cleverly laundered and made clean again.'
'Do you have a spot picked out to stop the car?'
'Yes,' Shirillo said. 'Let's go look at it.'
They spent that afternoon tramping the woods along the private lane, scouting prospective sites for the execution of the robbery. That done, they drove into the city again, where Tucker took a room in the hotel at Chatham Center. In his room, for the rest of the afternoon and evening, they discussed the fine points of the plan, argued alternatives and got it worked out to their mutual satisfaction. It looked good.
Back in Manhattan, Tucker needed only two weeks to locate and interest Bachman and Harris. The four of them had met in Pittsburgh this past Sunday, had gone over the details until they were exhausted. They monitored the delivery of the cash on Monday, went over everything one last time on Monday night in Tucker's hotel room, pulled the job off well. Quite well. Except for that damned woman in the Cadillac. That damn unexpected Cadillac.
Tucker hated failure more than he hated losing the money, more than the possibility of violence and death. He meant to see that the job did not end here.
'If Baglio's men are in front of us and behind us,' Jimmy Shirillo said, 'what do we do next?' He'd slowed the Mustang to a crawl, and he felt like stopping it altogether. If he could freeze them here, stop time, fix this instant for eternity, they'd not have to face Baglio at all; nothing bad could happen to them. For his first major job he'd held up quite well, in the face of almost total failure, but he had his limits. He remembered his brother, the weeks in the hospital, the limp, and he didn't want to go on with this. Tucker traced circles on the shotgun stock with his index finger and wondered how to answer the kid's question. His own reaction to failure was different from Shirillo's; his resourcefulness was increased, his determination magnified. He said, 'I've noticed branch roads leading from this main track. We must have passed a dozen of them since we turned off the macadam.'
Shirillo nodded quickly. 'I saw them too. They were narrower than this, more rutted than this, grown full of weeds, and absolute disaster for anything less formidable than a Land Rover.'
'I didn't pretend to mean we'd get all that far on one of them,' Tucker said patiently. He didn't like this dawning note of pessimism in the kid, but he didn't comment on it. The best way to bring Shirillo around was to be calm, lead him by example. He said, 'At least we ought to make a mile or so before we have to start walking.'
'I don't like it,' Shirillo said.
'You like facing Baglio's roadblocks any better?'
Shirillo didn't answer.
Tucker said, 'By now they know that we have a man with a machine gun, and they won't be overpowered again.'
Shirillo thought a moment and said, 'Why don't we just abandon the car here and go into the woods, away from any trails they might watch?'
'Because we'd never find our way overland; we'd be lost in ten minutes. Unless we can find that macadam road again, we won't know where we are. None of us is a woodsman.'
'That's damn straight,' Harris said, clutching his Thompson tighter than before, his own pessimism bottled up inside of him, behind a mask of stoic indifference that was not as good as Tucker's own carefully maintained facade. Harris's gloom was not based on inexperience, as was Shirillo's, but on a growing certainty that he had been too long in this business and that he was nearer than ever to a big payment of dues. He remembered his short time behind bars, and he knew he wouldn't go that route here-this would be worse, much worse, and painful. Baglio wouldn't send him to a cell but to a grave.
'Okay, then,' Shirillo said, resigned to the worst. 'But you pick the road, okay?'
A thousand feet farther along, Tucker pointed to a narrow gap in the almost solid wall of thick pine trunks, said, 'That one, on the right, ought to lead in the general direction of the mansion.'
Shirillo drove into the weed-choked track with all the caution of a man who fully expected it to be generously laced with land mines. The Mustang sighed, sank down in the damp earth with its thick carpet of pine needles, the springs singing unpleasantly. It trembled coltishly, bounced into and out of a muddy hole, making a grinding noise as it pressed brambles, grass and milkweed plants out of the way, moving slowly but deliberately forward.
They rode in silence for more than a mile and a half before the compact car settled abruptly into a pool of black muck and refused to come out of it again, even though Tucker and Harris assisted with a push.
Shirillo finally shut off the engine and got out of the car. He said, 'She's wedged in there until someone brings a wrecker after her.'
'We'll walk now,' Tucker said.
Actually, Shirillo was feeling better than he had fifteen minutes before, because he had never expected a Mustang to get this far over that kind of terrain. That it had lasted as long as this seemed to be some sort of omen that the job wouldn't turn out so bad after all.
Tucker took the lead as they followed the overgrown trail into the woods, Shirillo second and Harris bringing up the rear with his heavy artillery. The older man carried the Thompson snout forward, at the hip, like a wary infantryman going through a suspected enemy position. That was, in fact, pretty much the case.
Although Tucker was aware of the woods around him and was on the lookout for Baglio's gunmen, the greatest part of his attention was on the problem of the botched robbery. In the past three years he had pulled off thirteen perfect operations, a couple of which were already legend in the business. Each job had its hitches, of course, but each had turned put right in the end. At twenty-eight he'd begun to build the kind of reputation among other freelancers that Clitus Felton had retired on. Reliable Mike Tucker. He liked the sound of that, even though the Tucker part of it was not his real name. It had been his alias for three years, and he felt that, given another five years of continued success, he wouldn't give a damn about any name except his assumed one; he would be Tucker then. Already, he was more concerned about upholding Tucker's reputation than about what was said against his real name and family. There was nothing to be proud of in his real name, nothing at all. Tucker, however, was a name to be reckoned with. A botched-up job? Remember Tucker's first disaster, the Baglio robbery? After that, it was all downhill for him, right on to that job when he? No. Not failure. He wouldn't permit it to remain a failure, because that would be playing right into his father's hands-not Tucker's father, of course; the real father. He refused. He would not provide anyone with a reference point for the beginning of his decline. Before he was finished he would have those damned suitcases, or three others exactly like them, filled with money.
He looked at his watch as he walked along the rutted, unused track, was surprised to see that despite all that had happened this morning it was still only a few minutes past eleven o'clock. A great deal could be done yet today-if they were lucky enough to find their way off the mountain unobserved.
Ten minutes after they abandoned the Mustang, the woods began to thin out around them. The trees were smaller, farther apart, the underbrush thicker. Tucker gave all of his attention to the landscape now; the planning could wait until later. The woods seemed deserted except for them, but Baglio might have men stationed along the perimeter. Whether they had a chance or not was all dependent on how many gunmen he kept in the mansion on the day of a cash transfer.
Spread out side by side now, rather than strung out in one line, they slowly approached the edge of the trees, circumspect, increasingly certain that they were alone. At the edge of the forest, still in the darkness beneath the pines, they stopped and looked down the long manicured slope of a contoured hillside. The mansion rested at the bottom, a white flare in the middle of all that green grass.
Sprawled on the ground at the edge of the woods, the three men watched the activity down at the Baglio mansion. On the long flagstone promenade that fronted the great house, two gunmen had taken up positions, one at either end, leaning against white wooden pillars from which they could survey the circular drive and both the east and west lawns. Tucker imagined that, in the back of the house which he could not see from here, other hoods had also settled in for the duration. Otherwise, the picture was serene, the windows of the house taking the bright sunlight and casting it back in doubled brilliance, a willow tree lazily waving whiplike branches, a bird crying somewhere close by.
Tucker put down the binoculars and said, 'The white Thunderbird parked in the driveway has MD plates.'
'A doctor for Bachman?' Shirillo asked.
'Most likely.'
