Blood risk (3 page)

    "Underground stream somewhere nearby," Tucker said.

    At the foot of the hill, the land bottomed for a hundred yards before tipping over another slope. Here, shrouded by overhanging trees and flanked by thousand-layer shale walls, the Dodge choked, coughed, rattled like Demosthenes talking around his mouthful of pebbles and expired with very little grace.

    "What's the matter?" Harris asked.

    Shirillo was not at all surprised, for he'd been expecting this for some time now. He was surprised, though, by his own serenity. "The gas tank was holed when we turned onto the dirt track," he told them. "I've been watching the indicator drop little by little the last half hour-must be a small hole-but I didn't see any sense in putting everyone on edge until we were actually empty."

    They got out and stood in the small glen where a trace of early-morning fog still drifted lazily through the trees, a ghost without a house.

    Harris slung his machine gun over his left shoulder, by the black leather strap, and he said, "Well, the road's too damn narrow for them to get around the Dodge. If we have to walk, so do they."

    Tucker said, "We're not going to walk so long as they're right behind us with a good car." His tone left no room for debate. "We'll take that Mustang away from them."

    "How?" Shirillo asked.

    "You'll see in a minute." He ran around the nose of the Dodge, opened the driver's door and threw the shotgun on the seat. He tossed their rubber masks into the road. Unspringing the handbrake, he put the gear shift in neutral. "The two of you get behind and push," he said.

    They braced opposite ends of the rear bumper, while Tucker put his shoulder to the doorframe and walked slowly forward, keeping one hand on the wheel to prevent the car from wedging against the shale that loomed close on both sides. At the point where the road began to dip, Tucker picked up the shotgun and leaped out of the way. "Let her go!"

    Shirillo and Harris stood back and watched the black car rumble clumsily down the first few yards of the descending trail. As the slope grew steeper, the car gathered speed, veered to the left. It struck the shale wall, sparks flying, screeching, went toward the right like an animal seeking shelter, slammed into the other stone bank, skidded as the trail abruptly angled down, jolted in a rut they couldn't see from the top of the run. It started to turn around as if it had had enough and would come back up the hill, then it gracefully rolled onto its side with a resounding crash that slapped over them like a wave. It slid another two hundred feet before it stopped, its undercarriage facing them.

    "The conservationists would love us," Shirillo said. "We've started our own war on the automobile today- three down in less than an hour."

    "You want them to think we wrecked?" Harris asked. When Tucker nodded he said, "What about our footprints here in the mud?"

    "We'll have to hope they don't notice them." Half a mile behind them, the steady drone of the Mustang engine became audible. Tucker picked up the masks and distributed them, slipped on his own. "Move ass," he said. "Stay to the side of the road, by the wall, so the prints going down won't be conspicuous. By the bank, there should be enough loose shale to hide our trail." He took off, the others close behind, the fallen shale shifting under them, damp and slick. Twice Tucker thought he would fall, but he kept his balance by running faster. They made it behind the shelter of the overturned Dodge only a moment before the Mustang appeared at the top of the hill.

    "What now?" Harris asked. He had unslung the machine gun.

    Tucker looked farther down the hill, behind them, saw that the shale diminished considerably on both sides only a short distance ahead. "Stay down and follow me," he said, moving off in a fast duck walk.

    When they reached a point where they could get atop the banks that had hedged the trail all the way down the slope, Tucker looked back to see how visible they were from above. He couldn't see any of the road beyond the overturned Dodge; good, it was safe to assume they couldn't be seen, either. He sent Pete Harris to the left, took Shirillo with him on the right, climbed the now diminutive bank, slipping once, scraping his knee on loose shale, ignoring the flash of pain When they were in the woodlands that lay above the road, he looked across and waved at Harris, who signaled with his machine gun in response. Cautiously, they made their way back to the spot where the Dodge had flipped on its side, edged to the brink of the shale walls and looked down.

    The Mustang was parked twenty feet above the wreck, doors open. The two men who had been in it moved warily in on the Dodge, pistols drawn.

    "Don't move at all," Tucker told them.

    They were good, if surprised, and they listened.

    "Remove the clips from your pistols-but keep them pointed at the ground. You're covered from both sides of the road."

    The two men did as they were told, reluctantly but with the evident resignation of professionals who knew they were cornered. Both were large in the shoulders, dressed in lightweight summer suits that didn't seem to belong on them. Gorillas. Figuratively and almost literally. They would look much more at home in a zoo, railing at visitors through iron bars.

    "Now," Tucker said, "look up at me."

    They looked up, shielded their eyes from the bright sky, grimaced at the shotgun.

    "Now look across the road."

    They turned as if connected, stared up at the Thompson in Pete Harris's hands. Tucker couldn't see their faces, but he knew they were properly impressed, for he could see their shoulders draw up in an instinctive urge to crouch and run.

    "Now throw your guns up here," he told them. When he had both pistols tucked into his belt, he pointed at the dirt-streaked Mustang and said, "Who was driving?"

    "Me," the taller of the gorillas said. He jammed both hands into his pants pockets like a sulking child and looked up at Tucker from under his brow, waiting to see what came next.

    "You a good driver?"

    "I do okay."

    "Which of you is better?"

    The man who had not been driving pointed at the man who had and said, "He is. He drives for Mr. Baglio when-"

    "Enough!" the driver snapped.

    The smaller man blanched and shut up. He looked at Tucker, then at his partner. He rubbed at his mouth as if he could scrub out what he had already said.

    "Get back in the Mustang," Tucker told the driver, "and bring it right up to the Dodge."

    "Why?" the driver asked.

    "Because, if you don't, I'll kill you," Tucker said. He smiled. "Good enough for you?"

    "Good enough," the driver said, starting for the Mustang.

    Tucker said, "Don't try backing out of range. That gentleman over there could blow the car apart before you'd gone ten feet." To the second gorilla Tucker said, "Stand over against the wall. Stay out of the way and be good."

    "You won't get away with this," the gorilla said. Clearly, though, he expected that they would. His grainy, broad-nosed face was covered with more than a patina of defeat; the expression was deeply rooted. He was one of those who hadn't any faith in himself unless he could get his hands on his adversary. At this distance he was feeling exceedingly inferior.

    "Let's get this moving," Tucker said.

    The driver stopped the Mustang when its front bumper was a foot from the underside of the overturned Dodge. His window was rolled down, and he leaned out and said, "Now what?"

    "Move it ahead until you feel it make contact."

    The driver didn't ask questions. When a solid thunk proved he'd obeyed, he leaned out his window again and waited to hear the next part of it. While the man standing against the wall across the road seemed unable to comprehend what was happening, the driver knew what Tucker wanted. He was going to wait for Tucker to say it just the same.

    Tucker hunkered down at the top of the bank, brushed away a swarm of gnats that rose out of the grass at his feet, pointed the shotgun at the driver's face. "I want you to put the gas to it, slowly, build up the pressure until something happens. The Dodge isn't wedged tight. It should slide loose. The moment it's moved enough for you to squeeze your heap past it, do just that."

    "And if I keep going?" the driver asked. He smiled as if this were a joke between them, and he had very nice teeth.

    "We'll shoot out your tires, blow out the back window, very likely put half a dozen slugs in the back of your head-and possibly blow up your gas tank." He smiled back; his own teeth weren't bad, either.

    "I thought so," the driver said. He eased his foot down on the accelerator.

    For a moment nothing much happened. As the engine noise built into a scream, a ring-necked pheasant took off from the brush behind Tucker and Shirillo, startling the boy but not the older man. The Mustang's bumper popped a bolt and crunched back onto the grill. Still, the engine noise climbed. The driver was gritting his good teeth, aware that the Dodge might tilt the wrong way, that he might slip off it and careen into the shale wall himself.

    Then the Dodge began to creak and give. A section of the shale broke loose from the wall and crashed down over the ruined automobile, rained on the Mustang, clattered at the feet of the gorilla who stood against the far wall, above the, wreck. Then the big car twisted sideways, its roof coming around flat against the shale wall across the road. The driver of the Mustang pulled his car through the opening, badly scraping the whole length of his side against the rock. He stopped where he was supposed to, opened his door and got out.

    "Come back up here," Tucker said. He hadn't been sure that the Dodge would move, but now he showed no surprise. Tucker was never surprised. It would have damaged his reputation if he had been.

    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.