Blood risk

this size that three suitcases could be hidden. And from the way you've been acting, you can't spend much more time in here-you've got someone coming to pick you up."
        He admired her despite the fact that she'd started out on the other side of the fence. When she saw that the circumstances had gotten beyond her control, she maneuvered to increase the range of her power. He could see why Baglio had respected her. The old man's only mistake was in not respecting her even more than he had. He was also pleased with her demands. They were eminently reasonable if she could supply what she boasted.
        "Okay," he said.
        "Deal?"
        "Deal."
        She frowned and said, "It's not as easy as that, though. We'll have to talk some more."
        "Talk," he said. He reached into his pocket and took out the roll of Life Savers, popped one into his mouth.
        "Not here."
        "Where?"
        "In the room you're on your way to."
        Tucker looked at his watch: 6:06. He didn't feel much like finishing the operation in broad daylight, though it appeared as if they were going to have to do just that. He said, "We can't take long bargaining. It's getting damn late."
        "I'll need two minutes," she said.
        "Come on, then."
        She stepped over the corpse on the corridor floor, her pretty bare toes squishing in the damp carpet, went with Tucker to the guard's bedroom. Behind them, Harris fared another burst down the main stairwell.
        

----
        
        In the bedroom she sat down on the corner of the mattress and tucked her long legs under her, now very demure and innocent in the flannel gown. She said, "How do you expect to get out of here?"
        He hesitated, then said, "A helicopter."
        She made a face. "I'm serious."
        "So am I."
        She said, "I don't want to make a deal if you're really a bunch of clowns who didn't think this thing through."
        He explained, in detail but as rapidly as possible, about Norton and the helicopter with the state-police markings.
        "I'm impressed," she said.
        "Now," he said, "impress me. Do you know what happens to people who upset Ross Baglio?"
        "I know."
        "But you're willing to risk it?"
        "A girl has to provide for herself," she said. She sounded like an earnest, homely high-school freshman deciding to take the sensible secretarial program to prepare to meet the bills four years hence. She was delightful.
        "Baglio knows your name. It'll be easy to track you down."
        "A name can be changed," She was implying that Loraine wasn't her real name anyway.
        "You can't change the way you look. Every man who sees you is going to remember you."
        "You're exaggerating my appeal," she said. "Besides, I know something about makeup and disguise." She got off the bed and said, "Are you trying to talk me out of helping you?"
        "No," he said. "I just want to understand exactly why you're doing this so I have a better idea of what's going to happen later. For instance, I wouldn't want you to go through with this with the idea of bringing your twenty percent back to Baglio and telling him all you learned about us while you were counted as a friend."
        "I'd have to be a fool," she said.
        "I know."
        "But I'm not."
        He sighed. So much like Elise. "I know that too."
        "Well?"
        "Deal," he said again.
        She went to the closet and started tossing out suits, trousers and dress shirts. When everything was cleaned out of the way, she asked him to step back and to direct the flashlight on the floor between them. Kneeling, she studied the floorboards a moment, got her nails into the cracks on both sides of one of them, tugged at it, let it go. She tried the one beside it, which looked identical to the first, sighed when it rattled and came away in her hands, a two-inch-wide and four-foot-long strip of wood. She put it out of the way, revealing a lever that lay under the tightly fitted but unnailed board.
        "I'd have found that in no time," he said.
        "Of course," she said. "And you'd have gotten Bachman too. But I'm along to help you get the money, which you didn't even know was here."
        "Go on," he said.
        She pressed the lever down with the heel of her hand. On Tucker's right the entire back wall of the closet swung inward, a feature that negated the need for a telltale