Blood risk

was this about her which had temporarily mesmerized him so that he hadn't noticed Baglio going for the gun.
        On the other side of the bed, Baglio, dressed in only a pair of blue shorts, was rubbing his numbed hand. He said, "You could have hit me, you idiot." He sounded like a schoolteacher reprimanding a thoughtless and irresponsible child.
        "No chance," Tucker said. "I'm an excellent shot." He did not know if Baglio would believe that anyone could have planned to hit the gun in that dark room, with that much space between them, with a silenced pistol, but he didn't think it would hurt to puff himself. "Don't get the idea I'm shy about putting one through your hand if you reach for anything else."
        "I don't know what you're after," Baglio said, unaffected by Tucker's bravura. "But you've made a mistake breaking into my house. Have you any idea who I am?" A real schoolteacher.
        "The famous Rossario Baglio," Tucker said. "Now, come along with us."
        Baglio was responding to the situation with admirable aplomb, not at all frightened by the hooded, greasepainted specters carrying silenced pistols and not the least humiliated at being caught in his shorts. He'd already figured out who they were, in a general sense, and knew the threat they posed wasn't mortal. And he had less to be ashamed of about his body than most men fifteen years his junior: from his wide shoulders to his loose-skinned but relatively flat stomach he was in good shape; evidently he made use of the swimming pool, sauna and gymnasium in the basement. Too, the Loraine woman would give him a strong motivation for staying fit. It was also the woman, Tucker decided, who helped Baglio meet the situation with so much cool: a man hated to be made a fool of in front of a woman he'd been bedding.
        Baglio said, "Come along with you-where?"
        "Across the hall."
        "As soon as I dress," Baglio said, starting for the closet. He carried himself well, his back straight, head high. If he had had time to drag a comb through his silvery hair, he would almost have been presentable enough for a stint on nationwide television-perhaps as a Presidential candidate.
        "No time for that," Tucker said.
        In the study across the hall, Shirillo pulled out two sturdy straight-backed chairs and placed them side by side in the middle of the room, indicated them with the barrel of his Lüger and stood out of the way as the couple sat down.
        "You still haven't explained yourselves," Baglio said. He continued to be the schoolteacher: lips tight, eyes grim, nostrils flared a bit in indignation. He was going to give them detention minutes if they didn't shape up damn soon.
        "We're looking for a friend," Tucker said.
        "I don't understand."
        Miss Loraine laughed slightly, though Tucker couldn't tell whether the laugh was directed at him or Baglio. Or at herself.
        "He was in the car Tuesday morning," Tucker said. "The driver."
        Miss Loraine looked up and smiled, not nastily, not as a friend either but as if in remembered pleasure of that collision, as if the excitement still lingered and still touched all the right pleasure centers in the brain.
        "I'm sorry you came this far for so little," Baglio said.
        "Oh?"
        "Yes. The driver's dead."
        Tucker smiled. "Of old age?"
        Baglio said, "He was banged up pretty badly." His voice had a note, almost, of indifference. "He died yesterday."
        "The body?"
        "Buried."
        "Where?"
        "I've a whole graveyard here," Baglio said. His diction was excellent. Either he had gone to the best schools as a boy or he had hired private tutors in his middle age. The last was far more likely than the first. He seemed to take pride in his word choices, his conscious wit, his clear pronunciation, much in the same way a college boy might. "The pine trees are the markers, suitably engraved." He looked at the woman and grinned winningly, elicited a chuckle from her.
        Though he forced himself to react emotionally, Tucker's next move was guided solely by intellect. It was clear that neither Baglio nor the woman expected any harm to come to them and that neither of them would make a good subject for interrogation so long as he was comforted by this assumption. Grunting, then, Tucker leaned in and raked the barrel of the Lüger across Baglio's face, using the sight point, gouging him