Surrounded (3 page)

    "And I don't think I want to know," Tucker said.

    "Felton deals with me!" Meyers said. His whispery voice now contained a note of pride, a curious dignity that was at odds with his slovenly appearance. "I'm not a loser. I've been in this business all my life. I've been successful at it, too."

    Tucker looked around at the dirty walls, the unswept carpet, the tattered furniture. "If you've been so terribly successful what are you doing in a place like this?"

    Following the younger man's gaze, Meyers seemed to see the apartment for the first time. He coughed, wiped his face with both hands, a man trying to slough off the insubstantial but disconcerting residue of a nightmare. "I have one weakness."

    "Is that right?"

    "Women."

    "That's no weakness."

    "It is with me." Meyers's right hand went to his throat. His blunt fingers traced a series of vague, pale scars that Tucker now saw for the first time. Someone had stomped on his throat, or had opened it with a quick knife. Right now Meyers looked as if he could still feel the flesh parting under the blade. "I get ahead, pull a few good jobs, build up a cushion, figure I don't have any worries… Then I hook up with a woman. And she takes it all away from me. You know how it is. Women are parasites."

    "Maybe yours are," Tucker said. "Mine isn't."

    "Then you're damned lucky," Meyers said. "Mine are always parasites." But there was a false note in his voice, a lack of conviction. He did not sound like a woman hater-or like a man who would let anyone, man or woman, take money away from him. "Look, we aren't here to talk about women. Come back to the kitchen. Give me ten minutes to explain everything. I know you'll want in on this as soon as you understand what it is."

    "I already know what it is," Tucker said sourly. "It's a bank job with especially high risks. I'm not that desperate for money."

    "Sure you are," Meyers said. He chuckled. "If you weren't desperate, you'd be long gone by now. You're small, but you wouldn't let me stop you so easily unless you wanted to be stopped. You'd flip me on my ass and walk out that door. No… You want to hear the whole scheme, but right now you're playing little games so that you can learn more about me."

    Tucker smiled. Meyers was entirely correct, and it was to his credit that he had perceived the situation so clearly. Maybe he was a better man than he appeared to be.

    "Ten minutes?"

    "Okay," Tucker agreed.

    "Let's go out to the kitchen and look at the diagram again." The big man led the way.

    

    Fifteen minutes later Meyers thumped the top of the kitchen table with one clenched fist. "That's the whole plan, every last detail. Smooth as silk. What do you think?"

    "It's extremely clever," Tucker admitted, still studying the whiteprint of Oceanview Plaza, the shopping mall. "But there are a few problems."

    The anxiety returned to Meyers's voice. "Problems?"

    "You don't seem to have given any thought to weapons," Tucker said. "Have you?"

    "We don't need anything fancy." Meyers rubbed his hands together as if he were soaping them under a hot-water spigot. "Each man can supply his own piece."

    "I disagree," Tucker said. "In the first stages of this job you're going to have two professional guards, probably ex-cops, and you're going to have to subdue them quickly. One of them is bound to be a hero type. But he's less likely to become a real threat if he's faced with a gun that intimidates him. The bigger and uglier the guns, the less trouble you'll have with the people on the other end of them. It's just good psychology."

    Meyers continued to lather his hands with invisible soap. "We can't conceal machine guns under our coats."

    "They don't have to be machine guns."

    "What else?"

    "Let me worry about that. I have a good contact. He'll find something suitable."

    Meyers licked his heavy lips. "I didn't expect to have to finance this operation."

    "I'll put up for the guns," Tucker said.

    "Then you're in?"

    Tucker looked at the diagram for a long while, admired the work Meyers had put into it. Then he let his eyes move around the kitchen, from the filthy dishes in the sink to the pair of cockroaches that had come out in the far corner in bold defiance of the human presence. "I'm in-but only if this is my job."

    "It's your job," Meyers said.

    "I don't know if you fully understand me." Tucker began to fold up the diagram of the shopping mall. "I make all the decisions, right down the line."

    Meyers nodded rapidly. He walked quickly to the sink, turned on his heel, leaned against the drainboard, then came away almost at once, paced nervously back to the table as Tucker finished folding the whiteprint. He started lathering his hands again. "Clitus explained how you work. You always have to be in charge of the operation. I accept that."

    "Just so we're straight with each other from the start."

    "I don't mind," Meyers said. "You've got a good reputation, so I trust you. The only thing that really matters is getting a team together, getting the job done." He was growing increasingly agitated, as on edge as he had been when Tucker had first come into the apartment. He wanted badly to get on with the job, wanted to set it up and knock it off as fast as possible. Apparently he needed money even worse than Tucker did. However, he looked as if he required it for something more essential than food, a new apartment, and a new woman. "What kind of split would you want?"

    "A third," Tucker said.

    Meyers winced, turned away, wheeled back again, rubbing his hands together incessantly. "Hey, that's steep."

    "It's the same thing that you'll be getting." Tucker gave him the folded diagram, chiefly to keep him from lathering his hands. "We'll need only one more man for this, and we'll divide the take three ways, even shares for everybody."

    "One more man?"

    "Someone to break the safe, two safes if necessary," Tucker said.

    "But we can't pull this off with less than four or five men," Meyers insisted.

    Tucker smiled. "Just watch us."

    

    

    Imrie's place did not look like an illicit gun shop. It was a three-story brick building on a quiet lower-middle-class street in Queens. Weathered and somewhat soiled, it was also solid and dignified, a respectable neo-Colonial structure from the turn of the century. It shared the block with a neighborhood grocery, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner's, and many narrow well-kept apartment buildings. To add to the image of serenity there were even a few large battered elms shadowing pieces of the street and sidewalks. On the glass door to Imrie's first-floor showroom, gilt lettering read: antiques and used furniture. The antique dealership was mostly a front for the more lucrative gun business.

    Tucker pulled open the heavy door and went inside. A loud buzzer, like the shrill call of a jungle bird, sounded at the rear of the store, softened a bit by the intervening forest of old cane-back chairs, tables, table lamps, sideboards, gramophones, dry sinks, and teetering stacks of other valuable and worthless paraphernalia that Imrie had accumulated.

    Sudden shadows, dark corners, dust, and bare lightbulbs contributed to the decor. Imrie was sitting in an ancient maroon brocade chair in one of the few patches of light, just inside the door.

    "Sorry I took so long," Tucker said. "I had trouble catching a cab, and then the traffic was terrible."

    "It's always terrible," Imrie said, struggling to his feet with a deep groan of real physical distress. He was only five feet six, but he weighed more than two hundred pounds. His physique, his baby-smooth but sly and knowing face, and the crinkly fringe of gray hair that ringed his bald head all made him look like a philandering, vow-breaking medieval friar. He put down a pornographic novel that he had been reading and hitched up his baggy trousers, which tended to settle too far down over his gut. He had been eating cookies, and now he had crumbs on his shirt. Sighing with distaste at his own slovenliness, he brushed away the tiny bits. "Be with you in a minute, Tucker."

    He locked the door and put up the closed sign.

    "How you been?" Tucker asked.

    "Not too good." Imrie drew the blind down behind the front door. "I've got stomach problems." He turned around and slapped his ample belly. "It's this business. Anybody'd get ulcers from it. Too damned many worries." He put his hands on his stomach as if to reassure himself that it was still there. "There was a time not very long ago," he said wistfully, "when a man in my line could go about his work unhampered, when he could be certain of his place in things." This was Imrie's favorite topic for conversation, or rather for monologue. "These days, you have to worry about the anti-gun nuts, the bleeding-heart liberals, the peace fanatics, these mixed-up pacifist kids… They make me feel like a criminal, for Christ's sake."

    If you wanted to do business with Imrie, you were obliged to spend some time listening to his complaints. Trying to sound sympathetic, Tucker said, "I can see where it would ruin your digestion."

    "To say the least." Imrie rubbed his stomach, consoling it. "Thank God the majority of decent Americans understand that we have to have guns to keep this country free. If we didn't have guns, how would we keep the Communists out?" He burped on his cookies, excused himself. "Most people realize that there's nothing foul and fiendish about a man who deals in guns. Look, I'm no degenerate. Most people know that a gun dealer is no more a villain than your local Ford salesman or the friendly neighborhood Good Humor man." He burped again, patted his lips. "Now, Tucker, what can I do for you?"

    "I want three guns. Something ugly enough to terrorize the average citizen. Something that would intimidate a man and keep him from behaving foolishly."

    "Sure," Imrie said, smiling. "I know just what you mean. I can fix you up."

    "I thought you could," Tucker said.

    They walked to the rear of the store along a tight aisle of cupboards, corner desks, bookcases, china closets, and other furniture, all stacked on top of one another, all graced with nearly perfectly preserved isinglass doors. At the back of the room, they went through a tattered yellow curtain, up dimly lighted stairs past the second floor where Imrie lived, and on up to the third level where the fat man kept his guns.

    "I couldn't deliver these today, if that's what you have in mind," Imrie said as they came off the stairs. "They need work done on them."

    "I don't need them today," Tucker said.

    On the third floor, as on the first, the partitions had been knocked out to form one enormous room. But while the first floor contained old furniture, curiosities and antiques, this place housed more deadly merchandise: in excess of two thousand rifles, shotguns, handguns, machine and submachine guns. They were hooked on the white pegboard walls, crammed on wooden and metal wall shelves, tilted against wooden display lifts, laid gently in velvet-lined collector's cases, scattered about the floor, jammed into paper bags. The room also contained metal-working machines, lathes and a small gas-fired forge and cooking pots where metals could be melted down and shaped. Despite the disarray there was no dust up here as there was on the first floor. And all the corners were well lighted. There was an open, airy feeling that the lower level did not have. Quite obviously, it was here at the top of the building where Imrie's heart would remain even if the improbable should come to pass and his antique business should become more profitable than gun dealing.

    "I take it you don't want machine guns," Imrie said. "If you did, you'd have said."

    "Something ugly and impressive-but concealed," Tucker said, measuring an imaginary weapon with his slim hands.

    "Three of them?"

    "That would be best."

    The fat man scratched his shiny skull, ruffled the fringe of gray hair, pursed and unpursed his lips, smiled with sudden inspiration. "Give me a minute or two." He went off to prowl through his haphazardly stored collection. Five minutes later he called Tucker over to the main workbench. "Here's what I can let you have," he said, carefully aligning three guns on the top of the bench.

    They were fairly well matched heavy black automatic pistols with folding wire stocks that could be swung back to transform them into moderately efficient submachine guns. At the moment, all the stocks were clamped forward over the barrels; however, the pistols looked nonetheless deadly in this compacted shape.

    "These are perfect," Tucker said, lifting one of the guns, testing its weight on his flat palm. "I've never seen anything like this before."

    "It's a Czech Skorpion," Imrie said fondly.

    "World War Two?"

    "Sure."

    "Looks like a thirty-eight," Tucker said.

    "No. Just a thirty-two." Imrie picked up one of the others. "But it isn't a lady's weapon, believe you me. It packs more wallop than any other thirty-two-caliber piece ever made."

    As gently as if he were handling a mean-tempered poisonous snake, Tucker turned the pistol over in his hands, examining it from every angle. Heavy, well defined, cast with many rich planes, the piece looked especially wicked and even alien, almost like something from the lurid cover of an old science-fiction magazine. Though inanimate, it radiated a chilling animal malevolence, a tangible and exciting evil. Because he was basically a non-violent man who operated in a violent business, Tucker was able to assess the weapon from the viewpoints of both the professional and the victim. From either perspective the Skorpion passed muster.

    "Nice work," Imrie said.

    "Yes."