Blood risk

from temple to chin. Blood popped up in a bright line.
        "It's time to stop playing games to impress the lady," Tucker said. "It's time to come to grips with your decidedly disadvantageous position." He wondered if Baglio understood, by his choice of words and tone, that Tucker was mimicking him.
        Baglio touched his bleeding face, stared at his carmined fingers in disbelief. A long minute later he looked at Tucker, the humor in his face metamorphosed into hatred. "You've just bought yourself one of those pine-marked graves," he said. His voice had not deteriorated. Schoolmaster meting out punishment to the bad boy.
        Distasteful as he found this, Tucker swung the Lüger again and scored a red ribbon on Baglio's undamaged cheek.
        The strongman started out of his chair, head lowered like a bull ready to ram, yelped and crumpled backward as Shirillo delivered another brutal blow from behind with his own pistol on Baglio's right shoulder. He clutched at the bruised and spasming muscles, hunched forward as if he might be sick. Gradually he'd begun to look his age.
        The girl looked older too.
        She licked her lips and shifted her gaze around the room as if she thought she'd see something that would unexpectedly turn the tables. That fantasy lasted a brief moment, because she realized, as she must have done often before, that her best weapon was herself-her body and her wits. She looked up, aware of Tucker's eyes on her, and without being obvious about it she shifted inside her tentish yellow gown to mold it at strategic points to her. An offering. But poisoned.
        He smiled at her, for he had the vague idea that he might need her cooperation later, then turned back to Baglio. "We were talking about a friend of mine."
        "Go to hell," Baglio said.
        Shirillo, unbidden, stepped forward and, judging the position of Baglio's kidneys through the slatted back of the chair, jammed the barrel of his Lüger hard into the man's left side. Ordinarily this sort of tactic was beyond him. Now, he kept thinking of his father. And his brother. The shoe shop. His brother's limp.
        Baglio grunted, sucked breath, reared up, then crumpled under Shirillo's second, swift chop to his shoulder. He fell off the chair, to the floor.
        "My friend?" Tucker asked.
        Baglio got his hands under himself and, feigning more weakness than he felt, started up, shifted toward Tucker's feet. That was a stupid move for a man in his situation, the first indication that he'd been frightened and that he was acting on a gut level. Tucker back-stepped and kicked him alongside the head. When he went down this time he stayed down, unconscious.
        "Get a glass of water," Tucker told Shirillo.
        The kid went after it.
        Miss Loraine smiled at Tucker.
        He smiled back.
        Neither spoke.
        Shirillo returned with the water, but before he could throw it in Baglio's face Tucker said, "No vendetta, kid. We can't afford it." He had remembered Shirillo's monologue when they'd first met several weeks ago, remembered the worn-out father and the brother who'd been badly beaten.
        "I'm finished," Shirillo said. "I thought at first I wanted to kill him. But I've decided I don't want to pay him back in his own coin; I don't want to be like he is."
        "Good," Tucker said. "Think he'll recognize you?"
        "No. He saw me once for five minutes, a year and a half ago."
        "Wake him, then."
        Shirillo tossed the water into the bruised and bloody face, went around behind the two chairs again.
        Baglio blinked, looked up.
        "We were talking about my friend," Tucker said.
        Baglio's lips were swollen, but that could not account for the change in his voice. Behind the slurred words there was a different tone, no more haughtiness, the tone of a man suddenly brought down from a high place and made to see his own mortality. "I told you, he's dead."
        "Why does your cook tell a different story?"
        "I wouldn't know."
        "And Deffer?"
        Baglio looked up. The hate was still in his eyes, though it had been veiled now, as if he knew it would be dangerous to show any sort of resolve. "What did they say?"
        "An ambulance came and took him away."
        "It did. To a grave in the woods."
        "Bullshit."
        "Again on the shoulder?" Shirillo asked from behind Baglio. "Or another kidney