by Dean Koontz
"I started to see what a beautiful job it was," Meyers said, nodding his bristled head. "I figured I could combine the job with getting Keski. I knew the bastard would be surprised when I walked into his office an hour after closing time and pointed a gun at him. Then, ripping off his mall after I'd fingered him seemed like a real nice touch."
"It was Keski who stayed late every Wednesday," Tucker said, "not the bank manager."
"Sure."
"You lied."
"I didn't have a choice."
"That doesn't make any difference," Tucker said. "You lied to Felton. You lied to me. If you get out of this, you're finished in the business."
"I had to lie to make it sound sweet enough to get you into it," Meyers said earnestly. He saw the anger in Tucker's eyes, a subdued but steady flame. "I was a man on the ropes, Tucker. I could still get up for a job, but between jobs I was a mess. I just sat in that apartment in New York letting myself go to hell thinking about it. I had to get Keski before the whole thing ate me up." He cleared his throat and looked nervously at the smaller man. "You understand that, don't you?"
"No."
"He nearly killed me. He-"
"He was your problem," Tucker said. "Not mine or Edgar's."
"Hey, look," Meyers said. "Whether or not the manager is here, that bank can be knocked over."
"Could have been," Tucker said, stressing each word. "But you overlooked that alarm pedal beneath Ledderson's desk "
"Christ, what a mess!" Meyers said, as if he had, for most of their conversation, forgotten that they were in a bind, that carloads of police now surrounded Oceanview Plaza. Gaining his revenge, killing Rudolph Keski, Frank Meyers had not regained his old common sense and self-control. His wit and his nerves would never be what they had been before Keski had slit his throat. He was still a ruined man, operating on the remembrance of courage. "We should have shot our way out while we had the chance."
"It's too late for that now," Tucker said.
"I know. If you'd let me-"
"And I think I may have come up with something better," Tucker said, stepping away from the wall of boxes, straightening his coat with a quick shrug of his shoulders. "You see what's right there beside you?"
Meyers turned right and left, perplexed.
"On the floor," Tucker said.
Meyers looked down, saw it, was still perplexed. "It's a drain, that's all."
Tucker knelt beside a drainage grill that had a diameter half again as large as that of the standard manhole. "Outside, behind the mall, there are some pretty steep hills, nothing on them. When it rains, a great deal of water must collect on the parking lot. They'll have a system of storm drains to cope with it."
"So what?" Meyers knelt down too.
"A storm drain is usually pretty large," Tucker said thoughtfully. He stared into the tunnel below, through the holes in the heavy grilled cover. Beyond the metal grid there was only darkness, deep and velvety and black as a starless sky. "It's designed to convey huge volumes of water for short periods of time. It ought to be big enough for us to crawl through."
Meyers dug a finger in his ear as if he thought he had not heard Tucker properly. "Are you serious?"
"It might work."
"Go out through a sewer?"
"It isn't a sewer," Tucker said impatiently. "It only carries fresh rain water. Right now it ought to be dry-or nearly so."
"But if we went down there," Meyers said, "where would we come out?" Clearly, he did not relish the idea of using the storm drains for a getaway.
"I don't know," Tucker admitted. "But I'm sure as hell going to find out." He put his gun aside. "Here. Help me get this grill out of the way." He got to his feet and laced his fingers through the steel grid.
Unhappily, Meyers put his own Skorpion beside Tucker's, stood up, bent over, and grabbed the other side of the grill.
Between them they lifted it out of its hole, walked it across the floor, and set it down a few feet away.
Tucker went back and knelt by the hole again. "I still can't see anything. Go over to the workbenches and get one of the flashlights."
Meyers picked up his Skorpion, holding it in both hands for a moment. "Anything else?"
"Maybe you should look out in the hall and see if everything's okay with Edgar."
"Should I tell him about this?" Meyers asked, gesturing toward the hole in the floor.
Tucker raised his head. "Yeah. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. Even if it leads nowhere, it might cheer him up for a few minutes. He's probably feeling low right now."
"So am I," Meyers said.
"Sure," Tucker said. "We all are."
Tucker sat on the edge of the drain opening, then jumped down into the darkness, landing feet first on the corrugated steel floor. He switched on the flashlight that Meyers had brought him, and he discovered that the pipe was larger than he had expected it would, be, nearly high enough to allow him to stand upright, wide enough so that neither shoulder touched it.
"What do you think?" Frank Meyers asked. He was kneeling on the warehouse floor overhead, peering down through the circular entrance to the drain.
"Maybe we're on to something," Tucker said.
He directed the wide yellow beam of the flashlight over the walls. The tunnel was dirty, a bit rusted, and spotted with luminescent gray-green moss. Spiderwebs filled the shallow troughs between a few of the ripples in the steel. Centipedes clung to the metal ribs, long eyestalks flicking nervously up and down; and when the light touched them, they fled into the shadows. Though the walls were generally dry, the floor of the tube was puddled with filthy water. He was standing in an inch or two of dark, brackish sludge that gleamed like oil in the amber light.
"Want me to come down?" Meyers asked.
"Not just yet."
"I'll wait here for you."
"Do that."
Tucker held the flashlight out in front of himself, looked first south and then north. In both directions the tunnel bored away into unrelieved darkness, an artery in the earth. Tucker remembered that to the south there was no parking lot, and there the well-maintained mall property gave way to abrupt and ragged hills, rock formations, sun-bleached scrub, widely scattered palm trees, and ugly erosion gullies like dozens of dry stream beds. There the land fell sharply away to the main road and then down to the sea. If the storm drains emptied anywhere, they would pour forth into that chaotic jumble of useless land.
He turned south and started walking, stooping just enough to keep from striking his head on the ceiling. His footsteps rang on the metal floor, echoed in front and behind him. When he had to splash through a puddle, the noise was amplified until it sounded like the incessant roar of the giant fountain out in the mall's public lounge.
The air was stale but not unpleasant, like that in a closet full of old clothes. And if it led to the fresher air of freedom, then it was quite easily endured.
Ahead the tunnel angled to the left.
When Tucker turned the corner, the tainted air was freshened by a cool night breeze, and he knew that he was suddenly close to the end of the drainage system's main run. He switched off the flashlight at once, stood dead still until his eyes could adjust to the intense darkness. Gradually he was able to discern an area of lesser darkness perhaps fifty or sixty feet ahead, an ethereal, shimmering circle of extremely dim gray light that contrasted with the pitch-black tunnel walls, caught the eye and held it like a far-off beacon.
Cautiously he went forward again, making as little noise as possible. At the mouth of the drain, which opened at the brink of an erosion gully six feet above the ground, he stopped and hunkered down. He tried to press against one wall and make a smaller target of himself, though he was painfully aware of how bullets would ricochet off the rippled steel all around him
He stared out at the shadow-cloaked hills, down the rugged slope toward the inrushing night sea. Only two things moved out there: a thick cloud covering that drifted eastward from the ocean and a steady stream of aut
omobiles on the main highway a hundred yards below.
Then, arising suddenly, there were voices.
Tucker stiffened.
A hundred feet downslope two flashlight beams appeared at the edge of the gully.
Tucker checked to be certain that the Skorpion was fully loaded. It was, of course.
Behind the flashlights three cops came into sight. They stood on the bank of the narrowly eroded channel looking upslope toward the mouth of the drain where Tucker sheltered. Apparently they could not penetrate the darkness in the tunnel well enough to see him, for they made no effort to protect themselves or to conceal their movements. Instead they clambered noisily down the side of the gully, slipping and stumbling into the dry stream bed where they took up positions behind a series of weathered boulders not seventy feet from the drain pipe. At almost the same instant, the two flashlights winked out.
The night fell back in like a collapsing roof.
Carefully, quietly unfolding the wire stock of the Skorpion, Tucker locked it into place in its extended form. Now he could use the pistol as a submachine gun if the cops came up the gully and tried to gain entrance to the mall through the drain tunnel. He ardently hoped they would stay where they were right now.
Their voices still carried through the night on the gentle sea breeze, but Tucker could not quite make out what they were saying. Several minutes passed as their conversation grew less boisterous and finally settled down to a constant murmur well beyond his understanding.
Cars continued to streak by on the highway.
In endless masses the gray-black clouds, like giant ships, came in from the sea.
Without wanting to, Tucker thought about Elise. He conjured up a vivid mental image of her face and sleek body, thought of the way she walked and talked, the many ways they joked together and made love and shared their lives He felt weak in his guts, cold and tired and terribly lonely. Losing Elise, he would be losing nearly everything that mattered most to him, a truth he had not often admitted to himself. For all his cool sophistication, for all their talk about wanting to be able to go their separate ways, they needed each other. And he needed her more, perhaps, than she needed him. When he contemplated the loss of her, the taste of that emptiness to come could almost paralyze him
Which was no good at all. He was not yet beaten, not if he got up and moved and tried. In fourteen other jobs he had made a name for himself, had proved the worth of the "Tucker" pseudonym. He was more proud of his false identity than of his real one. This was no time to throw all that away and let his life fall apart. He would get out of this somehow.
On the highway below a symphony of horns sounded and brakes squealed; the traffic flow went on.
After Tucker had watched the boulders and had listened to the three cops for almost five minutes, he was fairly sure they did not intend to come any farther. They were merely covering the drain to prevent anyone from escaping through it.
Tucker smiled grimly. Whoever was in charge of this police operation was a shrewd and dangerous man, someone who thought of the unlikely and prepared for even the improbable.
But it doesn't matter, Tucker thought, by way of an internal pep talk. Whoever the bastard is, he can be beaten. Everyone can be beaten, no matter how tough or smart he is. "Except me," he said softly, as an afterthought. He laughed quietly at himself, and that made him feel much better than the pep talk had done.
He got up and turned, stretched as best he could to get the kinks out of his legs and back. Then he walked north, the way he had come, not daring to switch on his flashlight until he was a good twenty steps past the bend in the pipe and back in the stale air of the main drainage line.
Frank Meyers was waiting for him at the hole in the warehouse floor, his harsh face peering anxiously down into the lightless pipe. "I was getting worried."
"No need," Tucker said, handing up the flashlight and then his Skorpion.
"Does it lead out?" Meyers asked.
"Help me up," Tucker said.
The big man put out a hand.
Tucker grabbed it, struggled up, pulled himself over the edge of the hole, and flopped on the cement floor.
"Does it lead out?" Meyers asked again.
"Yeah."
"We can use it then?"
"No," Tucker said, catching his breath. "They thought of it, too. They put three men on it."
Meyers's face twisted into a hideous mask of anger, hatred, and frustration. "Shit!"
"My sentiments exactly."
"Now, what can we do to-"
Meyers was interrupted by Edgar Bates. The old jugger stepped through the door from the east hall where he was standing guard, and he shouted across the warehouse for Tucker. "One of the telephones is ringing out in the lounge!"
"The cops?" Meyers asked.
Tucker nodded and got to his feet. "It'll be for me."
Lieutenant Norman Kluger, the officer who, thirty minutes ago, had been put in charge of the police response to the crisis at Oceanview Plaza shopping mall, was pleased to be given full responsibility for the problem. He knew that his immediate superior on the night shift had passed the buck on this one, had tried to step out from under a job that was potentially both politically and physically dangerous. Certainly, people were likely to be killed before the night was out, cops and robbers together. And perhaps thousands of dollars of property damage would result in and around the classy mall building. In the morning there might well be a great deal of bad press for the police and the way they handled those hoodlums in there. But Kluger did not care to think about any of that. He had come a long way on the force in a relatively short time, gaining promotions precisely because he was willing to take chances and to jump into the middle of the ugliest situations. He had his eye set on the department head's chair, and he meant to be sitting there by the time he was forty, thereby becoming the youngest chief in the history of the force. And, he was confident, one of the best in its history, too.
Kluger stood in a telephone booth on the raised platform of the mall's automated drive-up post office in the northeast corner of the parking lot. The phone box was at his left shoulder. On his right, beyond the booth, lay the large square housing for the stamp dispensers, scales, and mailboxes. Straight ahead, visible through the clear Plexiglas wall, was Oceanview Plaza and many of the twenty patrolmen for whom Kluger was now responsible. He watched his men, and he listened to the telephone ringing and ringing and ringing on the other end of the line
Thirty-five years old and looking even a couple of years younger than that, Norman Kluger nonetheless had an undeniable air of authority about him. He was six-feet-three, trim and muscular, with long arms and hands fit for a basketball star. His face was square and unlined, but hard and cold as ice. He had a Ronald Reagan jaw, and he knew it. He thrust it out as consciously and effectively as Reagan always did. His eyes were dark and quick, deeply shelved under a broad forehead that bore the only wrinkles in his face. Fortunately, his red-brown hair had already begun to turn gray at the temples; and it was this touch more than his size or his clenched jaw that made him look old enough and experienced enough for command.
In the mall the phone stopped ringing. A quiet, steady voice said, "Hello?"
"My name is Kluger," the lieutenant said. "I'm in charge of the police out here."
"So?"
"So," Kluger said, trying to conceal his irritation, "I want to know what you're going to do next."
"That depends on you," the stranger said.
"Oh?"
"Yes. It depends on whether or not you act intelligently. If you pull any crazy heroics on us, try to force the issue-well, that wouldn't be at all intelligent."
The lieutenant frowned. His heavy rust-colored eyebrows came together, forming one dark bar across the base of his brow. He had expected to hear a well-struck note of desperation in the man's voice. After all, this stranger and his hoodlum friends were trapped in there like snakes in a bag. But this one sounded unfrightened, almost serene. "Sergean
t Brice tells me you have hostages."
"Five of them," the man said.
"Then you're going to want to use them."
"I doubt it."
"As long as you have them, we'll have to let you go," Kluger said. "We won't have a choice. We don't want any innocent parties killed or hurt."
"Bullshit," the man on the phone said. "If we tried to use them as a shield, and if you thought you saw an opening, there would be gun play. You'd count on marksmanship and luck to miss the hostages. And if you killed any of them, you'd do your best to pin their deaths on us. We wouldn't be alive to argue."
That had been approximately what had been going through Kluger's mind for the last twenty minutes. He was unsettled by the stranger's perspicacity.
"All we want from you at the moment," the man inside the mall said, "is the same thing that I told Brice earlier: We want you to stay out of here. Back off and stay backed off. Don't try to come in after us."
"Oh?" Kluger said. "What are you going to do? How long will you last? Are you going to homestead in there?"
The stranger laughed. He had a smooth, mellow laugh, like an actor. Kluger distrusted people who laughed too easily or too well. "At least," the man said, "it's nice to be dealing with a cop who has a sense of humor."
Kluger scowled at his reflection in the Plexiglas before him. "I wasn't being funny, mister," he said sharply, the "mister" delivered in a most military fashion. "I asked you a serious question. How in the hell long do you jerks think you can hide in that place?"
The man was silent for a moment, readjusting himself to Kluger's mood. "We'll stay here until we can get safely away. Maybe a few hours-or maybe a few days."
"Days?" Kluger didn't think he could have heard him right.
"That's what I said."
"You're crazy."
The stranger said nothing.
"You're in a hopeless situation."
"Are we?"
"You know it," the lieutenant said.
"I don't know it," the stranger said. "Currently, it looks as if we can't get out of here without running headlong into you people."
"You got it."
