"He'll be in place now," Tucker whispered.
"Right," Shirillo said.
The boy ran now, making even less noise than Harris had, bent even lower. The heavy fog opened up and swallowed him too, in one gulp, leaving Tucker completely alone.
And alone, Tucker remembered the nightmare more vividly than ever: the shadows and the light, the reaching hand. He felt an itch between his shoulder blades, a dull cold ache of expectancy in the back of his neck.
He rose and, crouching, ran to join the others.
They lay on their stomachs behind the evenly trimmed hedge on the inside of the driveway fifty yards from the front doors of the mansion. Through breaks in the foliage they had a good view. The fog was not thick enough to shroud the house altogether at such a short distance, but it did dull the outlines of the roof and softened the joints between slabs of siding so that the place appeared to be made of a single piece of expertly carved alabaster. From their position they could see all the windows on the front of the house: four of them backed by dull yellow light, six of them perfectly dark on the first level; all ten windows on the second floor were dark.
"Been watching," Harris said.
"And?"
"I don't think anyone's at the windows."
"That's unlikely."
"Just the same Watch them and see."
Five minutes later Shirillo said, "I don't see anyone, either."
"Four windows are lighted," Tucker said.
Harris said, "I didn't say there wasn't anyone inside there, awake. I just don't think there's anyone watching the windows. Probably that's because of the fog; they figure they wouldn't see much of anything even if there was something to see."
In a few minutes Tucker was willing to agree that they were not being watched. If one of Baglio's men were standing at any of the front windows, on either floor, in a darkened room, he would most certainly be visible as a lighter gray blur against the deeper blackness of the room behind him. There was only half a moon, and the light from that was considerably diluted by the fog; still, a man's face positioned only inches from the glass ought to reflect enough light to stand out plainly to any knowledgeable observer. The lighted windows, of course, would have clearly revealed any posted guard; those windows were empty, the rooms beyond them apparently quiet and still.
"Well?" Harris asked.
Nerves. A case of nerves. After all, he was twenty-five years in this business, with two tours of a federal prison already behind him. He was too old and had weathered too much to risk getting shot down by a Mafia gunman in the pursuit of something as quixotic as tonight's goal; they would bury him above the house, in the woods, where his body would decompose, the component minerals washing down the slope to fertilize a hood's landscaped estate. In the grave, the only things that would survive the flesh were his bones-and the vinyl windbreaker with its alligator insignia. So Harris had a case of nerves. Of course, everyone had nerves; that definition of his condition was imprecise. Still, one day Tucker would be the same as Harris, tensed to the breaking point, promising himself he would retire, taking that "one last job" over and over again, until his case of nerves led to one final misjudgment.
No. It would not be that way for Tucker, because he would have his inheritance by then. His father would be dead, his problems solved. It was, he thought, a sad way to have to live: waiting for your father to croak.
Tucker studied the house one last time to make sure he knew what he was doing. All four of the ground-floor windows which had light behind them were to the left; the six dark windows on that level were all on the right of the huge white double doors. Tucker nodded toward the unlighted glass and said, "One of those."
"Not the doors?" Harris asked.
"Bound to be locked," Tucker said. "Try for the next to the last window. The telephone wires feed in there, too."
The submachine gun held at hip level in one hand, his finger on the trigger, clutching the silenced Lüger in the other hand, Harris got up and ran lightly, quickly, to a place along the front wall to the left of the second window. No one cried out.
"Go," Tucker said.
Shirillo followed Harris without incident.
Tucker brought up the rear, used a small set of shears that he carried in his windbreaker to cut the telephone wires as planned. He had stopped directly before the window which he was going to open, but he saw no use in shielding himself from it. If anyone was in the room beyond, he was going to know about Tucker soon enough when he cut the glass.
Move ass.
Tucker unbuckled his belt of tools and handed it to Shirillo. He'd intended to break into the house himself, because he trusted his own ability to make the entrance in silence. Now, he belatedly realized that Shirillo must be good at this (why else would he own a custom-made set of tools?) and that the boy would get them in faster since the instruments and the pouch were his and were more familiar to him than to Tucker. "Ever done this?" Tucker asked unnecessarily, in as low a voice as he could use and still be heard.
"Often."
Tucker nodded, stepped back, took Shirillo's pistol and watched him as he knelt before the dark glass.
Pete Harris turned and faced the longest length of the mansion, waiting for someone to appear at the far end of the promenade or to step out of the front doors. If they came through the doors, they'd be near enough to be taken out with the pistol; if they came from the far end of the house, however, a pistol shot wouldn't be accurate, and the Thompson would come in handy. He held both weapons slack in his hands, parallel with his legs, so that they would not unduly tire his arms but so he could bring them up fast in an emergency.
There very well might be one, too.
Tucker wished the place were less well lighted. Directly above his head, in the promenade ceiling, a hundred-watt bulb burned inside a protective wire cage.
Tucker faced away from Harris, in the opposite direction, and thought it might be a good idea to step to the corner of the house where he could command a view of the side lawn as well as of the driveway. He took a single step in that direction just before one of Baglio's men appeared.
He was tall and lean and broad across the shoulders, not at all stupid-looking but stamped by the same die as the gunmen who had been riding in the back of the Cadillac when Tucker and the others had forced it to stop on the mountain road only two days ago. Perhaps he was one of them. He was strolling along, distracted by his thoughts, slouched into himself as if he had been folded at the middle. He was looking at the ground in front of his feet. He didn't suspect a thing. Abruptly, however, as if he had been warned by some extrasensory perception, a sudden clairvoyance, he snapped his head up, his eyes wide, hand moving beneath his jacket with the oiled sureness and the economy of movement that signified a trained professional.
No, Tucker wanted to say. Don't make me. Relax. You haven't got a chance, and you know it.
The gunman had his pistol half in the open when Tucker put a shot into him, high in the chest, by the right shoulder.
The gunman dropped his pistol.
It clattered softly on the concrete promenade floor.
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 associated 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.