Blood risk

Willis's handshake was indifferent, as if he felt formalities of this sort were a waste of time. Close up, Tucker saw in him an impatience, a need to keep moving, a quality that was unsettlingly like his own.
        "You know what we want?" he asked Willis.
        "Jimmy told me the most of it."
        To Shirillo Tucker said, "Are you sure of him?"
        "Of course. He's my uncle, on my mother's side, by marriage."
        "For one thing," Willis explained, "even if I were willing to sell out on you, I wouldn't know where the hell to go to do it. My line is mostly weddings and freelance nude photography for men's magazines."
        "Good enough," Tucker said. "It's a fifteen-minute walk to the helicopter. Jimmy, you'll stay here with the car until we come back. You can pretend you got sleepy driving and pulled off for a nap-that is, if a cop stops and wants to know if you're just loitering. We'll be back before dark, I hope."
        Shirillo returned to the car.
        Tucker picked up Willis's heavy metal suitcase and said, "Across the highway. We'll wait until there aren't any cars coming before we try it. We don't want to stir up anyone's curiosity."
        
        The big red summer sun had already touched the peak of the mountain on which the Baglio mansion rested, caressed the gentle ridgeline with bright fingers and slowly began to settle out of sight. Full darkness was still more than an hour away, the true sunset obscured by the mountainside, but even so they were going to have to scramble to get done everything they had come here for.
        Norton took them over the roof of the huge white house, a dozen yards above the television antennae, peeled to the right when they had reached the end of the lawn and circled back, swept over the house from the opposite direction, even closer this time.
        "Can you get it like that?" Norton shouted.
        Willis shook his head vehemently, negatively. "I'll either have to hang out of the door or shoot through the nose glass here." He reached across the narrow dash and thumped his knuckles on the windshield. They made a hollow tok, tok, tok sound.
        "I can stand her on end a little," Norton said.
        "And do it going away from the sun," Willis said, "so there's no glare against the glass."
        Tucker sat in the seat directly behind Norton, watching the mansion closely, waiting for the first sign of Baglio's bodyguards. He wondered what they'd think when they came dashing out and found a police helicopter buzzing their retreat.
        Norton stood the helicopter on its nose at a thirty-five-degree angle, slanted enough so that they all slid forward on their seats, testing the belts that bound them in.
        "Good," Willis said.
        The photographer had loaded his camera, unfastened his seat belt and was now out of his bucket-form chair, leaning across the dash, his face pressed close to the window as he focused and shot one frame after another.
        Paul Norton didn't like the fact that Willis wasn't strapped down, but he didn't say much about it. He concentrated on keeping the copter's flight path as even and steady as possible so that there was little chance of Willis being thrown around.
        Below, two men came out of the front door of the white house and looked up at the circling craft, raised flattened hands to shield their eyes from the last direct glints of sunlight that touched the polished framework and the windshield of the copter as it fluttered in a tight little turn. They were, Tucker saw, the next thing to nonentities, two husky muscle types, their sports coats hanging open so that guns would be more quickly at hand.
        Tucker leaned forward and said, almost in Norton's ear, "The glass isn't bulletproof, is it?"
        "Plexiglass," Norton said. "It'll deflect a pistol shot pretty well, even if we were close enough for them to use handguns. Even when it cracks under rifle fire, it can throw the slug away first."
        Tucker remained forward in his seat, bracing himself against the back of Norton's seat, staring down through the tilted nose window. "I think we have enough front-to-back shots. Let's try cruising it from end to end."
        Norton obliged, brought the copter around in a whine of engine noise, coasted the length of the mansion while Willis busily used his camera.
        Baglio himself had come out of the house and stood in front of the pillared promenade in the