't meant for any but young men.

  Fifteen minutes after they had started out, Tucker flicked off the flashlight and slowed their pace considerably. At 3:35 in the morning they came to the perimeter of the forest and the beginning of Baglio's immaculately cared-for lawn.

  In the forest, as they were on the way up from the picnic area where they had changed clothes, a thin layer of ground fog had clung to the bottoms of the trees and twined through the undergrowth like a tangle of wispy rags, now and again obscured the way ahead, cold and wet and clinging. Here in the open the aisles of trees funneled the fog between them, poured it onto the shrub-dotted lawn where it lay like piles and piles of heavy quilts. The lights on the front promenade, under the pillars, were diffused by it, as were the dimmer lights that shone through a few downstairs windows. The result was an eerie wash of yellow light that filled the immediate lawn about the house but illuminated nothing, lay upon the dense shadows but did not disperse them.

  Tucker, Harris and Shirillo lay in the woods at the edge of the mowed grass and studied the stillness of the early-morning scene, not wanting to find any movement up there but more or less resigned to it. Apparently there were no guards prowling the grounds, though one or more of them might be stationed at fixed points from which they could scan the entire lawn. Tucker knew that was a strong possibility, but he pretty much rejected it anyway. Baglio would not be expecting them to return. There was no reason for him to mount an extraordinary guard tonight unless he had been especially impressed with the state-police helicopter during the day. That was possible, Tucker supposed, but not very likely. Baglio's sort did not like policemen much, but they were not as paranoid about them as a lesser criminal-say, a common burglar or mugger-might have been. For Ross Baglio, there were always payoffs that could be made, influence that could be bought; or, failing that, there were always top-notch lawyers, bail bonds and an eventual dismissal of the charges on one ground or another.

  "Probably inside the house this early in the morning, this kind of weather," Harris whispered.

  "Of course," Tucker said.

  "As planned, then?"

  "As planned."

  Harris went first. He crouched so that he was only half his normal height, and he ran toward a line of shrubbery that ringed the inside of the circular driveway and provided a well-concealed vantage point from which they could safely gauge the presence of sentries at any of the front windows. For a moment there was the sound of his receding footsteps, soft, wet hissing as he disturbed the dewy grass. Then there was nothing at all. The fog swallowed him completely.

  "He'll be in place now," Tucker whispered.

  "Right," Shirillo said.

  The boy ran now, making even less noise than Harris had, bent even lower. The heavy fog opened up and swallowed him too, in one gulp, leaving Tucker completely alone.

  And alone, Tucker remembered the nightmare more vividly than ever: the shadows and the light, the reaching hand. He felt an itch between his shoulder blades, a dull cold ache of expectancy in the back of his neck.

  He rose and, crouching, ran to join the others.

  They lay on their stomachs behind the evenly trimmed hedge on the inside of the driveway fifty yards from the front doors of the mansion. Through breaks in the foliage they had a good view. The fog was not thick enough to shroud the house altogether at such a short distance, but it did dull the outlines of the roof and softened the joints between slabs of siding so that the place appeared to be made of a single piece of expertly carved alabaster. From their position they could see all the windows on the front of the house: four of them backed by dull yellow light, six of them perfectly dark on the first level; all ten windows on the second floor were dark.

  "Been watching," Harris said.

  "And?"

  "I don't think anyone's at the windows."

  "That's unlikely."

  "Just the same Watch them and see."

  Five minutes later Shirillo said, "I don't see anyone, either."

  "Four windows are lighted," Tucker said.

  Harris said, "I didn't say there wasn't anyone inside there, awake. I just don't think there's anyone watching the windows. Probably that's because of the fog; they figure they wouldn't see much of anything even if there was something to see."

  In a few minutes Tucker was willing to agree that they were not being watched. If one of Baglio's men were standing at any of the front windows, on either floor, in a darkened room, he would most certainly be visible as a lighter gray blur against the deeper blackness of the room behind him. There was only half a moon, and the light from that was considerably diluted by the fog; still, a man's face positioned only inches from the glass ought to reflect enough light to stand out plainly to any knowledgeable observer. The lighted windows, of course, would have clearly revealed any posted guard; those windows were empty, the rooms beyond them apparently quiet and still.

  "Well?" Harris asked.

  Nerves. A case of nerves. After all, he was twenty-five years in this business, with two tours of a federal prison already behind him. He was too old and had weathered too much to risk getting shot down by a Mafia gunman in the pursuit of something as quixotic as tonight's goal; they would bury him above the house, in the woods, where his body would decompose, the component minerals washing down the slope to fertilize a hood's landscaped estate. In the grave, the only things that would survive the flesh were his bones-and the vinyl windbreaker with its alligator insignia. So Harris had a case of nerves. Of course, everyone had nerves; that definition of his condition was imprecise. Still, one day Tucker would be the same as Harris, tensed to the breaking point, promising himself he would retire, taking that "one last job" over and over again, until his case of nerves led to one final misjudgment.

  No. It would not be that way for Tucker, because he would have his inheritance by then. His father would be dead, his problems solved. It was, he thought, a sad way to have to live: waiting for your father to croak.

  Tucker studied the house one last time to make sure he knew what he was doing. All four of the ground-floor windows which had light behind them were to the left; the six dark windows on that level were all on the right of the huge white double doors. Tucker nodded toward the unlighted glass and said, "One of those."

  "Not the doors?" Harris asked.

  "Bound to be locked," Tucker said. "Try for the next to the last window. The telephone wires feed in there, too."

  The submachine gun held at hip level in one hand, his finger on the trigger, clutching the silenced Lüger in the other hand, Harris got up and ran lightly, quickly, to a place along the front wall to the left of the second window. No one cried out.

  "Go," Tucker said.

  Shirillo followed Harris without incident.

  Tucker brought up the rear, used a small set of shears that he carried in his windbreaker to cut the telephone wires as planned. He had stopped directly before the window which he was going to open, but he saw no use in shielding himself from it. If anyone was in the room beyond, he was going to know about Tucker soon enough when he cut the glass.

  Move ass.

  Tucker unbuckled his belt of tools and handed it to Shirillo. He'd intended to break into the house himself, because he trusted his own ability to make the entrance in sile
nce. Now, he belatedly realized that Shirillo must be good at this (why else would he own a custom-made set of tools?) and that the boy would get them in faster since the instruments and the pouch were his and were more familiar to him than to Tucker. "Ever done this?" Tucker asked unnecessarily, in as low a voice as he could use and still be heard.

  "Often."

  Tucker nodded, stepped back, took Shirillo's pistol and watched him as he knelt before the dark glass.

  Pete Harris turned and faced the longest length of the mansion, waiting for someone to appear at the far end of the promenade or to step out of the front doors. If they came through the doors, they'd be near enough to be taken out with the pistol; if they came from the far end of the house, however, a pistol shot wouldn't be accurate, and the Thompson would come in handy. He held both weapons slack in his hands, parallel with his legs, so that they would not unduly tire his arms but so he could bring them up fast in an emergency.

  There very well might be one, too.

  Tucker wished the place were less well lighted. Directly above his head, in the promenade ceiling, a hundred-watt bulb burned inside a protective wire cage.

  Tucker faced away from Harris, in the opposite direction, and thought it might be a good idea to step to the corner of the house where he could command a view of the side lawn as well as of the driveway. He took a single step in that direction just before one of Baglio's men appeared.

  He was tall and lean and broad across the shoulders, not at all stupid-looking but stamped by the same die as the gunmen who had been riding in the back of the Cadillac when Tucker and the others had forced it to stop on the mountain road only two days ago. Perhaps he was one of them. He was strolling along, distracted by his thoughts, slouched into himself as if he had been folded at the middle. He was looking at the ground in front of his feet. He didn't suspect a thing. Abruptly, however, as if he had been warned by some extrasensory perception, a sudden clairvoyance, he snapped his head up, his eyes wide, hand moving beneath his jacket with the oiled sureness and the economy of movement that signified a trained professional.

  No, Tucker wanted to say. Don't make me. Relax. You haven't got a chance, and you know it.

  The gunman had his pistol half in the open when Tucker put a shot into him, high in the chest, by the right shoulder.

  The gunman dropped his pistol.

  It clattered softly on the concrete promenade floor.

  The shot had pushed him half around, so that he leaned back against the wall and, just now beginning to reach for his shoulder, fell forward and lay still.

  Despite the high risk associated with his profession, Tucker had only twice been pressed into a position where he had no choice but to kill a man. Once, it had been a crooked cop who tried to force his point with a handgun; the second time it was a man who'd been working with Tucker on a job and who'd decided there was really no sense in splitting the proceeds when one shot from his miniature pearl-handled revolver would eliminate that economic unpleasantry and make him twice as rich. The cop was fat and slow. The partner with the pearl-handled revolver was as affected in every habit as he was in his choice of handguns. He didn't choose to shoot Tucker in the back, which would have been the smartest move, but wanted instead to explain to Tucker, in the course of a melodramatic scene, in very theatrical terms what he intended to do. He wanted to see Tucker's face as death approached, he said. He'd been very surprised when Tucker took the revolver away from him, and even more surprised when, during the brief struggle, he was shot.

  Both kills had been clean and quick, on the surface; but both of them had left an ugly residue long after the bodies had been buried and begun to rot. For months after each murder Tucker was bothered by hideous nightmares in which the dead men appeared to him in a wide variety of guises, sometimes in funeral shrouds, sometimes cloaked in the rot of the grave, sometimes as part animal-goat, bull, horse, vulture, always with a human head-sometimes as they looked when they were alive, sometimes as children with the heads of adults, sometimes as voluptuous women with the heads of men and as balls of light and clouds of vapor and nameless things that he was nonetheless able to identify as the men he had killed. In the few months immediately following each kill, he woke nearly every night, a scream caught in the back of his throat, his hands full of damp sheets.

  Elise was always there to comfort him.

  He couldn't tell her what had caused the dreams, and he would pretend that he didn't understand them or, sometimes, that he didn't even remember what they had been.

  She didn't believe him.

  He was sure of her disbelief, though she never showed it in her manner or in her face and never probed with the traditional questions. She could not know and could hardly suspect the real cause of them, but she simply didn't care about that. All she was interested in was helping him get over them.

  Some nights, when she cradled him against her breasts, he could take one of her nipples in his mouth as a child might, and he would be, in time, pacified in the manner of a child. He wasn't ashamed of this, only welcomed it as a source of relief, and he did not feel any less a man for having clung to her in this manner. Often, when the fear had subsided, his lips would rove outward from the nipple, changing the form of comfort she offered, now offering her a comfort of his own.

  He wondered how other people who had killed handled the aftermath, the residue of shame and guilt, the deep sickness in the soul.

  How, for instance, did Pete Harris handle it? He'd killed, by his own admission, six men during the last twenty-five years, not without cause-and countless others before that, during the war when he had carried the Thompson and used it indiscriminately. Did Harris wake up at night pursued by demons? Dead men? Minotaurs and harpies with familiar human faces? If he did, how did he comfort himself, or who comforted him? It was difficult to imagine that lumbering, red-faced, bull-necked man in the arms of someone like Elise. Perhaps he never had been consoled and nursed out of his nightmares. Perhaps he still carried them all inside him, a pool of that dark, syrupy residue of death. That would explain the bad nerves as well as anything.

  "I think his shoulder's broken," Shirillo said, looking up from the wounded gunman.

  "He's not dead?"

  "You didn't mean him to be, did you?" the kid asked.

  "No," Tucker said. "But a silenced pistol can kick off the mark, even if it's been well machined."

  "He's bleeding," Shirillo said. "But it's not arterial blood, and it won't kill him."

  "What now?" Harris asked.

  Tucker knelt and looked at the gunman's wound, peeled back his eyelids, felt for and found the rapid beat of his heart. "He'll come to before long, but he'll be in shock. He won't be any threat if we leave him behind."

  "He could sound a warning," Harris said.

  Shirillo said, "He's not going to have the strength for that, even if he's thinking clearly enough to try it."

  "We could gag him."

  "And maybe kill him if the gag triggers convulsions," Tucker said. "No. We'll just take him inside with us and tuck him in a closet and hope for the best."

  Shirillo nodded, still cool, much cooler than Tucker would have expected him to be at a time like this, and he went back to the window, finished applying the masking tape to the center pane, cut a circle of glass, lifted that out of the way, reached in and carefully felt around with his fingers. "Wires," he said. "An alarm."

  "Know the type?" Tucker whispered.

  "Maybe. Flashlight, please."

  Tucker took that out of his windbreaker pocket and handed it over.

  Shirillo flicked the light on and directed it through the hole he had cut in the window glass, angled the beam left and right, grunted softly as if confirming something he already thought to be true, flicked the light off and returned it to Tucker.

  "Well?"

  "I know it."

  "Built in?"

  "No. The wire loops through two brass guide rings screwed into the base of the window. When I lift the win
dow, I stretch the wire and trip the alarm-if I'm stupid."

  "You aren't stupid," Harris said.

  "Thanks. I needed your reassurance."

  Tucker said, "How long to finish with it-two or three minutes?"

  "Less."

  "Go on, then."

  Working more quickly than Tucker himself would have been able to, Shirillo taped and cut another pane in the bottom row of the window segments, lifted that out of the way and, using the special tools in his pouch, reached inside and worked the guide rings free of the wood. That done, the wire would lie in place on the sill no matter how high the window was lifted. Finished, he returned the tools to his pouch, belted that around his waist beneath his jacket. Reaching through the window with both hands, he freed the latch and carefully slid the whole works up high enough for a man to pass under it. The frame was a tight fit, and the window remained open.

  "You first," Tucker said.

  Shirillo hunched and went inside.

  "Help me with him," Tucker said, indicating the wounded man who was still unconscious on the promenade floor.

  He and Harris put their guns down and lifted the guard, worked the man through the window and into the darkened room, where Shirillo helped settle him gently to the floor. They had to work more carefully and take more time with the man than they would have if he'd been dead. But that was okay. That was fine. At least there wouldn't be any nightmares this way.

  "Now you," Tucker said.

  Harris handed his Thompson through the open window and went in quickly after it, as if he would be unable to function if the weapon were out of his hands and out of sight for more than a brief moment. He had to twist himself around painfully to force his bulk through that narrow frame, but he didn't protest, made no sound at all.

  Tucker picked up the circles of glass that had been cut from the window panes, peeled the tape off the window around the holes and passed these through to Shirillo, then looked around to see if they'd left any other trace of their work here.