The driver stopped the Mustang when its front bumper was a foot from the underside of the overturned Dodge. His window was rolled down, and he leaned out and said, "Now what?"
"Move it ahead until you feel it make contact."
The driver didn't ask questions. When a solid thunk proved he'd obeyed, he leaned out his window again and waited to hear the next part of it. While the man standing against the wall across the road seemed unable to comprehend what was happening, the driver knew what Tucker wanted. He was going to wait for Tucker to say it just the same.
Tucker hunkered down at the top of the bank, brushed away a swarm of gnats that rose out of the grass at his feet, pointed the shotgun at the driver's face. "I want you to put the gas to it, slowly, build up the pressure until something happens. The Dodge isn't wedged tight. It should slide loose. The moment it's moved enough for you to squeeze your heap past it, do just that."
"And if I keep going?" the driver asked. He smiled as if this were a joke between them, and he had very nice teeth.
"We'll shoot out your tires, blow out the back window, very likely put half a dozen slugs in the back of your head-and possibly blow up your gas tank." He smiled back; his own teeth weren't bad, either.
"I thought so," the driver said. He eased his foot down on the accelerator.
For a moment nothing much happened. As the engine noise built into a scream, a ring-necked pheasant took off from the brush behind Tucker and Shirillo, startling the boy but not the older man. The Mustang's bumper popped a bolt and crunched back onto the grill. Still, the engine noise climbed. The driver was gritting his good teeth, aware that the Dodge might tilt the wrong way, that he might slip off it and careen into the shale wall himself.
Then the Dodge began to creak and give. A section of the shale broke loose from the wall and crashed down over the ruined automobile, rained on the Mustang, clattered at the feet of the gorilla who stood against the far wall, above the, wreck. Then the big car twisted sideways, its roof coming around flat against the shale wall across the road. The driver of the Mustang pulled his car through the opening, badly scraping the whole length of his side against the rock. He stopped where he was supposed to, opened his door and got out.
"Come back up here," Tucker said. He hadn't been sure that the Dodge would move, but now he showed no surprise. Tucker was never surprised. It would have damaged his reputation if he had been.
The driver came back, stood beside his companion and looked very disgusted with himself. He had a right. However, unlike the other gorilla, he didn't try to tell them that they wouldn't get away with it. He looked at his dusty shoes, wiped each of them against the back of a trouser leg and did a good job of pretending boredom.
"Where's this road go?" Tucker asked. While he held the shotgun on them, Harris went downslope to the place where he'd climbed the bank, gained the road again and walked back up toward them.
"Nowhere," the driver said.
"It's a dead end?"
"Yeah."
The smaller of Baglio's men, the one who hadn't had enough sense to keep quiet before, looked at the driver quizzically, then smiled and looked up at Tucker. His face might as well be a blackboard with a huge, chalked message on it. "You're never going to get out of here. Mr. Baglio will get you sooner or later, 'cause this is a dead end."
The driver looked scornfully at the other man, spat on the road and sighed, leaned back against the shale wall,
"Is he Baglio's son-in-law, or something?" Tucker asked the driver.
"No," the driver said. "But help's not easy to get these days."
The smaller gorilla blinked stupidly, looked from one to the other. "Son-in-law?" he asked.
When they were all in the Mustang and Jimmy Shirillo had pulled away from the wreck and the two gunmen, Harris said, "Obviously, it's not a dead end at all."
"Go to the front of the class," Tucker said.
Harris's goblin mask hung below his chin like a second face in the middle of his chest, bobbing when he talked. "A dead end would be bad, but this is something worse, so why go on?"
"Because we can't go back," Tucker said. "Obviously Baglio knows we're on this road and has the other end sealed up. But we might come to something else before we run into the roadblock."
"Like what?"
"I couldn't say, but I'll know it when I see it."
At the beginning of May, when the trees were just greening and the summer ahead seemed devoid of any job possibilities, a letter had arrived at Tucker's midtown Manhattan mail drop, sealed in a white envelope with no return address. He had known that it was from Clitus Felton before he opened it, since he was accustomed to receiving letters like it on the average of ten times a year. Half that often they contained something worthwhile. Clitus Felton, despite his unlikely name, earned his way as a contact point between freelancers on the East Coast, operating out of a small specialty bookshop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Once he had been in the business himself, expertly planning and executing two or three substantial jobs a year. But age had gotten to him-as had his wife, Dotty, who was afraid that the amazing Felton luck was soon going to be stopped by a cop's bullet or a long stretch behind walls. However, a bookshop wasn't enough to keep Felton interested in life. He was only six months behind the counter when he began to contact old friends and offer his middle-man service. He kept names, aliases and addresses all in his head, and when someone contacted him about a perfect job with a need for the proper partners, Felton considered the possibilities, wrote a few letters and tried to help out. For a percentage. Usually five, if the job worked out as expected. Vicarious crime. He lived for it.
This latest letter had intrigued Tucker. He placed a couple of telephone calls, got the information that couldn't be trusted to the mails and flew to Pittsburgh, from Kennedy International, to meet with Jimmy Shirillo.
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."