Dean Koontz - Surrounded

Tucker listened closely at the gray door. He could hear a number of salesclerks laughing and talking as they passed the warehouse entrance and went through the doors of the mall's east exit just a few feet down the corridor. Most of them were calling good night to someone named Chet and another man named Artie. Chet and Artie were probably the two night watchmen.

Leaning away from the door, Tucker glanced at a set of shelves on his right, and for the first time he saw two thermos bottles and two sparkling aluminum lunch buckets. Though they were only inanimate objects, there was something pathetic about them. Chet and Artie wouldn't have an opportunity to eat their late-night snack or enjoy the card game that most likely went with it.

After a while Tucker looked at his watch. "A quarter past ten," he said.

"Soon, now," Meyers said, clutching the Skorpion in both hands, one thick finger through the trigger guard.

"What about the dog?" Bates asked. He was sweating profusely now, and his face was especially pale. His voice was not as loud as a whisper.

"What about him?" Tucker asked.

Bates's eyebrows were beaded with sweat, like twin caterpillars crawling through dew. He blinked the salty fluid out of his eyes. "Mean-looking bastard, isn't he?" He shuddered as he thought of the German shepherd. "He could tear off your arm if he really wanted to do it."

Tucker and Meyers looked at each other. Before the big man could say anything, Tucker said, "Look, he's chained to the wall. He will be chained to the wall the whole time that we're here."

"Sure, sure," Bates said in a self-deprecating tone of voice. "I know that. Don't bother with me. Don't pay me any mind. It's just that I hate waiting. Waiting makes me nervous as hell. But I'll be in shape when the crunch comes."

"I'm wondering if you will," Meyers whispered, giving Bates a hard, cold look.

"Believe me," Tucker said, "Edgar will come through. He does every time. He's always shaky at the start, but once he's working on a safe, he's steady as a rock."

"And when he's finished with the safe?" Meyers asked, as if they were talking about someone who was not present.

"Then," Bates said, as if he objected to being talked over, "I'm so delighted with my handiwork that I fairly float along for days afterward."

"It's true," Tucker said.

"You see," Bates told Meyers, "there's nothing to me except my work. I'm hollow, otherwise."

Tucker knew that what Bates said was fairly close to the truth. Except when he was dealing with a vault door or a fancy combination lock, the old jugger had no self-confidence whatsoever. He was extremely gentle, passive, withdrawn, the willing victim of an inferiority complex. Right now he felt utterly worthless and helpless, as vulnerable as a child. But when he started to work on the safe, he would have the self-assurance of Superman.

"Twenty-five after ten," Meyers said, looking at his watch. "Everyone should be out by now." He lowered the ugly Skorpion until it centered on the gray door, and he grinned idiotically once more.

A moment later the laughter and conversation in the corridor stopped. Now there were only Chet and Artie swapping jokes while they locked and tested the glass doors.

Edgar swallowed loudly.

"Here they come," Tucker whispered.

Meyers stiffened.

The two watchmen opened the warehouse door and walked inside. They were both about six feet, both middle-aged men who had retired after twenty years on a real police force, both of them going to flab and both a great deal slower to react than they once had been. They were so engrossed in the dirty story one of them was telling that neither was immediately aware of the presence of the three intruders. They took half a dozen steps into the room before they realized there was something wrong. Then, just at the punch line, they looked up and froze, shocked at the sight of three men with automatic weapons.

"Take it easy," Tucker said in a reassuringly mellow voice. "Don't go for your guns."

The guards blinked stupidly. They still did not get it. They had evidently been off a regular police force more than a few months. They were acting like amateurs.

"If you try for a gun," Meyers said, leveling the Skorpion, "I'll have to blow your brains out." In his gravel-toned voice, the threat sounded genuine.

With that, they were committed. They were in it too deep now to just walk away and forget the whole thing. They had gained control of Oceanview Plaza without spilling a drop of blood, just as Frank Meyers had promised. It was easy. Indeed, it seemed almost too easy. Tucker was worried about that.

Morose as a pair of slack-faced hound dogs, the watchmen were sitting on the floor, their shoulders against the wall, legs straight out in front of them. Their hands were bound behind their backs, ankles securely tied together with strong copper wire Edgar Bates had produced from his battered black satchel full of safecracking tools.

The largest of the guards, who was two inches taller and fifteen pounds flabbier than his companion, was a florid man in his late forties or early fifties. Beneath the beer belly and the glowing nose of the quasi-alcoholic, he looked grizzled and mean. His eyes were bracketed by hard folds of flesh, and laugh lines slashed his drooping cheeks like sword wounds. Tucker thought the man had probably been a high school football jock in his day, a combat soldier, and a real sonofabitch in a police uniform. Like most of his type, a large part of his hard-nosed image would be a bluff. However, deep inside somewhere he would have that peculiar, violent, dangerous American sense of machismo. Because of that he might do something foolish. He looked up at Tucker as Bates put away what was left of the roll of copper wire, and he said, "You won't get away with this, you little bastard."

Tucker smiled. "You watch a lot of television, don't you? You have your lines down just pat."

The watchman colored. He narrowed his eyes and made a tight, grim line of his mouth. "I've got your face filed away. I have absolutely every detail of it memorized. Hell, I have all of your faces memorized."

His Skorpion casually pointed at the man's face, Frank Meyers stepped forward, a singularly menacing presence with his horror-movie voice. "You're pretty damn dumb," he said nastily, meeting the guard's hostile stare.

"He'll be okay," Tucker said, quickly dismissing Meyers before the watchman could respond and exacerbate the situation. Tucker could sense an almost natural antagonism between these two men. They were the sort who seemed to react chemically from the moment of first contact, the sort who would be at one another's throats with little provocation. And that could not be allowed. He knelt down beside the guard and smiled at him. "Which one are you-Chet or Artie?"

Both of the watchmen were surprised. "How'd you know our names?" the mean one demanded.

Tucker sighed. "I stood at that door and listened to everyone in the mall say good night to you."

The ex-cop was disgusted with himself for not figuring it out right away.

"Which are you?" Tucker insisted quietly.

"Chet," the mean one said.

The important thing, Tucker knew, was to soothe Chet's battered pride, doctor his bruised machismo. The less like a fool that Chet felt, the more cooperative he would be. "Chet, I know you're not the kind of man who takes this sort of thing easily. You're not used to letting anyone get the jump on you. But now it's happened, and you have to make the best of it. My friend here," he said, pointing to Frank Meyers, "will be right out in the corridor watching over the east exit. Every once in a while he'll look in on you. He will not want to see you struggling to get loose. You don't want to make him nervous. There isn't any reason for anyone to get killed here tonight."