Blood risk

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,