by Dean Koontz
"It's ten minutes after six in the morning," Tucker explained patiently. "It's almost broad daylight. If the cops left a squad car behind to cover the Plaza, they'll spot us the minute we step outside."
"It's a chance we shouldn't take," Edgar Bates said. Even now, despite all that had gone wrong with other aspects of the job, he was floating along on the memory of his successes.
Meyers frowned, as if he felt they were ganging up on him without reason. "You think the cops would stake this place out after they searched it and came up empty handed?"
"Yes," Tucker said.
"Why?" Meyers asked. "Why would they?"
"Kluger's the type to cover all bets," Tucker said. "I wouldn't even be surprised if he was out there himself."
"Well," Meyers said, scratching his chin and thinking it over, "you haven't been wrong about anything you've done."
"That's right."
He stopped scratching his chin. "So I guess I'll go down the drain with you."
"You don't have to phrase it quite as pessimistically as that," Tucker said, smiling.
"We're home free," Bates said.
Tucker said, "Not yet."
Meyers sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. "You think this Kluger might have put a man on the end of this drain pipe, even after the mall search failed?"
"If I thought that," Tucker said, "we wouldn't be going out this way."
"Well, then, aren't we home free, like Edgar said?"
"I just don't like to hear a lot of talk about how we're out of it-until we really are out of it." He fished in his jacket pocket and found a roll of Life Savers. "Lime," he told them. "Anybody want one?"
Neither Bates nor Meyers wanted one.
Tucker popped the circlet into his mouth, put the roll into his pocket, then sat down on the edge of the drain and jumped down into the pipe. He turned and reached up to Bates who handed down the two large waterproof sacks that contained the bank bags full of money and uncut stones. The jugger followed, then Meyers.
They had two flashlights, which drove back the darkness and the centipedes, and they reached the end of the tunnel in only three or four minutes. Meyers greeted the first sight of the exit with a loud sigh of relief.
Sunlight slanting in behind them flooded the erosion gully and made the scrub land look washed out and dead. It stung their eyes and robbed them of the cover of night for the remainder of their escape route. But it plainly showed that there were no police hidden behind any of the boulders.
Weary, stiff, and sore, the three of them climbed out of the drain and down the gully wall, dragging the two big sacks with them. Tucker called a halt at the boulders behind which the three cops had taken refuge last night, and he said, "We'll bury the Skorpions here."
Meyers glanced quickly at the brush and the scattered palms, looked back in the direction of Oceanview Plaza, which was hidden from them by the rising land. "What if we need them?"
"We won't," Tucker said.
They scooped up the soft earth and laid the pistols in the depression they had made, then shoved the loose dirt over them.
"What if they find them?" Meyers asked. He seemed ready to exhume his own gun.
"So what if they do?" Tucker asked.
"They'll trace them."
"No."
"You sure?"
"Come on," Tucker said wearily. "Let's move ass."
They continued along the gully, considerably slowed and burdened by the two sacks of money and gems but not in the least displeased to have to bear them. The six-and seven-foot banks on both sides kept them from being seen by anyone to the north or the south, while only empty land lay behind them. And the closer they got to the highway, the more they were hidden from the cars rushing up and down the coast, for the erosion channel dropped even deeper and fed into another man-sized drainage tunnel under the roadbed. They dragged the sacks through the drain and came out on the far side of the highway, on the last of the gentle hills above the beach.
The air was pleasantly tangy with elemental odors.
Sea gulls soared in from the whitecaps, crying shrilly and dancing on the air currents.
"The ocean's beautiful this morning," Edgar Bates said as he followed the other two out of the drain.
Although he ached in every muscle and joint, and although his eyes felt grainy and his mouth tasted of rubber, Tucker looked out at the rolling sea and the endless sky, and he had to agree. "It sure is," he said.
They crabbed down the slopes to the beach and turned south through the soft yellow-white sand. In less than five minutes they came to a paved beach-access road. Above them now, overhanging the beach, were expensive glass, chrome, and redwood houses that glinted in the early-morning sunlight.
"We'll need a car," Tucker said. He turned to Meyers. "Think you can find one up there?"
"Sure."
"Take your time."
"Five minutes."
"Take your time," Tucker repeated. "We don't want to blow it all now, not after what we've been through."
Tucker sat down on the money sacks. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and he watched Meyers walk away up the curving access lane and out of sight around a hillock of sand and yellow beach grass.
Edgar put down his satchel and went out to the edge of the sea to splash water on his face. He was whistling again.
Twenty minutes later, at 6:45, Frank Meyers drove down to them in a new Jaguar 2+2, a sleek black machine that purred much more softly than did its namesake.
They put the sacks in the trunk. Edgar climbed into the back seat with his bag of tools, and Tucker sat in the front passenger's bucket next to Meyers.
"How do you like this baby?" Meyers asked, grinning and patting the wooden steering wheel.
"Did you have to take the flashiest thing you could find?" Tucker asked. "We don't want to turn heads, you know. We just want to slip back into the city like three ordinary guys on their way to work."
"I like it," Bates said from the back seat.
"There were maybe half a dozen others I could have gotten," Meyers said, "but they weren't so convenient. There was a lot less risk for me with this baby. The engine was cold, but the keys were in the ignition." He laughed. "Didn't have to jump wires. This guy must have had a late night, come home stoned, and won't be up for hours yet. Look, we'll just be like three stinking rich ordinary guys on their way to work."
"And in a way," Edgar Bates said, "that's what we are."
Tucker smiled, relaxed, leaned back in the genuine leather upholstery. "Except that we're not going to work-we're coming home from it." He pulled his seat belt across and buckled it. "Let's get out of here."
Sitting in his squad car across the highway from Oceanview Plaza, Lieutenant Norman Kluger watched the sun come up. Inexorably, as the night gave way to warm morning light, Kluger's self-confidence gave way to anger, irritation, confusion, and finally despair. No one had come out of the mall. Had anyone been in there to begin with? He wished he could wind the sun back down across the sky, turn it half way around the world, and tackle this case again, from the beginning.
Well after sunrise, when the traffic began to pick up, he reluctantly decided to call it quits. He buckled his seat belt, started the engine, and drove away from there. All the way back to the station, he functioned under a veil of emotional narcosis.
He delivered the car to the division garage man and went inside the low stucco building to fill out his duty roster. His eyes felt grainy, his mouth dry and stale. All he wanted now was to get home and fall into bed.
At the dispatchers' table, there was considerable excitement. He ignored that and went to his own desk in the large main room, where he filled out a skeleton report and filed it. His first failure
As he was leaving, one of the off-duty officers who was in the crowd around the dispatchers stopped him. "Hey, weren't you on that Oceanview robbery last night?"
Kluger winced. "Yeah." He yawned.
"What do you think of this?"
"O
f what?" Kluger was suddenly alert.
"The day shift of Oceanview's security guard came on this morning, just a couple of minutes ago. They found the watchmen tied up again. Looks like the place was robbed twice last night."
Kluger just stood there. He was looking at the other man, but he was seeing the police chief's chair in which he would never sit by the time he was forty years old.
They parked six blocks from the hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and Bates went to get his rented car to ferry them the last half mile. At the hotel they went to their rooms, showered and shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and checked out at half-hour intervals. Then Bates drove them out to Van Nuys where they took two rooms at the Carriage Inn, a motel where they could have complete privacy. Exhausted, they slept all afternoon.
At seven o'clock that evening Meyers and Bates came to Tucker's room with a banquet of take-out orders from Saul's, a first-class Jewish restaurant-delicatessen on Ventura. They ate, drank cold bottles of Coors, and talked about everything but the job they had worked on only that morning.
When they had finished supper and cleaned up the debris, Tucker opened the two waterproof yellow sacks and then the bank bags, and they separated the cash from the jewels. For an hour they counted money, then cross-checked one another's figures. The total take from Countryside Savings and Loan Company was $212,210, no change. After Tucker peeled off a thousand to cover the expense of the Skorpions, they each had $70,400. It looked very nice.
"What'll we do with the extra ten?" Meyers asked, pointing at the last bill left alone on the center of the bedspread.
"Leave it for the room maid," Tucker said, placing it in the center of the blotter on the desk.
"Now what about the jewels?" Edgar asked, lifting two handfuls of them and letting them trickle out between his fingers. "You're the one who knows the fence. You going to take these back to New York?"
"They'd make for a damned heavy suitcase," Tucker said. "Besides, certain models of airport metal detectors will pick up on diamonds."
"What, then?"
"In the morning," Tucker said, "I'll get three or four one-pound cans of pipe tobacco. I'll empty the tobacco out, fill the tins with the stones, pack the tins in a box, and mail it all to myself."
Meyers frowned. "Is that safe?"
"I might insure it," Tucker said, "for a thousand bucks."
They looked at him, open-mouthed, then caught on and laughed.
"If the post office loses them," Meyers said, "I'll expect my three hundred and thirty-three dollars."
They drank a few more bottles of Coors, talked about other people in the business, and broke up shortly past midnight.
At the door of Tucker's room Meyers said, "You leaving first thing tomorrow?"
"I've got reservations for the two o'clock flight," Tucker said.
"I'll probably stay over a few days. Just through the weekend. I'll be at the same apartment when I come back to New York. At least I will be for a few weeks. When you get yours from the fence, you know where to reach me."
"Okay," Tucker said.
"It's been a pleasure."
Tucker nodded.
"Maybe we'll do it again soon."
"Maybe," Tucker said, though he knew that he would never get involved in another job with Frank Meyers.
Early Friday evening, Tucker walked into his Park Avenue apartment, closed the door, and called for Elise. When he found that she was not home, he opened the front closet, stepped inside, and worked the combination dial of the wall safe. His Tucker wallet full of Tucker papers went into the safe, and his real wallet full of his real papers came out. He unlatched the smallest of the two suitcases, the one he had bought in Los Angeles, and he transferred the seventy thousand dollars to the small vault.
In the kitchen he found the accumulated mail from the last four days laid out for him on the table, and he looked through it. There were several bills, advertisements, a bookclub selection, magazines, nothing really important.
He made himself a cold roast beef sandwich with a slice of cheese, mixed a drink, and went out into the main hall. He stood in front of the Edo shield and spear, eating and drinking as his eyes roved over the familiar lines of the artifacts.
When Elise had not shown up by nine-thirty, he knew that she was either working on a night filming assignment or was out to dinner and a show with friends. She would probably not get back until midnight or after.
In the den he picked up Smith and Wan-go's China: A History in Art, but his mind kept wandering, and his eyes would not focus on the printed words. He put the book aside and switched on the television set.
Watching the screen without actually paying attention to the images moving upon it, he began to think about those two bloody bodies in the mall's business office. He shuddered uncontrollably and felt nauseous. He always tried to set up a job in such a way that no killing was required. He was not quick to point a gun, and he rarely used one. In the past he had found himself incapable of extreme violence except when it was absolutely necessary to save his own life. That had happened only twice. The first time, he had been forced into a corner by a crooked and brutal cop who wanted to cut himself in on a piece of the action-Tucker's piece; and once there had been a partner who had decided to kill Tucker and avoid the unpleasant ritual of splitting the take from a robbery. Both times, Tucker had taken the only option that they had left open to him: he had killed. But the nightmares had haunted him for months afterward, and the guilt was still with him. Although he had not had a hand in the deaths of Keski and the bodyguard at Oceanview Plaza, he knew he would always feel some responsibility for them. There would be new nightmares.
Suddenly the color picture on the television screen came through to him for the first time-and there was Elise spraying perfume on her slender wrists and pretty neck. As the male voice-over sold the product, Elise smiled at the camera, smiled at Tucker She seemed perfectly real, not an image on a strip of film but a flesh-and-blood woman.
Tucker wanted to reach out and touch her. When he had been sitting at the bottom of the pool in Oceanview Plaza, he had been worried about losing her, and he was plagued by the same anxiety now. He needed her more than he had ever previously admitted to himself. She had nursed him through those nightmares and through so much more. When everyone else was considered, she was his only friend.
The commercial ended. Elise vanished.
Before his thoughts could slip back to the dead men in his past, he went out and mixed himself another drink. He stood by the spear and shield in the main hall. There, he could turn and look at Elise the moment she came through the front door, which could not be too soon.
Brian Coffey is the pen name of a young American writer whose fiction has sold over two million copies throughout the world.
Surrounded is the second (the first was Blood Risk) in a series featuring Mike Tucker, a man with two identities and a Robin Hood attitude to crime.
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