Dean Koontz - Surrounded

Moving in between the aisles of stored goods, Kluger said, "Let's go see what we have here."

What they had here were three hysterical hostages: the two night watchmen and an extremely attractive young woman in her late twenties. They were bound with wire at wrists and ankles, sitting on the floor and propped against the concrete wall. They stopped shouting as soon as they saw the lieutenant.

"Thank God," the woman said. She had large dark eyes and a velvety complexion. She interested Kluger.

"Did you get them? Did you nail that little bastard that was in charge?" the largest of the watchmen demanded.

"No,"' Kluger said. "Do you know where they are?"

"They didn't get past you, did they?"

"No."

"Well," the watchman said, "then they're still here somewhere."

Hawbaker went forward and started to untie the woman while Peterson dealt with this most vocal of the guards.

"Don't worry," Kluger said. "We'll get them." He caught a strange look on the young woman's face and turned to her. "You don't think we will?"

Her hands suddenly freed, she began to massage her numbed fingers and wrists. They were the most delicate fingers and the slenderest wrists that Norman Kluger had ever seen.

"You don't think we'll get them?" he repeated.

"No," she answered firmly. She had a warm, appealing voice. "At least you won't get the one who was in charge."

"Oh? Why?"

"Because," she said, "he's not the sort who'll ever spend a night in jail."

By three o'clock in the morning, an hour and fifteen minutes after Kluger had led the police into Oceanview Plaza, all the search parties had reported back to the lieutenant's command post by the fountain in the mall lounge. They had not found a single trace of the thieves.

Officer Peterson and two other men had poked about in all the stores that faced out on the east corridor. They had peered into every nook in Surf and Subsurface and into every cranny in Shen Yang's Orient. At the Rolls dealership they had looked in and under the five gleaming automobiles on display, had pulled up the trunk lids with all the trepidation of men expecting to be shot in the face, and had even lifted the hoods to make sure no one was curled around the engine blocks. In the Toolbox Lounge-a very expensive bar that based its name on the campy decor of giant-sized hammers, screwdrivers, and wrenches that hung on the walls-they pushed flashlights under all the tables and booths, searched behind the bar and in the whiskey storage closet and even in the two large beer coolers. Next door to the bar, in Young Maiden, they thoughtlessly violated the sanctity of a pink-and-buff ladies' powder room and slid back the curtains on all the changing rooms. They went from one end of the mall warehouse to the other, checking the aisles and the side aisles and the cul-de-sacs; indeed, they had actually broken apart a few of the larger crates with the notion that the thieves might have boxed themselves up in order to pass themselves off as merchandise.

While Peterson's group was worriedly, frantically darting around in the east end, Officer Haggard and two other men explored the stores along the north corridor. Their greatest challenge was Markwood and Jame, one of the mall's two largest stores, for it was filled with counters and design partitions that provided thousands of possible hiding places; in fact, Haggard's men became so paranoid midway through the search of Markwood and Jame that they all had the feeling that the thieves were slipping around behind them, crawling from one counter to the next and moving always at the periphery of vision. However, they found no one in the store. It was a simple matter, by comparison, to check the changing rooms in Archer's Tailor Shoppe and declare that place clean. Likewise, Gallery Gallery-the mall's rather expensive art gallery-was easily looked into and found empty. Tie and Kerchief offered few places for concealment, and all these were unused. Freskin's Interior Decoration was wildly partitioned into sample rooms, but all of these were quiet and unlived-in.

"I feel like a kid playing hide-and-seek," one of Haggard's men said, disgusted with the whole affair.

"There's a difference," Haggard said. "When you were a kid playing hide-and-seek, there wasn't any chance at all that you could get your brains blown out."

Rookies Hawbaker and Muni were working under Officer Shrout over in the west corridor toward the front of the mall. They did not have to prowl through the Plaza's business office, because that was crawling with homicide detectives and technicians from the police laboratory downtown. But they had to check out everything else. They stayed close together and kept their revolvers drawn; Shrout was only seven months away from retirement and did not intend to get killed and be cheated out of his pension, while Patrolmen Hawbaker and Muni were too young to be anything but scared witless. Cautiously they moved through the flower shop and then through Craftwell Gifts, went down to the fancy shoe store and then across to The New Place, a hip clothing store where the prices were decidedly unhip. In the House of Books, where some of the rows of shelves were eight feet high, they had a bad moment when Hawbaker and Muni collided coming out of different aisles and almost shot each other in terror. Henry's Gaslight Restaurant, with its individually partitioned booths and its large kitchen lined with.food-storage closets, was the most harrowing part of the stalk, but it, too, proved to be deserted.

In the south wing additional lab technicians were at work in the jewelry store and in Countryside Savings and Loan. If anyone were hiding in those two places, one of the policemen would have tripped over him by this time. Therefore, Officer Brandywine and his two men concentrated their search on Sasbury's, the mall's other large clothing-department store. Like Haggard's group in Markwood and Jame, these men became so jumpy that they were looking over their shoulders more than they were watching where they were going. But they did not find anyone. Tramping on the broken glass that littered most of the corridor, a bit unnerved by the sound of it crunching under their shoes, they went next to Harold Leonardo Furriers and poked around in the cold-storage vaults full of animal pelts. All that was hiding in Harold's was a herd of dead mink.

When Officer Peterson, the last search party leader to bring in a negative report, told Lieutenant Kluger that his men had not found a trace of the thieves, the lieutenant thrust out his jaw and began to shout at them. He slammed his fist on the top of the card table that he was using for a desk, and his voice rose until it seemed to drown out the steady susurration of the fountain behind him. "They have to be here! There is no way they could have gotten out! No way!"

Peterson, Haggard, Shrout, Brandywine, and the other men just stared at him, unable to say anything that would please him.

"They have to be hiding in here," Kluger said through gritted teeth. "Somewhere in this mall, you've overlooked a hiding space big enough to contain three men." He glared at them, waiting for one of them to dare to disagree. When they remained mute, he said, "Change off. Take different corridors this time. Peterson, you search the north hall. Haggard, go over the ground Shrout covered on the west end; see if you can spot something he missed. Shrout, take the south corridor. Brandywine, you take the east stores and the warehouse."

Haggard started to say something to Peterson.

"Officer Haggard!" Kluger snapped. "I'd prefer that you did not tell Peterson where you've already searched. Let him start fresh, without preconceptions."

Haggard frowned, nodded grudgingly.

"Now move," Kluger said.

As they were leaving, Evelyn Ledderson arrived. Though it was past three o'clock in the morning, and though she had been through quite an ordeal in the course of the night, she appeared to have showered and applied makeup and started her day only a couple of hours ago. Her short green skirt and ruffled white blouse were wrinkled and smudged, but she was crisp and alert and extremely attractive. "They said you wanted to question me."