When Shirillo welcomed him at the airport, Tucker almost said thanks-but-no-thanks, almost got right the hell out of there before he had heard anything more about the job. Shirillo looked far too young, seventeen at the most, and he didn't look any better to Tucker when he said he was actually six years older than that. Despite the Italian surname, he was fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, with sandy brown hair. He was only about five feet four, perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds. A well-placed bullet wouldn't just kill him; it would knock him a couple of blocks if there was any breeze moving at all.
Tucker wasn't such a big man himself, standing five feet nine and weighing a hundred and forty-odd pounds. He supposed, too, that he didn't look the way a man in his profession should look. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with high cheekbones, a thin-boned nose, an air of the aristocrat, and he had been told, at different times, that he was somewhat fey. However, he looked like a bruiser compared to the kid; he looked a thousand times more experienced and cautious and capable. The kid inspired no confidence at all, and he made Tucker feel like a father meeting his son.
Shirillo, smiling, reached out and took Tucker's single suitcase with one hand while he offered the other to be shaken. His handshake was surprisingly firm, though unforced, the handshake of a man who was certain of himself. It was enough to make Tucker hold his initial judgment in check.
As Shirillo drove them into and then across the city during the first wave of morning rush-hour traffic, handling his new Corvette with caution but with no restraint whatsoever, making better time than Tucker would have thought possible, he was forced to junk his first evaluation of the boy and come up with a different one altogether. Beneath that somewhat fragile exterior was a man of competence and-as he proved again and again in that freeway war-not just a little daring.
"Why you?" Shirillo had asked, weaving around a large beer truck, squeaking back into the proper lane with no more than a thickness of paint to spare.
"Excuse me?"
The boy grinned. "You've been sizing me up ever since I took your suitcase in the arrivals lounge, and you seem to have decided to trust me."
Tucker said nothing.
"Now," Shirillo said, "I'd like to size you up. Why did Felton think you were especially right for this job?"
Tucker leaned back in the bucket seat, found the roll of lime-flavored Life Savers he usually carried in a pocket, offered one to Shirillo, took one for himself and sucked on it. He said, "I only steal from institutions. I guess that's why Felton thought of me."
"Institutions?"
"Yes. Banks, insurance companies, department stores, diamond brokers, that sort of thing. I've never taken anything from an individual, from anyone who could be hurt by the loss."
Shirillo mulled that over for a moment, then said, "You call the Mafia an institution?"
"One of the oldest," Tucker said.
"But there are differences between the Mafia and-and a bank or an insurance company."
"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," Shirillo 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," Shirillo 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," Shirillo 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," Shirillo 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 shit-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 damn 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," Shirillo admitted.
Out of the city, moving east on the superhighway, the traffic thinned out considerably. Shirillo 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," Shirillo said. He looked at his watch. "And we'll have to make it fast." He picked up two pairs of field glasses 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 Shirillo 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," Shirillo 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?"
Shirillo 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 bastard 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?"