Surrounded (7 page)

    Monday morning, after Elise had left to attend several interviews for commercial work, Tucker put his real credentials in the living-room closet safe and removed those bearing the Tucker name. Then he went out and caught a cab and went to Radio City Music Hall where he called Clitus Felton from a telephone booth.

    First thing when he phoned back, Felton said, "I'm afraid this is a waste of money."

    "You didn't learn anything?"

    "I asked around. But there wasn't anything to learn."

    "Maybe you didn't ask enough people."

    "I asked everyone I could find. Everyone. Hell, you know how I work, Mike." He sounded hurt that Tucker would question his thoroughness. As inactive as he was these days, his reputation was all that Clitus Felton had, and he guarded it jealously.

    The receiver still pressed to his ear, Tucker sighed loudly and closed his eyes and put his forehead against the phone box and thought about things for a long moment. "Do you happen to know what his last job was?"

    "Oh," Felton said, "Frank worked with that armored car company out in Milwaukee."

    "When was this?"

    "Six months ago."

    "I believe I remember now."

    "You should remember," Felton said. "Frank did extremely well out there."

    "Who were his consultants on that one?" Tucker asked, opening his eyes and staring down at the crushed cigarette butts and chewing-gum wrappers that littered the booth floor.

    "Lindsay, Phillips, Spooner, and Pierce," Felton said, as if he were reading off the name of a high-powered stock brokerage.

    "You talked to each of them?"

    "To Lindsay and Pierce," Felton said. "I couldn't get hold of the other two."

    "What did Lindsay and Pierce have to say?"

    "I already told you, Mike. Nothing. They think Frank's a fine man, a real pro."

    Tucker leaned back away from the phone box, looking at the booth's ceiling now instead of at the filthy floor. "Dammit, I know there's something wrong with him!"

    "Listen," Clitus said, "there is one thing-"

    The long-distance operator interrupted, asking for more money. Felton grumbled, fumbled noisily with a pile of change, fed the machine what she said he must.

    "What one thing?" Tucker asked when the operator cut out of the line.

    "You notice the way Frank talks?" the old man asked.

    "Like a frog."

    "He was treated very badly about two-and-a-half years back. Got mixed up with the wrong crowd-the organized group. You know who I mean?"

    "Italian fellows," Tucker said.

    "Most of them," Felton agreed. "Anyway, he was hurt badly. He was in the hospital more than eight weeks, couldn't talk again for six months. That kind of thing can change a man. It can put some fear into him."

    "This is more than fear," Tucker said.

    "Maybe not," Felton said. "And even if Frank's a little more nervous than he used to be, he's a good man."

    "I guess I'll have to hope you're right," Tucker said.

    Felton said, "If you aren't sure of this, why don't you just; forget it?"

    "Because I'm desperate," Tucker said.

    "Sorry to hear that."

    "It's not your fault," Tucker said. "Good-by, Clitus." He hung up and pushed open the booth door.

    Out on the street again, he flagged down a taxi and gave the driver a Queens' address that was only a few blocks away from his real destination-Imrie's place.

    "I don't like to go out to Queens," the driver said. He was a big, good-looking man with neatly clipped salt-and-pepper hair. He bore a strong resemblance to Peter Lawford, looked more like an executive who had escaped from the corporate grind than like a cabby.

    "You'll get a fifty per cent tip," Tucker said.

    The driver smiled. "Well, that's mighty decent of you. It's about impossible to pick up a return fare from out there. And every minute I ride around empty, I'm losing money."

    "Sure," Tucker said. When they had pulled into the traffic flow, he said, "You always been a cab driver?"

    "About a year now," the driver said, smiling into the rear-view mirror.

    "I'll bet you were a corporation executive."

    "Wrong," the driver said. "I was a physicist with NASA. But everyone stopped caring about the future."

    "Isn't that the truth," Tucker agreed.

    In Queens, when he had paid the driver and watched the cab pull out of sight, Tucker looked at his watch: 12:01. He was anxious to pick up the Skorpions. Once he had those, once he was taking the risk of possessing illegal weaponry, he knew that he would feel more committed to the operation and more sure of himself.

    By 12:45 he had tested the guns in Imrie's basement range and had paid for them. Imrie packed the three Skorpions in an old, battered Samsonite suitcase, added several boxes of ammunition and cushioned everything with old newspapers. Tucker took the suitcase outside, walked four blocks to the bus stop, and caught a bus into Manhattan. In Penn Station he fished a quarter from his pocket and rented a locker, slid the case inside, closed the double-strength door and tested it, then pocketed the red key.

    Shortly after three o'clock, back at the apartment on Park Avenue, he packed a second bag, this one full of his own clothes and toiletries. When he was satisfied that he had not forgotten anything, he sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a notepad and a pen. He wrote a short note to Elise:

    

    A sudden business deal has come up. I'm flying out to San Francisco this afternoon to negotiate the sale of a twelfth-century jade figurine. Northern Sung Dynasty. Should fetch a good price. Should be back in a few days. If not, I'll call.

    

    Love,

    Mike

    

    Displeased by the need to lie, Tucker got up, picked up his suitcase, and left the apartment. Outside, the doorman got a cab for him, and he went back down to Penn Station. He retrieved the Skorpions from the rented locker and caught a late-afternoon train to Philadelphia. That was the first step of a complex, carefully planned journey to Santa Monica, California.

    

    

    Facing the main highway and the Pacific Ocean just beyond, the shopping mall stood on a large chunk of choice real estate. It was approximately three hundred yards on a side, a big square structure of pebbled white concrete and gleaming glass doors. Although the stores inside were all on a single floor, the roof rose in a sweep of fake grass, in imitation of the thatched, peaked top of a South Seas islander's hut. It should have been tasteless. However, the architect had fortunately been a man with some talent and a good eye for harmony. Sheltered by stands of thriving palm trees and well-tended hedgerows, Oceanview Plaza looked cool and pleasant-and decidedly exclusive. There was no gaudy billboard out front, no sign advertising stores and special sales. A single line of parking spaces flanked the tree-shrouded walk in front of the building. On the south side there was only a two-lane drive, no parking spaces whatsoever. Instead, here the land grew jumbled, rocky, and spotted with palms and scrub, dropping to the highway and then down to the glaringly white beach. On the north there was parking for perhaps five hundred cars, which was also the case behind the mall on its east face. Most of the automobiles parked there right now were Cadillacs, Mark-IVs, Thunderbirds, and expensive sports cars.

    "Frank, just look at all these wonderful luxurious cars," Edgar Bates said from the back seat as they approached Ocean view Plaza.

    "What about them?" Meyers asked, braking their own car.

    "Why couldn't you steal us a nice comfortable Cadillac?" Bates asked as their weak-springed, half-rusted station wagon bounced sickeningly from the highway to the mall's entrance drive.

    "I'm truly sorry, Edgar," Meyers said. He was in better form now than he had been back East. "But this was the only one I found that had keys in it."

    The three of them had driven out here in Edgar's rented Pontiac that afternoon, and now they were back in a stolen car, which could not be traced to any of them. If something went wrong and the wagon had to be abandoned in a moment of crisis, it would not be any danger to them. The cops would learn nothing from it. Of course by tomorrow morning it would be a very hot item. That did not matter. They were only going to need it for an hour or two.

    Meyers pulled the slightly battered, peach-colored Oldsmobile into the northside parking area, went past all the Cadillacs, which gleamed in the darkness with purple reflections of the overhead mercury vapor lights. He drove around behind the mall and stopped in a space next to several medium-line Fords, Chevrolets, and cheap foreign imports. "Just like I said," he told the other two. "Here's the employee parking." He pointed straight ahead through the windshield at the mall's rear entrance. "All the clerks and managers will come out of that door."

    Tucker looked at his watch. "Nine-thirty," he said. "They'll be closing in half an hour. We'd better move ass." He opened the Samsonite suitcase that was on the seat between him and Frank Meyers, passed out the Skorpions and the ammunition.

    "Hellish-looking things," Edgar Bates said. Like Tucker, he worked with guns quite often but had never come to trust or like them. "Are you sure we wouldn't be better off carrying a couple of good old-fashioned forty-fives, Mike?"

    "I'm sure," Tucker said without turning around to look at the jugger. "This is best."

    Meyers held his gun below the window level and stared hard at the shadowed lines of it, traced the folded wire stock with his blunt fingers. "Now I see what you meant about psychology, Tucker. Who in the hell would ever try to go up against something this damned ugly?"

    "No one," Tucker said, "I hope."

    "I've never used anything like this before," Bates said. "How does it handle?"

    "Point it and pull the trigger," Tucker said.

    "Really?"

    "How else?"

    "How's the kick?" Bates asked skeptically.

    "Not bad."

    "You've tried one?"

    "I've tried all three," Tucker said.

    "Which way does mine pull-left or right?" Bates asked.

    "It doesn't."

    "Not even a little bit?"

    "No."

    "I've never used a gun that held perfectly steady on the target," the jugger said doubtfully.

    Tucker said, "The fellow who provided these is a first-rate gunsmith. He cleaned these up, even rebored the barrels. The guns are better than new." He was aware of Edgar's nervousness and sympathized with him. He hoped his calm, almost whispered explanations would soothe the older man.

    In the dull violet light that filtered through the windows, they finished loading and pocketed more ammunition. Frank Meyers was breathing too heavily but seemed much improved otherwise. In fact, he seemed too improved in too short a time. Perhaps he was the sort of man who wasted away from inactivity but regained his gloss when he was in the midst of action. Nevertheless, Tucker distrusted sudden personality changes even when he thought he knew the reasons for them.

    "Didn't you have to pass through a metal detector at the airport?" Bates asked, leaning forward from the rear seat. "Didn't they examine your luggage? The way they screen for hijackers these days, I don't see how you could have gotten these things all the way across the country."

    "I took a train to Philadelphia," Tucker said, stuffing the bulky pistol into his waistband and buttoning his loose jacket over it. "Then I hopped a chartered shuttle for Cleveland."

    "And they don't search your baggage on a shuttle flight?" Bates asked.

    "Not on the really small regional airlines," Tucker said. "They don't have the resources or the time."

    Meyers worked his Skorpion under his wide belt, concealed it with his blue-and-white-striped seersucker jacket. "Where did you go from Cleveland?"

    "I took another chartered plane to Kansas City," Tucker said. In Kansas City he had caught the first flight out to Denver, had gone from Denver to Reno on a third plane. In Reno he had boarded a Greyhound bus for the short trip in to San Francisco. "From there I caught another plane down to Los Angeles," he said. "It took a lot longer than a through flight from New York would have taken, but then I couldn't have gotten aboard a through flight with the Skorpions."

    Bates shook his head admiringly. "And you didn't have to pass through a metal detector or open a single suitcase for inspection?"

    "That's right."

    "I think I see why no one ever objects to your being the boss," Meyers said. His voice contained a note of genuine amusement, something of which he had seemed incapable when Tucker had met with him back in New York. Why this change in the man? And how long could it be expected to last?

    Tucker looked at his watch again. "We're wasting time. Is everybody ready?"

    They got out of the car and closed the doors. Edgar Bates put down his briefcaselike satchel full of tools, and they all stripped off the thin cotton gloves they had worn while in the stolen station wagon, putting the gloves into their pockets for use later in the night. The chance of leaving behind an identifiable fingerprint on anything but a just-washed drinking glass was negligible. Television and movies had greatly exaggerated the threat of fingerprint science to the modern criminal. Nevertheless, they took the precaution of wearing gloves. Tucker insisted on it.

    "Well," Meyers said, "shall we go earn a living?"

    

    

    Each face of the Oceanview Plaza building contained an entrance precisely midway in its length. Each set of these heavy glass doors opened onto a wide terrazo-floored corridor where there were shops on both sides. Decorated with rectangular stone planters full of miniature palms and ferns and other tropical plants, the public corridors all converged under the peaked ceiling of the mall's lounge.