Part 8 (1/2)

The shot had pushed him half around, so that he leaned back against the wall and, just now beginning to reach for his shoulder, fell forward and lay still.

Despite the high risk a.s.sociated with his profession, Tucker had only twice been pressed into a position where he had no choice but to kill a man. Once, it had been a crooked cop who tried to force his point with a handgun; the second time it was a man who'd been working with Tucker on a job and who'd decided there was really no sense in splitting the proceeds when one shot from his miniature pearl-handled revolver would eliminate that economic unpleasantry and make him twice as rich. The cop was fat and slow. The partner with the pearl-handled revolver was as affected in every habit as he was in his choice of handguns. He didn't choose to shoot Tucker in the back, which would have been the smartest move, but wanted instead to explain to Tucker, in the course of a melodramatic scene, in very theatrical terms what he intended to do. He wanted to see Tucker's face as death approached, he said. He'd been very surprised when Tucker took the revolver away from him, and even more surprised when, during the brief struggle, he was shot.

Both kills had been clean and quick, on the surface; but both of them had left an ugly residue long after the bodies had been buried and begun to rot. For months after each murder Tucker was bothered by hideous nightmares in which the dead men appeared to him in a wide variety of guises, sometimes in funeral shrouds, sometimes cloaked in the rot of the grave, sometimes as part animal-goat, bull, horse, vulture, always with a human head-sometimes as they looked when they were alive, sometimes as children with the heads of adults, sometimes as voluptuous women with the heads of men and as b.a.l.l.s of light and clouds of vapor and nameless things that he was nonetheless able to identify as the men he had killed. In the few months immediately following each kill, he woke nearly every night, a scream caught in the back of his throat, his hands full of damp sheets.

Elise was always there to comfort him.

He couldn't tell her what had caused the dreams, and he would pretend that he didn't understand them or, sometimes, that he didn't even remember what they had been.

She didn't believe him.

He was sure of her disbelief, though she never showed it in her manner or in her face and never probed with the traditional questions. She could not know and could hardly suspect the real cause of them, but she simply didn't care about that. All she was interested in was helping him get over them.

Some nights, when she cradled him against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, he could take one of her nipples in his mouth as a child might, and he would be, in time, pacified in the manner of a child. He wasn't ashamed of this, only welcomed it as a source of relief, and he did not feel any less a man for having clung to her in this manner. Often, when the fear had subsided, his lips would rove outward from the nipple, changing the form of comfort she offered, now offering her a comfort of his own.

He wondered how other people who had killed handled the aftermath, the residue of shame and guilt, the deep sickness in the soul.

How, for instance, did Pete Harris handle it? He'd killed, by his own admission, six men during the last twenty-five years, not without cause-and countless others before that, during the war when he had carried the Thompson and used it indiscriminately. Did Harris wake up at night pursued by demons? Dead men? Minotaurs and harpies with familiar human faces? If he did, how did he comfort himself, or who comforted him? It was difficult to imagine that lumbering, red-faced, bull-necked man in the arms of someone like Elise. Perhaps he never had been consoled and nursed out of his nightmares. Perhaps he still carried them all inside him, a pool of that dark, syrupy residue of death. That would explain the bad nerves as well as anything.

”I think his shoulder's broken,” s.h.i.+rillo said, looking up from the wounded gunman.

”He's not dead?”

”You didn't mean him to be, did you?” the kid asked.

”No,” Tucker said. ”But a silenced pistol can kick off the mark, even if it's been well machined.”

”He's bleeding,” s.h.i.+rillo said. ”But it's not arterial blood, and it won't kill him.”

”What now?” Harris asked.

Tucker knelt and looked at the gunman's wound, peeled back his eyelids, felt for and found the rapid beat of his heart. ”He'll come to before long, but he'll be in shock. He won't be any threat if we leave him behind.”

”He could sound a warning,” Harris said.

s.h.i.+rillo said, ”He's not going to have the strength for that, even if he's thinking clearly enough to try it.”

”We could gag him.”

”And maybe kill him if the gag triggers convulsions,” Tucker said. ”No. We'll just take him inside with us and tuck him in a closet and hope for the best.”

s.h.i.+rillo nodded, still cool, much cooler than Tucker would have expected him to be at a time like this, and he went back to the window, finished applying the masking tape to the center pane, cut a circle of gla.s.s, lifted that out of the way, reached in and carefully felt around with his fingers. ”Wires,” he said. ”An alarm.”

”Know the type?” Tucker whispered.

”Maybe. Flashlight, please.”

Tucker took that out of his windbreaker pocket and handed it over.

s.h.i.+rillo flicked the light on and directed it through the hole he had cut in the window gla.s.s, angled the beam left and right, grunted softly as if confirming something he already thought to be true, flicked the light off and returned it to Tucker.

”Well?”

”I know it.”

”Built in?”

”No. The wire loops through two bra.s.s guide rings screwed into the base of the window. When I lift the window, I stretch the wire and trip the alarm-if I'm stupid.”

”You aren't stupid,” Harris said.

”Thanks. I needed your rea.s.surance.”

Tucker said, ”How long to finish with it-two or three minutes?”

”Less.”

”Go on, then.”

Working more quickly than Tucker himself would have been able to, s.h.i.+rillo taped and cut another pane in the bottom row of the window segments, lifted that out of the way and, using the special tools in his pouch, reached inside and worked the guide rings free of the wood. That done, the wire would lie in place on the sill no matter how high the window was lifted. Finished, he returned the tools to his pouch, belted that around his waist beneath his jacket. Reaching through the window with both hands, he freed the latch and carefully slid the whole works up high enough for a man to pa.s.s under it. The frame was a tight fit, and the window remained open.

”You first,” Tucker said.

s.h.i.+rillo hunched and went inside.

”Help me with him,” Tucker said, indicating the wounded man who was still unconscious on the promenade floor.

He and Harris put their guns down and lifted the guard, worked the man through the window and into the darkened room, where s.h.i.+rillo helped settle him gently to the floor. They had to work more carefully and take more time with the man than they would have if he'd been dead. But that was okay. That was fine. At least there wouldn't be any nightmares this way.

”Now you,” Tucker said.

Harris handed his Thompson through the open window and went in quickly after it, as if he would be unable to function if the weapon were out of his hands and out of sight for more than a brief moment. He had to twist himself around painfully to force his bulk through that narrow frame, but he didn't protest, made no sound at all.

Tucker picked up the circles of gla.s.s that had been cut from the window panes, peeled the tape off the window around the holes and pa.s.sed these through to s.h.i.+rillo, then looked around to see if they'd left any other trace of their work here.

Blood.

He studied the pattern of the blood on the promenade floor where the wounded man had lain. There was not much of it, because the blood had come in a thick trickle rather than a spurt, and the guard's clothes had absorbed most of it. Already, what little blood there was had begun to darken and dry. Even if someone pa.s.sed this way-and that seemed unlikely if this was the wounded man's patrol sector-he might not properly interpret the stain. In any case, there was nothing to be done about it.

He looked around the fog-shrouded front lawn one last time, at the h.o.a.ry shrubbery, the mist that laced the big trees, the gra.s.s made colorless by the dim house lights.

Nothing.

He listened to the night.

Silence.

Except for the wounded man, no one else had discovered them. Now their chances were pretty good. They would finish the job properly. He felt it, beyond intellect, beyond reason. Success was theirs. Almost. Unless Merle Bachman had talked, in which case they were all blown.

He followed Harris through the window and into the house, closed the window behind himself.