Blood risk Read Free Page A

bullets.
        "They're right behind us," Harris said. "Just turned in."
        Both Tucker and Harris stared through the back window, 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 planking 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 sideways 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,