"No," Baglio said.
Tucker nodded, looked at Shirillo. "Tie him to the chair, then go keep our friend company at the stairwell. You could cover the back stairs while he watches the main ones."
"Expecting trouble?" Shirillo asked.
"It's going to take longer than I thought," Tucker said. "And Mr. Baglio may be screaming loud enough to attract his boys outside before I'm done with him."
Shirillo nodded, used a letter opener to cut down the cords of the draw drapes and expertly lashed Baglio to the straight-backed chair. The older man offered no resistance.
"What about her?" Shirillo asked.
"I can handle her."
"Sure?"
"Positive."
Shirillo left to join Harris at the stairs.
Tucker looked at his watch: 5:10 in the morning. Shortly the dawn would come. Would the two men stationed outside the house leave their posts when the sun had fully risen?
Tucker shook off the thought and directed the woman to move her chair away from Baglio, which she did, putting it down so that it faced him from the side. When she was seated again, like a spectator at a sporting event, Tucker stood behind her, watching Baglio, tracing his fingertips along her warm neck.
Baglio laughed out loud, even though that must have hurt his face.
"Something funny?" Tucker asked. He let his hand become more sure, lying full against her throat, feeling her pulse. He hated himself for trying to get to Baglio through whatever relationship he enjoyed with the woman. He kept thinking how it would be if things were reversed, if he were in the chair and Baglio were caressing Elise.
"That won't work," Baglio said.
Tucker moved his hand, traced the edge of her jaw-line, tenderly tilted her head up. She responded to his touch, or he imagined that she did.
Baglio said, "I've always got a different woman around. Women are nothing to me, nothing at all. I've got nothing special with her. I wasn't the first with her, and I know I'm hot going to be the last, so go ahead, be my guest." All that talking made a tiny stream of thick blood run from the corner of his mouth, down his blackening chin. He made no attempt to lick it away, perhaps because his tongue was cut and swollen-or perhaps because he didn't notice it, his entire attention riveted on Tucker's proprietary hand.
"I think you're lying," Tucker said.
"Think what you want."
"It would get to a man like you if a stranger walked into his house and made him watch, powerless, while-"
"Powerless" was the word that did it. Baglio flared up again, inwardly, hatred rising in his eyes and burning brightly a moment before he veiled it again. "See if I care."
Tucker turned her face toward him, tilted it higher, looked into her green-blue eyes. "If I were to pistol-whip her?" he asked Baglio. "Put a couple of scars on her face — say, from the hairline straight down to the chin-break a few of those perfect teeth?" If Elise could hear him now, what would she say? It wouldn't be good.
But Baglio laughed again, more genuinely this time, or with his act more under control.
The girl stiffened, looked worriedly up at Tucker, shifted her eyes sideways, straining to see Baglio. She hadn't expected this. And in her eyes was a hatred more intense than Baglio's, not for Tucker but for her lover. Her former lover. She'd been made aware, in one brutal instant, that though there might be more between them than just sex, the old man found her expendable. Watching her now, as her face set into grim lines, Tucker knew she would perform a vendetta far better than any Sicilian ever could.
Now that her circumstances were clear, she adjusted quickly, recovered her composure; and decided what she must do. Earlier, Tucker had imagined that she reacted favorably to his caress, but now the reaction was real and not imagined at all. His hand slid down her throat until it lay just above her heavy breasts; and she sat up straighter, leaning into his hand, trying to accommodate him, tempting.
Baglio noticed.
She smiled at Tucker, turned to Baglio and smiled at him too, though 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?"