Blood risk (9 page)

    Tucker sipped his beer, agreed with the judgment and said, "I need a chauffeur."

    "So you said on the phone."

    "You have the copter ready?"

    "It only took a few minutes."

    "Efficiency."

    "My trademark."

    Tucker swallowed some beer, sighed, put the bottle down, lifted the lighter of the two briefcases, unsnapped the latches and opened the top. He said, "All you have to know to set your price is the destination. Pittsburgh. And the length of time I'll need you-perhaps it'll be as late as tomorrow noon before we get back here. Maybe it'll be some time tonight. Your own complicity involves nothing more than the alteration of the markings on the copter. It's damn unlikely that the FAA will find out about that, and, besides, you're accustomed to risking as much."

    "Quite accustomed," Norton agreed. "But you forget that, according to the law, I'll be aiding and abetting you with whatever you have in mind. Understand me, Mike, I don't want to know what that is. I just want to point out that I'll be liable for criminal charges."

    "This operation isn't directed against anyone the law would rush to defend," Tucker said.

    Norton raised his eyebrows, picked up his beer and took another third of it in one swallow.

    "That's the last factor you have to consider. We're going up against a man named Baglio, against his entire machine."

    "Organized?"

    "Let's call him an entrepreneur."

    "Successful?"

    "Very."

    Norton considered the angles for a moment, scratching unconsciously at the three long white marks on his right cheek. "Three thousand sound all right to you?"

    Tucker paid without any argument, closed his briefcase again. It was a fair enough price for everything that he was going to ask of Norton and his machine.

    The big man put the money in the lockbox in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet behind his desk, locked both the box and the drawer, pocketed the keys and came back to his desk.

    "Someone could carry the whole cabinet away," Tucker said.

    "It's bolted to the floor."

    They drank the remainder of their beer in silence, and when they were finished Norton said, "You ready?"

    "Yes."

    They left the office and walked to the third berth in the same building, where a gray helicopter sat on a wheeled towing platform. It was the same four-seater quadra-prop that Norton had used twice before when Tucker had required his services, though its own markings had been expertly masked with colored tape. New numbers, also formed with tape, decorated the proper plates on the nose and both sides. The Pennsylvania state seal, with its two rearing horses, was firmly attached to both doors of the craft; below the seal, in white letters, were the words pennsylvania state police. It all looked very genuine. It should have, since the insignia were exact copies of those in use by the authorities, rendered by a friend of Norton's who worked in an ad agency during the day and moonlighted however he could. He had drawn Norton nine sets of state seals so far, though Tucker had not had the opportunity, thus far, to operate in so many different colonies. Norton had other customers.

    "Good?" Norton asked.

    "Fine," Tucker said.

    A golf cart was already hooked up to the platform on which the copter stood, and Norton hopped into this. He started it and drove slowly outside. Out of the hangar, he stopped, detached the cart from the platform, drove it back inside and parked it. They boarded the helicopter.

    "You've got a change of clothes?" Tucker asked.

    "I packed as soon as you called."

    "Good."

    "Even before I went out to doctor the copter."

    "Fine."

    A few minutes later, they drifted onto the cracked macadam runway. Both Tucker and Norton sat in the forward seats; behind them was a pair of seats that folded down to form a large cargo area. Most of Paulnik Air's freight work was handled with one of the two twin-engine Apaches that they maintained, though the dense, built-up New York area often required a helicopter to land where there was no runway. Besides, the copter was the most lucrative of the three Paulnik craft, thanks to Tucker and to others like him.

    As they lifted into the early-afternoon sky, Tucker wondered where Simonsen would be hiding. Simonsen professed to know absolutely nothing about Norton's willingness to bend the law for a buck. He handled none of the illegitimate work, though Norton knew his partner always stood at a window and watched proceedings such as these, as if he secretly envied what he supposed was a glamorous mission. He would be down there now, watching and a little jealous, a little frightened.

    Then the airfield and the hangars were out of sight as they banked west toward the city.

    The time was 2:12 as the copter, laden with auxiliary fuel tanks, began the longest leg of the journey.

    Tucker wondered if Baglio had had an opportunity to question Merle Bachman. The driver had been in the mansion more than a full day. If he was not badly injured, that was plenty of time for Baglio to break him, enough time for Bachman to spill everything he knew about Tucker and the others.

    Norton had said something which Tucker, lost in the reverie, had not heard.

    "What?" Tucker asked.

    "I said, 'The pollution sure is nice today, isn't it?' "

    Norton waved one burly arm at the vista of yellow-white mist that rose up from all quarters of the city, meshed high overhead and roiled like a ball of snakes, smoke snakes. He indicated the awful scenery much as a legitimate guide might gesture grandly at the undeniable splendor of Niagara Falls.

    "Beautiful."

    "It'll make a grand sunset."

    "Lovely."

    "Too bad we can't see it."

    "Too bad."

    But Tucker could not bring himself to think very long about sunsets and atmospheric pollution.

    Perhaps Baglio's people wouldn't be able to trace the Tucker name any farther than the downtown mail drop. They had contacts, yes, of course they had, but they were not omniscient.

    Yet, even if they got that far and no farther, he would have to forget the Tucker identity altogether, assume a new name, purchase all new credentials in that name, and strictly avoid everyone who had, to date, known him only as Tucker.

    That would require an outlay of cash and a period of relative inactivity, and it would be, in the vulgate, a pain in the ass.

    And he could not expect an identity change to provide safety for very long. Sooner or later, when one of them was using a new name himself, he would encounter an old acquaintance who'd remember the Tucker identity. Then a second name change would be necessary-and after that, a third and a fourth.

    He could see no end to it.

    Much better to think the driver had not talked yet. If Baglio didn't get through to Bachman in the next twelve hours, they were all home safe.

    

    

    Tucker looked at the map spread out on his knees, glanced through the front window of the copter as Norton flew at an angle to the roadway below them, and shouted, "There! That's the highway that runs past the turn-off for Baglio's estate-and I think the house is over that way, in those slopes. If I'm right, the turn-off should be just ahead."

    It was.

    "Good work!" he shouted at Norton, grinning.

    Perhaps he wouldn't have had to shout quite so loudly, for the cabin was fairly well insulated against the roar of the overhead rotors. But after several hours in the air, listening to that thumping racket, his ears buzzed like the core of a beehive on a busy spring morning, and he shouted mostly to hear himself.

    Norton nodded and said, "Is that a likely place to put down?" He pointed across the highway, almost directly opposite the entrance to the Baglio drive. A thousand yards from the road's edge, the woodlands broke for several hundred feet, providing a clean, grassy, somewhat sloped expanse of land between arms of the forest.

    "Good enough," Tucker said.

    They went that way and, five minutes later, were on the ground. Norton cut the engines, let the blades stutter down. The bees began to fly out of Tucker's ears, until the numbed ringing was gone and he could hear once more.

    "Now what?" Norton asked.

    "Now, you'll wait here while I go telephone a colleague," Tucker said, working loose of the seat belt and the shoulder harness which had bitten deep into his flesh.

    Norton stretched his long legs as well as he could in the recess below the control dash and looked around at the pine trees. "I know you're clever at organizing operations, Mike. God knows, I've been in the thick of two of them, and I could tell as much about your expertise without knowing just what in the hell was going on. But I can't believe that you've had a branch line run into these woods just on the off chance that you might have to telephone someone from here."

    Tucker smiled. "No branch line. But there's a picnic area not too far from here, along the main highway, with a phone booth at the end of it. Sit tight until I get back."

    He pushed open the heavy copter door, jumped out, reached up and slammed the door shut. Fifteen minutes later he made his call from the booth in the picnic area. An hour after that, Jimmy Shirillo drove into the parking lot in his red Corvette, cut the engine and climbed out, smiling.

    Another man got out of the low-slung car. He was at least twenty years older than Tucker, about Pete Harris's age, though he was slim and almost delicate-looking, like Shirillo, quite unlike the bearish Harris. He wore heavy-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, combed his hair back from his forehead and looked, from the neck up, much like a turn-of-the-century schoolmaster. From the neck down he looked not unlike a hippie, in bellbottom blue jeans and a rumpled blue work shirt with the cuffs rolled up. He looked at Tucker, smiled slightly, bent back into the Corvette to get his equipment which he had packed into a shoulder-slung leather satchel and a small metal suitcase.

    Shirillo introduced them-Ken Willis, photographer- and let them shake hands. Willis's handshake was indifferent, as if he felt formalities of this sort were a waste of time. Close up, Tucker saw in him an impatience, a need to keep moving, a quality that was unsettlingly like his own.

    "You know what we want?" he asked Willis.

    "Jimmy told me the most of it."

    To Shirillo Tucker said, "Are you sure of him?"

    "Of course. He's my uncle, on my mother's side, by marriage."

    "For one thing," Willis explained, "even if I were willing to sell out on you, I wouldn't know where the hell to go to do it. My line is mostly weddings and freelance nude photography for men's magazines."

    "Good enough," Tucker said. "It's a fifteen-minute walk to the helicopter. Jimmy, you'll stay here with the car until we come back. You can pretend you got sleepy driving and pulled off for a nap-that is, if a cop stops and wants to know if you're just loitering. We'll be back before dark, I hope."

    Shirillo returned to the car.

    Tucker picked up Willis's heavy metal suitcase and said, "Across the highway. We'll wait until there aren't any cars coming before we try it. We don't want to stir up anyone's curiosity."

    

    The big red summer sun had already touched the peak of the mountain on which the Baglio mansion rested, caressed the gentle ridgeline with bright fingers and slowly began to settle out of sight. Full darkness was still more than an hour away, the true sunset obscured by the mountainside, but even so they were going to have to scramble to get done everything they had come here for.

    Norton took them over the roof of the huge white house, a dozen yards above the television antennae, peeled to the right when they had reached the end of the lawn and circled back, swept over the house from the opposite direction, even closer this time.

    "Can you get it like that?" Norton shouted.

    Willis shook his head vehemently, negatively. "I'll either have to hang out of the door or shoot through the nose glass here." He reached across the narrow dash and thumped his knuckles on the windshield. They made a hollow tok, tok, tok sound.

    "I can stand her on end a little," Norton said.

    "And do it going away from the sun," Willis said, "so there's no glare against the glass."

    Tucker sat in the seat directly behind Norton, watching the mansion closely, waiting for the first sign of Baglio's bodyguards. He wondered what they'd think when they came dashing out and found a police helicopter buzzing their retreat.

    Norton stood the helicopter on its nose at a thirty-five-degree angle, slanted enough so that they all slid forward on their seats, testing the belts that bound them in.

    "Good," Willis said.

    The photographer had loaded his camera, unfastened his seat belt and was now out of his bucket-form chair, leaning across the dash, his face pressed close to the window as he focused and shot one frame after another.

    Paul Norton didn't like the fact that Willis wasn't strapped down, but he didn't say much about it. He concentrated on keeping the copter's flight path as even and steady as possible so that there was little chance of Willis being thrown around.

    Below, two men came out of the front door of the white house and looked up at the circling craft, raised flattened hands to shield their eyes from the last direct glints of sunlight that touched the polished framework and the windshield of the copter as it fluttered in a tight little turn. They were, Tucker saw, the next thing to nonentities, two husky muscle types, their sports coats hanging open so that guns would be more quickly at hand.