Dean Koontz - Surrounded

Kluger stood in a telephone booth on the raised platform of the mall's automated drive-up post office in the northeast corner of the parking lot. The phone box was at his left shoulder. On his right, beyond the booth, lay the large square housing for the stamp dispensers, scales, and mailboxes. Straight ahead, visible through the clear Plexiglas wall, was Oceanview Plaza and many of the twenty patrolmen for whom Kluger was now responsible. He watched his men, and he listened to the telephone ringing and ringing and ringing on the other end of the line

Thirty-five years old and looking even a couple of years younger than that, Norman Kluger nonetheless had an undeniable air of authority about him. He was six-feet-three, trim and muscular, with long arms and hands fit for a basketball star. His face was square and unlined, but hard and cold as ice. He had a Ronald Reagan jaw, and he knew it. He thrust it out as consciously and effectively as Reagan always did. His eyes were dark and quick, deeply shelved under a broad forehead that bore the only wrinkles in his face. Fortunately, his red-brown hair had already begun to turn gray at the temples; and it was this touch more than his size or his clenched jaw that made him look old enough and experienced enough for command.

In the mall the phone stopped ringing. A quiet, steady voice said, "Hello?"

"My name is Kluger," the lieutenant said. "I'm in charge of the police out here."

"So?"

"So," Kluger said, trying to conceal his irritation, "I want to know what you're going to do next."

"That depends on you," the stranger said.

"Oh?"

"Yes. It depends on whether or not you act intelligently. If you pull any crazy heroics on us, try to force the issue-well, that wouldn't be at all intelligent."

The lieutenant frowned. His heavy rust-colored eyebrows came together, forming one dark bar across the base of his brow. He had expected to hear a well-struck note of desperation in the man's voice. After all, this stranger and his hoodlum friends were trapped in there like snakes in a bag. But this one sounded unfrightened, almost serene. "Sergeant Brice tells me you have hostages."

"Five of them," the man said.

"Then you're going to want to use them."

"I doubt it."

"As long as you have them, we'll have to let you go," Kluger said. "We won't have a choice. We don't want any innocent parties killed or hurt."

"Bullshit," the man on the phone said. "If we tried to use them as a shield, and if you thought you saw an opening, there would be gun play. You'd count on marksmanship and luck to miss the hostages. And if you killed any of them, you'd do your best to pin their deaths on us. We wouldn't be alive to argue."

That had been approximately what had been going through Kluger's mind for the last twenty minutes. He was unsettled by the stranger's perspicacity.

"All we want from you at the moment," the man inside the mall said, "is the same thing that I told Brice earlier: We want you to stay out of here. Back off and stay backed off. Don't try to come in after us."

"Oh?" Kluger said. "What are you going to do? How long will you last? Are you going to homestead in there?"

The stranger laughed. He had a smooth, mellow laugh, like an actor. Kluger distrusted people who laughed too easily or too well. "At least," the man said, "it's nice to be dealing with a cop who has a sense of humor."

Kluger scowled at his reflection in the Plexiglas before him. "I wasn't being funny, mister," he said sharply, the "mister" delivered in a most military fashion. "I asked you a serious question. How in the hell long do you jerks think you can hide in that place?"

The man was silent for a moment, readjusting himself to Kluger's mood. "We'll stay here until we can get safely away. Maybe a few hours-or maybe a few days."

"Days?" Kluger didn't think he could have heard him right.

"That's what I said."

"You're crazy."

The stranger said nothing.

"You're in a hopeless situation."

"Are we?"

"You know it," the lieutenant said.

"I don't know it," the stranger said. "Currently, it looks as if we can't get out of here without running headlong into you people."

"You got it."

"But," the stranger continued, "by the same token, you can't come inside without running headlong into us. We. may be under siege, but we also happen to be in a fortress. Fortresses are built to withstand sieges. You'd die like flies trying to get through those doors, Kluger. And by the way, you better not send those three men in by the storm drain. They'd just get their heads blown off before they could reach the warehouse."

Kluger felt a line of perspiration break out on his forehead. The conversation was not going anything like he had thought it would, was taking quirky turns that left him baffled. "How did you know about them?"

"We have a couple of our own men down in the drains," the stranger said. "They saw your fellows enter the gully a couple of minutes before you called."

Kluger wanted to strike the booth wall with his fist, but he restrained himself. "One thing I don't believe," he said, changing the subject as best as he could. "There aren't seven of you in there, like you said. No way."

"That so?"

"With all the lights on, we can look through the doors with binoculars and see pretty much what you're up to. We've only seen three of you. Three, not seven."

"And the two in the drain, remember."

"Maybe there aren't two in the drain," Kluger said angrily, his face flushed with blood.

"Maybe there aren't," the stranger agreed, again confusing and frustrating the lieutenant. "Just don't test us."

For a moment there was silence from both ends of the line. Then Kluger said, "I have an offer to make."

"Make it, then."

The lieutenant spoke evenly, slowly but tensely, straining his Ronald Reagan jaw to the breaking point. "I'll send in two of my men, two unarmed police officers. You'll send the innocent bystanders out and keep my officers as hostages."

"No chance."

"We aren't going to shoot at our own men!" Kluger insisted impatiently. Why wouldn't this stranger listen to reason? Why wouldn't he fall for anything? What made him so goddamned different from the hundreds of other hoodlums Kluger had handled so well in the past? "Two patrolmen would make a better shield than those five you have now, for God's sake."

"I've already said no. Anything else you want?"

Sweat was now streaming down Kluger's temples. The cords in his neck stood out like ropes. "Whatever you have in mind, it won't work. You're not up against a bunch of fools. I spent four years in Southeast Asia. Volunteered for it. You're dealing with a veteran, mister."

"So are you," the stranger said. Then he laughed and said, "Listen, what's your number there?"

"Why?"

"Well… I might want to ring you up and surrender," the stranger said.

Kluger did not answer at once, for he had to calm himself before he was able to speak. "You haven't got a chance now, smartass," he said at last.

The stranger laughed again. "Oh, come on, Lieutenant. Give me your number, anyway."

Kluger read it off to him. "It's a booth out here in the parking lot. I'll put a man beside it so I'll be sure to know when you call. If you have any brains at all-"

The stranger cut him off.

The line buzzed in his ear.

Kluger turned and slammed the receiver down hard, and the sound cracked like a gunshot in the tiny enclosure. As he turned again and pushed through the folding door, a mosquito bit him on the back of the neck. Cursing, he slapped at it, caught it on his palm, and brought it around to have a look at it. The mosquito was extraordinarily big, red with the lieutenant's blood which it had been drinking. Although it was already dead, he worked it fiercely between his hands-until there was nothing but a brown smear left of it.