Dean Koontz - Blood risk

Shirillo said, "But a safe would do it. A hidden room is a grandiose way of-"

"A safe wouldn't do, say, for a large drug shipment. And if cops showed up at the door with a warrant, they'd be empowered to open a safe, whereas they'd bypass a hidden room altogether."

"Maybe."

"So how would you go about looking for a hidden room?"

Shirillo considered it awhile and finally said, "I guess you'd have to compare partitions from the corridor and from inside the rooms, try to find a discrepancy somewhere."

Tucker nodded, looked at his watch.

5:36.

"I better get moving then," he said.

Shirillo nodded.

"Our missing guard is either in the hidden room, somewhere between you and Pete, or he was outside the house when he heard the shots."

"If he was outside," Shirillo said, "we would have heard from him by this time."

"Unless he decided not to come in here after us."

"Why wouldn't he?"

"Maybe he knows he's outnumbered."

"He couldn't know."

Tucker finished the candy. An unpleasant possibility had occurred to him, and he didn't want to have to talk about it, though he knew that Shirillo had a right to hear what he was thinking. Of course Harris had the same right, though he'd never tell Harris. The kid, he felt sure, would be able to think about it without panicking. Harris might break. "Maybe he was outside, heard the shots, knew he wouldn't do any good rushing in here alone. Maybe he opened the garage door, got out the limousine, managed to drift it down the drive and out of earshot, started it and went after help."

"Christ." For the first time during those long evening hours Shirillo looked scared.

"Don't worry about it," Tucker said. "It's just a thing I thought we should keep in mind."

"Sure."

"We'll be a long time gone before he beats it back here with the reinforcements." He smiled and slapped Shirillo's shoulder, feeling like an older brother. "If he went away after anyone."

"He did."

"We can't be sure."

"Yes, we can. It's the worst thing that could happen-and that's been par for this whole operation." Despite his sincere pessimism, the kid wasn't ready to run for it.

Tucker knew what Shirillo said was true, and he felt the hard, emotional intolerance of failure that had driven him this far. He thought of his old man, of Mr. Mellio at the bank, of the trust monies held up in the long court battles, and he knew he wouldn't louse this up. He couldn't fail like that.

"Anyway," he said, "who's going to shoot at a state-police helicopter?"

"If they fall for it," Shirillo qualified.

"They did before."

"That's why they might not fall for it a second time. Familiarity breeds suspicion."

"Contempt, I believe it is."

"Not with these guys."

"The old Iron Hand, huh?"

Shirillo smiled.

Shirillo was correct, of course, no matter how much Tucker might attempt to minimize their problems. Still, Tucker couldn't see any good in standing together, depressing each other with speculations on the nature of their imminent demise. Soon they'd be in as bad a way as Pete Harris, jumping at the slightest noise, overreacting to every imagined movement in the shadows.

"Got to go," Tucker said.

He turned away from the kid and began to check the partitions between the rooms, searching for any obvious disparity.

The time was 5:41 in the morning, well after dawn of a new day.

Five minutes later Tucker knew where the hidden room lay and where, by extension, Merle Bachman was being kept. He entered the back room in the short wing where a guard-either the dead man, the wounded man or the missing gunman-slept, and he removed the clothes from the closet. He wasn't worried about wrinkling what he tossed out of the way, and he'd begun to examine the closet walls with the beam of his flashlight when he heard the Thompson start to chatter again in the corridor.

He went to see what was wrong, went to Harris, who stood at the head of the stairs with the big weapon aimed down at the landing wall.

"Tried to come up," Harris said. His wounded leg didn't seem to be bothering him as much as before That could be good or bad; it might mean the wound was as shallow as it looked and had stopped bleeding, or it might mean that Harris was too afraid to register pain. "It was the same bastard we tied up downstairs. I thought I put him out for a good long while."

"Get him?"

"No."

At least the missing guard hadn't high-tailed it off the estate, as he'd feared. Instead, the man had come inside and revived his workmate and was probably now trying to figure a way to get upstairs.

Down at the end of the hall Shirillo shouted something unintelligible. When Tucker turned he saw the kid shooting into the narrow confines of the rear stairs' shaft, though his silenced Lüger made very little sound.

"Any luck?"

"No!" Shirillo called.

"There are only two of them," Tucker said. "They can keep harassing us, but they can't very well rush us."

"There's the cook," Harris said.

"Keesey may lie, but he doesn't fight," Tucker said. "Besides, one more man isn't enough to put us on the defensive. We could stand off a dozen from here."

Harris stepped away from the head of the stairs so he could not see or be seen by anyone coming up. He remained facing the steps, though, with the machine gun at his hip, but his attention was on Tucker. His face was a mess of sweat, greasepaint, deeply carved lines of fatigue, and when he spoke he didn't have to whisper: his voice was hoarse with fear. "Let's get the hell out of here. Bachman isn't here. There's nothing here we want."

"Bachman's here," Tucker corrected him.

"Yeah?"

"Definitely."

"I don't see him," Harris said, grinning. The grin was malicious, and it threatened a further breakdown, one that would permit him to disregard Tucker's orders and call his own shots.

Harris was no longer trustworthy. Tucker did not let him see that he'd reached that conclusion, and he said, "Bachman's in a concealed room." He took two large steps to the back wall and rapped on the plaster with his knuckles. "Doesn't it seem odd there's all this wall space and no rooms behind it?"

Harris blinked at the long expanse of unmarred plaster, looked right and left at the nearest doors. "I thought those two rooms accounted for it."

"You've been in the one in the short wing. The one adjacent to this empty space in the long wing is about the same size. There's something in between them."

Harris squinted, thought about it. He would have preferred to get out of there; he didn't want to have to think about anything besides running, hiding, staying alive. However, he said, "Okay. How do we get him?"

"I think it's through a closet in one of the two adjacent rooms, but I haven't found the door yet."

"Make it fast," Harris said.

He turned back to the stairwell, waiting for something to happen, for something to shoot at.

"Hold the fort," Tucker said, turning back toward the room from which the stuttering Thompson had called him.

The walls of the closet were featureless plaster, too smooth to contain a secret doorway. He got down on his hands and knees and gave the quarter round a careful inspection to see if any of it was loose or movable. None of it was. Satisfied that the entrance was in the other room in the long wing, he went to raid a second closet.

Passing Harris and the woman, he said, "We'll have him out in a couple of minutes."

"Wait," Miss Loraine said.

He almost didn't hear her. When she called again he turned and said, "Yeah?"

"I want to talk to you."

"No time," Tucker said.

"I want to make a deal." She spoke softly, but her voice carried well. "I can help you."

"Too late for that."

"No, it isn't."