Dean Koontz - Blood risk

Now that her circumstances 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 breasts; 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 passing 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 buttocks, 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 hell, 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 shit has hit 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 hit 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."

He moved quickly, grabbed her arm, twisted it, levered it up behind her back, forcing her to bend and grunt in pain. "Remember what I told Baglio about your face?"

"You wouldn't do that to me."

She was right, but he couldn't afford to strengthen her certainty, so he pushed harder on her arm.

"I don't know where the hell he was!" she snapped, jerking straight up and breaking his hold. He hadn't applied full pressure, not what he would have used against a man. The ease with which she'd pulled away from him was a warning not to misjudge her again.

"Keep her covered," Tucker told Harris. "You feel up to it?"

"Sure, friend," he said, lifting the machine gun.

Tucker went to talk with Shirillo and found that the kid didn't know where the gunman had come from. "I didn't know he was here until he shot Pete. Then I fell flat and stayed flat to keep out of the way of ricochets from the Thompson."

Tucker looked at his watch. He examined the corridor again, stared at the corpse, tried to imagine where he'd come from. He said, "Did you look in the closets in the Halversons' room?"

"You know I did."

"What about those rooms you checked out on your own, down there in the other wing?"

"Give me some credit."

"Dammit, he came from somewhere.'"

Shirillo grimaced and said, "He came from the same place they're holding Bachman."

Tucker wiped at his face as if there were cobwebs over it. The greasepaint made his skin feel sticky. His vision was blurry, his mouth hot and dry. He said, "How do you get that notion?"

"It's logical."

"The attic?" Tucker said.

"We can go look. But I doubt that's it, because I seem to be standing under the attic door." He pointed to a trap in the ceiling directly overhead, reached up and gripped the chromed handle, pulled down a set of folding metal steps that led up into darkness.

Tucker went up and came back in less than five minutes. "Empty," he told Shirillo. "And this is the only door in or out." He left the stairs unfolded because, according to the plan, they'd need to use them later.

"Now?" Shirillo asked. He was in complete control of himself, holding it all together.

Tucker took a roll of lime-flavored Life Savers from the pocket of his windbreaker, offered one to Shirillo, popped one into his own mouth when the kid declined, sucked on the candy. He said, "How do you go about finding a hidden room?"

Shirillo blinked, wiped a hand over his hooded head as if he wanted to run fingers through his hair, said, "Isn't that a bit much?"

"You're the one who sold me on the idea that the Mafia is melodramatic, remember?"

"But a hidden room?"

"Bachman's in this house somewhere. I know it. But we've looked in every room and closet from the basement to the attic." He jammed his hands into his trouser pockets and worked at the ring of sweetness in his mouth. "A man like Baglio might find a hidden room very useful. For one thing, he could store the money there every other Monday night-and anything else he might think is too hot to leave out in the open or put into a safe-deposit vault that federal agents could get a court order to open." He cracked the Life Saver in two.