by Dean Koontz
"They're doing something they don't want us to see," said the young, pudgy patrolman beside him.
"You think so?" Kluger asked sarcastically.
The rookie, a kid named Muni, blinked and nodded. "Well What else, sir?" he asked, utterly missing the sarcasm.
For a while Kluger stood, intently watching the mall entrance. But nothing was happening there. And he was convinced that nothing would happen there until he made it happen. Before long, he and his men would have to move. Putting it short and sweet, as he had learned to do when he commanded men in Nam, they were going to have to storm the building and take it.
He was considering all the ways it could be done, was trying to decide which was the best method of operation, when Patrolman Hawbaker-another rookie who was as gangly and clumsy as Muni was pudgy and paradoxically graceful-ran down from the telephone booth to tell him that a call had come through. "It's that guy inside," Hawbaker said, pointing to the mall. His prominent Adam's apple worked rapidly up and down. "He wants to talk to you right away, sir."
Kluger followed Hawbaker across the parking lot, through deep shadows and pools of purple light to the automated post office. He pushed into the first telephone booth in a row of three and drew the door shut.
Hawbaker looked in at him like a spectator at a zoo watching a caged animal.
Opening the door, Kluger said, "Hawbaker, go away."
"Sir?"
"I said, go away."
"Oh," Hawbaker said. He turned and walked a dozen steps and stood facing the mall, his back to Kluger.
Shutting the booth door again, Kluger picked up the receiver and said, "Hello?"
"Kluger?"
"What do you want?"
"How are you?"
"What?"
"Are you feeling okay?" the stranger asked.
"What is this?"
"I just want to be sure you're not getting jumpy," the man in the mall said. "I'll bet you're under a great deal of pressure to get us out of here."
"What of it?" Kluger asked.
In point of fact, though, he was under almost no pressure at all except that which he manufactured for himself, that inner pressure that always helped him to excel in police work. Right now, only two newspapers had learned of the situation, and only three reporters and two photographers were on hand. None of them had filed anything with their offices. Very few people knew what was happening. Most of the politicians and other publicity seekers were home in bed. Indeed, even the chief of the department had probably not yet been informed. The chief was a wounded bear when awakened because of a crisis, and he was usually not disturbed until someone had been killed. Therefore, Kluger had another hour and perhaps even a bit longer to get this thing settled his own way, on his own terms, without everyone interfering with his methods.
"I just called to tell you to relax," the stranger said. "It's just about all over."
"What?"
"You can come inside," the stranger said.
"Are you serious?"
"Wait fifteen minutes," the stranger said. "Then you can come in, and we won't resist you."
"You're surrendering?" Kluger asked. It sounded too good to be true, yet he was strangely disappointed to realize that there was not going to be a fight.
"Surrendering? Not at all," the man said. "You can come in because we won't be here to stop you."
"What?"
"We're leaving."
"You're what?" Kluger asked, feeling like a broken record but unable to speak intelligently. His mind was racing, trying to find something about the mall that he had overlooked.
"We've found a way out, Lieutenant."
"Like hell you have."
"If you don't believe me," the stranger said, "you will when you come inside fifteen minutes from now."
"We have everything covered!"
"You missed one thing."
"I did not!" Kluger said. His face was a furious shade of red, the blood pounding visibly in his temples and in his neck. He was straining his jaw muscles so hard that they ached.
"Sorry, but you did."
"Look, you-"
"Remember," the stranger went on, "fifteen minutes. If you come inside one minute sooner, we'll have to kill the hostages."
"I don't know what you're up to-"
"We're up to escape," the stranger said, laughing. Then he put down his receiver and cut Kluger short just as he had before.
The lieutenant slammed open the booth door, nearly breaking it, and went outside.
"Sir?" Hawbaker asked, turning toward him.
"Shut up!" the lieutenant ordered. "Let me think."
Kluger stood by the automated post office, his hands fisted on his hips, and he gave the mall building a thorough going-over. He let his eyes travel along at ground level around the two faces-north and east-that he could see from this vantage point. Two public entrances. Both locked. Two men on the east doors. Three on the north entrance. There were no windows. The only other potential trouble spots were the two big bay doors on the east wall, the truck entrances to the warehouse. But they were also locked; his men had checked them out at the start of this. To leave the mall that way, the men inside would have to make a lot of noise. And Kluger's men would see the doors going up long before anyone could come through them. Kluger had six men covering the bay doors, and he knew there was not going to be trouble there.
But where else?
He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recall the way the south and west faces looked. One double-door public entrance on each of those walls. No windows. No loading docks. He had enough men on both places to deal with any attempted breakout.
The roof?
He looked at the garish, peaked, imitation thatch roof and immediately ruled that out. Even if they could get onto the roof-and Kluger doubted that-where could they go? Nowhere.
The storm drains?
Kluger had not been among the first men sent out to investigate the cause of the alarm at Oceanview Plaza, and therefore he had not been plunged into this thing unprepared. He had been at the station house on a rest break, using his thirty minutes of free time to catch up on a backlog of paperwork. He was there when Sergeant Brice received the first telephone call from that man in the Plaza building, and he was fairly well aware of the nature of the case before he was put in charge of it. When he was assigned to it minutes after the call to Brice, he had sent a man over to the courthouse to dig up the blueprints to the shopping mall, and then he had come straight out here as fast as he could drive. Even before the blueprints had arrived, he had sent three men into the scrub land next to the mall with orders to search for and guard over any large drain openings. That had been good, sound, far-sighted police work. When the prints had come and he had unrolled them on the macadam behind a squad car, he had learned that there was indeed a way out of the mall through the drains: the same one his men were already guarding. That was the only outlet big enough to pass a man. He was certain that he had read the blueprints correctly.
Therefore, the drains did not figure in this
What else?
Nothing else.
What was this threat of escape, then? A ruse of some sort, a trick? A bluff?
A fat mosquito buzzed persistently around the lieutenant's head and tried to alight on his left ear. This time he did not kill it. He brushed it away without thinking, without really being aware that he was expending the effort.
All over the parking lot the harsh and eerily garbled voices of radio dispatchers were crackling out of ten police-band radios, rising on the night air like ghostly messages from another world. They came to Lieutenant Kluger, but he did not, at the moment, hear them. His thoughts were elsewhere, turning over facts, looking for worms underneath them.
A bluff, was it?
But what could he hope to gain by bluffing?
Nothing. Kluger was sure of it.
If, in fifteen minutes, the lieutenant did lead a force into the mall, and if those hoodlums were waiting in there, t
hen they would start shooting at one another. A number of policemen would die. That was inevitable. Every battle had its casualties. But in the end, what could the thieves gain? They would be cut to ribbons. Unless they just wanted to go out with a bang And he was sure that the man he had talked to on the phone was not the type to make a grandstand play only to see a few fireworks. That man intended to live.
A trick?
There was no trick, under the circumstances, that amounted to more than a bluff.
He was almost tempted to dismiss it and to go on as he would have done if the stranger had not called with this fairy tale of escape. Yet Something about that man's voice, something about his style and his undeniable self-confidence led Kluger to believe that he had meant precisely what he had said, regardless of the seeming impossibility of it. He had said he and his men were leaving. And if he were telling the truth
Kluger looked at his watch.
1:34.
He had wasted almost five minutes, and he suddenly realized that they might have been the most precious five minutes of the night. That fifteen-minute waiting period which the man in the mall had demanded was a completely artificial time limit. Kluger was angry with himself for having fallen for it. If they had found a way out, then they would have used it by now. They would have left the five hostages behind and would be unable to reach and harm them. Each minute that Kluger delayed, each minute he stood here on his big flat feet, they might be getting farther and farther away. They might be getting off scot-free.
"Hawbaker!"
The rookie whirled. "Yes, sir?"
"When I came out here, I brought one of the department's acetylene torches to cut through those inner gates if we had to."
Hawbaker blinked at him.
"It's in the trunk of my car. Get it and bring it to me-on the double!"
"Yes, sir."
"Don't forget the tank, Hawbaker."
"No, sir." Hawbaker was off, running clumsily.
Kluger looked at the mall building again, thought of the man on the telephone, thought of the promotions he needed, thought of the chief's chair
"Damn!" he said. He ran down toward the east entrance of the mall shouting at his men as he went. "Look sharp! We're going in!"
Kluger grabbed the torch and the feeding hose in one hand, lifted the small tank of compressed gas in the other, and walked across the carpet of broken glass from the outer mall doors that two of his men had smashed with hammers. He was the only one up front now. The others had fallen back on his orders, had gladly taken up safer positions behind the squad cars.
In the nine years and six months that he had been a policeman, Norman Kluger had never hesitated to risk his life if the occasion seemed to call for that. He had something of a reputation as a daredevil, but he wasn't like that at all. Naturally, there was a slight bit of grandstanding in it because he often took chances in order to be noticed by those above him in the department. However, for the most part he took risks and bulled his way through dangerous territory, because he did not know how else to get a job done-and because he had long ago decided that he was one of those people who would lead a charmed life, a guy who could walk through a pit of snakes and not be bitten once. He had spent two years in Southeast Asia in the thick of the fighting and had re-upped for two more years when his regular hitch ran out. In all that time he had not suffered a single injury, while all around him were dying, and he eventually came to feel that he could not be hurt. He was charmed, protected, watched over.
He also figured that this special personal magic would keep him safe from legal prosecution and forced retirement if anyone ever seriously accused him of overstepping his policeman's authority and tramping too hard on the rights of those people with whom he had to deal. Long before the Nixon Court had begun to rescind the liberal decisions of the past several decades, Norman Kluger had done as he wished with suspects whom he was fairly certain he could prove guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Sometimes, of course, he had knocked over a few people who were innocent, had bruised those who knowingly or unknowingly got in his way, but by God he had done the job every time. And though there had been grumbling and protests about his methods, no one had ever, in the final analysis, filed or made stick any charge or accusation against him. He was charmed. He was destined, he knew, to move up into the chief's chair in five years. Or perhaps even sooner than that. You just never knew when fortune might smile on you.
At the steel-bar gate three feet past the ruined glass doors he put down the tank of gas. He squatted against the wall and, like a soldier putting together his rifle in the dark, hooked the hose to the torch and to the tank's feed valve, working with surprising speed in the dim red light from the police cruisers' rooftop beacons.
Beyond him, beyond the gate, the mall's east corridor was absolutely lightless. Three or seven men could have been waiting there for him, machine guns aimed right at his head.
Kluger never once looked inside.
Breathing evenly, actually thriving on the danger, lie took a pair of smoked-glass goggles out of his hip pocket and put them on, then wiped the dark lenses on the back of one shirt sleeve. Clipped loosely to the hose was a pair of silvery asbestos gloves. He put these on, working his big hands in them until they felt comfortable. Switching on the gas flow, he lighted the torch, threw away the match, and adjusted the intense blue-white flame. Then he turned it on the gate next to the left-hand lock bolt, which was an inch up from the carpeted floor.
Thousands of molten metal flecks cascaded over the top of the flame and across his gloves, made interesting patterns of red and blue, yellow and white light on his mirrorlike goggles. There was a loud hissing sound like a thousand snakes, and then metal parted before the fire. A section of steel rod clattered out of the gate's pattern, striking rods around it, and bounced noiselessly on the carpet. In a moment Kluger had cut through the grid to the bolt on the inside, and in little more than another minute he had sliced through the lock itself.
The carpet smoldered, but it was fireproof and did not burst into flame.
He dragged the tank over to the other side and hunkered down and began to work again, sparks lighting his way once more. The second lock was as easy as the first. Hardly more than five minutes after he had started on the first, he finished the second.
Turning off the gas flow and instantly killing the bright flame, he stood up and stripped off his fire-spotted gloves, then his goggles, dropped them on the floor, and kicked them out of the way. He shouted over his shoulder at the squad cars: "Four of you! Come here and help me!"
Muni, Hawbaker, and two veteran bulls-Peterson and Haggard-came up quickly and hooked their hands in the gate and put their backs into it, forcing it up into the ceiling far enough for Kluger to slide underneath. Once he was on the other side, he got a grip on the steel bars and relieved
Muni, who bellied under the barrier after him. Muni helped hold it up while Haggard came over. In that manner they were shortly all on the inside.
"Dark as a shithouse in here," Hawbaker said.
"Relax," Peterson said. "If anyone was going to shoot at us, they'd have done it by now."
Kluger felt along the wall on his left until he located the warehouse door. Standing to one side, he twisted the knob and threw the door open wide. Light spilled out, but no one opened fire on them. "Hello in there!" the lieutenant called.
At once, several excited voices responded, each trying to shout louder than the other, none of them making any sense.
"What the hell?" Peterson said.
Kluger looked around the corner and saw the workbenches and the jigsaw and the electric-powered fork lifts and the great stacks of boxed and crated merchandise. There was no one in sight. "Two of you come with me," he said.
Peterson and Hawbaker followed him, the first dutifully and the second resignedly.
The shouting at the far end of the long room grew even louder, more frantic, and considerably less intelligible. Echoing off the high warehouse walls, it sou
nded like the raving in a lunatic asylum.
Moving in between the aisles of stored goods, Kluger said, "Let's go see what we have here."
What they had here were three hysterical hostages: the two night watchmen and an extremely attractive young woman in her late twenties. They were bound with wire at wrists and ankles, sitting on the floor and propped against the concrete wall. They stopped shouting as soon as they saw the lieutenant.
"Thank God," the woman said. She had large dark eyes and a velvety complexion. She interested Kluger.
"Did you get them? Did you nail that little bastard that was in charge?" the largest of the watchmen demanded.
"No,"' Kluger said. "Do you know where they are?"
"They didn't get past you, did they?"
"No."
"Well," the watchman said, "then they're still here somewhere."
Hawbaker went forward and started to untie the woman while Peterson dealt with this most vocal of the guards.
"Don't worry," Kluger said. "We'll get them." He caught a strange look on the young woman's face and turned to her. "You don't think we will?"
Her hands suddenly freed, she began to massage her numbed fingers and wrists. They were the most delicate fingers and the slenderest wrists that Norman Kluger had ever seen.
"You don't think we'll get them?" he repeated.
"No," she answered firmly. She had a warm, appealing voice. "At least you won't get the one who was in charge."
