"Yes. The driver's dead."

Tucker smiled. "Of old age?"

Baglio said, "He was banged up pretty badly." His voice had a note, almost, of indifference. "He died yesterday."

"The body?"

"Buried."

"Where?"

"I've a whole graveyard here," Baglio said. His diction was excellent. Either he had gone to the best schools as a boy or he had hired private tutors in his middle age. The last was far more likely than the first. He seemed to take pride in his word choices, his conscious wit, his clear p.r.o.nunciation, much in the same way a college boy might. "The pine trees are the markers, suitably engraved." He looked at the woman and grinned winningly, elicited a chuckle from her.

Though he forced himself to react emotionally, Tucker's next move was guided solely by intellect. It was clear that neither Baglio nor the woman expected any harm to come to them and that neither of them would make a good subject for interrogation so long as he was comforted by this a.s.sumption. Grunting, then, Tucker leaned in and raked the barrel of the Luger across Baglio's face, using the sight point, gouging him from temple to chin. Blood popped up in a bright line.

"It's time to stop playing games to impress the lady," Tucker said. "It's time to come to grips with your decidedly disadvantageous position." He wondered if Baglio understood, by his choice of words and tone, that Tucker was mimicking him.

Baglio touched his bleeding face, stared at his carmined fingers in disbelief. A long minute later he looked at Tucker, the humor in his face metamorphosed into hatred. "You've just bought yourself one of those pine-marked graves," he said. His voice had not deteriorated. Schoolmaster meting out punishment to the bad boy.

Distasteful as he found this, Tucker swung the Luger again and scored a red ribbon on Baglio's undamaged cheek.

The strongman started out of his chair, head lowered like a bull ready to ram, yelped and crumpled backward as Shirillo delivered another brutal blow from behind with his own pistol on Baglio's right shoulder. He clutched at the bruised and spasming muscles, hunched forward as if he might be sick. Gradually he'd begun to look his age.

The girl looked older too.

She licked her lips and shifted her gaze around the room as if she thought she'd see something that would unexpectedly turn the tables. That fantasy lasted a brief moment, because she realized, as she must have done often before, that her best weapon was herself-her body and her wits. She looked up, aware of Tucker's eyes on her, and without being obvious about it she shifted inside her tentish yellow gown to mold it at strategic points to her. An offering. But poisoned.

He smiled at her, for he had the vague idea that he might need her cooperation later, then turned back to Baglio. "We were talking about a friend of mine."

"Go to h.e.l.l," Baglio said.

Shirillo, unbidden, stepped forward and, judging the position of Baglio's kidneys through the slatted back of the chair, jammed the barrel of his Luger hard into the man's left side. Ordinarily this sort of tactic was beyond him. Now, he kept thinking of his father. And his brother. The shoe shop. His brother's limp.

Baglio grunted, sucked breath, reared up, then crumpled under Shirillo's second, swift chop to his shoulder. He fell off the chair, to the floor.

"My friend?" Tucker asked.

Baglio got his hands under himself and, feigning more weakness than he felt, started up, shifted toward Tucker's feet. That was a stupid move for a man in his situation, the first indication that he'd been frightened and that he was acting on a gut level. Tucker back-stepped and kicked him alongside the head. When he went down this time he stayed down, unconscious.

"Get a gla.s.s of water," Tucker told Shirillo.

The kid went after it.

Miss Loraine smiled at Tucker.

He smiled back.

Neither spoke.

Shirillo returned with the water, but before he could throw it in Baglio's face Tucker said, "No vendetta, kid. We can't afford it." He had remembered Shirillo's monologue when they'd first met several weeks ago, remembered the worn-out father and the brother who'd been badly beaten.

"I'm finished," Shirillo said. "I thought at first I wanted to kill him. But I've decided I don't want to pay him back in his own coin; I don't want to be like he is."

"Good," Tucker said. "Think he'll recognize you?"

"No. He saw me once for five minutes, a year and a half ago."

"Wake him, then."

Shirillo tossed the water into the bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y face, went around behind the two chairs again.

Baglio blinked, looked up.

"We were talking about my friend," Tucker said.

Baglio's lips were swollen, but that could not account for the change in his voice. Behind the slurred words there was a different tone, no more haughtiness, the tone of a man suddenly brought down from a high place and made to see his own mortality. "I told you, he's dead."

"Why does your cook tell a different story?"

"I wouldn't know."

"And Deffer?"

Baglio looked up. The hate was still in his eyes, though it had been veiled now, as if he knew it would be dangerous to show any sort of resolve. "What did they say?"

"An ambulance came and took him away."

"It did. To a grave in the woods."

"Bulls.h.i.t."

"Again on the shoulder?" Shirillo asked from behind Baglio. "Or another kidney punch?"

"Wait," Tucker said, smiling. He apologized pleasantly to Baglio for his partner's overeager att.i.tude. He said, "I'm sure our friend's in this house. Otherwise everyone's story would match. Otherwise-a lot of things. Now, where is he?"

"No," Baglio said.

Tucker nodded, looked at Shirillo. "Tie him to the chair, then go keep our friend company at the stairwell. You could cover the back stairs while he watches the main ones."

"Expecting trouble?" Shirillo asked.

"It's going to take longer than I thought," Tucker said. "And Mr. Baglio may be screaming loud enough to attract his boys outside before I'm done with him."

Shirillo nodded, used a letter opener to cut down the cords of the draw drapes and expertly lashed Baglio to the straight-backed chair. The older man offered no resistance.

"What about her?" Shirillo asked.

"I can handle her."

"Sure?"

"Positive."

Shirillo left to join Harris at the stairs.

Tucker looked at his watch: 5:10 in the morning. Shortly the dawn would come. Would the two men stationed outside the house leave their posts when the sun had fully risen?

Tucker shook off the thought and directed the woman to move her chair away from Baglio, which she did, putting it down so that it faced him from the side. When she was seated again, like a spectator at a sporting event, Tucker stood behind her, watching Baglio, tracing his fingertips along her warm neck.

Baglio laughed out loud, even though that must have hurt his face.

"Something funny?" Tucker asked. He let his hand become more sure, lying full against her throat, feeling her pulse. He hated himself for trying to get to Baglio through whatever relationship he enjoyed with the woman. He kept thinking how it would be if things were reversed, if he were in the chair and Baglio were caressing Elise.

"That won't work," Baglio said.

Tucker moved his hand, traced the edge of her jaw-line, tenderly tilted her head up. She responded to his touch, or he imagined that she did.

Baglio said, "I've always got a different woman around. Women are nothing to me, nothing at all. I've got nothing special with her. I wasn't the first with her, and I know I'm hot going to be the last, so go ahead, be my guest." All that talking made a tiny stream of thick blood run from the corner of his mouth, down his blackening chin. He made no attempt to lick it away, perhaps because his tongue was cut and swollen-or perhaps because he didn't notice it, his entire attention riveted on Tucker's proprietary hand.

"I think you're lying," Tucker said.

"Think what you want."

"It would get to a man like you if a stranger walked into his house and made him watch, powerless, while-"

"Powerless" was the word that did it. Baglio flared up again, inwardly, hatred rising in his eyes and burning brightly a moment before he veiled it again. "See if I care."

Tucker turned her face toward him, tilted it higher, looked into her green-blue eyes. "If I were to pistol-whip her?" he asked Baglio. "Put a couple of scars on her face -say, from the hairline straight down to the chin-break a few of those perfect teeth?" If Elise could hear him now, what would she say? It wouldn't be good.

But Baglio laughed again, more genuinely this time, or with his act more under control.

The girl stiffened, looked worriedly up at Tucker, shifted her eyes sideways, straining to see Baglio. She hadn't expected this. And in her eyes was a hatred more intense than Baglio's, not for Tucker but for her lover. Her former lover. She'd been made aware, in one brutal instant, that though there might be more between them than just s.e.x, the old man found her expendable. Watching her now, as her face set into grim lines, Tucker knew she would perform a vendetta far better than any Sicilian ever could.

Now that her circ.u.mstances were clear, she adjusted quickly, recovered her composure; and decided what she must do. Earlier, Tucker had imagined that she reacted favorably to his caress, but now the reaction was real and not imagined at all. His hand slid down her throat until it lay just above her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s; and she sat up straighter, leaning into his hand, trying to accommodate him, tempting.

Baglio noticed.

She smiled at Tucker, turned to Baglio and smiled at him too, though differently.

Something was building here, maybe something quite useful, though Tucker didn't see how it could help him just yet.

His watch read 5:20. Time was pa.s.sing too swiftly.

What next? How could Baglio be broken? Or how could the woman be persuaded to tell him what he wanted to know? She was on the verge of that, he knew, and she needed only the slightest push to His concentration was broken by the bark of an unsilenced revolver shot echoing in the confines of the second-floor corridor. That single explosion was answered by the furious chatter of Pete Harris's Thompson submachine gun. A man screamed, but not for long, his voice fading out into an unintelligible gasp of meaningless words, and that into silence. Pete Harris mouthed a string of obscenities; they were all blown.

Down at the far end of the corridor, by the rear stairs, Jimmy Shirillo located a panel of switches and flooded the second-floor hallway with startlingly white light. That didn't matter any longer, because there was no hope of keeping their presence a secret from the men who were standing guard outside the house. Harris's burst of mar chine-gun fire had tossed the cards into the air, and the only way to be sure the cards landed in the right suits was to move fast and cover all the contingencies.

Tucker pushed the woman ahead of him, not rudely but firmly, as he hurried toward the main stairwell. He didn't bother to keep the pistol trained on her. Alone, she had nothing to gain by a grandstand play for escape, and she knew it.

Pete Harris sat against the wall, just this side of the entrance to the stairs, the Thompson lying on the carpet beside him. He was trying to work the trouser leg up over his right knee without touching the wound he'd suffered. His greasepainted face glistened with sweat that had popped through the black cover and had streaked it.

Shirillo waited at the back stairs, on guard for attack from that direction.

"You okay?" Tucker shouted.

"Yeah!" Shirillo called back.

Halfway between Shirillo and Harris, against the rear wall, lay a dead man. He was stretched out on his back, one leg twisted up under his b.u.t.tocks, his arms thrown above his head, nearly cut in half by the burst of machine-gun fire. A lot of blood decorated the walls and spread darkly over the expensive carpet.

"How is it?" Tucker asked Harris.

Harris looked up as he finally rolled the trouser leg above his knee. "He got me in the calf. It hurts like h.e.l.l, but I don't think it's really too bad."

Tucker bent and looked at the wound, squeezed it to force blood out of it, peered intently into the jagged slash before it could fill with new blood. "It seems to be just a graze," he said. "Just a crease. You'll live, I believe."

"Thanks, friend," Harris said. "Christ, the s.h.i.t has. .h.i.t the fan, has it not?" He didn't seem to notice Miss Loraine.

"We've still got the advantage," Tucker said.

Too much white showed around the irises of Harris's eyes, giving him an expression of shocked horror, no matter what his lips were doing. "Sure, friend," he said, none too enthusiastically.

"Where'd he come from?"

Harris looked at the dead man, cleared his throat, spat on the rug. "I can't figure that one."

"Up the steps?"

"No," Harris said. "And he couldn't have come up the back way without knocking Jimmy down to get a shot at me. My friend, he simply popped up like a ghost between the two of us. I was. .h.i.t before I saw him. When I caught his outline, I didn't waste time." He was upset. He had mentioned Shirillo's first name in front of the girl- as he had mentioned it in front of Keesey, the cook-and he looked on the edge of hysteria. He patted the Thompson, though, and forced a weak grin.

"You think he was already upstairs?" Tucker asked.

"I know it."

"Where was he hiding?"

"In one of those rooms."

"Couldn't have been. We searched them all."

"Not well enough, friend."

Was that possible? They'd looked in closets, under beds, been most professional about it. No. They hadn't overlooked anything. Tucker stood up and looked at Miss Loraine. "Where would he have been?"

"Who?"

"Don't be funny. The dead man."

"I wouldn't know."