Surrounded (18 page)

    "Especially after what's happened," Tucker whispered.

    "If they don't?"

    "We'll worry about that later."

    Meyers remained in the shadows in front of Shen Yang's, out of sight of anyone who might walk up the east corridor from the mall's warehouse. Planting his feet wide apart to give himself good balance, he gripped his Skorpion in both hands, held it across his broad chest, and settled down for a long wait.

    Stepping across the lounge to stand in the darkened entranceway to Young Maiden on the other flank of the east corridor, Tucker and Bates also took up the vigil.

    

    At 5:30, Chet and Artie came out of the warehouse and started up the corridor toward the lounge. They were arguing about the way the police had handled things, and from the spirited way they were going at each other it was obvious that they did not expect any more trouble.

    Meyers raised one hand.

    Tucker nodded affirmatively.

    When the two watchmen reached the lounge and stepped out of the hall, Meyers moved in on their right and Bates covered them on the left, pinning them between the two Skorpions.

    "If you go for your guns," Tucker said, "you're both dead. You played it cool and smart the first time. Don't be foolish now."

    The quiet one, Artie, groaned. "Hey… Hey, I feel like I'm having the same nightmare over and over."

    Chet was too enraged to speak. He spluttered at them and nearly choked on his anger, half raised one fist in a useless threat that impressed no one.

    Tucker walked around behind them to pick the revolvers out of their holsters. "Be cool now."

    "Little bastard," Chet said, finally regaining his voice.

    Tucker was reaching for Artie's gun when he heard a strange guttural sound behimd him. Odd as it was, he knew immediately the source of it. That damned police dog was loose.

    

    

    The German shepherd, which had been trained to follow well behind the night watchmen, had come out of the open warehouse door and was running for all its great strength, rapidly closing the distance between them. Its ears were pinned flat against its skull, and its long tail curved between its hind legs. The carpet gave the brute excellent purchase and considerably softened the sound of its thumping paws.

    Tucker turned completely around to face it and automatically swung up the Skorpion. But he hesitated, remembering what a friend in the business had once told him about guard dogs…

    Two years before Tucker had hooked up with three other men to knock over a major department store for its cash receipts on the last shopping day before Christmas. In the middle of that robbery one of the other men, an all-around professional named Osborne, had been attacked by a trained mutt. Using only his bare hands, he had quickly and efficiently killed it without sustaining a single tooth or claw mark. It was necessary, after that job, for them to hole up at an abandoned farmhouse for several days, and during that time Osborne explained to Tucker how to handle any dog. Osborne had learned his stuff in the army, where he had also learned to kill men, and he had not minded passing it along to Tucker.

    The dog was less than two hundred feet away.

    Most certainly this dog was not a killer. After all, it was trained to follow the guards and to be available in emergencies. Like this one. Nevertheless, Tucker had to deal with it as if it were a killer. It would worry him until it was either dead or badly hurt, and it might sow enough confusion to let Chet and Artie get control of the situation. Men had educated it in violence, had corrupted it, and now it was going to have to pay for its unwanted and unsought knowledge.

    "Look out!" Edgar shouted.

    Even as the jugger involuntarily cried out, Meyers said, "For Christ's sake, shoot!" Neither he nor Bates was in a position to use his Skorpion without killing the watchmen and Tucker, too. "Shoot!"

    According to Len Osborne, any gun you could name was useless against a well-trained guard dog. For one thing, a dog was too small a target, especially when it was coming at you head-on. Even a big shepherd was too damned narrow to get a sight on. Furthermore, it was too compact, vicious, and fast. Even a superior marksman would not have time to aim properly and squeeze off a shot before the dog was at his arm or throat. Shooting from the hip, figuratively speaking, without benefit of aiming, provided little accuracy. You might as well throw sticks, Osborne had said.

    Tucker dropped the Skorpion and heard Bates cry out. I hope this wetsuit doesn't slow me up, Tucker thought. If it did, he was dead, or at least badly mauled. And even if the dog held him without hurting him, he was certain to spend a long time in jail.

    There was only one moment, Osborne had said, when a dog was vulnerable: when it was in the air, after it had jumped, in the final seconds before it struck. Until that moment, it was totally mobile and could attack or evade or change its mind in an instant. But once it was committed, when it was in the air, launched at its victim, it was relatively defenseless. Its teeth were not yet within striking range, and its claws were harmless while it was in flight. Its front paws were tucked weakly back and would not spring forward and unsheath their claws until the bare instant before contact. If you moved quickly and surely enough… If you leaped forward to intercept instead of backing away from it, you could grab one of those front paws, twist it as you would a man's arm, let yourself fall to the ground, and throw the beast over your head just as hard as you could manage. Its own momentum would ensure that it would fall fairly far off and that it would hit the ground with considerable impact. At the very least, it would be badly stunned, too confused to attack again immediately. More likely than not, one of its legs would break. A cripple was no threat. And if you tossed it right, the neck would snap or the spine would splinter like a stick of dry wood.

    These things flicked through Tucker's mind, each part of the lesson like a silhouette against the strong light of fear. Then there was no time to recall any more of Osborne's advice because the shepherd jumped at him.

    Against all instinct, Tucker stepped into it, grabbed desperately for one of the animal's forelegs, closed his hand around the bone and muscle and fur, twisted, fell, and threw. He saw a fierce, wall-eyed face, bared fangs… He was certain his timing could not be right, though his body evidenced a natural timing in the maneuver.

    There were shouts behind him.

    Also behind him, something crashed heavily to the floor.

    Rolling against the corridor wall, pushing away from it with both hands, Tucker scrambled to his feet. He was breathing hard, and his shoulders hurt like hell; but so far he did not think that he was bleeding. Not much, anyway. He looked toward the others and saw that they had made room for the shepherd, which was struggling to stand on its shattered foreleg. It snapped at the air and glared with bloodshot eyes at Tucker. Then it made a strange, pathetic mewling sound and rolled over on its side and died. Though. to a lesser extent than he had when he discovered Meyers' victims in the mall office, Tucker felt sick to his stomach.

    For a long moment, stunned by the sudden violence, no one spoke. They stared at the dead shepherd, watching the blood spread out around it. Though they had all witnessed its demise, the entire episode seemed unreal.

    "Whew!" Meyers said finally.

    Tucker wiped his face, came away with a hand sheathed in sweat. "Whew!" he agreed.

    Edgar Bates said, "Where on earth did you learn to do a thing like that?"

    They all stared at him, even the two watchmen, interested in his answer.

    "Milwaukee," Tucker said.

    "Milwaukee?" Bates asked.

    "Spent Christmas Day with an ex-commando officer."

    "But you never did it before?"

    "Only in my mind, theoretically," Tucker said. He bent over and picked up the Skorpion, which he had thrown aside when he recalled Osborne's advice. "Let's tie up Chet and Artie here so we can get out of this damned place."

    "I'm for that," Meyers said.

    As Tucker relieved the watchmen of their guns, Chet said, "You won't get away with this."

    Tucker burst out laughing.

    

    

    Frank Meyers could not see why they had to go out of the mall through the storm drain. With the claustrophobe's classic expression of fear, his face deeply lined with apprehension and downright terror, he gazed into the black hole in the warehouse floor and shook his head. "It doesn't make sense to me. Why don't we just walk out the door, like we came in?"

    "It's ten minutes after six in the morning," Tucker explained patiently. "It's almost broad daylight. If the cops left a squad car behind to cover the Plaza, they'll spot us the minute we step outside."

    "It's a chance we shouldn't take," Edgar Bates said. Even now, despite all that had gone wrong with other aspects of the job, he was floating along on the memory of his successes.

    Meyers frowned, as if he felt they were ganging up on him without reason. "You think the cops would stake this place out after they searched it and came up empty handed?"

    "Yes," Tucker said.

    "Why?" Meyers asked. "Why would they?"

    "Kluger's the type to cover all bets," Tucker said. "I wouldn't even be surprised if he was out there himself."

    "Well," Meyers said, scratching his chin and thinking it over, "you haven't been wrong about anything you've done."

    "That's right."

    He stopped scratching his chin. "So… I guess I'll go down the drain with you."

    "You don't have to phrase it quite as pessimistically as that," Tucker said, smiling.

    "We're home free," Bates said.

    Tucker said, "Not yet."

    Meyers sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. "You think this Kluger might have put a man on the end of this drain pipe, even after the mall search failed?"

    "If I thought that," Tucker said, "we wouldn't be going out this way."

    "Well, then, aren't we home free, like Edgar said?"

    "I just don't like to hear a lot of talk about how we're out of it-until we really are out of it." He fished in his jacket pocket and found a roll of Life Savers. "Lime," he told them. "Anybody want one?"

    Neither Bates nor Meyers wanted one.

    Tucker popped the circlet into his mouth, put the roll into his pocket, then sat down on the edge of the drain and jumped down into the pipe. He turned and reached up to Bates who handed down the two large waterproof sacks that contained the bank bags full of money and uncut stones. The jugger followed, then Meyers.

    They had two flashlights, which drove back the darkness and the centipedes, and they reached the end of the tunnel in only three or four minutes. Meyers greeted the first sight of the exit with a loud sigh of relief.

    Sunlight slanting in behind them flooded the erosion gully and made the scrub land look washed out and dead. It stung their eyes and robbed them of the cover of night for the remainder of their escape route. But it plainly showed that there were no police hidden behind any of the boulders.

    Weary, stiff, and sore, the three of them climbed out of the drain and down the gully wall, dragging the two big sacks with them. Tucker called a halt at the boulders behind which the three cops had taken refuge last night, and he said, "We'll bury the Skorpions here."

    Meyers glanced quickly at the brush and the scattered palms, looked back in the direction of Oceanview Plaza, which was hidden from them by the rising land. "What if we need them?"

    "We won't," Tucker said.

    They scooped up the soft earth and laid the pistols in the depression they had made, then shoved the loose dirt over them.

    "What if they find them?" Meyers asked. He seemed ready to exhume his own gun.

    "So what if they do?" Tucker asked.

    "They'll trace them."

    "No."

    "You sure?"

    "Come on," Tucker said wearily. "Let's move ass."

    They continued along the gully, considerably slowed and burdened by the two sacks of money and gems but not in the least displeased to have to bear them. The six- and seven-foot banks on both sides kept them from being seen by anyone to the north or the south, while only empty land lay behind them. And the closer they got to the highway, the more they were hidden from the cars rushing up and down the coast, for the erosion channel dropped even deeper and fed into another man-sized drainage tunnel under the roadbed. They dragged the sacks through the drain and came out on the far side of the highway, on the last of the gentle hills above the beach.

    The air was pleasantly tangy with elemental odors.

    Sea gulls soared in from the whitecaps, crying shrilly and dancing on the air currents.

    "The ocean's beautiful this morning," Edgar Bates said as he followed the other two out of the drain.

    Although he ached in every muscle and joint, and although his eyes felt grainy and his mouth tasted of rubber, Tucker looked out at the rolling sea and the endless sky, and he had to agree. "It sure is," he said.

    They crabbed down the slopes to the beach and turned south through the soft yellow-white sand. In less than five minutes they came to a paved beach-access road. Above them now, overhanging the beach, were expensive glass, chrome, and redwood houses that glinted in the early-morning sunlight.

    "We'll need a car," Tucker said. He turned to Meyers. "Think you can find one up there?"

    "Sure."

    "Take your time."

    "Five minutes."

    "Take your time," Tucker repeated. "We don't want to blow it all now, not after what we've been through."