Blood risk (2 page)

    "Hold the celebrations," Tucker said. "Go help him."

    Bachman lifted the heaviest suitcase and walked off toward the Chevy, severely bent by the dragging weight. He wouldn't have been content to pick up one of the smaller cases, of course-for the same reason that he wore high-waisted trousers: he didn't like anyone to think of him as a small man, even though he was a small man.

    Jimmy went around and got the last two bags, carried them with little trouble, dropped them into the open trunk of the stolen Chevrolet and slammed the lid while Bach-man scurried for the front door.

    "Relax," Tucker told the men lined against the car, though none of them had moved.

    No one responded.

    Bachman started the Chevy, raced the engine once, shifted into reverse, squealed backward, angling the car downhill.

    "Easy!" Tucker shouted.

    But he didn't need to caution Merle Bachman, for the small man always gauged the situation properly and performed at the optimum safe speed. He was a good driver.

    Harris came off the stone wall, grunting, the sound of his heavy breathing magnified by the mask. While Bachman was backing the Chevy, Harris came around to Tucker and said, "Smooth."

    Again Tucker said, "Hold the celebrations."

    Bachman put the Chevy in gear, touched the gas lightly and started downhill toward the second curve, shimmering curtains of heat rising from the roof and trunk of the car.

    "Get the Dodge," Tucker ordered Shirillo.

    The boy went after it.

    Pete Harris was the only one still watching the Chevy, thinking about all that money in the trunk, thinking about retirement, and he was the first to see that it was going to go sour. "Oh, shit!" he said.

    He had not even finished the exclamation when Tucker heard the hot cry of the Chevrolet's brakes and whirled around to see what had gone wrong.

    Everything had gone wrong.

    Before Bachman had covered little more than half the distance to the bottom curve, a Cadillac had rounded the limestone down there, coming up. It was a match for the Caddy they had just hit, and it was moving too fast, much too fast for these road conditions. The driver pulled the wheel hard to the left and tried to run the bank; that was hopeless, because the shoulder of the road down there turned swiftly into the stone wall that continued unbroken to the top of the rise. A tire blew with the force of a cannon shot. The car jolted, bucked up and down like an enraged animal. Metal whined as a fender was compressed into half the space it had formerly occupied.

    Still braking, the Chevrolet wobbled crazily back and forth as Bachman fought to regain control, veered suddenly and purposefully toward the outside.

    "He can't get around a car as big as the Caddy!" Harris said.

    Bachman tried it anyway. He was still in the middle of a job, still calm and greased, quick and calculating. He realized that he had only one chance of pulling this off successfully, and no matter how infinitesimal that chance was, he took it. The Cadillac had come to a complete halt now, pretty badly crumpled on the one side, and the Chevy plowed into its rear door like a pig nosing in the turf, reared up and caught its front axle on the top of the ruined door, simultaneously sliding to the left toward the three-hundred-foot chasm. The back wheels jolted off the berm and swung over empty air, spinning up clouds of yellow dust. For a second Tucker was sure the Chevy would break loose and fall, but then he saw it would hold, halfway up the other, larger car like a dog mounting a bitch. Bachman had tried it; he'd lost.

    Completely undamaged on the passenger's side, the front door of the Cadillac opened and a tall, dark-haired man got out, dazed. He shook his head to clear it, turned and stared at the demolished Chevy angled crazily over him, bent forward with his hands on both knees to be sick. He seemed to think of something more important than that natural urge, for he straightened abruptly and looked into the front seat, reached inside and helped a young woman climb out. She appeared to be as uninjured as he, and she did not share his sickening intimation of mortality. She wore a white blouse and a very short yellow skirt: a big, lovely blonde. Her long hair flapped like a pennant in the breeze as she looked up the road at Tucker and the others.

    "Here!" Jimmy Shirillo shouted. He had turned the Dodge around and was facing uphill.

    "Get in the car," Tucker told Harris.

    The big man obliged, the Thompson held in both hands tenderly.

    "Don't force me to shoot any of you in the back," Tucker said, backing to the open rear door of the Dodge.

    Baglio's men remained silent.

    He slid into the car, still facing them, raised the shotgun and fired at the sky as Jimmy tore rubber getting out of there, slammed the door after they were moving and dropped onto the seat below window level until he felt the car swinging around the upper curve.

    "Are we just leaving Bachman there?" Harris asked.

    Tucker peeled off his mask and pushed his sweat-slicked hair out of his face. His stomach was bothering him worse than ever. He said, "We don't have the means to get him out and hold off Baglio's whole army at the same time." He belched and tasted the orange juice that had been his entire breakfast.

    "Still…" Harris began.

    Tucker interrupted him, his voice tense and bitter. "Bachman was right-we did need a fifth man."

    

    _

    

    "We're boxed," Shirillo said.

    From here on out, the private road no longer hugged the edge of the ravine, struck toward the broad interior slopes of the mountain with land opening on both sides. Flanked by pines, it fed ruler-straight into the circular driveway in front of Rossario Baglio's gleaming white many-windowed monstrosity of a house only another mile ahead. Just exiting that drive, a black Mustang arrowed directly for them.

    "Not boxed," Tucker said, pointing ahead and to the left. "Is that a turn-off?"

    Jimmy stared. "Yeah, looks like it."

    "Take it."

    The boy wheeled hard left as they came up on the dirt track, braked, barely avoided ripping through several small, sturdy pine trees, slammed brutally across a series of wet-weather ruts, apparently unperturbed by all of it. Tramping down on the accelerator, he grinned into the rear-view mirror and said, "It's not my car."

    Despite himself Tucker laughed. "Just keep your eyes on the road."

    Jimmy looked ahead, straddled a large stone in the middle of the way and built more speed.

    The wind hissed at an open wing window, and insects smacked against the glass like soft bullets.

    "They're right behind us," Harris said. "Just turned in."

    Both Tucker and Harris stared through the back window, dizzied by the green blur of trees and underbrush, brambles and grass that whipped by on both sides, waiting for the Mustang to bounce into view. They were startled, then, when Shirillo braked to a full stop three quarters of the way up the long hill. "What the hell…" Tucker said.

    "There's a log across the road," Shirillo said. "Either we move it or we go on foot from here."

    "Everybody out," Tucker said, pushing open his door. "We move it. Pete, bring the Thompson."

    The log was the corpse of a once mighty pine tree fully thirty feet long and as many inches in diameter, with a couple of thick branches that had been chopped short with a sharp ax. It looked as if it had been put there to keep anyone from using the road beyond this point, though it was just as likely that it was spillage from a logging truck when the forests had served to feed a paper mill or planking factory. Tucker directed all three of them to get on the same end of the log, spaced three feet apart, one foot on each side of the tree. Heaving together, stepping sideways in an awkward little dance, they managed to swing it around about a yard.

    "Not enough," Shirillo said.

    Harris said, "Where's the Mustang?"

    "It can't move as fast on these bad roads as our heavy car can," Tucker said. He sucked in his breath and said, "Again!"

    This time they moved the barrier almost far enough to squeeze the Dodge past, but when they stood to catch their breaths, their backs cracking with a pain like fire, Harris said, "I hear the other car."

    Tucker listened, heard it too, wiped his bruised hands against his slacks to make them stop stinging. "Take your Thompson and get ready to meet the gentlemen, Pete."

    Harris smiled, picked up the machine gun and trotted to the rear of the Dodge, where he sprawled in the middle of the dusty road. He was a large man, over six feet, more than two hundred and forty pounds; when he went down, the dust rose around him in a cloud. He raised the black barrel and centered it where the Mustang would be when it rounded the bend below. The large circular cannister of ammunition that rose out of the machine gun gave the impression of something insectoid, something that was somehow using instead of being used, an enormous leech draining Harris's body of its blood.

    Tucker bent and slipped his hands around the log again, found as good a hold as he was going to get on the surprisingly smooth, round pine trunk. Perspiration ran from his armpits down his sides; his shirt soaked that up. "Ready?" he asked.

    "Ready," Shirillo said.

    They heaved, gasped as all their stomach muscles tightened painfully. Tucker felt his back pop like a glass bottle full of pressurized soft drink, perspiration fizzing out of him. But he did not let go, no matter what the cost in strained muscles, raised the log a few inches, scraped sideways a frustratingly short distance before they had to drop it. This time Shirillo sat down on the log to regain his breath, panting like a dog that has run a long way in mid-June heat.

    "No loafing," Tucker said immediately.

    He felt as bad as the boy did, perhaps even worse-he was, after all, five years older than Shirillo, five years softer; and he had twenty-eight years of easy living to put up against the boy's twenty-three years of rough ghetto upbringing-but he knew that he was the one who had to keep the others moving, had to generate the drive, share some of his fanatical determination to see them through. It was not the getting killed that Tucker feared so much. More than that he feared failure. He said, "Come on, Jimmy, for Christ's sake!"

    Shirillo sighed, got to his feet and straddled the pine once more. As he bent to get a grip on it, Harris opened up with his Thompson, filling the woods about them with a manic chatter. Shirillo looked up, could not see anything because of the Dodge and the angle of the trail beyond that, bent again and took hold of the log, put everything he had into one final, frantic heave. Together they muscled the tree farther around than they had the last time before they were forced to let it go. Dropped, the tree landed in the baked roadway with a soft, dusty thump.

    "Far enough?" Shirillo asked.

    "Yes," Tucker said. "Move ass now!"

    They ran back to the car. Shirillo slid behind the wheel and started the engine. That was enough of an alert for Harris, who had not used the Thompson for almost a full minute. The big man jumped up and got into the back of the Dodge again. Tucker was sitting up front with Shirillo and was fumbling with his seat belt. He clicked it together as Jimmy pulled out, turned to Harris and said, "Get any tires?"

    "No," Harris said. The admission bothered him, for he respected Tucker and wanted the young man to return his respect. If this job had gone right, it would have been his last; now, because they'd botched it, he would need to work again, and he preferred to work with Tucker more than with anyone else, even after this fiasco. "The bastards caught on too quick, shifted into reverse before I'd nailed any tires." He cursed softly and wiped at his grimy neck, his voice too soft for Tucker to hear the individual words.

    "They coming?" Shirillo asked.

    "Like a cop with a broomstick up his ass," Harris said.

    Shirillo laughed and said, "Hold on." He tramped the accelerator hard, pinning them back against their seats for a moment, cutting into a long, shadow-dappled section of road.

    "Why don't they let us alone?" Harris asked, facing front, the Thompson across his lap. His face matched his body: all hard lines. His forehead was massive, the black eyes sunk deep under it and filled with cold, solid intelligence. His nose, broken more than once, was bulbous but not silly, his mouth a lipless line that creased the top of a big square chin. All those harsh angles crashed together in a look of bitter disappointment. "We didn't get their money."

    "We tried, though," Tucker said.

    "We even lost Bachman. Isn't that enough?"

    "Not for them," Tucker said.

    "The Iron Hand," Shirillo said. He took a turn in the road too far on the outside: pine boughs scraped the roof like long, polished fingernails, and the springs sang like a bad alto.

    "Iron Hand?" Harris asked.

    "That's what my father used to call them," Shirillo said, never taking his eyes off the road ahead.

    "Melodramatic, isn't it?" Tucker asked.

    Shirillo shrugged. "The Mafia itself isn't a staid and sober organization; it's as melodramatic as an afternoon soap opera. It's all the time playing scenes straight out of cheap movies: bumping off rivals, beating up store owners who don't want to pay for protection, fire-bombing, blackmailing, peddling dope to kids in junior high school. The melodrama doesn't make it any less real."

    "Yeah," Harris said, glancing uneasily out the rear window, "but could we go a little faster, do you think?"

    The road curved gradually eastward now and narrowed as the huge pines and occasional elms and birches crowded closer-like patrons at a play getting restless for the last act and the climax of the action. Abruptly, the trail slid downward again, and the dust dampened and became a thin film of mud.