Dean Koontz - Surrounded

"But how?" Tucker asked. "You're so much bigger than he was."

"He paid me half in advance," Meyers said, "and was supposed to give me the rest after the job was done. He met me in my hotel room here in L.A. to give me the rest of the money… Look, I'd worked with him before. He'd always been square with me. I turned my back on him, never thinking he might… He came in behind me like a cat… Reached around and slit my throat…" Meyers's whispery voice grew shallower, haunted. "When someone cuts you like that, you're too busy trying to hold the edges of the tear together to protect yourself from anything else. When I fell, he stomped once on my neck. Nearly crushed my windpipe. Then he walked out and left me for dead."

"That was a mistake."

"You know it. He hadn't hit my jugular. He'd done badly enough otherwise. But he missed the jugular." He grinned, an expression that worked this time.

"Still, you must have bled. You must have-"

"I was saved by my weakness," Meyers said.

"Weakness?"

"I had a woman with me," Meyers said. "I stashed her in the bathroom when Keski knocked on the door. I didn't want her to be a witness to the payoff. The moment Keski left, she came out and saw what he'd done to me, and she called down to the desk for an ambulance. I still might have died. But it turned out that three floors below an ambulance team was picking up an old man who'd had a fatal stroke in another room. They rushed upstairs for me. The old man died, but I pulled through."

"And ever since you've wanted Keski."

"You know it," Meyers said, petting his Skorpion with one hand as if it were alive. "A year after it happened, I came back out here and rented an apartment. Then I started hunting Keski. I found out that he'd gone straight, just like he'd wanted to do. He'd bought the majority stock in this mall, owned motels and restaurants up and down the coast, a dozen other things. I followed him to his office here in the mall every day for two months, looking for an opening. But he was packing two bodyguards then."

"He never saw you?" Tucker asked.

"If he did, he wouldn't have recognized me," Meyers said. "I used to be more of a dresser. And I didn't have a crew cut. I even had a mustache. But that got shaved off in the hospital, and I never felt like growing it back."

"So while you followed Keski around, you learned the layout of the mall."

"I started to see what a beautiful job it was," Meyers said, nodding his bristled head. "I figured I could combine the job with getting Keski. I knew the bastard would be surprised when I walked into his office an hour after closing time and pointed a gun at him. Then, ripping off his mall after I'd fingered him seemed like a real nice touch."

"It was Keski who stayed late every Wednesday," Tucker said, "not the bank manager."

"Sure."

"You lied."

"I didn't have a choice."

"That doesn't make any difference," Tucker said. "You lied to Felton. You lied to me. If you get out of this, you're finished in the business."

"I had to lie to make it sound sweet enough to get you into it," Meyers said earnestly. He saw the anger in Tucker's eyes, a subdued but steady flame. "I was a man on the ropes, Tucker. I could still get up for a job, but between jobs I was a mess. I just sat in that apartment in New York letting myself go to hell thinking about it. I had to get Keski before the whole thing ate me up." He cleared his throat and looked nervously at the smaller man. "You understand that, don't you?"

"No."

"He nearly killed me. He-"

"He was your problem," Tucker said. "Not mine or Edgar's."

"Hey, look," Meyers said. "Whether or not the manager is here, that bank can be knocked over."

"Could have been," Tucker said, stressing each word. "But you overlooked that alarm pedal beneath Ledderson's desk…"

"Christ, what a mess!" Meyers said, as if he had, for most of their conversation, forgotten that they were in a bind, that carloads of police now surrounded Oceanview Plaza. Gaining his revenge, killing Rudolph Keski, Frank Meyers had not regained his old common sense and self-control. His wit and his nerves would never be what they had been before Keski had slit his throat. He was still a ruined man, operating on the remembrance of courage. "We should have shot our way out while we had the chance."

"It's too late for that now," Tucker said.

"I know. If you'd let me-"

"And I think I may have come up with something better," Tucker said, stepping away from the wall of boxes, straightening his coat with a quick shrug of his shoulders. "You see what's right there beside you?"

Meyers turned right and left, perplexed.

"On the floor," Tucker said.

Meyers looked down, saw it, was still perplexed. "It's a drain, that's all."

Tucker knelt beside a drainage grill that had a diameter half again as large as that of the standard manhole. "Outside, behind the mall, there are some pretty steep hills, nothing on them. When it rains, a great deal of water must collect on the parking lot. They'll have a system of storm drains to cope with it."

"So what?" Meyers knelt down too.

"A storm drain is usually pretty large," Tucker said thoughtfully. He stared into the tunnel below, through the holes in the heavy grilled cover. Beyond the metal grid there was only darkness, deep and velvety and black as a starless sky. "It's designed to convey huge volumes of water for short periods of time. It ought to be big enough for us to crawl through."

Meyers dug a finger in his ear as if he thought he had not heard Tucker properly. "Are you serious?"

"It might work."

"Go out through a sewer?"

"It isn't a sewer," Tucker said impatiently. "It only carries fresh rain water. Right now it ought to be dry-or nearly so."

"But if we went down there," Meyers said, "where would we come out?" Clearly, he did not relish the idea of using the storm drains for a getaway.

"I don't know," Tucker admitted. "But I'm sure as hell going to find out." He put his gun aside. "Here. Help me get this grill out of the way." He got to his feet and laced his fingers through the steel grid.

Unhappily, Meyers put his own Skorpion beside Tucker's, stood up, bent over, and grabbed the other side of the grill.

Between them they lifted it out of its hole, walked it across the floor, and set it down a few feet away.

Tucker went back and knelt by the hole again. "I still can't see anything. Go over to the workbenches and get one of the flashlights."

Meyers picked up his Skorpion, holding it in both hands for a moment. "Anything else?"

"Maybe you should look out in the hall and see if everything's okay with Edgar."

"Should I tell him about this?" Meyers asked, gesturing toward the hole in the floor.

Tucker raised his head. "Yeah. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. Even if it leads nowhere, it might cheer him up for a few minutes. He's probably feeling low right now."

"So am I," Meyers said.

"Sure," Tucker said. "We all are."

Tucker sat on the edge of the drain opening, then jumped down into the darkness, landing feet first on the corrugated steel floor. He switched on the flashlight that Meyers had brought him, and he discovered that the pipe was larger than he had expected it would, be, nearly high enough to allow him to stand upright, wide enough so that neither shoulder touched it.

"What do you think?" Frank Meyers asked. He was kneeling on the warehouse floor overhead, peering down through the circular entrance to the drain.

"Maybe we're on to something," Tucker said.

He directed the wide yellow beam of the flashlight over the walls. The tunnel was dirty, a bit rusted, and spotted with luminescent gray-green moss. Spiderwebs filled the shallow troughs between a few of the ripples in the steel. Centipedes clung to the metal ribs, long eyestalks flicking nervously up and down; and when the light touched them, they fled into the shadows. Though the walls were generally dry, the floor of the tube was puddled with filthy water. He was standing in an inch or two of dark, brackish sludge that gleamed like oil in the amber light.