"A few," Tucker admitted. Already he felt at ease with the kid, despite the brief time he'd known him, despite the glittering cars that they sailed past and dueled with, despite the angry honking of horns, squeal of brakes. "Though there are fewer differences than you might think."

"One difference," Shirillo said, tramping hard on the accelerator to take advantage of an opening in traffic, "is that a bank, if it catches up with you, will have you tossed in jail-while these boys we're talking about will simply weight you down and drop you off a bridge somewhere."

Tucker smiled, sucked his lime Life Saver, watched the hurtling death machines around him as if they were playful animals. "They still do things like that?"

"Worse," Shirillo said. "I don't want anyone in this who doesn't understand the risks."

"Do you?" Tucker asked.

"I was raised in the Hill section of Pittsburgh," Shirillo said. His manner was no longer childlike. It was grim. His face set into tight lines, pinched up by bad memories. "That's mostly a black neighborhood-substandard housing, bad garbage pickup so you get rats running in the streets like dogs, hardly any police patrols, streets that haven't been paved in my lifetime, no family counseling or city services like in the white neighborhoods. It's the kind of place where pressures build up and up until, one summer night every couple of years, they just rip out through the top."

"Riots?"

"You been keeping up with the news," Shirillo said. "But I prefer to think of them as nervous collapses; it's not a physical thing but a psychological one. Everyone clucks about it for a few days; all the upstanding white citizens rush out and buy a lot of guns they don't know how to use; in a month it's forgotten, and nothing's changed. Nothing at all. If you're not black or Spanish, you've got to be s.h.i.t-poor to live in the Hill section. And that's why we were there. My father tried to keep ends together with a shoe-repair store, and did, too, until he kicked off at fifty-six from too much d.a.m.n work. My father has had to pay Rossario Baglio's collectors for the last fifteen years, simply for the privilege of remaining in business. An old Italian custom." He snorted, but wasn't amused by his own joke. "Before Baglio, it was someone else who got the weekly installments. I've seen what they do to people who miss a week or who come flat out and say no to extortion. One of the rebels was a brother of mine, and ever since he said 'No' he limps. Badly. He's lucky that he walks at all."

"So you know the risks," Tucker said.

"Too well."

"I know them too. But I also know that, in a job like this one, you gain advantages along with the risks. For my part, I think the advantages outweigh the additional risks."

"For instance?"

"For instance, you don't have to worry about organized police, the state or federal apparatus, fingerprint experts or any of the rest of it."

"That too," Shirillo admitted.

Out of the city, moving east on the superhighway, the traffic thinned out considerably. Shirillo put the Corvette up around seventy and held it there. Neither of them spoke again until he braked, slowed and drove off into a roadside picnic area fifteen minutes later.

"On foot from here," Shirillo said. He looked at his watch. "And we'll have to make it fast." He picked up two pairs of field gla.s.ses from the back seat, handed one to Tucker and got out of the car.

Twenty minutes later, having tramped a considerable distance through a pine woods, moving silently most of the time, they reached the vantage point Shirillo had chosen, in the trees to the side of the private road, halfway down the mile-long straightaway that fed into Baglio's driveway. They stood well back in the shadows under the pines, watching the big white mansion.

"Some house," Tucker said.

"Twenty-nine rooms," Shirillo said.

"Been inside?"

"Once," the boy said. "When I was eighteen, I was a numbers runner for one of Baglio's Hill operatives, a man named Guita. Guita thought I was a smart kid destined for big things in the organization, and he brought me here with him once to meet Mr. Baglio."

"What happened to your big career in the underworld?" Tucker asked.

"Guita got himself killed."

"Police?"

"No-Baglio."

"What for?"

"I never knew."

Tucker said, "Some action up there at the house. Is this it?"

Shirillo had not been using his binoculars for a few minutes, but he lifted them and peered up the slope. "Yes," he said. "That's Henry Deffer, Baglio's personal driver, that old b.a.s.t.a.r.d there. Walking beside Deffer, the dandified one, is Chaka, Baglio's accountant and trouble-shooter. He's the second most powerful man in the local organization."

"The other two?"

"Just hoods."

"That the money, in those suitcases?"

"Yes."

"How much, do you think?"

"I've asked around. No one could say for sure except Baglio and Chaka. But it's likely to be somewhere between two hundred and five hundred thousand, depending on what kind of two weeks it's been."

"Where's it come from?" Tucker asked.

"Baglio's suburban gambling operations, the small stuff -punchboards in a couple of hundred gas stations, small numbers operations out of laundromats and newsstands and beauty parlors, small sports betting from maybe sixty or seventy barrooms. Each one of them's a tiny situation in itself. Multiply a small stake by two thousand situations, and it turns into big money."

"Why only a twice-a-month collection?"

"Because it is so little compared to inner-city numbers running, organization hookers, protection money, the dope take from both suburbs and inner city. It isn't enough to warrant all those rounds every week. Besides, these situations with the punchboards and the dollar bets are mostly legitimate businesses copping a little dirty money on the side that they don't have to report on the income-tax returns. They like holding onto Baglio's share, interest free, for a couple of weeks; sometimes, it might help a guy make a payment he'd otherwise be a few days late on. Baglio doesn't mind that so long as they turn in an honest percentage and don't get behind."

A black Cadillac limousine had pulled out of the driveway and was on its way toward them down the narrow lane. They stepped even deeper into the shadows and watched it go past.

Shirillo said, "Baglio has about fifty collectors for the suburbs. Every second and fourth Monday of every month they hit the road, picking up the small change from these situations. They deliver it here starting midafternoon, until dinner. Monday night it's counted, packaged and put in suitcases for the trip into town Tuesday morning."

"What's done with it then?"

"Baglio owns a good piece of a bank in town, one of the big ones on Forbes. Deffer parks the Caddy in the garage under the bank, while Chaka and one of the bodyguards use the bank president's private elevator to take the suitcases to the president's sixteenth-floor office. What happens to it then, I don't know. I imagine that it's all very cleverly laundered and made clean again."

"Do you have a spot picked out to stop the car?"

"Yes," Shirillo said. "Let's go look at it."

They spent that afternoon tramping the woods along the private lane, scouting prospective sites for the execution of the robbery. That done, they drove into the city again, where Tucker took a room in the hotel at Chatham Center. In his room, for the rest of the afternoon and evening, they discussed the fine points of the plan, argued alternatives and got it worked out to their mutual satisfaction. It looked good.

Back in Manhattan, Tucker needed only two weeks to locate and interest Bachman and Harris. The four of them had met in Pittsburgh this past Sunday, had gone over the details until they were exhausted. They monitored the delivery of the cash on Monday, went over everything one last time on Monday night in Tucker's hotel room, pulled the job off well. Quite well. Except for that d.a.m.ned woman in the Cadillac. That d.a.m.n unexpected Cadillac.

Tucker hated failure more than he hated losing the money, more than the possibility of violence and death. He meant to see that the job did not end here.

_.

"If Baglio's men are in front of us and behind us," Jimmy Shirillo said, "what do we do next?" He'd slowed the Mustang to a crawl, and he felt like stopping it altogether. If he could freeze them here, stop time, fix this instant for eternity, they'd not have to face Baglio at all; nothing bad could happen to them. For his first major job he'd held up quite well, in the face of almost total failure, but he had his limits. He remembered his brother, the weeks in the hospital, the limp, and he didn't want to go on with this. Tucker traced circles on the shotgun stock with his index finger and wondered how to answer the kid's question. His own reaction to failure was different from Shirillo's; his resourcefulness was increased, his determination magnified. He said, "I've noticed branch roads leading from this main track. We must have pa.s.sed a dozen of them since we turned off the macadam."

Shirillo nodded quickly. "I saw them too. They were narrower than this, more rutted than this, grown full of weeds, and absolute disaster for anything less formidable than a Land Rover."

"I didn't pretend to mean we'd get all that far on one of them," Tucker said patiently. He didn't like this dawning note of pessimism in the kid, but he didn't comment on it. The best way to bring Shirillo around was to be calm, lead him by example. He said, "At least we ought to make a mile or so before we have to start walking."

"I don't like it," Shirillo said.

"You like facing Baglio's roadblocks any better?"

Shirillo didn't answer.

Tucker said, "By now they know that we have a man with a machine gun, and they won't be overpowered again."

Shirillo thought a moment and said, "Why don't we just abandon the car here and go into the woods, away from any trails they might watch?"

"Because we'd never find our way overland; we'd be lost in ten minutes. Unless we can find that macadam road again, we won't know where we are. None of us is a woodsman."

"That's d.a.m.n straight," Harris said, clutching his Thompson tighter than before, his own pessimism bottled up inside of him, behind a mask of stoic indifference that was not as good as Tucker's own carefully maintained facade. Harris's gloom was not based on inexperience, as was Shirillo's, but on a growing certainty that he had been too long in this business and that he was nearer than ever to a big payment of dues. He remembered his short time behind bars, and he knew he wouldn't go that route here-this would be worse, much worse, and painful. Baglio wouldn't send him to a cell but to a grave.

"Okay, then," Shirillo said, resigned to the worst. "But you pick the road, okay?"

A thousand feet farther along, Tucker pointed to a narrow gap in the almost solid wall of thick pine trunks, said, "That one, on the right, ought to lead in the general direction of the mansion."

Shirillo drove into the weed-choked track with all the caution of a man who fully expected it to be generously laced with land mines. The Mustang sighed, sank down in the damp earth with its thick carpet of pine needles, the springs singing unpleasantly. It trembled coltishly, bounced into and out of a muddy hole, making a grinding noise as it pressed brambles, gra.s.s and milkweed plants out of the way, moving slowly but deliberately forward.

They rode in silence for more than a mile and a half before the compact car settled abruptly into a pool of black muck and refused to come out of it again, even though Tucker and Harris a.s.sisted with a push.

Shirillo finally shut off the engine and got out of the car. He said, "She's wedged in there until someone brings a wrecker after her."

"We'll walk now," Tucker said.

Actually, Shirillo was feeling better than he had fifteen minutes before, because he had never expected a Mustang to get this far over that kind of terrain. That it had lasted as long as this seemed to be some sort of omen that the job wouldn't turn out so bad after all.

Tucker took the lead as they followed the overgrown trail into the woods, Shirillo second and Harris bringing up the rear with his heavy artillery. The older man carried the Thompson snout forward, at the hip, like a wary infantryman going through a suspected enemy position. That was, in fact, pretty much the case.

Although Tucker was aware of the woods around him and was on the lookout for Baglio's gunmen, the greatest part of his attention was on the problem of the botched robbery. In the past three years he had pulled off thirteen perfect operations, a couple of which were already legend in the business. Each job had its. .h.i.tches, of course, but each had turned put right in the end. At twenty-eight he'd begun to build the kind of reputation among other freelancers that c.l.i.tus Felton had retired on. Reliable Mike Tucker. He liked the sound of that, even though the Tucker part of it was not his real name. It had been his alias for three years, and he felt that, given another five years of continued success, he wouldn't give a d.a.m.n about any name except his a.s.sumed one; he would be Tucker then. Already, he was more concerned about upholding Tucker's reputation than about what was said against his real name and family. There was nothing to be proud of in his real name, nothing at all. Tucker, however, was a name to be reckoned with. A botched-up job Remember Tucker's first disaster, the Baglio robbery? After that, it was all downhill for him, right on to that job when he No. Not failure. He wouldn't permit it to remain a failure, because that would be playing right into his father's hands-not Tucker's father, of course; the real father. He refused. He would not provide anyone with a reference point for the beginning of his decline. Before he was finished he would have those d.a.m.ned suitcases, or three others exactly like them, filled with money.

He looked at his watch as he walked along the rutted, unused track, was surprised to see that despite all that had happened this morning it was still only a few minutes past eleven o'clock. A great deal could be done yet today-if they were lucky enough to find their way off the mountain un.o.bserved.

Ten minutes after they abandoned the Mustang, the woods began to thin out around them. The trees were smaller, farther apart, the underbrush thicker. Tucker gave all of his attention to the landscape now; the planning could wait until later. The woods seemed deserted except for them, but Baglio might have men stationed along the perimeter. Whether they had a chance or not was all dependent on how many gunmen he kept in the mansion on the day of a cash transfer.

Spread out side by side now, rather than strung out in one line, they slowly approached the edge of the trees, circ.u.mspect, increasingly certain that they were alone. At the edge of the forest, still in the darkness beneath the pines, they stopped and looked down the long manicured slope of a contoured hillside. The mansion rested at the bottom, a white flare in the middle of all that green gra.s.s.

Sprawled on the ground at the edge of the woods, the three men watched the activity down at the Baglio mansion. On the long flagstone promenade that fronted the great house, two gunmen had taken up positions, one at either end, leaning against white wooden pillars from which they could survey the circular drive and both the east and west lawns. Tucker imagined that, in the back of the house which he could not see from here, other hoods had also settled in for the duration. Otherwise, the picture was serene, the windows of the house taking the bright sunlight and casting it back in doubled brilliance, a willow tree lazily waving whiplike branches, a bird crying somewhere close by.

Tucker put down the binoculars and said, "The white Thunderbird parked in the driveway has MD plates."

"A doctor for Bachman?" Shirillo asked.

"Most likely."

Harris said, "Then they got him out of the wreck, you think?"

Tucker nodded. "And they aren't likely to send him to the local hospital, where someone might wonder how and where he got so banged up."

"How bad do you think Bachman is?" Shirillo asked.

"It has got to be more than a bruise or two."

Harris seemed to be remembering the Chevy angled up onto the mangled Cadillac, and he grimaced sourly. "Why didn't they just kill him? Why go to the trouble of bringing a doctor in for him? This Baglio doesn't sound like any humanitarian, from what I've heard."

Tucker brushed away a determined ant that had crept onto his coat sleeve, and he said, "Bachman must either be unconscious or in too much pain to talk coherently. Baglio sent for the doctor to help get Bachman back in shape so he can ask him a few pointed questions."

"About the job," Harris said.

"Yes," Tucker said. "About the job, about us."

"Bachman won't say anything."

"Bulls.h.i.t," Shirillo said.

Harris looked at the boy, his square face reddening again. He said, "I've worked with Merle Bachman half a dozen times before, and I can vouch for him."

"If the police had him, I wouldn't be the least bit worried," Shirillo said. "I'm sure he's able to withstand any number of late-night question-and-answer sessions in the squad room with those boys, but I also know that no one is going to make it through much of Baglio's questioning. They'll sew him back together from the wreck, ask him a few questions, and break every bone in his body, one at a time, until he spills. They aren't as limited in their choice of techniques as the police are."

Tucker picked up the gla.s.ses again, trained them on the front doors which opened on the promenade, followed two men as they came out of the house and walked toward the white Thunderbird. One was in a business suit and carried a black satchel, obviously the physician. The other man was tall, dark and distinguished, with full sideburns and a mane of gray-white hair. Twenty pounds too thick around the middle but otherwise in good condition, he might have been a Congressman or successful oilman. He had to be Baglio, and Shirillo confirmed that he was.

"What's going on, friend?" Harris asked.

Tucker said, "They're arguing, but not heatedly. I'd guess the doctor wants Bachman moved to a hospital, while Baglio disagrees. Right now he's probably telling the doc that he pays these exorbitant medical fees to be able to disregard his advice whenever it's convenient."

A moment later the doctor got into the Thunderbird and drove away, with Baglio waving at him in a friendly fashion. A third person came out of the house then and stood beside Baglio: the rangy blonde who'd been driving the Cadillac which had cut off Bachman's escape route. She wore shorts and a halter, and everything about her was zaftig, so ripe she would already have begun to decline by the age of thirty, when many women were reaching the fullest bloom. Right now, though, at twenty-two or twenty-three she was perfect, and she knew it; that was clear in the way she carried herself, the conscious provocative tilt to her hips when she stood beside Baglio. Tucker watched her as, with her arm around the old man, she went back into the mansion.

"You know the girl?" he asked Shirillo. "The one driving the Cadillac?"

"No, but she's probably the latest in Baglio's string of women."

"Lives in?"

"His women usually do."

Tucker watched the house, though no one moved down there and the guards had slumped back into att.i.tudes of boredom. "Is there any way we can find out for certain how many people are in that place at night, besides Baglio and this woman?"

Shirillo considered that for a moment and said, "I guess I could ask around, carefully, but I'm already sure that there's going to be at least four bodyguards. Outside of that, I just don't know."

"Why does it matter?" Harris asked.