Blood risk

differently.
        Something was building here, maybe something quite useful, though Tucker didn't see how it could help him just yet.
        His watch read 5:20. Time was passing too swiftly.
        What next? How could Baglio be broken? Or how could the woman be persuaded to tell him what he wanted to know? She was on the verge of that, he knew, and she needed only the slightest push to… His concentration was broken by the bark of an unsilenced revolver shot echoing in the confines of the second-floor corridor. That single explosion was answered by the furious chatter of Pete Harris's Thompson submachine gun. A man screamed, but not for long, his voice fading out into an unintelligible gasp of meaningless words, and that into silence. Pete Harris mouthed a string of obscenities; they were all blown.
        

----
        
        Down at the far end of the corridor, by the rear stairs, Jimmy Shirillo located a panel of switches and flooded the second-floor hallway with startlingly white light. That didn't matter any longer, because there was no hope of keeping their presence a secret from the men who were standing guard outside the house. Harris's burst of mar chine-gun fire had tossed the cards into the air, and the only way to be sure the cards landed in the right suits was to move fast and cover all the contingencies.
        Tucker pushed the woman ahead of him, not rudely but firmly, as he hurried toward the main stairwell. He didn't bother to keep the pistol trained on her. Alone, she had nothing to gain by a grandstand play for escape, and she knew it.
        Pete Harris sat against the wall, just this side of the entrance to the stairs, the Thompson lying on the carpet beside him. He was trying to work the trouser leg up over his right knee without touching the wound he'd suffered. His greasepainted face glistened with sweat that had popped through the black cover and had streaked it.
        Shirillo waited at the back stairs, on guard for attack from that direction.
        "You okay?" Tucker shouted.
        "Yeah!" Shirillo called back.
        Halfway between Shirillo and Harris, against the rear wall, lay a dead man. He was stretched out on his back, one leg twisted up under his buttocks, his arms thrown above his head, nearly cut in half by the burst of machine-gun fire. A lot of blood decorated the walls and spread darkly over the expensive carpet.
        "How is it?" Tucker asked Harris.
        Harris looked up as he finally rolled the trouser leg above his knee. "He got me in the calf. It hurts like hell, but I don't think it's really too bad."
        Tucker bent and looked at the wound, squeezed it to force blood out of it, peered intently into the jagged slash before it could fill with new blood. "It seems to be just a graze," he said. "Just a crease. You'll live, I believe."
        "Thanks, friend," Harris said. "Christ, the shit has hit the fan, has it not?" He didn't seem to notice Miss Loraine.
        "We've still got the advantage," Tucker said.
        Too much white showed around the irises of Harris's eyes, giving him an expression of shocked horror, no matter what his lips were doing. "Sure, friend," he said, none too enthusiastically.
        "Where'd he come from?"
        Harris looked at the dead man, cleared his throat, spat on the rug. "I can't figure that one."
        "Up the steps?"
        "No," Harris said. "And he couldn't have come up the back way without knocking Jimmy down to get a shot at me. My friend, he simply popped up like a ghost between the two of us. I was hit before I saw him. When I caught his outline, I didn't waste time." He was upset. He had mentioned Shirillo's first name in front of the girl- as he had mentioned it in front of Keesey, the cook-and he looked on the edge of hysteria. He patted the Thompson, though, and forced a weak grin.
        "You think he was already upstairs?" Tucker asked.
        "I know it."
        "Where was he hiding?"
        "In one of those rooms."
        "Couldn't have been. We searched them all."
        "Not well enough, friend."
        Was that possible? They'd looked in closets, under beds, been most professional about it. No. They hadn't overlooked anything. Tucker stood up and looked at Miss Loraine. "Where would he have been?"
        "Who?"
        "Don't be funny. The dead man."
        "I wouldn't know."
        He moved quickly, grabbed her arm, twisted it, levered it