Dean Koontz - Surrounded

Meyers pulled the slightly battered, peach-colored Oldsmobile into the northside parking area, went past all the Cadillacs, which gleamed in the darkness with purple reflections of the overhead mercury vapor lights. He drove around behind the mall and stopped in a space next to several medium-line Fords, Chevrolets, and cheap foreign imports. "Just like I said," he told the other two. "Here's the employee parking." He pointed straight ahead through the windshield at the mall's rear entrance. "All the clerks and managers will come out of that door."

Tucker looked at his watch. "Nine-thirty," he said. "They'll be closing in half an hour. We'd better move ass." He opened the Samsonite suitcase that was on the seat between him and Frank Meyers, passed out the Skorpions and the ammunition.

"Hellish-looking things," Edgar Bates said. Like Tucker, he worked with guns quite often but had never come to trust or like them. "Are you sure we wouldn't be better off carrying a couple of good old-fashioned forty-fives, Mike?"

"I'm sure," Tucker said without turning around to look at the jugger. "This is best."

Meyers held his gun below the window level and stared hard at the shadowed lines of it, traced the folded wire stock with his blunt fingers. "Now I see what you meant about psychology, Tucker. Who in the hell would ever try to go up against something this damned ugly?"

"No one," Tucker said, "I hope."

"I've never used anything like this before," Bates said. "How does it handle?"

"Point it and pull the trigger," Tucker said.

"Really?"

"How else?"

"How's the kick?" Bates asked skeptically.

"Not bad."

"You've tried one?"

"I've tried all three," Tucker said.

"Which way does mine pull-left or right?" Bates asked.

"It doesn't."

"Not even a little bit?"

"No."

"I've never used a gun that held perfectly steady on the target," the jugger said doubtfully.

Tucker said, "The fellow who provided these is a first-rate gunsmith. He cleaned these up, even rebored the barrels. The guns are better than new." He was aware of Edgar's nervousness and sympathized with him. He hoped his calm, almost whispered explanations would soothe the older man.

In the dull violet light that filtered through the windows, they finished loading and pocketed more ammunition. Frank Meyers was breathing too heavily but seemed much improved otherwise. In fact, he seemed too improved in too short a time. Perhaps he was the sort of man who wasted away from inactivity but regained his gloss when he was in the midst of action. Nevertheless, Tucker distrusted sudden personality changes even when he thought he knew the reasons for them.

"Didn't you have to pass through a metal detector at the airport?" Bates asked, leaning forward from the rear seat. "Didn't they examine your luggage? The way they screen for hijackers these days, I don't see how you could have gotten these things all the way across the country."

"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.