Part 2 (1/2)

”A few,” Tucker admitted. Already he felt at ease with the kid, despite the brief time he'd known him, despite the glittering cars that they sailed past and dueled with, despite the angry honking of horns, squeal of brakes. ”Though there are fewer differences than you might think.”

”One difference,” s.h.i.+rillo said, tramping hard on the accelerator to take advantage of an opening in traffic, ”is that a bank, if it catches up with you, will have you tossed in jail-while these boys we're talking about will simply weight you down and drop you off a bridge somewhere.”

Tucker smiled, sucked his lime Life Saver, watched the hurtling death machines around him as if they were playful animals. ”They still do things like that?”

”Worse,” s.h.i.+rillo said. ”I don't want anyone in this who doesn't understand the risks.”

”Do you?” Tucker asked.

”I was raised in the Hill section of Pittsburgh,” s.h.i.+rillo said. His manner was no longer childlike. It was grim. His face set into tight lines, pinched up by bad memories. ”That's mostly a black neighborhood-substandard housing, bad garbage pickup so you get rats running in the streets like dogs, hardly any police patrols, streets that haven't been paved in my lifetime, no family counseling or city services like in the white neighborhoods. It's the kind of place where pressures build up and up until, one summer night every couple of years, they just rip out through the top.”

”Riots?”

”You been keeping up with the news,” s.h.i.+rillo said. ”But I prefer to think of them as nervous collapses; it's not a physical thing but a psychological one. Everyone clucks about it for a few days; all the upstanding white citizens rush out and buy a lot of guns they don't know how to use; in a month it's forgotten, and nothing's changed. Nothing at all. If you're not black or Spanish, you've got to be s.h.i.+t-poor to live in the Hill section. And that's why we were there. My father tried to keep ends together with a shoe-repair store, and did, too, until he kicked off at fifty-six from too much d.a.m.n work. My father has had to pay Rossario Baglio's collectors for the last fifteen years, simply for the privilege of remaining in business. An old Italian custom.” He snorted, but wasn't amused by his own joke. ”Before Baglio, it was someone else who got the weekly installments. I've seen what they do to people who miss a week or who come flat out and say no to extortion. One of the rebels was a brother of mine, and ever since he said 'No' he limps. Badly. He's lucky that he walks at all.”

”So you know the risks,” Tucker said.

”Too well.”

”I know them too. But I also know that, in a job like this one, you gain advantages along with the risks. For my part, I think the advantages outweigh the additional risks.”

”For instance?”

”For instance, you don't have to worry about organized police, the state or federal apparatus, fingerprint experts or any of the rest of it.”

”That too,” s.h.i.+rillo admitted.

Out of the city, moving east on the superhighway, the traffic thinned out considerably. s.h.i.+rillo put the Corvette up around seventy and held it there. Neither of them spoke again until he braked, slowed and drove off into a roadside picnic area fifteen minutes later.

”On foot from here,” s.h.i.+rillo said. He looked at his watch. ”And we'll have to make it fast.” He picked up two pairs of field gla.s.ses from the back seat, handed one to Tucker and got out of the car.

Twenty minutes later, having tramped a considerable distance through a pine woods, moving silently most of the time, they reached the vantage point s.h.i.+rillo had chosen, in the trees to the side of the private road, halfway down the mile-long straightaway that fed into Baglio's driveway. They stood well back in the shadows under the pines, watching the big white mansion.

”Some house,” Tucker said.

”Twenty-nine rooms,” s.h.i.+rillo said.

”Been inside?”

”Once,” the boy said. ”When I was eighteen, I was a numbers runner for one of Baglio's Hill operatives, a man named Guita. Guita thought I was a smart kid destined for big things in the organization, and he brought me here with him once to meet Mr. Baglio.”

”What happened to your big career in the underworld?” Tucker asked.

”Guita got himself killed.”

”Police?”

”No-Baglio.”

”What for?”

”I never knew.”

Tucker said, ”Some action up there at the house. Is this it?”

s.h.i.+rillo had not been using his binoculars for a few minutes, but he lifted them and peered up the slope. ”Yes,” he said. ”That's Henry Deffer, Baglio's personal driver, that old b.a.s.t.a.r.d there. Walking beside Deffer, the dandified one, is Chaka, Baglio's accountant and trouble-shooter. He's the second most powerful man in the local organization.”

”The other two?”

”Just hoods.”

”That the money, in those suitcases?”

”Yes.”

”How much, do you think?”

”I've asked around. No one could say for sure except Baglio and Chaka. But it's likely to be somewhere between two hundred and five hundred thousand, depending on what kind of two weeks it's been.”

”Where's it come from?” Tucker asked.

”Baglio's suburban gambling operations, the small stuff -punchboards in a couple of hundred gas stations, small numbers operations out of laundromats and newsstands and beauty parlors, small sports betting from maybe sixty or seventy barrooms. Each one of them's a tiny situation in itself. Multiply a small stake by two thousand situations, and it turns into big money.”

”Why only a twice-a-month collection?”

”Because it is so little compared to inner-city numbers running, organization hookers, protection money, the dope take from both suburbs and inner city. It isn't enough to warrant all those rounds every week. Besides, these situations with the punchboards and the dollar bets are mostly legitimate businesses copping a little dirty money on the side that they don't have to report on the income-tax returns. They like holding onto Baglio's share, interest free, for a couple of weeks; sometimes, it might help a guy make a payment he'd otherwise be a few days late on. Baglio doesn't mind that so long as they turn in an honest percentage and don't get behind.”

A black Cadillac limousine had pulled out of the driveway and was on its way toward them down the narrow lane. They stepped even deeper into the shadows and watched it go past.

s.h.i.+rillo said, ”Baglio has about fifty collectors for the suburbs. Every second and fourth Monday of every month they hit the road, picking up the small change from these situations. They deliver it here starting midafternoon, until dinner. Monday night it's counted, packaged and put in suitcases for the trip into town Tuesday morning.”

”What's done with it then?”

”Baglio owns a good piece of a bank in town, one of the big ones on Forbes. Deffer parks the Caddy in the garage under the bank, while Chaka and one of the bodyguards use the bank president's private elevator to take the suitcases to the president's sixteenth-floor office. What happens to it then, I don't know. I imagine that it's all very cleverly laundered and made clean again.”

”Do you have a spot picked out to stop the car?”

”Yes,” s.h.i.+rillo said. ”Let's go look at it.”

They spent that afternoon tramping the woods along the private lane, scouting prospective sites for the execution of the robbery. That done, they drove into the city again, where Tucker took a room in the hotel at Chatham Center. In his room, for the rest of the afternoon and evening, they discussed the fine points of the plan, argued alternatives and got it worked out to their mutual satisfaction. It looked good.

Back in Manhattan, Tucker needed only two weeks to locate and interest Bachman and Harris. The four of them had met in Pittsburgh this past Sunday, had gone over the details until they were exhausted. They monitored the delivery of the cash on Monday, went over everything one last time on Monday night in Tucker's hotel room, pulled the job off well. Quite well. Except for that d.a.m.ned woman in the Cadillac. That d.a.m.n unexpected Cadillac.

Tucker hated failure more than he hated losing the money, more than the possibility of violence and death. He meant to see that the job did not end here.

_.

”If Baglio's men are in front of us and behind us,” Jimmy s.h.i.+rillo said, ”what do we do next?” He'd slowed the Mustang to a crawl, and he felt like stopping it altogether. If he could freeze them here, stop time, fix this instant for eternity, they'd not have to face Baglio at all; nothing bad could happen to them. For his first major job he'd held up quite well, in the face of almost total failure, but he had his limits. He remembered his brother, the weeks in the hospital, the limp, and he didn't want to go on with this. Tucker traced circles on the shotgun stock with his index finger and wondered how to answer the kid's question. His own reaction to failure was different from s.h.i.+rillo's; his resourcefulness was increased, his determination magnified. He said, ”I've noticed branch roads leading from this main track. We must have pa.s.sed a dozen of them since we turned off the macadam.”