by Dean Koontz
"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.
The core of the building was this circular lobby of slightly more than a hundred-foot diameter, with its dark wood paneling and its sloped ceiling coming to a dramatic point fifty feet overhead. There were padded benches here where weary shoppers could pause and regain their strength. Full-length mirrors were set at regular intervals in the walls, a convenient place to check, surreptitiously as one walked past them, that one's appearance was, indeed, impeccable. The lounge contained more planters and plants than did the corridors, providing a fresh, natural, relaxing atmosphere. In the very center of the lounge there was a deep pool, another circle, this one about forty feet in diameter. It was sided with lavalike stone and low green ferns. Hundreds of jets of water fountained out of hidden nozzles in those stones, made patterns in the air, rained down on the surface of the pool with a soft shushing sound. A colorful free-standing signboard nearby informed the casual shopper that a world-famous novelty diving act would perform in the mall daily during the following week. Apparently, even exclusive shopping centers full of the most expensive shops needed to run an occasional promotional stunt.
Tucker sat on one of the benches, hands folded on his lap to make sure his coat didn't stretch tight across the outlines of the Skorpion. When they had first come into the building through the east doors, the three men had split up for tactical reasons. Now, as he waited for the proper moment to rejoin Meyers and Bates at their prearranged rendezvous point, he watched the flow of commerce around him.
Only four places of business were situated so that their fronts faced out on the lounge and the fountain. On the northeast quarter of the circular chamber stood Shen Yang's Orient, an import shop with windows full of handsome ivory and jade art, hand-woven carpets, and hand-carved screens. Nothing in Shen Yang's Orient bore a price tag, which meant it was all very dignified and priced at three times its real retail value. Only a few shoppers were poking around in the oriental shop, and the Japanese proprietor was already beginning to close up for the day. On the northwest side of the lounge Henry's Gaslight Restaurant, a favorite place for luncheons and early dinners in Santa Monica, had served its last desserts and was politely but firmly saying good-by to its customers. On the southwest side the House of Books was still fairly busy, even though the manager had begun to turn out a few of the lights at the back of the store. This was, as far as Tucker had ever seen, the only large bookstore outside of New York that handled no paperbacks, that dealt solely in the more expensive hard covers and higher-priced gift books.
Behind him, on the southeast corner of the lounge, Young Maiden, a clothing store for the tradition-bound girl, had closed its doors after its last customer.
Those four stores were indicative of the state of the remaining fifteen. Only a handful of shoppers yet prowled the mall. Shortly, there would be none. The clerks and managers would leave, too. And the job could begin at last.
It was going to work. The operation had sounded like the ravings of a madman when Frank Meyers first began to talk about it. It was too risky, too dangerous. But it was going to work.
It had to work.
Aside from the fact he needed the money, Tucker could not endure failure. He was neurotic about success. He took a job only when he felt he could pull it off. If he failed, even once, he would play into his father's hands, which bothered him more than the idea of spending ten years in federal prison.
Only one thing marred his cultured optimism. He had seen a room that was not on Meyers's diagram. In the west corridor at the front of the mall there was a dark wood door labeled: oceanview plaza business office. He knew the existence of this office in no way affected their plans, yet he was bothered by Meyers's omission of it on the master whiteprint. Why overlook this one detail?
He looked at his wristwatch, decided it was time to move. Rising, adjusting his jacket to be sure that it continued to conceal the Skorpion, he walked back the eastern corridor down which he had come when they had first entered the mall. On the left was a Rolls-Citroën-Maserati-Jaguar dealership, a gleaming showroom full of elegant automobiles. Beyond that was Surf and Subsurface, a tasteful and richly appointed sporting-goods store-surfboards and aqualungs on lush Freeport carpet, shotguns displayed in a blue-velvet-lined case-which made Abercrombie amp; Fitch appear positively plebeian by comparison. On his right was the Toolbox Lounge, where the help was even now gently but insistently saying good-by to its last high-society drunkard. Beyond the bar was the entrance to the mall warehouse and maintenance center. It was here that Tucker opened a gray door marked employees only and stepped out of the corridor.
Meyers and Bates were waiting with drawn Skorpions. Tucker said, "Don't shoot."
"What's it like out there?" Meyers asked, lowering the gun.
"They're closing up."
The big man smiled. "Right on schedule."
"Frank, I looked the place over, and I've been wondering why you didn't include the mall office on your diagram." He watched Meyers closely.
"Didn't I?" Meyers asked. "Just an oversight."
Intuitively, Tucker knew that it was more than that, but he saw no way or no real reason to pursue the issue. He liked Meyers's new personality, this more competent version. He didn't want to do anything that would bring back the New York City slob.
"We only have to wait," Bates said, wiping perspiration from his wide forehead. He was never comfortable on a job until he was working on a safe, applying his skill. Then he was steady, self-assured, altogether at ease. "Just wait," he repeated.
"I hope that's all," Tucker said.
The warehouse wa
s as large as any store in the mall, larger than most of them. It was fully four hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. Just inside the door stood a scarred workbench, a heavy-duty vise, a jigsaw, and all the other tools the maintenance men would need to keep the building in good repair. The remainder of the room was given over to storage. The floor was marked off into nineteen sections of varying size, one for each of the retail outlets in the mall, and every section was stacked with cartons, crates, and drums of goods that would eventually be taken via electric-powered carts and fork lifts to the many stores under this one roof. Those electric vehicles were parked in a row beside barrels of cleaning compounds and floor waxes. Two corrugated steel garage doors, each as high as the room and wide enough to admit the back end of a large truck, were set in the east wall. The warehouse had no windows. With the garage doors closed and dogged down tight, as they were now, all light came from fluorescent tubes framed in sheet-metal reflectors twenty feet overhead. This cold, blue-white glare, combined with the cinder-block walls and plain cement floor, too closely resembled the decor of hospitals and prisons. It made Tucker decidedly ill at ease.
Tucker looked at his watch.
"Ten o'clock on the nose," said Bates, who had looked at his own watch in chorus with Tucker. "Fifteen or twenty minutes and we should be able to move." He looked at Meyers. "Are you certain there aren't maintenance men on duty now?"
Meyers laughed softly and slapped the smaller man on the back. The sound of that gentle blow whispered back from the ceiling and the cold cement walls. "Have I been wrong about anything else? Look, the maintenance men work a regular nine-to-five shift. They're long gone. No one's going to walk in on us unexpectedly."
Bates ran one strong, stubby-fingered hand through his white hair and tried to smile. But he could not manage anything more than a pained grimace. "Don't mind me," he said. "I've never been much good at waiting around."
Taking the Skorpion from his waistband and tightening his belt, Tucker said, "What about the guard dog?"
"He's just where I told you he'd be," Meyers said, pointing over his shoulder.
"Big brute," Edgar said.
Tucker walked past the other two men, down a narrow aisle between ten-foot stacks of merchandise, all the way to the far end of the room. The dog, a healthy young German shepherd with a beautiful coat, was there and waiting at attention, alerted by Tucker's footsteps. It was chained to a thick iron ring that was set firmly in a cement-block wall. Ears flattened along its lupine skull, wicked teeth bared, it strained forward until the chain was taut, focusing its fierce black eyes on Tucker. It growled quietly in the back of its throat, but it did not bark or attempt to lunge at him.
"Nice dog," Tucker said, hunkering down to the animal's level, though keeping a few feet between them.
The dog growled a bit louder, a sound like a broken engine chugging away beneath layers and layers of insulation. Thick saliva glistened on its teeth and dripped from the corners of its black lips.
"Good dog," Tucker said, though the damned thing frightened him. "Good, quiet dog."
The shepherd snapped at him this time, scrabbled at the floor with its claws, and tried to close the gap between them.
Tucker stood up again. "Lousy, rotten mutt," he said.
The two night watchmen had brought the dog with them when they had come on duty at nine o'clock. That was part of the protection package the mall bought from their company: two men, one dog. The guards had chained the shepherd here, and at nine-thirty they had gone out into the mall itself to help with the flushing out of the last-minute customers. They would check and lock the public rest rooms, inspect all the architectural cul-de-sacs to be certain that no accidental or intended stragglers were left in the building after closing time. They would shut down the north, west, and south entrances and see that all the clerks, salesmen, and store managers left by the east exit, the back doors. Then, when they were alone in the building-except for the bank's manager and assistant manager, who, according to Meyers, always stayed late on Wednesday-the guards would come back to the warehouse to release the dog. Except that tonight the shepherd was going to remain where he was, chained to the wall.
Tucker went back across the room and stood by the door with Bates and Meyers. "Everything okay?"
Meyers nodded vigorously. His grin was so wide that it was nearly imbecilic, and his eyes seemed to Haze. "Nothing out of the ordinary. It's going to go like clockwork. A few of them have already left, and the rest are leaving now."
Tucker listened closely at the gray door. He could hear a number of salesclerks laughing and talking as they passed the warehouse entrance and went through the doors of the mall's east exit just a few feet down the corridor. Most of them were calling good night to someone named Chet and another man named Artie. Chet and Artie were probably the two night watchmen.
Leaning away from the door, Tucker glanced at a set of shelves on his right, and for the first time he saw two thermos bottles and two sparkling aluminum lunch buckets. Though they were only inanimate objects, there was something pathetic about them. Chet and Artie wouldn't have an opportunity to eat their late-night snack or enjoy the card game that most likely went with it.
After a while Tucker looked at his watch. "A quarter past ten," he said.
"Soon, now," Meyers said, clutching the Skorpion in both hands, one thick finger through the trigger guard.
"What about the dog?" Bates asked. He was sweating profusely now, and his face was especially pale. His voice was not as loud as a whisper.
"What about him?" Tucker asked.
Bates's eyebrows were beaded with sweat, like twin caterpillars crawling through dew. He blinked the salty fluid out of his eyes. "Mean-looking bastard, isn't he?" He shuddered as he thought of the German shepherd. "He could tear off your arm if he really wanted to do it."
Tucker and Meyers looked at each other. Before the big man could say anything, Tucker said, "Look, he's chained to the wall. He will be chained to the wall the whole time that we're here."
"Sure, sure," Bates said in a self-deprecating tone of voice. "I know that. Don't bother with me. Don't pay me any mind. It's just that I hate waiting. Waiting makes me nervous as hell. But I'll be in shape when the crunch comes."
"I'm wondering if you will," Meyers whispered, giving Bates a hard, cold look.
"Believe me," Tucker said, "Edgar will come through. He does every time. He's always shaky at the start, but once he's working on a safe, he's steady as a rock."
"And when he's finished with the safe?" Meyers asked, as if they were talking about someone who was not present.
"Then," Bates said, as if he objected to being talked over, "I'm so delighted with my handiwork that I fairly float along for days afterward."
"It's true," Tucker said.
"You see," Bates told Meyers, "there's nothing to me except my work. I'm hollow, otherwise."
Tucker knew that what Bates said was fairly close to the truth. Except when he was dealing with a vault door or a fancy combination lock, the old jugger had no self-confidence whatsoever. He was extremely gentle, passive, withdrawn, the willing victim of an inferiority complex. Right now he felt utterly worthless and helpless, as vulnerable as a child. But when he started to work on the safe, he would have the self-assurance of Superman.
"Twenty-five after ten," Meyers said, looking at his watch. "Everyone should be out by now." He lowered the ugly Skorpion until it centered on the gray door, and he grinned idiotically once more.
A moment later the laughter and conversation in the corridor stopped. Now there were only Chet and Artie swapping jokes while they locked and tested the glass doors.
Edgar swallowed loudly.
"Here they come," Tucker whispered.
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 b
oth 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."
