Blood risk (18 page)

    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.

    

    "Move," Tucker told the woman.

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

    

    

    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.