Dean Koontz - Blood risk

"Sorry."

"I could save you half an hour finding Bachman."

He said. "I doubt that. The entrance to that hidden space has to be in the closet in that room. I'll have it worked out in…" He suddenly realized that she'd used Bachman's name, that both he and Harris had given it to her. What the hell. Was he losing his edge? He said, "Christ!"

She walked toward him and held out her hand as if to take his. "You can buy Bachman, and my silence, if you want to."

"It'd be easier for Bachman to change his name," he said.

"Untrue. Besides, Ross would find him sometime."

That was right enough. But he said, "Buy your silence? With what?"

"Money."

"We haven't any." He sounded angry and bitter, but he couldn't help it. He'd had to keep up his renowned facade too long already.

"You will if you deal with me," the girl said. She dropped the offered hand, waiting. She looked even more like Elise now, a secret smile of self-satisfaction tinting her lovely face.

Tucker said, "What's the deal?"

She pursed her lips, licked them. She said, "Okay, you're going to find this Bachman on your own, I see that. You're going to make a fool out of Ross like no one's ever done before. He won't want me around once I've seen him humiliated, so I haven't any reason to stick around here. The deal is-I get twenty percent of whatever's in those three suitcases, plus a free ride out of here."

Tucker blinked, felt his legs grow momentarily weaker, then smiled. "I'll be damned," he said. "The Tuesday shipment?"

"That's it."

"The cash?"

"Yes."

"I didn't think it'd be here yet."

"It wasn't sent out a second time, for reasons I'll explain if you'll deal."

He shook his head ruefully. "Now that I know it's here, why do I need to deal at all?"

"Because you could waste hours hunting for it. There are a thousand places in a house this size that three suitcases could be hidden. And from the way you've been acting, you can't spend much more time in here-you've got someone coming to pick you up."

He admired her despite the fact that she'd started out on the other side of the fence. When she saw that the circumstances had gotten beyond her control, she maneuvered to increase the range of her power. He could see why Baglio had respected her. The old man's only mistake was in not respecting her even more than he had. He was also pleased with her demands. They were eminently reasonable if she could supply what she boasted.

"Okay," he said.

"Deal?"

"Deal."

She frowned and said, "It's not as easy as that, though. We'll have to talk some more."

"Talk," he said. He reached into his pocket and took out the roll of Life Savers, popped one into his mouth.

"Not here."

"Where?"

"In the room you're on your way to."

Tucker looked at his watch: 6:06. He didn't feel much like finishing the operation in broad daylight, though it appeared as if they were going to have to do just that. He said, "We can't take long bargaining. It's getting damn late."

"I'll need two minutes," she said.

"Come on, then."

She stepped over the corpse on the corridor floor, her pretty bare toes squishing in the damp carpet, went with Tucker to the guard's bedroom. Behind them, Harris fared another burst down the main stairwell.

In the bedroom she sat down on the corner of the mattress and tucked her long legs under her, now very demure and innocent in the flannel gown. She said, "How do you expect to get out of here?"

He hesitated, then said, "A helicopter."

She made a face. "I'm serious."

"So am I."

She said, "I don't want to make a deal if you're really a bunch of clowns who didn't think this thing through."

He explained, in detail but as rapidly as possible, about Norton and the helicopter with the state-police markings.

"I'm impressed," she said.

"Now," he said, "impress me. Do you know what happens to people who upset Ross Baglio?"

"I know."

"But you're willing to risk it?"

"A girl has to provide for herself," she said. She sounded like an earnest, homely high-school freshman deciding to take the sensible secretarial program to prepare to meet the bills four years hence. She was delightful.

"Baglio knows your name. It'll be easy to track you down."

"A name can be changed," She was implying that Loraine wasn't her real name anyway.

"You can't change the way you look. Every man who sees you is going to remember you."

"You're exaggerating my appeal," she said. "Besides, I know something about makeup and disguise." She got off the bed and said, "Are you trying to talk me out of helping you?"

"No," he said. "I just want to understand exactly why you're doing this so I have a better idea of what's going to happen later. For instance, I wouldn't want you to go through with this with the idea of bringing your twenty percent back to Baglio and telling him all you learned about us while you were counted as a friend."

"I'd have to be a fool," she said.

"I know."

"But I'm not."

He sighed. So much like Elise. "I know that too."

"Well?"

"Deal," he said again.

She went to the closet and started tossing out suits, trousers and dress shirts. When everything was cleaned out of the way, she asked him to step back and to direct the flashlight on the floor between them. Kneeling, she studied the floorboards a moment, got her nails into the cracks on both sides of one of them, tugged at it, let it go. She tried the one beside it, which looked identical to the first, sighed when it rattled and came away in her hands, a two-inch-wide and four-foot-long strip of wood. She put it out of the way, revealing a lever that lay under the tightly fitted but unnailed board.

"I'd have found that in no time," he said.

"Of course," she said. "And you'd have gotten Bachman too. But I'm along to help you get the money, which you didn't even know was here."

"Go on," he said.

She pressed the lever down with the heel of her hand. On Tucker's right the entire back wall of the closet swung inward, a feature that negated the need for a telltale seam in the middle of the wall where an ordinary secret door might have been.

He said, "Is Baglio a chronic paranoid?"

"Among other things."

The wall swung wider open.

"Don't feel you have to catalogue them."

The room beyond the closet was nearly as large as the guard's bedroom on the other side, lighted by fluorescent ceiling strips, windowless. Merle Bachman was strapped in the bed against the far wall, looking their way and trying to grin.

Tucker saw at once why Bachman had not been forced to tell Baglio what he knew, why he was still alive and why they still had a chance to keep their identities intact. The crash in the Chevrolet had ruined the small man's lovely smile by breaking loose eighty percent of his teeth and splitting both his lips. The upper lip was split clear to his septum and swollen four or five times larger than it should have been. He had to breathe through his mouth, since the lip closed off his nostrils, and his breathing was so noisy Tucker wondered why that hadn't been audible even through all these walls.

Bachman made a gagging sound that was apparently some sort of greeting, though it didn't succeed any better than his smile.

"You can't talk?" Tucker asked.

Bachman made chortling sounds.

"Then don't try," Tucker said. "You sound disgusting. And while you're at it, wipe that-smile? — off your face."

Bachman didn't try to speak again, but he kept smiling. His left eye was puffed shut and his right was blackened, though not swollen like the other. Several fingers on both hands had been splinted and bandaged by Baglio's doctor. Otherwise, he looked well enough.

"No broken legs or arms?" Tucker asked, kneeling at the bed. "Just shake your head."