Blood risk

about the room until he was sure that it was clear. He located a closet and helped Shirillo move the unconscious wounded guard into it.
        "No turning back from here on out," Harris said.
        "Too right," Tucker said.
        Cautiously they opened the main library door and filed into the dimly lighted first-floor corridor, closed the door after them. Across the hall another door opened on steps that led down into darkness.
        "Basement," Shirillo explained.
        "What's there?"
        "Swimming pool, sauna, gymnasium."
        "This the only entrance?"
        "Yeah. Nobody down there at this hour anyway, not in the dark. It's safe enough."
        Tucker stared down into the blackness, then shook his head. "Check it anyway," he said.
        Shirillo didn't argue. He took the flashlight and went down to the basement, out of sight.
        The silence in the house was oppressive, deep and still enough to touch and, in their present state of mind, subtly false, as if they were being witched every moment and had been prepared for.
        Not three minutes after Shirillo reached the bottom of the cellar steps, Harris deserted his post from which he had been covering the corridor, went to the open cellar door and looked down into the inkiness. His face was red, beaded with perspiration, and he was trembling slightly. He said, "Come on, friend."
        "Take it easy."
        "Where is he?"
        "Give him a few more minutes."
        Harris turned back to the open corridor, obviously unhappy with the waiting, both the machine gun and the pistol raised from his sides. Tucker hoped no one would come upon them accidentally, because Harris couldn't be trusted to use the silenced pistol first. He'd open with the big Thompson, out of habit, out of need, out of fear. He'd ruin any element of surprise.
        Two minutes later, as Shirillo had promised, he returned. "No one down there," he said.
        Harris smiled and used the back of his pistol hand to wipe the perspiration from his face. He wondered if he was sweating only because he was scared, or because he was rapidly becoming physically exhausted as well. God, he felt old. He felt much older than he really was. This wouldn't be the last job now, with the money gone, but the next one would have to be.
        "Let's hustle," Tucker said. He was afraid that if they remained still for much longer, he'd be unable to maintain the composure he was known for. All they needed to louse up this operation was both he and Harris quaking in their boots and only the green kid with any nerve left.
        Quickly they opened doors on both sides of the corridor and ascertained that all the rooms beyond were deserted. Past the front entrance to the house and the main staircase, past the foyer with its eagle-print wallpaper, in the other ground-floor wing where the lighted rooms lay, they were almost certain to find things more difficult than this.
        Harris watched the closed doors to the two lighted rooms, his Lüger and the machine gun raised into firing position. He was running with sweat and breathing harder and faster than either Tucker or Shirillo. While he stood guard, the other two men opened each of the four doors at the back of the house and examined the rooms there: a small art room, windowless, the walls tastefully hung with original oils; the ultramodern kitchen; a storage room full of canned goods, racked wine and whiskey still in cardboard cases; a full bathroom carpeted in white shag. No one was in any of these rooms. They closed the last two doors almost as one and turned to Harris, who looked as if he were being pulled apart: neck strained so veins and arteries stood out like thick strings, head thrust forward, shoulders drawn up tight toward his ears, feet spread and legs tensed, legs bent at the knees, arms out from his sides with white knuckles bent around the weapons in each hand.
        Tucker motioned for Shirillo to accompany him to the end door and directed Harris to take the first. At a signal from Tucker, Shirillo and Harris stepped forward and opened the doors on the lighted rooms, throwing them wide without banging them against walls.
        Tucker saw Harris move quickly into the room on the left as if he had seen someone in there who would need settling down, but he did not wait to see what happened. As the door of the end room began to swing slowly shut again of its own momentum, he preceded Shirillo