Dean Koontz - Surrounded

Neither Bates nor Meyers wanted one.

Tucker popped the circlet into his mouth, put the roll into his pocket, then sat down on the edge of the drain and jumped down into the pipe. He turned and reached up to Bates who handed down the two large waterproof sacks that contained the bank bags full of money and uncut stones. The jugger followed, then Meyers.

They had two flashlights, which drove back the darkness and the centipedes, and they reached the end of the tunnel in only three or four minutes. Meyers greeted the first sight of the exit with a loud sigh of relief.

Sunlight slanting in behind them flooded the erosion gully and made the scrub land look washed out and dead. It stung their eyes and robbed them of the cover of night for the remainder of their escape route. But it plainly showed that there were no police hidden behind any of the boulders.

Weary, stiff, and sore, the three of them climbed out of the drain and down the gully wall, dragging the two big sacks with them. Tucker called a halt at the boulders behind which the three cops had taken refuge last night, and he said, "We'll bury the Skorpions here."

Meyers glanced quickly at the brush and the scattered palms, looked back in the direction of Oceanview Plaza, which was hidden from them by the rising land. "What if we need them?"

"We won't," Tucker said.

They scooped up the soft earth and laid the pistols in the depression they had made, then shoved the loose dirt over them.

"What if they find them?" Meyers asked. He seemed ready to exhume his own gun.

"So what if they do?" Tucker asked.

"They'll trace them."

"No."

"You sure?"

"Come on," Tucker said wearily. "Let's move ass."

They continued along the gully, considerably slowed and burdened by the two sacks of money and gems but not in the least displeased to have to bear them. The six-and seven-foot banks on both sides kept them from being seen by anyone to the north or the south, while only empty land lay behind them. And the closer they got to the highway, the more they were hidden from the cars rushing up and down the coast, for the erosion channel dropped even deeper and fed into another man-sized drainage tunnel under the roadbed. They dragged the sacks through the drain and came out on the far side of the highway, on the last of the gentle hills above the beach.

The air was pleasantly tangy with elemental odors.

Sea gulls soared in from the whitecaps, crying shrilly and dancing on the air currents.

"The ocean's beautiful this morning," Edgar Bates said as he followed the other two out of the drain.

Although he ached in every muscle and joint, and although his eyes felt grainy and his mouth tasted of rubber, Tucker looked out at the rolling sea and the endless sky, and he had to agree. "It sure is," he said.

They crabbed down the slopes to the beach and turned south through the soft yellow-white sand. In less than five minutes they came to a paved beach-access road. Above them now, overhanging the beach, were expensive glass, chrome, and redwood houses that glinted in the early-morning sunlight.

"We'll need a car," Tucker said. He turned to Meyers. "Think you can find one up there?"

"Sure."

"Take your time."

"Five minutes."

"Take your time," Tucker repeated. "We don't want to blow it all now, not after what we've been through."

Tucker sat down on the money sacks. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and he watched Meyers walk away up the curving access lane and out of sight around a hillock of sand and yellow beach grass.

Edgar put down his satchel and went out to the edge of the sea to splash water on his face. He was whistling again.

Twenty minutes later, at 6:45, Frank Meyers drove down to them in a new Jaguar 2+2, a sleek black machine that purred much more softly than did its namesake.

They put the sacks in the trunk. Edgar climbed into the back seat with his bag of tools, and Tucker sat in the front passenger's bucket next to Meyers.

"How do you like this baby?" Meyers asked, grinning and patting the wooden steering wheel.

"Did you have to take the flashiest thing you could find?" Tucker asked. "We don't want to turn heads, you know. We just want to slip back into the city like three ordinary guys on their way to work."

"I like it," Bates said from the back seat.

"There were maybe half a dozen others I could have gotten," Meyers said, "but they weren't so convenient. There was a lot less risk for me with this baby. The engine was cold, but the keys were in the ignition." He laughed. "Didn't have to jump wires. This guy must have had a late night, come home stoned, and won't be up for hours yet. Look, we'll just be like three stinking rich ordinary guys on their way to work."

"And in a way," Edgar Bates said, "that's what we are."

Tucker smiled, relaxed, leaned back in the genuine leather upholstery. "Except that we're not going to work-we're coming home from it." He pulled his seat belt across and buckled it. "Let's get out of here."

Sitting in his squad car across the highway from Oceanview Plaza, Lieutenant Norman Kluger watched the sun come up. Inexorably, as the night gave way to warm morning light, Kluger's self-confidence gave way to anger, irritation, confusion, and finally despair. No one had come out of the mall. Had anyone been in there to begin with? He wished he could wind the sun back down across the sky, turn it half way around the world, and tackle this case again, from the beginning.

Well after sunrise, when the traffic began to pick up, he reluctantly decided to call it quits. He buckled his seat belt, started the engine, and drove away from there. All the way back to the station, he functioned under a veil of emotional narcosis.

He delivered the car to the division garage man and went inside the low stucco building to fill out his duty roster. His eyes felt grainy, his mouth dry and stale. All he wanted now was to get home and fall into bed.

At the dispatchers' table, there was considerable excitement. He ignored that and went to his own desk in the large main room, where he filled out a skeleton report and filed it. His first failure

As he was leaving, one of the off-duty officers who was in the crowd around the dispatchers stopped him. "Hey, weren't you on that Oceanview robbery last night?"

Kluger winced. "Yeah." He yawned.

"What do you think of this?"

"Of what?" Kluger was suddenly alert.

"The day shift of Oceanview's security guard came on this morning, just a couple of minutes ago. They found the watchmen tied up again. Looks like the place was robbed twice last night."

Kluger just stood there. He was looking at the other man, but he was seeing the police chief's chair in which he would never sit by the time he was forty years old.

They parked six blocks from the hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and Bates went to get his rented car to ferry them the last half mile. At the hotel they went to their rooms, showered and shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and checked out at half-hour intervals. Then Bates drove them out to Van Nuys where they took two rooms at the Carriage Inn, a motel where they could have complete privacy. Exhausted, they slept all afternoon.

At seven o'clock that evening Meyers and Bates came to Tucker's room with a banquet of take-out orders from Saul's, a first-class Jewish restaurant-delicatessen on Ventura. They ate, drank cold bottles of Coors, and talked about everything but the job they had worked on only that morning.

When they had finished supper and cleaned up the debris, Tucker opened the two waterproof yellow sacks and then the bank bags, and they separated the cash from the jewels. For an hour they counted money, then cross-checked one another's figures. The total take from Countryside Savings and Loan Company was $212,210, no change. After Tucker peeled off a thousand to cover the expense of the Skorpions, they each had $70,400. It looked very nice.