'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.
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 Luger 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
