Dean Koontz - Blood risk

"That wasn't necessary," Tucker said.

"He didn't have any teeth to lose, friend," Harris said. He was using the "friend" much too often, further on the edge than he had ever been before.

"I was going to tie and gag him."

Harris looked at the old man, prodded him with the barrel of the machine gun and said, "He's only unconscious. He'll stay completely out of the way and this saved us time."

Tucker got out of his chair and felt the quivering weakness behind his knees again. "You said you wanted to talk."

"I do," Harris said. He crossed to the window, looked out, turned, sidestepped and leaned against the wall. Still in a whisper, he said, "What if Bachman talked? What if they killed him?"

"Then we get out of here and go to ground for a while, until they've given up on us."

Harris shook his head violently. "No. I can't afford that. I've got nothing to show for this job, and I needed the cash. I have another idea altogether."

Tucker knew what it was, but he asked anyway.

"If they got it out of Bachman, got anything at all out of him, we'll have to kill Baglio, maybe Deffer-maybe the guard downstairs."

"What about the girl, Miss Loraine?"

Harris looked genuinely perplexed. "What about her?"

"Baglio's sleeping with her," Tucker explained patiently. "He's a fifty-year-old man, and she isn't half that. She's one hell of a looker, the kind of chick who sometimes engenders gratitude in a man that old. It's possible that he could think of her as more than just another lay-that he might be telling her more about his affairs than he should. Other men have been known to make fools of themselves in the same manner."

Harris thought about it a moment, his deep-set eyes sinking even deeper. He said, "I don't like it-but we kill her too if we have to."

"The Halversons?"

"They wouldn't know anything," Harris said confidently. "A man like Baglio wouldn't be blabbing his business to the maid and butler."

"Handyman."

"Whatever."

Tucker shook his head sadly and went to the bed, took Deffer's pulse and checked his breathing. He began to tear the pillowcase apart to make strips of binding. He said, "Pete, you're in a bad way. I recommend retirement as soon as possible."

"You do, huh?"

Tucker nodded, not bothering to look at him, hoping to avoid a show of temper that way. He began to tie Deffer's ankles together. "If you kill Baglio and the others, this becomes a police affair. This greasepaint doesn't make us invisible. It would have been enough to thwart any search that Baglio might be able to mount; but the police, when they get the descriptions from the Halversons and from Keesey, are going to be able to match those to your photograph where it appears in about a million' mug books. That's a small chance of discovery, admittedly, but large enough to worry about. You want to kill everyone in the house, then, even the maid and the handyman?"

Harris softly cleared his throat and stood away from the wall, though he couldn't think of anything to say. He had made a fool of himself in front of Tucker. He couldn't afford that.

Tucker flopped Deffer onto his stomach, got his hands behind him and tied them in place, rolled him onto his back again. Even if the old man's throat permitted him to speak in more than a whisper when he regained consciousness, there did not seem to be any need to gag him. By the time he came to, everyone in the house would already know the place had been breached.

"Still…" Harris said at last, trying to break the silence.

"Even if you kill everyone in the house," Tucker interrupted, "how do you know Baglio hasn't communicated what Bachman told him to others, maybe to that dandified accountant, Chaka? If he did, all your killing's for nothing."

"A flaw in your reasoning," Harris said. "This is already a police affair. The guard you shot makes it that."

"Bullshit, and you know it," Tucker said. "Baglio will get his own doctor to fix his boy up."

Harris knew that, but he still wouldn't let go of it. "I can't afford to go to ground for a year, dammit."

Because he had to get Harris off the subject, Tucker said, "Maybe by the time we leave here you'll have a bankroll to last you for a year or even longer."

"How?"

"Wait," Tucker said, because he had no real answer.

They left Deffer's room, turning off the lights and closing the door behind them.

Jimmy Shirillo was waiting with the Halversons. He was standing just inside their door, while they were sitting up against the brass headboard of their bed, bound and gagged, their hands tied to the brass bars behind them. She was thin and somewhat pretty, though with the sagging look about the eyes that indicated a woman wearied and almost beaten by life. Her husband, a tall, thin, sallow-faced man with bushy eyebrows and ears that looked as if they had been grafted from a hound, had been weathered even worse by the years, servile and eager to please. And terrified.

"Questions?" Shirillo asked.

Tucker looked at the Halversons again and saw exactly what Keesey had meant. "No questions. If they even know what Baglio is, I'd be amazed. I have a feeling our man could have been kept in this house for the last month without these two ever being aware of it,"

Shirillo nodded. "They were so obliging, I thought they were going to tie each other up."

"Let's check out the rest of the rooms on this side," Tucker said. "Just to be safe."

In the last two rooms in that smaller of the mansion's two wings, they found proof that both Keesey and Deffer had lied to them: two used bedrooms with full closets. A cursory examination of each was enough to convince Tucker that two more gunmen were up and about and currently unaccounted for.

"I wouldn't have guessed the cook would lie to us," Harris said. He had pocketed his Lüger and was using his free hand to caress the sleek lines of the machine gun.

"He did, though," Tucker said. "And when Deffer mentioned more than two guards, I thought he was lying."

"But where are they?" Harris asked. Anxiously he turned to face the unlighted stairwell, the long arm of the corridor, then the short one.

Shirillo said, "They have to be outside yet." He wasn't ruffled at all. He had surprised himself, and Tucker, with the degree of his adaptability. If Harris became unreliable, Tucker would still be able to count on Shirillo.

"They must have seen us," Harris insisted. His voice was coarse, unsteady. "The way we've been turning the lights off and on in this place, anyone outside would-"

"We haven't, really," Shirillo said. "We've mostly used the flashlight, and the draperies would block that much from a man outside. The only places we used ceiling lights were the art room, storage room and the Halversons' bedroom. The first two don't have any windows, and the third alone wouldn't necessarily arouse suspicion. I think the guards must be behind the house; that's why I'm eliminating what lights we turned on in the front rooms."

Good. Clean, reasoned thought. Tucker knew, if they got out of here, he'd use Shirillo again, on another job. To Harris, whom he knew he would never use again, he said, "I agree with Jimmy."

"Well, friends, even if this is true, it doesn't change anything. Even if those two loose guards don't know we're in the house, they're still down there, below us. Any time now they might go off duty or step inside for a cup of coffee, and when they do it's over." The last couple of words came out of his throat like juice squeezed through a fine-web strainer.

"On the other hand," Tucker said, "we might get finished before they know anything at all."

"Unlikely," Harris said. He revised that opinion: "Impossible."

Tucker said, "Just the same, our best chance is to be quick, to get this done and call in the copter. Let's go see Mr. Baglio."