Blood risk

after us then."
        "Tucker's right," Jimmy Shirillo said.
        Harris shook his burly head, some color back in his face now. "I just don't know. I'm used to operating on common sense. If a man takes a fall, you let him. That's his business; we all take the same risk."
        "With the cops, yes," Tucker said. "If Bachman was being held by the cops, I'd walk off." That was not entirely true, for there was still the money they hadn't gotten, the failure he had to erase from the record. "I know he wouldn't name any of us. But these aren't cops, Pete. With these boys, you have to throw out the old rules and adapt to the circumstances."
        Harris looked at the house, still dubious. "How can we do it?"
        "I'm working out a few angles right now," Tucker said, tapping the side of his head. "But I don't want to lay them out until I've thought everything through." He got up and brushed off his clothes. "Right now, we've got to get off this damn mountain before they shift the search away from the interior and back toward the macadam road."
        "Down at the highway, do we just hitchhike back to the city, friend?" Harris asked. "With a shotgun and a Thompson in hand?"
        "We can still use Shirillo's Corvette, as planned, though it'll have to seat three of us instead of two. It's parked in the picnic area three quarters of a mile from Baglio's lane. Shirillo can drive east, take the first exit, get on coming west again, take another exit after passing us, get on coming east again and pick us up at a prearranged spot along the berm."
        "That'll be fast enough," Shirillo said. "The exits are still pretty close together this near the city."
        "Let's hope you're right, friend," Harris said.
        Tucker was bothered by a sudden emergence of the "friend" tag on Harris's speech. The big man was not new to this business, and his nervousness was far more dangerous than that of the inexperienced apprentice, since its roots went deeper. Tucker knew that, when he was disturbed, the odd means of address punctuated a lot of Harris's conversation. That he should be this upset already, before much of anything had happened, was not a good sign. "Let's move ass, then," Tucker said. "I've got a hell of a lot of arrangements to make."
        

----
        
        The suitcase in which Harris carried the machine gun in its less conspicuous, fragmented form was in Shirillo's Corvette. If the job had gone well, Shirillo and Harris would have left the stolen Dodge for the sportscar and driven back to the city in that, while Tucker would have used the big car and disposed of it on some quiet residential street where it might not be noticed for a couple of days. Now, jammed in the tiny, low-slung machine, Shirillo and Harris in the seats, Tucker sitting sideways in the shallow storage compartment behind them, they suffered Harris's elbows as he broke the large weapon down and fitted the pieces into the Styrofoam cups that were firmly glued to the bottom of the suitcase. He took three times longer than usual to complete the chore, but at least he was calmed by it. When he was done he smiled at Tucker, patted the suitcase and said, "It's a beautiful tool, isn't it?"
        "Beautiful," Tucker agreed. "I see why you never got married and had children."
        Harris didn't catch the sarcasm but took that as a compliment for the gun.
        They dropped Harris in front of his hotel after he promised to stay low and keep to his room starting tomorrow morning when Tucker might be expected to phone.
        "I still don't see how we can get in there," he said.
        "I'll work it out," Tucker said.
        Harris closed the door and walked off, carrying the suitcase full of submachine gun as if it were only underwear and shirts.
        When Tucker got out of the Corvette in front of his Chatham Center hotel feeling as if he had been folded into someone's pocket, he left the shotgun with Shirillo, told him to wait for a telephone call and sent him home. He went upstairs to his room, showered, dressed, packed his single suitcase and checked out. He called the airport from the lobby, reserved a place on the earliest flight to New York, got a cab and left the city.
        At 4:36 that afternoon he landed at Kennedy, not at all happy to be home again, since it was a temporary failure that had driven him back.
        In the main airport lounge, which was static-filled by hundreds of chattering