Dean R. Koontz - Blood Risk

Blood Risk [Version 2.0 by BuddyDk – October 8 2003][Easy read, easy

print][Completely new scan]BLOOD RISKBrian Coffey is the pen name for a young

American writer whose fiction has sold throughout the world to the tune of

over two million copies. 'Blood Risk' should add considerably to those

figures.

Brian CoffeyBlood RiskFutura Publications LimitedA Contact Book

First published in Great Britain in 1974by Arthur Barker LtdFirst Futura

Publications edition 1975Published in association withArthur Barker

conditionthat it shall not, by way of trade orotherwise, be lent, re-sold,

hired out orotherwise circulated without the publisher'sprior consent in any

form of binding orcover other than that in which it ispublished and without a

similar conditionincluding this condition being imposed on thesubsequent

purchaser.ISBN 08600 71677Printed in Great Britain byC. Nicholls & Company

Ltd.The Philips Park PressManchester.Futura Publications Limited,49 Poland

Street,LONDON WlA 2LG

They had decided that only four men were required to stop the big car on the

narrow mountain road, hold the occu-pants at bay and remove the cash that was

stuffed into the suitcases on the floor behind the front seat. At first Merle

Bachman—who would be driving away, alone, in the blue Chevrolet with the money

locked safely in the trunk—had insisted on a fifth man. Number five would have

been stationed at the bottom of the private lane to work an inter-cept routine

in the event that someone turned off from the main highway while the robbery

was in progress. The others argued against Bachman, because the private road

to the Baglio estate supported very little traffic, especially on the morning

of a biweekly cash transfer. Also, no one wanted his share knocked to hell by

a fifth cut. Bachman clearly saw the economic sense of using a spare crew,

though he insisted there was no other wisdom behind this detail of the plan,

and he reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the job as a foursome. Now, the

darkly dressed men waited in their prearranged positions as the time for

action drew near.Upslope, the macadam roadway on which the robbery would

transpire made an abrupt appearance around a limestone outcropping, ran a

hundred yards past a lay-by on the outside where two cars could pass if they

should meet coming in opposite directions, went down for another four hundred

yards before turning a second limestone cor-ner and continuing out of sight to

the main highway. The two sharp twists beyond which nothing was visible, and

the still morning air, generated the feeling that all the rest of the world

had vanished in some unexplained catas-trophe.If you faced upslope, the left

side of the roadway was edged by a sheer stone wall slightly higher than a man

and, above that, by a thick pine forest and underbrush as green as new money.

Though the long grass at the brink of the woods stirred gently in the morning

breeze, it made no sound at all, bending down and unfolding back up again in a

graceful, mute ballet. Lying at the high corner above the first turn in the

road, stretched out in the carbon-paper shadows of the big trees, oblivious of

the dew-dampened grass and the quiet way it seemed to be reaching for him,

Jimmy Shirillo watched the Baglio mansion through a pair of high-power field

glasses. The long blades of grass had brushed Shirillo's face, leaving bright

droplets of dew sus-pended on his fair skin, his only blemishes, giving him a

vulnerable look that pointed up his youth. On the other hand, his own

professional stillness, his economy of move-ment and the intensity with which

he watched the mansion indicated the experienced professional beneath the

tender exterior.The binocular lenses were all that might have given Shirillo

away to someone looking down from the great house, but they had been tinted to

eliminate any telltale glare. Michael Tucker had thought of that, for he

thought of everything.A hundred yards below Shirillo, on the left, sitting in

the brush along the top of the stone wall, Pete Harris cra-dled an old

Thompson submachine gun, a souvenir from World War II. Harris had broken it

down, oiled it, packed it in cloth and mailed it from Paris in five packages

to his home address in the States. Back then, at the end of the war, that sort

of thing was still quite possible. He had not contemplated putting the gun to

any illegal use, or indeed to any use at all, for he thought he was finished

with war. A civilian again, he had to face his inability to hold a

nine-to-five job, and in desperation he launched his own war against the

system, against boredom and respecta-bility and enduring poverty. His

inability to fit that system did not arise out of any great sensitivity or

intelligence. Harris was only averagely perceptive. However, he was also

stubborn, very much his own man, with expensive tastes. This would have led

him into crime eventually, be-cause he was only fit to be a clerk in any other

field. He was the oldest of the four men here. At forty-eight he had ten years

on Bachman, twenty on Mike Tucker, twenty-five on the Shirillo boy, though he

didn't use his age and expe-rience to usurp power within the group as others

might have done. All he cared about was making the hit and getting the money,

and he knew Tucker was a damn fine operator.Thinking about the money, he grew

uncomfortable and shifted in the brush, stretching his long legs and working a

cramp out of his thick, muscular thighs. When the vigil first began, he

occupied himself by pulling burrs out of his clothes, his heavily callused

fingers uninjured by the sharp points. Now, though his calluses remained

inviolate, he was too nervous to fool with such minutiae, and he longed to be

on the move.On the right-hand side of the roadway, across from Harris, the

gravel berm dropped abruptly into a rock-strewn ravine that bottomed out more

than three hundred feet below. The only safe place on that side was the

fifty-yard-long lay-by where the Dodge and Chevrolet, both stolen, were now

parked facing slightly downhill. Tucker and Bachman waited there, the older

man behind the wheel of the Chevy, Tucker shielded from the lane by the bulk

of the Dodge.Bachman carried a .32-caliber pistol in a chamois shoulder

holster, as did Tucker. Unlike Tucker, however, he kept touching it, like a

savage with his talisman. With damp fingertips he traced the Crosshatch

pattern on the solid butt, lifting the whole weapon slightly out of the

holster, testing the way it fit, looking for potential snags— though he had

worn this same piece for years and knew that it wouldn't snag, ever.Though

Bachman had only the one gun, Tucker held an additional shotgun with only

seven inches of barrel; both chambers were loaded, and six spare cartridges

were dis-tributed in his jacket pockets. If Bachman had been carry-ing the

shotgun, he would have been constantly patting his pockets to be sure the

cartridges were there. Tucker, how-ever, stood quietly, moving as little as he

had to, waiting.“They should be here by now,” Bachman called through the open

window of the Chevy. He wiped a slender hand across his face, more than

covering his small, com-pressed features, pulled off something invisible—maybe

his own impatience—and shook that off his fingertips. Right now he was jumpy,

and he was talking too much, but when the time came for the job he would be

all grease and oil, as Tucker had discovered on the other three jobs they'd

worked on together.Tucker said, “Patience, Merle.” He was known for his

serenity, for maintaining a cool facade that never cracked under pressure.

Inside, though, he was all knotted up and bleeding. His stomach twisted this

way and that, as if it were an animal trapped inside of him; perspiration

gath-ered over his whole body, a symbolic film of his repressed terror.He had

not been born and raised to make his living this way, had never understood the

criminal social stratum. That he was now a success at what he did was a

testament to an almost fanatical determination to achieve what he set out to

achieve, and he was usually the undisputed leader of any group simply because

others saw and admired his single-mindedness.At the top of the slope, Jimmy

Shirillo dropped the field glasses and rolled onto his back, cupped his hands

around his mouth and shouted, “Here they come!” His voice cracked on the last

word, but everyone understood what he had said.“Go!” Tucker shouted, slamming

a flat palm down on the hood of the stolen Dodge.Bachman stopped fiddling with

the pistol cradled under his armpit and switched on the Chevrolet's engine,

revved it a few times and drove forward, blocking the road diago-nally.

Without wasting a second, smooth and fluid, he put the car in park, pulled on

the handbrake, opened his door and jumped out. He took cover at the very end

of the rear fender, where, if he saw there was going to be a collision, he

could leap to safety easily enough. As an afterthought he grasped the

grotesque Halloween mask that dangled from an elastic band around his neck and

slipped it over his head.Halloween in June, he thought. It was the wrong time

to wear a rubber mask, in this heat and humidity.On the hilltop Jimmy had

crept to the edge of the limestone outcropping, ready to jump into the lane

behind the Cadillac the moment the big car had gone by. He fumbled with his

goblin's face a moment, felt the dew on it and thought—inexplicably—that the

water was blood. Fear. Green fear, pure and simple. Angry with himself, he got

the mask in place.Down at the lay-by, behind the Dodge, Tucker became a

scarred old witch with one quick movement of his hand, grimaced at the odor of

latex that he now drew with every breath, then looked across the road at the

brush above the stone wall. Where was Harris? There. Maintaining good cover

for a city boy, blending right in with the weeds. Cradling his Thompson, his

face that of a grotesque mon-ster, he seemed twice as big and dangerous as he

had ever looked before.Tucker raised his shotgun and propped the barrel on the

fender of the Dodge, cautioning himself to stay loose. His stomach burned;

gall stung the back of his throat. Be-hind the mask he could allow himself a

wince, for none of the others would see it.The roar of the Cadillac's engine

was audible now. Tucker wondered if it was moving too fast to stop in time,

and he tried to calculate all the possible moves he could make if it slammed

into the barricade. Although the shock of the collision would delay Baglio's

men's reaction time and ease the strain of getting them firmly under control,

there was also the danger of jammed doors. And of fire. Baglio's men could

burn—but what about the money, then? The building roar of the car's engine

sounded in that moment like flames devouring stacks of crisp dollar bills.The

Cadillac came into sight.The driver was quick. He hit the brakes, slewed the

big chrome machine sideways, then let up so that he could correct a dangerous

plunge toward the precipice, brought the car to a jerking halt six feet away

from the Chevy's passenger door.Clouds of blue smoke caught up with the

Cadillac and swept past it.As planned, Pete Harris let go with a burst of

machine-gun fire, aimed well above everyone's head, before any of the others

could move toward the limousine. The shots glanced around the hillsides like a

series of hammer blows on an iron forge bed. The racket was almost certain to

be audible the length of the slopes and would draw reinforce-ments from the

mansion. In five minutes the site would be swarming with Baglio's gunmen.

Still, this was the quick-est, simplest way to let those inside the limousine

know that this was serious business, rough business, and that they were

hopelessly outgunned.When the echo died, Tucker was at the driver's win-dow,

the stubby shotgun leveled at the old man's neck. A blast from the first

barrel alone would shatter the window and fragment the chauffeur's skull

before he could com-plete any dive for the floorboards. The old bastard knew

it; he sat where he was, motionless.The other man in the front seat was Vito

Chaka, Baglio's trusted “accountant,” forty years old, slim and almost

feminine, graying at the temples. He cultivated a tiny mustache that covered a

third of his upper lip like a smudge of paint. In the 1930s he would have

driven the women wild, Tucker thought. And perhaps he still did, with the help

of his position and his bankroll. Chaka looked at him, sizing him up, then

nodded and slowly placed both hands on the padded dash in front of him, palms

turned up, everything in the open, in recognition of their

pro-fessionalism.“Get out!” Tucker said. His voice sounded thick and mean

through the slit of the rubber mouth.The chauffeur and Chaka obeyed at once.

When the two muscle types in the back seat hesitated, Jimmy Shirillo tapped on

the rear window with the barrel of his pistol. He had climbed onto the trunk

of the Caddy without making a sound, and his goblin mask seemed to grin at the

gunmen when they jumped in surprise.Shirillo was feeling good, better than he

had antici-pated he would feel, less afraid than he had been before things got

moving. He was sweating, and the full-head mask made his neck itch; but those

were minor troubles.Thirty seconds later Baglio's men were all lined up along

the driver's side of the limousine, their hands flat-tened on the roof or

hood, legs spread wide, leaning for-ward so they were off balance, heads

tucked between shoulderblades, all very neat, very classic. Only Chaka looked

sure of himself, dapper even in this humiliating pose.Bachman quickly opened

the rear door on the far side. “Three cases,” he said. No trace of his

previous anxiety remained in his voice.Jimmy Shirillo laughed

triumphantly.“Hold the celebrations,” Tucker said. “Go help him.”Bachman

lifted the heaviest suitcase and walked off toward the Chevy, severely bent by

the dragging weight. He wouldn't have been content to pick up one of the

smaller cases, of course—for the same reason that he wore high-waisted

trousers: he didn't like anyone to think of him as a small man, even though he

was a small man.Jimmy went around and got the last two bags, carried them with

little trouble, dropped them into the open trunk of the stolen Chevrolet and

slammed the lid while Bach-man scurried for the front door.“Relax,” Tucker

told the men lined against the car, though none of them had moved.No one

responded.Bachman started the Chevy, raced the engine once, shifted into

reverse, squealed backward, angling the car downhill.“Easy!” Tucker

shouted.But he didn't need to caution Merle Bachman, for the small man always

gauged the situation properly and per-formed at the optimum safe speed. He was

a good driver.Harris came off the stone wall, grunting, the sound of his heavy

breathing magnified by the mask. While Bach-man was backing the Chevy, Harris

came around to Tucker and said, “Smooth.”Again Tucker said, “Hold the

celebrations.”Bachman put the Chevy in gear, touched the gas lightly and

started downhill toward the second curve, shimmering curtains of heat rising

from the roof and trunk of the car.“Get the Dodge,” Tucker ordered

Shirillo.The boy went after it.Pete Harris was the only one still watching the

Chevy, thinking about all that money in the trunk, thinking about retirement,

and he was the first to see that it was going to go sour. “Oh, shit!” he

said.He had not even finished the exclamation when Tucker heard the hot cry of

the Chevrolet's brakes and whirled around to see what had gone

wrong.Everything had gone wrong.Before Bachman had covered little more than

half the distance to the bottom curve, a Cadillac had rounded the limestone

down there, coming up. It was a match for the Caddy they had just hit, and it

was moving too fast, much too fast for these road conditions. The driver

pulled the wheel hard to the left and tried to run the bank; that was

hopeless, because the shoulder of the road down there turned swiftly into the

stone wall that continued unbroken to the top of the rise. A tire blew with

the force of a cannon shot. The car jolted, bucked up and down like an enraged

animal. Metal whined as a fender was compressed into half the space it had

formerly occupied.Still braking, the Chevrolet wobbled crazily back and forth

as Bachman fought to regain control, veered suddenly and purposefully toward

the outside.“He can't get around a car as big as the Caddy!” Harris

said.Bachman tried it anyway. He was still in the middle of a job, still calm

and greased, quick and calculating. He realized that he had only one chance of

pulling this off successfully, and no matter how infinitesimal that chance

was, he took it. The Cadillac had come to a complete halt now, pretty badly

crumpled on the one side, and the Chevy plowed into its rear door like a pig

nosing in the turf, reared up and caught its front axle on the top of the

ruined door, simultaneously sliding to the left toward the three-hundred-foot

chasm. The back wheels jolted off the berm and swung over empty air, spinning

up clouds of yellow dust. For a second Tucker was sure the Chevy would break

loose and fall, but then he saw it would hold, half-way up the other, larger

car like a dog mounting a bitch. Bachman had tried it; he'd lost.Completely

undamaged on the passenger's side, the front door of the Cadillac opened and a

tall, dark-haired man got out, dazed. He shook his head to clear it, turned

and stared at the demolished Chevy angled crazily over him, bent forward with

his hands on both knees to be sick. He seemed to think of something more

important than that natural urge, for he straightened abruptly and looked into

the front seat, reached inside and helped a young woman climb out. She

appeared to be as uninjured as he, and she did not share his sickening

intimation of mortality. She wore a white blouse and a very short yellow

skirt: a big, lovely blonde. Her long hair flapped like a pennant in the

breeze as she looked up the road at Tucker and the others.“Here!” Jimmy

Shirillo shouted. He had turned the Dodge around and was facing uphill.“Get in

the car,” Tucker told Harris.The big man obliged, the Thompson held in both

hands tenderly.“Don't force me to shoot any of you in the back,” Tucker said,

backing to the open rear door of the Dodge.Baglio's men remained silent.He

slid into the car, still facing them, raised the shot-gun and fired at the sky

as Jimmy tore rubber getting out of there, slammed the door after they were

moving and dropped onto the seat below window level until he felt the car

swinging around the upper curve.“Are we just leaving Bachman there?” Harris

asked.Tucker peeled off his mask and pushed his sweat-slicked hair out of his

face. His stomach was bothering him worse than ever. He said, “We don't have

the means to get him out and hold off Baglio's whole army at the same time.”

He belched and tasted the orange juice that had been his entire

breakfast.“Still . . .” Harris began.Tucker interrupted him, his voice tense

and bitter. “Bachman was right—we did need a fifth man.”

“We're boxed,” Shirillo said.From here on out, the private road no longer

hugged the edge of the ravine, struck toward the broad interior slopes of the

mountain with land opening on both sides. Flanked by pines, it fed

ruler-straight into the circular driveway in front of Rossario Baglio's

gleaming white many-windowed monstrosity of a house only another mile ahead.

Just exiting that drive, a black Mustang arrowed directly for them.“Not

boxed,” Tucker said, pointing ahead and to the left. “Is that a

turn-off?”Jimmy stared. “Yeah, looks like it.”“Take it.”The boy wheeled hard

left as they came up on the dirt track, braked, barely avoided ripping through

several small, sturdy pine trees, slammed brutally across a series of

wet-weather ruts, apparently unperturbed by all of it. Tramp-ing down on the

accelerator, he grinned into the rear-view mirror and said, “It's not my

car.”Despite himself Tucker laughed. “Just keep your eyes on the road.”Jimmy

looked ahead, straddled a large stone in the middle of the way and built more

speed.The wind hissed at an open wing window, and insects smacked against the

glass like soft bullets.“They're right behind us,” Harris said. “Just turned

in.”Both Tucker and Harris stared through the back win-dow, dizzied by the

green blur of trees and underbrush, brambles and grass that whipped by on both

sides, waiting for the Mustang to bounce into view. They were startled, then,

when Shirillo braked to a full stop three quarters of the way up the long

hill. “What the hell . . .” Tucker said.“There's a log across the road,”

Shirillo said. “Either we move it or we go on foot from here.”“Everybody out,”

Tucker said, pushing open his door. “We move it. Pete, bring the Thompson.”The

log was the corpse of a once mighty pine tree fully thirty feet long and as

many inches in diameter, with a couple of thick branches that had been chopped

short with a sharp ax. It looked as if it had been put there to keep anyone

from using the road beyond this point, though it was just as likely that it

was spillage from a logging truck when the forests had served to feed a paper

mill or plank-ing factory. Tucker directed all three of them to get on the

same end of the log, spaced three feet apart, one foot on each side of the

tree. Heaving together, stepping side-ways in an awkward little dance, they

managed to swing it around about a yard.“Not enough,” Shirillo said.Harris

said, “Where's the Mustang?”“It can't move as fast on these bad roads as our

heavy car can,” Tucker said. He sucked in his breath and said, “Again!”This

time they moved the barrier almost far enough to squeeze the Dodge past, but

when they stood to catch their breaths, their backs cracking with a pain like

fire, Harris said, “I hear the other car.”Tucker listened, heard it too, wiped

his bruised hands against his slacks to make them stop stinging. “Take your

Thompson and get ready to meet the gentlemen, Pete.”Harris smiled, picked up

the machine gun and trotted to the rear of the Dodge, where he sprawled in the

middle of the dusty road. He was a large man, over six feet, more than two

hundred and forty pounds; when he went down, the dust rose around him in a

cloud. He raised the black barrel and centered it where the Mustang would be

when it rounded the bend below. The large circular cannister of ammunition

that rose out of the machine gun gave the impression of something insectoid,

something that was somehow using instead of being used, an enormous leech

draining Harris's body of its blood.Tucker bent and slipped his hands around

the log again, found as good a hold as he was going to get on the surprisingly

smooth, round pine trunk. Perspiration ran from his armpits down his sides;

his shirt soaked that up. “Ready?” he asked.“Ready,” Shirillo said.They

heaved, gasped as all their stomach muscles tightened painfully. Tucker felt

his back pop like a glass bottle full of pressurized soft drink, perspiration

fizzing out of him. But he did not let go, no matter what the cost in strained

muscles, raised the log a few inches, scraped sideways a frustratingly short

distance before they had to drop it. This time Shirillo sat down on the log to

regain his breath, panting like a dog that has run a long way in mid-June

heat.“No loafing,” Tucker said immediately.He felt as bad as the boy did,

perhaps even worse—he was, after all, five years older than Shirillo, five

years softer; and he had twenty-eight years of easy living to put up against

the boy's twenty-three years of rough ghetto upbringing—but he knew that he

was the one who had to keep the others moving, had to generate the drive,

share some of his fanatical determination to see them through. It was not the

getting killed that Tucker feared so much. More than that he feared failure.

He said, “Come on, Jimmy, for Christ's sake!”Shirillo sighed, got to his feet

and straddled the pine once more. As he bent to get a grip on it, Harris

opened up with his Thompson, filling the woods about them with a manic

chatter. Shirillo looked up, could not see anything because of the Dodge and

the angle of the trail beyond that, bent again and took hold of the log, put

everything he had into one final, frantic heave. Together they muscled the

tree farther around than they had the last time before they were forced to let

it go. Dropped, the tree landed in the baked roadway with a soft, dusty

thump.“Far enough?” Shirillo asked.“Yes,” Tucker said. “Move ass now!”They ran

back to the car. Shirillo slid behind the wheel and started the engine. That

was enough of an alert for Harris, who had not used the Thompson for almost a

full minute. The big man jumped up and got into the back of the Dodge again.

Tucker was sitting up front with Shirillo and was fumbling with his seat belt.

He clicked it together as Jimmy pulled out, turned to Harris and said, “Get

any tires?”“No,” Harris said. The admission bothered him, for he respected

Tucker and wanted the young man to return his respect. If this job had gone

right, it would have been his last; now, because they'd botched it, he would

need to work again, and he preferred to work with Tucker more than with anyone

else, even after this fiasco. “The bastards caught on too quick, shifted into

reverse before I'd nailed any tires.” He cursed softly and wiped at his grimy

neck, his voice too soft for Tucker to hear the individual words.“They

coming?” Shirillo asked.“Like a cop with a broomstick up his ass,” Harris

said.Shirillo laughed and said, “Hold on.” He tramped the accelerator hard,

pinning them back against their seats for a moment, cutting into a long,

shadow-dappled section of road.“Why don't they let us alone?” Harris asked,

facing front, the Thompson across his lap. His face matched his body: all hard

lines. His forehead was massive, the black eyes sunk deep under it and filled

with cold, solid intelli-gence. His nose, broken more than once, was bulbous

but not silly, his mouth a lipless line that creased the top of a big square

chin. All those harsh angles crashed together in a look of bitter

disappointment. “We didn't get their money.”“We tried, though,” Tucker

said.“We even lost Bachman. Isn't that enough?”“Not for them,” Tucker

said.“The Iron Hand,” Shirillo said. He took a turn in the road too far on the

outside: pine boughs scraped the roof like long, polished fingernails, and the

springs sang like a bad alto.“Iron Hand?” Harris asked.“That's what my father

used to call them,” Shirillo said, never taking his eyes off the road

ahead.“Melodramatic, isn't it?” Tucker asked.Shirillo shrugged. “The Mafia

itself isn't a staid and sober organization; it's as melodramatic as an

afternoon soap opera. It's all the time playing scenes straight out of cheap

movies: bumping off rivals, beating up store owners who don't want to pay for

protection, fire-bombing, black-mailing, peddling dope to kids in junior high

school. The melodrama doesn't make it any less real.”“Yeah,” Harris said,

glancing uneasily out the rear window, “but could we go a little faster, do

you think?”The road curved gradually eastward now and narrowed as the huge

pines and occasional elms and birches crowded closer—like patrons at a play

getting restless for the last act and the climax of the action. Abruptly, the

trail slid downward again, and the dust dampened and became a thin film of

mud.“Underground stream somewhere nearby,” Tucker said.At the foot of the

hill, the land bottomed for a hundred yards before tipping over another slope.

Here, shrouded by overhanging trees and flanked by thousand-layer shale walls,

the Dodge choked, coughed, rattled like Demosthenes talking around his

mouthful of pebbles and expired with very little grace.“What's the matter?”

Harris asked.Shirillo was not at all surprised, for he'd been expect-ing this

for some time now. He was surprised, though, by his own serenity. “The gas

tank was holed when we turned onto the dirt track,” he told them. “I've been

watching the indicator drop little by little the last half hour—must be a

small hole—but I didn't see any sense in putting everyone on edge until we

were actually empty.”They got out and stood in the small glen where a trace of

early-morning fog still drifted lazily through the trees, a ghost without a

house.Harris slung his machine gun over his left shoulder, by the black

leather strap, and he said, “Well, the road's too damn narrow for them to get

around the Dodge. If we have to walk, so do they.”Tucker said, “We're not

going to walk so long as they're right behind us with a good car.” His tone

left no room for debate. “We'll take that Mustang away from them.”“How?”

Shirillo asked.“You'll see in a minute.” He ran around the nose of the Dodge,

opened the driver's door and threw the shotgun on the seat. He tossed their

rubber masks into the road. Un-springing the handbrake, he put the gear shift

in neutral. “The two of you get behind and push,” he said.They braced opposite

ends of the rear bumper, while Tucker put his shoulder to the doorframe and

walked slowly forward, keeping one hand on the wheel to prevent the car from

wedging against the shale that loomed close on both sides. At the point where

the road began to dip, Tucker picked up the shotgun and leaped out of the way.

“Let her go!”Shirillo and Harris stood back and watched the black car rumble

clumsily down the first few yards of the de-scending trail. As the slope grew

steeper, the car gathered speed, veered to the left. It struck the shale wall,

sparks flying, screeching, went toward the right like an animal seeking

shelter, slammed into the other stone bank, skidded as the trail abruptly

angled down, jolted in a rut they couldn't see from the top of the run. It

started to turn around as if it had had enough and would come back up the

hill, then it gracefully rolled onto its side with a re-sounding crash that

slapped over them like a wave. It slid another two hundred feet before it

stopped, its un-dercarriage facing them.“The conservationists would love us,”

Shirillo said. “We've started our own war on the automobile today— three down

in less than an hour.”“You want them to think we wrecked?” Harris asked. When

Tucker nodded he said, “What about our footprints here in the mud?”“We'll have

to hope they don't notice them.” Half a mile behind them, the steady drone of

the Mustang engine became audible. Tucker picked up the masks and distrib-uted

them, slipped on his own. “Move ass,” he said. “Stay to the side of the road,

by the wall, so the prints going down won't be conspicuous. By the bank, there

should be enough loose shale to hide our trail.” He took off, the others close

behind, the fallen shale shifting under them, damp and slick. Twice Tucker

thought he would fall, but he kept his balance by running faster. They made it

behind the shelter of the overturned Dodge only a mo-ment before the Mustang

appeared at the top of the hill.“What now?” Harris asked. He had unslung the

ma-chine gun.Tucker looked farther down the hill, behind them, saw that the

shale diminished considerably on both sides only a short distance ahead. “Stay

down and follow me,” he said, moving off in a fast duck walk.When they reached

a point where they could get atop the banks that had hedged the trail all the

way down the slope, Tucker looked back to see how visible they were from

above. He couldn't see any of the road beyond the overturned Dodge; good, it

was safe to assume they couldn't be seen, either. He sent Pete Harris to the

left, took Shirillo with him on the right, climbed the now diminutive bank,

slipping once, scraping his knee on loose shale, ignoring the flash of pain

When they were in the woodlands that lay above the road, he looked across and

waved at Harris, who signaled with his machine gun in response. Cautiously,

they made their way back to the spot where the Dodge had flipped on its side,

edged to the brink of the shale walls and looked down.The Mustang was parked

twenty feet above the wreck, doors open. The two men who had been in it moved

warily in on the Dodge, pistols drawn.“Don't move at all,” Tucker told

them.They were good, if surprised, and they listened.“Remove the clips from

your pistols—but keep them pointed at the ground. You're covered from both

sides of the road.”The two men did as they were told, reluctantly but with the

evident resignation of professionals who knew they were cornered. Both were

large in the shoulders, dressed in lightweight summer suits that didn't seem

to belong on them. Gorillas. Figuratively and almost literally. They would

look much more at home in a zoo, railing at visitors through iron bars.“Now,”

Tucker said, “look up at me.”They looked up, shielded their eyes from the

Dean R. Koontz - Blood Risk

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