by Dean Koontz
"But," the stranger continued, "by the same token, you can't come inside without running headlong into us. We. may be under siege, but we also happen to be in a fortress. Fortresses are built to withstand sieges. You'd die like flies trying to get through those doors, Kluger. And by the way, you better not send those three men in by the storm drain. They'd just get their heads blown off before they could reach the warehouse."
Kluger felt a line of perspiration break out on his forehead. The conversation was not going anything like he had thought it would, was taking quirky turns that left him baffled. "How did you know about them?"
"We have a couple of our own men down in the drains," the stranger said. "They saw your fellows enter the gully a couple of minutes before you called."
Kluger wanted to strike the booth wall with his fist, but he restrained himself. "One thing I don't believe," he said, changing the subject as best as he could. "There aren't seven of you in there, like you said. No way."
"That so?"
"With all the lights on, we can look through the doors with binoculars and see pretty much what you're up to. We've only seen three of you. Three, not seven."
"And the two in the drain, remember."
"Maybe there aren't two in the drain," Kluger said angrily, his face flushed with blood.
"Maybe there aren't," the stranger agreed, again confusing and frustrating the lieutenant. "Just don't test us."
For a moment there was silence from both ends of the line. Then Kluger said, "I have an offer to make."
"Make it, then."
The lieutenant spoke evenly, slowly but tensely, straining his Ronald Reagan jaw to the breaking point. "I'll send in two of my men, two unarmed police officers. You'll send the innocent bystanders out and keep my officers as hostages."
"No chance."
"We aren't going to shoot at our own men!" Kluger insisted impatiently. Why wouldn't this stranger listen to reason? Why wouldn't he fall for anything? What made him so goddamned different from the hundreds of other hoodlums Kluger had handled so well in the past? "Two patrolmen would make a better shield than those five you have now, for God's sake."
"I've already said no. Anything else you want?"
Sweat was now streaming down Kluger's temples. The cords in his neck stood out like ropes. "Whatever you have in mind, it won't work. You're not up against a bunch of fools. I spent four years in Southeast Asia. Volunteered for it. You're dealing with a veteran, mister."
"So are you," the stranger said. Then he laughed and said, "Listen, what's your number there?"
"Why?"
"Well I might want to ring you up and surrender," the stranger said.
Kluger did not answer at once, for he had to calm himself before he was able to speak. "You haven't got a chance now, smartass," he said at last.
The stranger laughed again. "Oh, come on, Lieutenant. Give me your number, anyway."
Kluger read it off to him. "It's a booth out here in the parking lot. I'll put a man beside it so I'll be sure to know when you call. If you have any brains at all-"
The stranger cut him off.
The line buzzed in his ear.
Kluger turned and slammed the receiver down hard, and the sound cracked like a gunshot in the tiny enclosure. As he turned again and pushed through the folding door, a mosquito bit him on the back of the neck. Cursing, he slapped at it, caught it on his palm, and brought it around to have a look at it. The mosquito was extraordinarily big, red with the lieutenant's blood which it had been drinking. Although it was already dead, he worked it fiercely between his hands-until there was nothing but a brown smear left of it.
In Oceanview Plaza's main lounge Michael Tucker pushed open his booth door and stepped out of the stench of French perfume. He went over to the fountain and dipped one hand into the pool, splashed his face with cool water. It felt good. It ran down his neck and soaked his shirt, and that felt good too. The water flushed away the clinging perfume and the bad odor that he imagined he had picked up from talking to Kluger.
Refreshed, he started across the lounge again, toward the entrance to the east corridor, and was brought up short by a sudden, incredible idea. Somewhat numbed by the daring of the plan that had just occurred to him, he walked unhurriedly back to the fountain and sat down on the fake lavaform rocks at the edge of the pool. For some long minutes he stared into the falling water, thinking furiously. When he got up, he was grinning like a fool, though he knew he was most certainly not one. It just might work
Meyers and Bates were waiting for him by the gate at the end of the east corridor.
"What was the call about?" Meyers asked.
Bates said nothing. He was pale and even shakier than he had been earlier.
"Wait here a minute," Tucker said. He stepped into the warehouse, smiled at Chet, Artie, and Evelyn Ledderson.
"What's going on out there?" Chet demanded.
"We're about to rob the bank," Tucker said. "Then we'll make our escape."
"Not damned likely," Chet said.
Artie said nothing, but the woman disagreed with Chet. She looked at Tucker and said, "He'll do it. He'll get away."
Tucker winked at her.
Although she met his gaze frankly and studied him with icy interest, she made no response.
He searched for and found the panel of switches that controlled the mall lights. He was able to decipher the abbreviations beneath the toggles in fairly short order, and he doused two of the three overhead fluorescent strips in each of the mall's four main corridors. When he went back out and pulled the warehouse door shut behind him, he told Meyers and Bates why they were going to have to make do with minimal illumination. "This Kluger is too damned clever. And if he's able to keep watch on us, he'll soon decide there are only three of us. When he's sure of that, he might try to force his way through one of the entrances."
"But we have hostages!" Bates said.
"Kluger is the hard-nosed type," Tucker said, remembering the humorless man to whom he had spoken, the low voice like flint striking sparks on flint. "He doesn't give a damn who stands in his way."
"Surely he wouldn't kill hostages," Bates said. "And one of them a woman!"
"He'd try not to," Tucker said. "And if he accidentally did kill them, he'd still come out of it with another promotion. He's that type."
"If he comes in here, he loses a lot of men," Meyers said, brandishing his Skorpion.
"If he comes in here," Tucker corrected, "it won't matter. Because, my friends, we won't be here."
Bates and Meyers stared at him uncomprehendingly, like a couple of straightmen who had been set up for the punch line.
Then the jugger blinked and cleared his throat and said, "You've come up with something, haven't you?" He was still pale and shaky, but now he was smiling.
"You found a way out?" Meyers asked.
"A way out," Tucker said, not without some theatricality. "But not exactly a way out."
Meyers and Bates glanced at each other.
"Yes," Tucker said, "that's the best way to describe it-just like a line from Alice in Wonderland. It's a way out, to be sure-but not exactly a way out."
"What is this?" Meyers asked. "Riddle time?" He half believed that Tucker was on to something, but he also half believed that Tucker was out of his mind.
"Best of all," Tucker said, "we can go ahead and knock over the bank and the jewelry store."
"We can?" Edgar asked.
In the darker hall the red lights from the police cars that were parked outside shone brighter than they had when all three of the fluorescent strips had been turned on, and they gave everything an eerie, bloody hue
"We can take the money and the stones," Tucker said.
"You're serious," Meyers said, moving up close to Tucker and staring into his eyes.
"Sure."
Meyers grinned hesitantly, then more surely, then as broadly as he could. "You sonofabitch, you really mean it!" Meyers laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.
/> Bates laughed, too, but more nervously. "Tell us about it, for God's sake."
Tucker told them.
The door of the Countryside Savings and Loan Company's main vault measured eight-feet-four by six-feet-two and was, — in Edgar Bates's professional judgment, at least nine but no more than twelve inches thick. It was constructed of from twenty-eight to fifty-four layers of highly shock-and heat-resistant steel alloy, set as flush with the wall as could be done, and it had beveled seams that were half an inch deep and an inch wide where it was joined to its steel frame. On the top, bottom, and right-hand side these seams had been filled tightly with a contiguous charge of gelignite, a grayish plastic explosive that resembled carpenter's putty, although it was a good deal more rubbery and more cohesive than putty. On the right-hand side, where the door and the frame joined, there were three massive hinges as large as automobile shock absorbers, each twelve inches long and four inches in diameter. These were protected from assault by heavy blue steel casings that had been shaped to the hinge cylinders and then riveted shut when the door was hung in place. Edgar Bates had carefully molded six ounces of gelignite to each of these hinge casings.
"One of the finest vaults made," Edgar said as he worked. He was flushed and happy. "Pekins and Boulder Company of Ashland, Ohio. They're always a challenge."
Tucker was kneeling on the floor on the other side of Bates's open satchel, in front of the vault door. "Has one of their safes ever stumped you?" he asked the older man.
Bates was disgruntled by the question, and he made no effort to conceal his irritation. "Hell, no. Of course not. You know how good I am."
Tucker smiled. "Sorry I asked."
"I've knocked down and split open maybe thirty of them over the years. Not a bit of trouble any time. They're always a lot of fun, though."
The safe's hatchlike opening handle, a wheel with a two-foot diameter, the design for which had been borrowed straight from the watertight doors in submarines, was also packed with gelignite at every jointure. It was most likely affixed too smoothly and too seamlessly to the main body of the door to be easily blown loose. However, there was no harm in trying.
Bates had chiseled away the manual combination dial above the wheel, had removed the guardian plate that was soldered beneath it, and had squeezed several ounces of gelignite into the vault door's primary mechanisms. This lump of explosives had been tied to that around the wheel and to that which was molded in the door's seams by a thick gray thread of itself.
Consulting his wristwatch, Tucker said, "It's five minutes of one. You about finished?"
"Done," Bates said, getting to his feet and quickly massaging his tension-knotted thighs. Again, he might have been a Russian peasant working out the kinks in his muscles after a long day in the fields. "Except for the detonator."
Tucker rummaged in the satchel, came up with a blasting cap about half as large as a breakfast muffin. He passed this on to Bates, closed the jugger's neatly packed black bag, hefted it, and stood up.
After he had examined the cap's battery and timer to be sure they were operable, Bates set the device for a two-minute fuse. The moment he had plugged its two base prongs into the gelignite on one of the hinge casings, he said, "Let's get out of here."
They hurried around the desks behind the tellers' cages and went through a half gate into the bank's lobby. Out in the south corridor they ran sixty or seventy feet to a stone planter and stooped beside it, waiting for the explosion.
Tucker handed Bates the set of master keys he had taken from Chet, the night watchman. "As soon as it's clear that the safe is finished, you can go for the jewelry store. I'll clean out the cash in the bank and join you later. We don't have any time to lose."
"We're doing okay," Bates said. "We-"
The blast was like a muffled crack of thunder. The glass front of the bank shattered and was pushed out across the corridor in a wave of sparkling fragments. Smoke, like sea foam, rushed out behind the glass, roiled up.
An alarm began banging away inside the bank. At police headquarters another alarm would also be sounding.
"Let's go," Tucker said.
Glass crunching under their feet, they pushed into the savings and loan company's lobby, fanned away the acrid smoke with their arms. The vault door had been ripped from its two highest hinges and was hanging loosely from the third. The wheel was smashed, and the lock mechanism was a mass of jagged metal splinters. The plaster around the vault entrance was broken and charred, but no fire had been started.
"Beautiful," Bates said with more than a little pride.
Tucker choked on the foul air, wiped at his teary eyes. "It looks good," he agreed.
"It looks perfect."
"You go hit the jewelry store."
Whistling despite the corditelike stench in the air, Bates turned and disappeared down the corridor.
Tucker went back behind the tellers' cages to the breached vault, wishing he could somehow silence the strident alarm bells. But that would take time. And right now they needed every minute they could get if they were to bring off what they had planned before Kluger came charging in and stopped them.
He stepped into the vault, past the multilayered door that the gelignite had begun to peel apart like the many crusts of a good Danish pastry. Inside he found an accordion gate separating him from the money. He raised his Skorpion, put the muzzle close to the gate lock, and shot away the heavy latch. The barrier slid back easily after that. In the corner stood a mahogany rack that held canvas money sacks labeled contryside savings. Tucker took two of these and began to fill them with the well-bundled stacks of bills that blossomed everywhere on the shelves and on the counters and in the drawers of the inner vault.
Ten minutes later, when he joined Edgar Bates at the rear of the jewelry store next door, he found that the older man was still whistling merrily. "How's it going here?"
Bates smiled broadly, whistled the last bars of the tune he was on, and said, "After the Pekins and Boulder beauty, this one is a cinch."
"You're a marvel."
"I know."
"How long?"
"Another couple of minutes."
Accent Jewelry's safe was not so large as the bank's vault had been, but it was a walk-in model and appeared to be quite formidable. For nearly anyone else but Edgar Bates, Tucker supposed, it would have been a major job.
"You got the money?" Bates asked as he examined and primed the electric fuse.
"All but the change."
"How much?"
"I didn't take time to count it."
"Make a guess."
Tucker indicated the two gray canvas sacks. "Well, it seems to be more than I first thought."
Bates raised his white eyebrows. "Really? Better than a hundred thousand?"
"Maybe twice that."
"Ahhh," Bates said, finishing with the cap and plugging it into the gelignite.
They went out into the corridor again and waited for the explosion, which, when it came, was only half as violent as the first one had been. The store windows shattered outward across the hall. Another alarm began to go bong bong bong, and smoke rolled out of the broken shop front,
"Wonderful," Bates said.
They went inside to get the stones.
On three walls the jewelry store vault was lined with row after row of metal drawers, hundreds of them from the floor to within a foot of the ceiling. Each drawer pulled out about twenty inches, but each was only three inches deep. In every drawer there was a single layer of gems neatly arranged on sheets of dark blue velvet, ranked according to quality, size, and color.
"There must be a couple of thousand stones here," Bates said. "It looks like we hit the jackpot again."
They began pulling drawers out of the wall and emptying them into the two bags that already contained the cash. They did not bother to keep the diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and other gems separated. They had no time for that.
Twenty minutes later, while they were dumping the jewels from
the last drawers, Frank Meyers came into the vault. "Everything's ready," he told Tucker. Then he walked over and looked into the open sacks at the green bills and the gleaming stones. "Tell me I'm not dreaming."
"You're not dreaming," Tucker said.
Tucker and Meyers each took a sack and dragged it out of the vault, through the jewelry store, and into the south corridor. Edgar, humming delightedly under his breath, followed with his Skorpion and his satchel full of tools.
"Okay As soon as we move Chet, Artie, and Evelyn-" Tucker began, breathing hard between the words.
"I already moved them," Meyers interrupted.
"You did? How?"
"On one of those electric cargo carts in the warehouse," Meyers said. "You saw them."
They were walking toward the lounge, and Tucker slowed as they reached it. "You mean you lifted each one onto the cart-"
"Then drove the cart across the warehouse, unloaded him near that damned dog, and went back for another one," Meyers finished.
"You're even stronger than you look," Tucker said.
Meyers laughed. "It wasn't hard. The woman didn't weigh much at all. Artie was cooperative. Chet didn't like the idea, so he got dropped and bruised a few times."
Tucker laughed. "Well Then we're just about ready to go."
"It's going to work," Bates said. He was floating along now, elated with his successes, as high as if he had taken drugs. Nothing could depress him for the next few hours.
"I hope you're right," Tucker said.
They walked down to the end of the east corridor, the alarms ringing wildly behind them and the red glow of police lights pulsing ahead. By the warehouse door they dropped the sacks and the Skorpions.
"I'll switch off the rest of the lights and make my telephone call," Tucker said. "You two start getting ready."
He opened the warehouse door and stepped inside as they went in the opposite direction. At the light-control panel he flicked four switches and turned out the last fluorescent strips in the corridor ceilings. Out there the mall would now be completely darkened. Kluger would be unable to see anything. And that was essential.
Lieutenant Norman Kluger was crouching behind an open squad car door twenty feet from the mall's east entrance when the last of the corridor lights went out inside. That didn't surprise him. When he had heard them blow the bank safe and had gotten confirmation from the alarm center at headquarters, he had known they would do something crazy. If they would still try to rob the bank when they had no hope of escaping, they would try anything. Turning out all the lights was only a first step in some cockeyed plan of theirs. Even though the lighting had been previously reduced, Kluger's men had been able to see shadows moving about in there. Now they could see nothing. With a bit of calculated bravery he knew would not go unnoticed by the other men, he stood up to his full six-feet-three and rubbed the back of his head in consternation. "Now what's that bastard up to?"
