Five minutes after that he'd transferred all three of the money-stuffed suitcases to the same spot. "Anything happening here?" he asked Shirillo.
"No. They're too quiet down there."
Before Tucker could respond, Miss Loraine came up behind him and said, "I'm ready."
She was wearing white levis and a dark-blue sweater, all of it cut to fit like second skin, both functional and sensual. Tucker remembered how she'd looked the day of the robbery in the miniskirt and tight sweater, and he wondered why, with that canny head of hers, she still was so careful to keep her sex honed as a bargaining tool.
As if reading his mind, she said, "It always pays to be prepared for anything."
"It does," he agreed. He looked at his watch: 7:02.
It was full daylight outside.
He'd told Norton that the operation would be concluded by dawn at the very latest. Paul would be chewing his nails and wondering how much longer he should hold on. Tucker hoped he'd wait another ten minutes, until they could put a call through on the walkie-talkie. No, he wasn't just hoping for that-he knew Norton would wait. He would wait. He was sure of it. Damn, damn, damn.
He slipped a new clip into his Lüger, pocketed the depleted clip and relieved Shirillo of his watch over the pear stairs.
"Get the suitcases up first," he said.
The kid nodded, picked up the largest piece of luggage and struggled with it to the top of the metal steps, muscled it overhead and slid it onto the attic floor. He didn't have the physique for heavy work, but he wasn't complaining. By the time he'd taken the second case from Miss Loraine and worked it through the trap door overhead, his face glistened, his black makeup streaked. When he shoved the third bag into place above, he leaned into the steps and let out a long wheeze of exhaustion.
"Want me to get Bachman up?" Tucker asked.
"No. I will."
The time was 7:10.
Norton would be waiting.
Shirillo examined Bachman, helped the battered man to his feet, found an acceptable hold on him and went sideways up the narrow collapsible steps. Near the top he had to let go of his burden. Bachman gripped the top steps, his weakened hands clumsy with the splinted and bandaged fingers. Shirillo scrambled quickly into the attic, turned, reached down, took Bachman by the wrist and, with a little help from Merle himself, got him through the trap door and into the upper chamber.
"Ready up here," Shirillo called down.
"Good work."
"Just plenty of motivation," Shirillo said, grinning.
7:14.
"Move," Tucker told the woman.
She went up the ladder fast, took Jimmy's hand and was gathered into the overhead room.
7:15.
Harris looked up the hall, saw that most of the work was done, nodded in response to Tucker's hand signal.
We're going to make it, Tucker thought. He'd done it. He'd made a botched job into a success; he'd persevered.
Turning, he started up the steps-but got no farther than the third rung as the window shattered beside him and two closely spaced slugs struck him hard on the left side.
He fell and struck his head on the last rung of the metal ladder before he rolled up against the corridor wall. Strangely, the moment he'd been hit, he thought: Iron Hand, recalling the nightmare. Then he was too numbed from the shock of being wounded to think of anything. When pain began to replace the paralysis, seconds later, he thought the man at the bottom of the back steps had shot him, but then he realized, as he sat up in the middle of all that broken glass, that the shots had come from outside the house.
The shots were a signal to the man downstairs to try to come up now that their attention was diverted. Harris was prepared for that strategy, and he let out a long chatter of machine-gun fire down the main stairwell.
Shirillo came off the attic steps fast, drawing another shot from outside as he moved quickly past the window. "How is it?"
"The nerves are still mostly deadened from the impact, but it's starting to hurt pretty badly. I got it twice, I think, close together. Damn hard punch."
"Rifle," Shirillo said. "The garage roof connects with this end of the house. I saw him standing out there when I went by the window just now." As he spoke he removed the shattered walkie-talkie from Tucker's arm and threw it into the middle of the hallway. "I was going to tell you that you'd overprepared by bringing two of these, since we never needed to use them between us. Now I'm glad I kept my mouth shut."
"The damn thing didn't take both shots, did it?"
"No," Shirillo said. "There's blood." He probed the wound with a finger until Tucker was sweating with pain. "You only stopped one bullet," he said. "It passed through the back of your arm and out the top of your shoulder, right through the meaty part, then out again. At least, by the way your jacket's all ripped up, I'd say that's how it is. But I wouldn't want to swear to it until we have you in the copter and can get your clothes off. There's a good bit of blood."
Tucker winced at the pain, which, having held off for several minutes, now throbbed relentlessly, and he said, "It's easy enough to come down that ladder fast. But going up again is another thing altogether. He'll have enough time to pick us off like painted targets."
"Clearly true," Shirillo said. Even now he did not appear to be shaken. Tucker thought he could see in the kid's manner, however, his own kind of bottled-up terror below a facade of calm maintained at only the greatest expenditure of nervous energy.
Tucker said, "Now don't shout for him, but get Pete. Walk down there and ask him to come up here. I think, as long as there's one man on the garage roof, there isn't anyone else down there to come up the steps. Not unless they untied Keesey, which I seriously doubt."
"Be right back," Shirillo said.
He returned with Harris, who listened to Tucker explain the situation, which he had figured out on his own anyway. He assured them that he could use the rapid-firing Thompson to clear the garage roof while running little risk of getting hit himself.
"Just be damned careful," Tucker said. "You deserve your share after making it this far."
"Don't worry your ass, friend," Harris said, grinning. He got up and flattened himself against the wall next to the shattered window. He let a long minute pass, as if one unknown moment were better than another, then suddenly whirled around, facing the open window, the Thompson up before him, chattering away at the rifleman. No one screamed, but a moment later Harris turned to them and said, "He's finished. But one thing: it wasn't one of the gunmen. It was Keesey."
"The cook?"
"The cook."
"Shit," Tucker said. "Then there's still one of them downstairs, and he knows you're no longer guarding the stairs."
He got to his feet despite the thumping invisible stick that seemed to be trying to drive him down again. The pain in his arm lanced outward, crossed his entire back, over to his other shoulder, down to his kidneys.
"You make the stairs yourself?" Harris asked.
"I can. But Jimmy has to go first."
Shirillo began to protest, realized he was the one carrying the last walkie-talkie, nodded and scrambled upward into the attic.
"Follow me closely," Tucker said.
"Don't worry about that, friend."
Tucker gripped the stair railing with his good hand and climbed toward the square of darkness overhead which framed Jimmy Shirillo's anxious face. He felt as if he were with some Swedish mountaineering 'team, but he finally made it, with the kid's help.