Surrounded (9 page)

    Meyers stiffened.

    The two watchmen opened the warehouse door and walked inside. They were both about six feet, both middle-aged men who had retired after twenty years on a real police force, both of them going to flab and both a great deal slower to react than they once had been. They were so engrossed in the dirty story one of them was telling that neither was immediately aware of the presence of the three intruders. They took half a dozen steps into the room before they realized there was something wrong. Then, just at the punch line, they looked up and froze, shocked at the sight of three men with automatic weapons.

    "Take it easy," Tucker said in a reassuringly mellow voice. "Don't go for your guns."

    The guards blinked stupidly. They still did not get it. They had evidently been off a regular police force more than a few months. They were acting like amateurs.

    "If you try for a gun," Meyers said, leveling the Skorpion, "I'll have to blow your brains out." In his gravel-toned voice, the threat sounded genuine.

    With that, they were committed. They were in it too deep now to just walk away and forget the whole thing. They had gained control of Oceanview Plaza without spilling a drop of blood, just as Frank Meyers had promised. It was easy. Indeed, it seemed almost too easy. Tucker was worried about that.

    

    

    Morose as a pair of slack-faced hound dogs, the watchmen were sitting on the floor, their shoulders against the wall, legs straight out in front of them. Their hands were bound behind their backs, ankles securely tied together with strong copper wire Edgar Bates had produced from his battered black satchel full of safecracking tools.

    The largest of the guards, who was two inches taller and fifteen pounds flabbier than his companion, was a florid man in his late forties or early fifties. Beneath the beer belly and the glowing nose of the quasi-alcoholic, he looked grizzled and mean. His eyes were bracketed by hard folds of flesh, and laugh lines slashed his drooping cheeks like sword wounds. Tucker thought the man had probably been a high school football jock in his day, a combat soldier, and a real sonofabitch in a police uniform. Like most of his type, a large part of his hard-nosed image would be a bluff. However, deep inside somewhere he would have that peculiar, violent, dangerous American sense of machismo. Because of that he might do something foolish. He looked up at Tucker as Bates put away what was left of the roll of copper wire, and he said, "You won't get away with this, you little bastard."

    Tucker smiled. "You watch a lot of television, don't you? You have your lines down just pat."

    The watchman colored. He narrowed his eyes and made a tight, grim line of his mouth. "I've got your face filed away. I have absolutely every detail of it memorized. Hell, I have all of your faces memorized."

    His Skorpion casually pointed at the man's face, Frank Meyers stepped forward, a singularly menacing presence with his horror-movie voice. "You're pretty damn dumb," he said nastily, meeting the guard's hostile stare.

    "He'll be okay," Tucker said, quickly dismissing Meyers before the watchman could respond and exacerbate the situation. Tucker could sense an almost natural antagonism between these two men. They were the sort who seemed to react chemically from the moment of first contact, the sort who would be at one another's throats with little provocation. And that could not be allowed. He knelt down beside the guard and smiled at him. "Which one are you-Chet or Artie?"

    Both of the watchmen were surprised. "How'd you know our names?" the mean one demanded.

    Tucker sighed. "I stood at that door and listened to everyone in the mall say good night to you."

    The ex-cop was disgusted with himself for not figuring it out right away.

    "Which are you?" Tucker insisted quietly.

    "Chet," the mean one said.

    The important thing, Tucker knew, was to soothe Chet's battered pride, doctor his bruised machismo. The less like a fool that Chet felt, the more cooperative he would be. "Chet, I know you're not the kind of man who takes this sort of thing easily. You're not used to letting anyone get the jump on you. But now it's happened, and you have to make the best of it. My friend here," he said, pointing to Frank Meyers, "will be right out in the corridor watching over the east exit. Every once in a while he'll look in on you. He will not want to see you struggling to get loose. You don't want to make him nervous. There isn't any reason for anyone to get killed here tonight."

    Chet glared at him but said nothing. His mouth just got tighter, his eyes narrower.

    "No one's going to think less of you because you let us pull this thing off," Tucker said patiently. "You were completely surprised. Hell, anyone would have been surprised. You did everything right. But we had machine guns. And there were more of us than there were of you…"

    The watchman seemed to relax slightly. Some of the stiffness went out of him, and his lips took on color again. He stopped straining so steadily against his wire bonds.

    Tucker looked at the second man. He was only fractionally less physically formidable than Chet, but he had none of the other man's inner fire. He was pale and obviously frightened. "You don't see any reason to get yourself killed, do you, Artie?" Tucker asked.

    "No," Artie said.

    "Good for you," Tucker said.

    Chet gave the other man a cool look. Then he looked at Tucker again and said, "The way I have your faces memorized, the police will be able to work up a good composite drawing of you. Your faces will be plastered in every station house in the country. You'll never get away with this. Never."

    "Maybe you're right," Tucker said, getting to his feet.

    "I am. You'll see."

    "We'll just have to take our chances."

    "You got no chances," Chet said. But he was not genuinely belligerent now. He was merely playing out a role, winding up a performance.

    "It's twenty minutes to eleven," Edgar Bates said. "Those bank people aren't going to work all night. We'd better get going."

    Tucker saw the watchmen exchange a curious glance at the mention of "bank people," but he supposed they were so dull-witted that they were only now realizing what was to be robbed. "Come on," he said, leading Meyers and Bates out of the storage room.

    Frank remained behind in the east corridor to watch over the doors through which they would shortly leave Oceanview Plaza and to see that the watchmen remained out of action.

    Tucker and Bates hurried quietly up the hall, past Surf and Subsurface, past the Rolls Royce salesroom, the bar… In the mall lounge the fountain was still splashing, dancing on the surface of the deep pool. Evidently the water was turned off by a set of controls in the warehouse-controls that Chet and Artie had not had the opportunity to use. That was good. The splashing water covered any unintentional noise they might make. Standing by the fountain, Tucker could look down each of the other three corridors, which were well lighted and deserted. At the end of each hall the glass doors were shut. Inside the mall, three feet behind each set of those glass doors, steel-bar gates had been rolled out of the ceiling and locked into baseboard bolt holes. No one could come in or go out of those three entrances.

    "It's just like Frank described it, down to every detail," Bates said. "I'm feeling better by the minute."

    Tucker thought of the plain dark wood door and the mall's business office that lay behind it, thought of that single detail that had not been on Meyers's diagram… Then he shrugged off the unwarranted feeling that something was not altogether right. It was useless to worry until something went wrong. And nothing was going to go wrong. The whole operation was going to tick along like a clockwork mechanism.

    They turned left from the lounge and the fountain and entered the south corridor of the mall. On their right was the House of Books and Sasbury's, one of the building's two largest clothing stores. On the left was Young Maiden, Harold Leonardo Furriers, Accent Jewelry, and finally the Countryside Savings and Loan Company where most of the stores deposited their daily cash intake and where shoppers kept personal checking accounts against the times when they had overcharged their store credits.

    Having learned from experience that the bold approach was almost always the best, Tucker and Bates intended to walk right up to the bank and take it over, subdue the late-working manager and his assistant without any skulking around. But it was not going to be that easy. The sliding glass panels that fronted the bank were closed and locked. Inside, the darkness was relieved only by two blue night lamps above the vault door and immediately behind the short row of tellers' cages. No manager or assistant manager was diligently toiling away after hours. The bank was deserted.

    "Christ," Bates said miserably. "They probably work late every Wednesday night, month in and month out-until tonight."

    Tucker pressed his face to the glass and carefully examined the unlighted room beyond. There was definitely not anyone in there. Meyers had said that the front doors would be open and that maybe even the vault itself would be standing wide. He had said there would be only two meek bank officers to be dealt with. And here it was, empty, closed up tight. "You'll have to do it the hard way, Edgar."

    "Blow this safe as well as the one at the jewelry store."

    "And circumvent two sets of alarms."

    "I thought this might be, for once, an easy job," the old jugger said, obviously delighted that the challenge was greater than he had anticipated. He was in his element. He was no longer nervous. Putting down his satchel, slipping on the pair of thin cotton gloves, he peered at the glass panels where they joined, studied this transparent barrier that separated them from the bank. "I'll bet there's an alarm in these, too."

    "You shouldn't have to worry about that," Tucker said.

    "Oh?"

    "Either Chet or Artie will have the keys."

    "To the bank?"

    "They'd have to have keys in case a fire started in one of the stores." Tucker grinned at the jugger's sudden frown. "Don't worry, Edgar. They won't have the vault combination. You'll still have plenty of work to do."

    Bates blushed. "Well, I was merely-"

    Off in another part of the mall five shots were fired in rapid succession.

    

    

    When Tucker ran out of the south corridor and into the public lounge under the peaked ceiling, he saw that Frank Meyers was not down at the east exit where he was supposed to be. The hall was empty. Tucker knew at once where to look: at the opposite end of the building from the warehouse and the two disabled watchmen-at that one room Meyers had left out of the diagram. He ran past the fountain into the west corridor. He passed Henry's Gaslight Restaurant, the House of Books, a clothing store for teen-agers, a shoe importer, a florist, Craftwell Gifts… Breathing hard, his heart pounding like a sledge on an anvil, he slid to a stop outside of the half-open door of the mall's business office.

    "Frank?" He stood warily out of the line of fire but covered the doorway with his Skorpion.

    "In here," the familiar hoarse voice answered.

    "What's wrong?"

    "It's over."

    "You okay?"

    "Yeah." Meyers sounded in the best of spirits as he approached the door on the other side and pulled it open. "It's finished. Come in."

    "You bastard," Tucker said. "This was planned, wasn't it? You were after someone, weren't you?"

    Meyers grinned. "And I got him."

    Confused and angry, Tucker pushed past him into the room. This was the outer office, a reception area. The walls were cream-colored, the carpet a deep forest green, the furniture all dark and heavy and vaguely Mediterranean. Three good oil paintings caught his eye, held it for a moment.

    In the center of the room an extremely pretty young woman sat behind an enormous desk. She was in her late twenties, with a dusky Italian complexion and thick black hair that fell to her shoulders. She was terrified. Her brown eyes were open wide. She was sitting as stiff as a statue. Her hands were on the blotter in front of her where Meyers had probably told her to keep them, and the long fingers were knotted like trysting worms, the knuckles white.

    "Who's she?" Tucker asked.

    "His secretary," Meyers said.

    "Whose secretary?"

    Meyers pointed at the open door to the inner office.

    Tucker went in and looked at the dead men. One of them was on the floor to the right of the desk, the focal point of a widening pool of blood. In his hand he had a gun he had not used, and he looked like the bodyguard type. Another dead man was sitting in a swivel chair behind the desk. He was about fifty years old, thickset and ugly. He had two holes in his chest and one in his neck, and he was grinning at Tucker.

    Tucker felt sick. He wanted to turn and cut Meyers down as the big man had done with these two. But he was incapable of that, just as he would have been incapable of the senseless murders Meyers had just committed.

    He turned away from the carnage, for he could not look at a dead man without suffering intimations of his own mortality. Facing Meyers, struggling to keep his anger and disgust in check, he said, "Who was he?"

    "Rudolph Keski," Meyers said. "The other one was his protection. Some protection." He laughed. Tucker winced.

    "Why did you want him?" Tucker's voice was low and cold. No one should have had to die.

    "Keski gave me this voice," Meyers said. "He put me in the hospital for months." For the first time he realized that Tucker didn't take killing quite so lightly as he did. Now Meyers was trying to justify himself.