Surrounded

Therefore, the drains did not figure in this

What else?

Nothing else.

What was this threat of escape, then? A ruse of some sort, a trick? A bluff?

A fat mosquito buzzed persistently around the lieutenant's head and tried to alight on his left ear. This time he did not kill it. He brushed it away without thinking, without really being aware that he was expending the effort.

All over the parking lot the harsh and eerily garbled voices of radio dispatchers were crackling out of ten police-band radios, rising on the night air like ghostly messages from another world. They came to Lieutenant Kluger, but he did not, at the moment, hear them. His thoughts were elsewhere, turning over facts, looking for worms underneath them.

A bluff, was it?

But what could he hope to gain by bluffing?

Nothing. Kluger was sure of it.

If, in fifteen minutes, the lieutenant did lead a force into the mall, and if those hoodlums were waiting in there, then they would start shooting at one another. A number of policemen would die. That was inevitable. Every battle had its casualties. But in the end, what could the thieves gain? They would be cut to ribbons. Unless they just wanted to go out with a bang… And he was sure that the man he had talked to on the phone was not the type to make a grandstand play only to see a few fireworks. That man intended to live.

A trick?

There was no trick, under the circumstances, that amounted to more than a bluff.

He was almost tempted to dismiss it and to go on as he would have done if the stranger had not called with this fairy tale of escape. Yet… Something about that man's voice, something about his style and his undeniable self-confidence led Kluger to believe that he had meant precisely what he had said, regardless of the seeming impossibility of it. He had said he and his men were leaving. And if he were telling the truth

Kluger looked at his watch.

1:34.

He had wasted almost five minutes, and he suddenly realized that they might have been the most precious five minutes of the night. That fifteen-minute waiting period which the man in the mall had demanded was a completely artificial time limit. Kluger was angry with himself for having fallen for it. If they had found a way out, then they would have used it by now. They would have left the five hostages behind and would be unable to reach and harm them. Each minute that Kluger delayed, each minute he stood here on his big flat feet, they might be getting farther and farther away. They might be getting off scot-free.

"Hawbaker!"

The rookie whirled. "Yes, sir?"

"When I came out here, I brought one of the department's acetylene torches to cut through those inner gates if we had to."

Hawbaker blinked at him.

"It's in the trunk of my car. Get it and bring it to me-on the double!"

"Yes, sir."

"Don't forget the tank, Hawbaker."

"No, sir." Hawbaker was off, running clumsily.

Kluger looked at the mall building again, thought of the man on the telephone, thought of the promotions he needed, thought of the chief's chair

"Damn!" he said. He ran down toward the east entrance of the mall shouting at his men as he went. "Look sharp! We're going in!"

Kluger grabbed the torch and the feeding hose in one hand, lifted the small tank of compressed gas in the other, and walked across the carpet of broken glass from the outer mall doors that two of his men had smashed with hammers. He was the only one up front now. The others had fallen back on his orders, had gladly taken up safer positions behind the squad cars.

In the nine years and six months that he had been a policeman, Norman Kluger had never hesitated to risk his life if the occasion seemed to call for that. He had something of a reputation as a daredevil, but he wasn't like that at all. Naturally, there was a slight bit of grandstanding in it because he often took chances in order to be noticed by those above him in the department. However, for the most part he took risks and bulled his way through dangerous territory, because he did not know how else to get a job done-and because he had long ago decided that he was one of those people who would lead a charmed life, a guy who could walk through a pit of snakes and not be bitten once. He had spent two years in Southeast Asia in the thick of the fighting and had re-upped for two more years when his regular hitch ran out. In all that time he had not suffered a single injury, while all around him were dying, and he eventually came to feel that he could not be hurt. He was charmed, protected, watched over.

He also figured that this special personal magic would keep him safe from legal prosecution and forced retirement if anyone ever seriously accused him of overstepping his policeman's authority and tramping too hard on the rights of those people with whom he had to deal. Long before the Nixon Court had begun to rescind the liberal decisions of the past several decades, Norman Kluger had done as he wished with suspects whom he was fairly certain he could prove guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Sometimes, of course, he had knocked over a few people who were innocent, had bruised those who knowingly or unknowingly got in his way, but by God he had done the job every time. And though there had been grumbling and protests about his methods, no one had ever, in the final analysis, filed or made stick any charge or accusation against him. He was charmed. He was destined, he knew, to move up into the chief's chair in five years. Or perhaps even sooner than that. You just never knew when fortune might smile on you.

At the steel-bar gate three feet past the ruined glass doors he put down the tank of gas. He squatted against the wall and, like a soldier putting together his rifle in the dark, hooked the hose to the torch and to the tank's feed valve, working with surprising speed in the dim red light from the police cruisers' rooftop beacons.

Beyond him, beyond the gate, the mall's east corridor was absolutely lightless. Three or seven men could have been waiting there for him, machine guns aimed right at his head.

Kluger never once looked inside.

Breathing evenly, actually thriving on the danger, lie took a pair of smoked-glass goggles out of his hip pocket and put them on, then wiped the dark lenses on the back of one shirt sleeve. Clipped loosely to the hose was a pair of silvery asbestos gloves. He put these on, working his big hands in them until they felt comfortable. Switching on the gas flow, he lighted the torch, threw away the match, and adjusted the intense blue-white flame. Then he turned it on the gate next to the left-hand lock bolt, which was an inch up from the carpeted floor.

Thousands of molten metal flecks cascaded over the top of the flame and across his gloves, made interesting patterns of red and blue, yellow and white light on his mirrorlike goggles. There was a loud hissing sound like a thousand snakes, and then metal parted before the fire. A section of steel rod clattered out of the gate's pattern, striking rods around it, and bounced noiselessly on the carpet. In a moment Kluger had cut through the grid to the bolt on the inside, and in little more than another minute he had sliced through the lock itself.

The carpet smoldered, but it was fireproof and did not burst into flame.

He dragged the tank over to the other side and hunkered down and began to work again, sparks lighting his way once more. The second lock was as easy as the first. Hardly more than five minutes after he had started on the first, he finished the second.

Turning off the gas flow and instantly killing the bright flame, he stood up and stripped off his fire-spotted gloves, then his goggles, dropped them on the floor, and kicked them out of the way. He shouted over his shoulder at the squad cars: "Four of you! Come here and help me!"

Muni, Hawbaker, and two veteran bulls-Peterson and Haggard-came up quickly and hooked their hands in the gate and put their backs into it, forcing it up into the ceiling far enough for Kluger to slide underneath. Once he was on the other side, he got a grip on the steel bars and relieved

Muni, who bellied under the barrier after him. Muni helped hold it up while Haggard came over. In that manner they were shortly all on the inside.

"Dark as a shithouse in here," Hawbaker said.

"Relax," Peterson said. "If anyone was going to shoot at us, they'd have done it by now."

Kluger felt along the wall on his left until he located the warehouse door. Standing to one side, he twisted the knob and threw the door open wide. Light spilled out, but no one opened fire on them. "Hello in there!" the lieutenant called.

At once, several excited voices responded, each trying to shout louder than the other, none of them making any sense.

"What the hell?" Peterson said.

Kluger looked around the corner and saw the workbenches and the jigsaw and the electric-powered fork lifts and the great stacks of boxed and crated merchandise. There was no one in sight. "Two of you come with me," he said.

Peterson and Hawbaker followed him, the first dutifully and the second resignedly.

The shouting at the far end of the long room grew even louder, more frantic, and considerably less intelligible. Echoing off the high warehouse walls, it sounded like the raving in a lunatic asylum.

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."

Kluger smiled. "That's right." He pointed to the folding chair that was set up on the other side of the card table. "Just sit down there and help me tie up a few loose ends. I'm sure we can let you go home shortly."

She sat down. "Why do I have to be questioned twice?"

Kluger settled into the other chair and folded his hands on the table. "Those other detectives are with homicide. I'm a burglary-and-theft man. So there are sort of two investigations going on at the same time." He felt slightly tongue-tied in her presence.

"Go ahead then," she said.

"You worked for Mr. Rudolph Keski?"

"Yes."

"He was the owner of this mall?"

"He owned most of it."

"What were you-his secretary?"

She smiled coldly. "Yes."

"Did you often work evenings?"

"Only on Wednesday nights," she said, recrossing her slim legs. "Every Wednesday Mr. Keski and his business associates ate an early dinner at Henry's Gaslight." She pointed to the restaurant that faced out on the lounge. "Then they came over to the office and discussed the week's finances until closing time. Mr. Keski and I always stayed another hour or so, attending to the details that had come up during the meeting."

"Was that one of his associates in there with him when he was killed?" Kluger asked.

"No. That was his bodyguard."

"I see." He thought about that for a while, staring unabashedly at her face, slender shoulders, and full breasts. Then he said, "Tell me what happened. How was Keski killed?"

She told him, quickly, succinctly.

"That was smart work, using that alarm pedal."

"It wasn't so smart," she said. "I was terrified."

He smiled at her, wondering how he could go about asking for a date. "Then they tied you up in the warehouse?"

"Yes." Unconsciously she rubbed her wrists where the wire had encircled them.

"I've already talked to the night watchmen," Kluger explained. "I won't waste a lot of time going over old ground."

"I am awfully tired," she said.

"I appreciate that, Miss Ledderson," he said, smiling and nodding to show her how sympathetic he was. "Or… May I call you Evelyn?"

She leaned forward seductively, then winked at him and said, "Why don't you just keep on calling me Miss Ledderson?" Her dark eyes bored straight through him and saw much more than he wanted her to know.

He colored, looked at his hands, glanced at the spritzing fountain, and felt like a schoolboy caught doing something filthy. "I understand… This must have been difficult for you. I was only trying to be friendly."

"I know what you were trying to be," she said.

At that moment, when he realized that she was not the sort of woman who could be easily fooled, Kluger lost all interest in her. Women who could hold their own, women who were sharp and perceptive and not afraid to speak their minds never had appealed to him. They offended his sense of tradition, of male-female lightness. He liked the soft and helpless type, the ones who needed support and guidance from sun up to sunset. He didn't want to have to compete with a woman in the bedroom. It never occurred to him, at least not on a conscious level, that he was afraid of losing that competition.

His voice had a nasty twist to it now. "You must have known that Rudolph Keski hasn't always been a legitimate businessman."

"Oh?" She seemed amused.

"He used to be in the rackets."

She smiled. "He was in jail, then?"

"Nothing was ever proved," Kluger admitted.

"Well, then, it's nothing more than hearsay." She sat back in her chair again. She was obviously pleased with Lieutenant Kluger's discomfort.

"Did you know about this 'hearsay' reputation of his?" the lieutenant persisted.

"If I did know," she said, "what possible difference could it make? It couldn't have anything to do with what happened here tonight." Her voice got hard. There was no longer any amusement in it. "You're angry because I saw through you, and you're just trying to irritate and frighten me. I won't sit here and be harassed much longer."

"You'll sit there until I tell you to leave," Kluger said, an ugly edge to his voice.

"I'm afraid not."

"You will-"

"Do you have any serious questions? Or are you completely stumped? If you have anything serious to ask, you'd better ask it right now," she said, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet.

Kluger looked down at his hands. They were curled into tight fists. He made an effort to relax. "The manhole cover was off the drain entrance in the warehouse. Do you think they escaped that way?"

"I wouldn't know."

"First they tied you up and left you on the north side of the warehouse. Then one of them used an electric cart to move you to the south side of the room. Why?"

"I guess they were going to be doing something on the north side of the room. Something they didn't want us to see."

"Could it be that they were going to leave by the drain and didn't want you to know?"

She shrugged. Her full dark hair bounced on her shoulders. "Why would it matter if we knew? We were all tied up. We couldn't do anything about it."

Kluger got to his feet because he didn't like to have her staring down at him. "I may want to talk to you again. What's your home phone number and address?"

"I gave it to the homicide detective," she said, tilting her head impishly to one side.

"I'll need it, too."

"You can ask them for it."

"I'm asking you for it."

"You can reach me here any weekday afternoon," she said, ignoring the implied command. "I'm an employee of the company and not just of Mr. Keski. Even if the new management hires another woman, I'll have to stay on a few weeks to help her get adjusted. I'm convinced you'll have this all wrapped up by then, Lieutenant." She turned and walked off across the lounge, entered the east corridor, and disappeared around the corner.

At 3:25, Kluger unfolded the blueprints on the card table and studied them more assiduously than he had before. He found no hidden rooms. No secret passageways. No air ducts. large enough to hold a man. Nothing.

At 3:40, a three-man search party that he had sent into the storm-drain system returned without having found anything worthwhile. So far as they were able to ascertain, the original blueprints were accurate in every detail. The entrances to the storm drain from the parking lot were all much too small to pass a man. There was only one way out: the one that Kluger's men, out in that patch of scrub land, had been covering from almost the start.

At 4:00, a representative of the largest local television station came in to bargain for filming permission. He was a short, blocky man who dressed too loud for Kluger's taste and talked too rapidly.

"I told you," the lieutenant said irritably, "that I'm not going to allow anyone in here."

"The media has a right-"

"As far as I'm concerned," Kluger said, "those bastards haven't left the mall."

The television man looked around, perplexed. "They're still here, you mean?"

"I know they are," Kluger said, like a religious man earnestly repeating the supreme tenet of his faith. "And I'm not letting you people interfere with a case when it's still a hot-pursuit item."

"Hot pursuit?" the man said. "Where?"

At 4:10 the lab technicians and the homicide detectives called it a night. They put up barriers in front of the bank and jewelry store, closed and sealed the room in which Keski and his bodyguard had been murdered. The chief detective on the case-a sallow, quiet little man named Bretters-came over to the card table by the fountain to see how things were with Kluger.

"You can't be leaving now," Kluger said. "They must be here just waiting for us to leave."

"They can't be here," Bretters said softly.

"But they can't have gotten out."

"It's a real mystery how they slipped past you," Bretters admitted. "But we'll figure it out in a day or two."

"They didn't slip past me!"

"Then where are they?"

"Here!"

"Haven't your men looked everywhere?" Bretters asked.

"Everywhere."

"We'll figure it out in a couple of days," Bretters said. Then he went out after the others.

At 4:20, Kluger learned that headquarters had begun to take his men away from him, dispatching them to other trouble spots all over the city. By 4:30, he was the only one left besides Hawbaker and Haggard. They went out to their patrol car to wait for him.

The newspaper reporters and the radio and television people had given up at last and gone away. The owner of the jewelry store, his very nervous insurance agent, and the manager of Countryside Savings and Loan had all gone back to their homes to lie sleepless for the remainder of the night. The four corridors and the nineteen stores were deserted, silent.

Lieutenant Kluger walked over to the pool and sat on the edge of the fake rocks. The fountain rose in front of him, two hundred jets of water that shot twenty feet into the air and rained back into the artificial pond. The surface of the pool was like a sheet of opaque white glass through which and in which one could see nothing at all except milky angles, whirlpools of foam, silvered bubbles. It was a restful thing to watch while he went over the night in his mind to see if he had overlooked something, anything.

The two night watchmen came up to the lounge to see if there was anything he needed or wanted.

"Take the chairs and table away," he said, reaching out to pluck the blueprints from the table top.

As the two men folded the furniture, the big man said, "How in the hell did they do it, Lieutenant?"

"Do what?" Kluger asked, looking up from the pool.

"Get away."

"They didn't."

"What do you mean?"

"They're here."

The guard looked around at the mall. "I don't think so," he said, glancing pityingly at Kluger.

The other watchman, the quiet one, said, "We were told not to touch anything after we were untied. Does that still go? Or can we finish closing up for the night?"

The lieutenant hesitated, then sighed. "Go ahead."

"Will you be leaving soon?" the first guard asked.

"Soon," Kluger muttered dismally.

They picked up the folded chairs and the collapsed table and carried them out of the lounge, down the east corridor to the warehouse. The carpet soaked up their footsteps. In a moment all was quiet again.

How? Kluger wondered.

Through the north exit? No, that had been guarded.

Through the west? No.

Out of the south doors or the east? No.

Up onto the roof? Impossible and pointless.

Out the storm drains?

He got to his feet and folded up the blueprints. Still thinking about it, searching for the hole they'd used, he walked slowly across the public lounge.

Behind, the fountain suddenly died.

He whirled, then realized the guards had turned it off from the control panel in the warehouse.

Out one of the bay doors in the east wall?

Impossible.

He walked slowly along the east corridor and was passing under the breached steel-bar gate when two of the three strips of fluorescent lights in the ceiling behind him fluttered out.

"Good night, Lieutenant," Artie said as he came out of the warehouse behind Kluger. "Tough luck."

"Yeah," Kluger said.

"You'll get them sooner or later."

"Yeah."

In the parking lot he stood alone, the wind from the Pacific Ocean slicing past and over him. It carried the odor of salt and seaweed. In the last few hours the cloud cover had grown more dense, and the smell of rain now lay on the air, a portent.

Hawbaker and Haggard were not waiting for him as he had thought they would be. Apparently they had gotten dispatched to the scene of another crime.

Kluger looked at his watch.

4:43.

He turned and stared at the Plaza, wondering if it could really be only three hours since he had broken into it with the acetylene torch. He saw one of the watchmen lowering the ruined gate-and that was all he saw. Everything else was still, at peace, shrouded in the early-morning calm.

Dawn would soon come. Already the sky seemed to be growing lighter, the blackness seeping away behind the clouds.

He walked across the macadam to his unmarked Ford, opened the door and got in behind the wheel. The radio fizzed and sputtered at him, and the dispatcher's voice faded in and out on other channels. He started the engine and drove out of the lot, turned north on the main highway. He drove half a mile, made a wide U-turn, came back and parked on the shoulder of the road just two hundred yards from Ocean view Plaza, facing south.

"Okay," he said.

He thought of the smartass to whom he had talked on the telephone, thought of the ruptured bank vault and the stolen gems and the two dead men, thought of the way that Evelyn Ledderson had treated him and of the look of pity he had received from that potbellied night watchman. All of these things ran together in his mind and were inseparable, as if they were a single insult. They made a rich broth of humiliation, peppered with the realization that he had taken a setback on his march toward the chief's chair.

"Okay."

He took his revolver from the leather holster under his left armpit, checked to be sure it was fully loaded.

"They'll have to come out on foot since we hauled the

stolen station wagon out of there," Kluger said, though there was no one to hear him.

He put the revolver on the seat beside him. "Okay," he repeated. "Okay, let's go. Just come right on out. Just waltz right on out of there. Come on, you bastards."

When Tucker looked up toward the surface of the pool, he could see nothing except milky angles, whirlpools of foam, and streams of silvered bubbles. It was like a sheet of opaque white glass barring sight of what lay beyond, but it was even more fragile than glass and might vanish in an instant. Throughout the more than three hours in which they had to hide from the police, Tucker's greatest fear was that someone would turn off the mall's display fountain. Without that artificial rain rising up and cascading down from two hundred jets on all sides, the surface would grow clear. Anyone could walk to the edge and look down and see three men sitting on the bottom of the pool, eight feet below. Or someone could be attracted by the sound of three noisy bubble trails rising from three separate scuba units no longer masked by the more furious sounds of the fountain itself. If the fountain were switched off and the pool's surface permitted to resolve itself, they would be caught.

However, while that was his greatest worry, it was not Tucker's only concern. He worried that their air supply-three hours which might be stretched to three hours and ten minutes by their relative inactivity-might not be sufficient to last them through the search of the mall. They might be forced to go up before the police had left; and their cleverness and planning would not count for anything.

He was also worried that some lucky cop, in searching Surf and Subsurface, would accidentally discover the empty containers that had once held the scuba suits and aqualungs that he, Meyers, and Bates were now using. Meyers had said that after removing the gear, he had placed the boxes back on the shelves where he had found them, leaving no traces. He had done the same with the boxes that had contained the bright-yellow waterproof sacks in which they now stored the money, jewels, and clothing; and he had made certain that the pressurizing equipment that had charged the scuba tanks was turned off and left just as he had come across it. Nevertheless

Tucker worried. He wondered if he should have removed the sign board that had stood beside the fountain and had carried a notice of the following week's novelty diving act. If Kluger saw the sign and took the time to read it, would he then realize that the pool, being deep enough to accommodate a diving act, was deep enough to conceal three desperate men?

When the three of them had slipped into the pool with the two plastic-encased bank bags and the waterproof sacks full of clothing, had they appreciably raised the water level? Would that be noticed by anyone up there who was familiar with the mall? Had they raised the water level so far that tens of gallons had poured over the rim and onto the lounge floor?

Were the rising bubbles from their aqualungs really concealed in the surface turmoil caused by the fountain? Or were they quite evident, awaiting a keen eye and quick mind to be properly interpreted?

He worried.

Every ten minutes he raised his wrist to his face, put the dial of his watch against the view plate of his snugly fitted diving mask, and checked the time. With as much humor as he was capable of at the moment, he thought that this would all make an excellent television commercial for the watch company, a convincing demonstration of the durability of their fine product. The slender, luminous hands crawled slowly but inexorably around the glowing green numerals, while the equally phosphorescent sweep second hand just whirled and whirled and whirled

2:30.

The rubber mouthpiece that fitted past his teeth and fed air to him had a foul taste. His tongue seemed to be coated with a bitter fluid, and his saliva grew thick and rank. It was gradually making him sick to his stomach. The tanked air itself was stale, flat, unpleasant, and yet too oxygen-rich. He worked his lips around the device in his mouth, trying to make it fit more comfortably than it did, and he saw that both Frank Meyers and Edgar Bates were similarly occupied.

3:00.

He had the curious sensation of being both hot and cold at the same time. Inside the tight rubber scuba suit he was slick with nervous perspiration, yet was simultaneously aware of the unrelenting cold that seeped through to him from the water.

3:30.

He leaned back against the wall of the pool and tried to think about Elise and about all they had done and would do together. Staring at the shimmering green-blue water in front of him, he attempted to picture the Edo shield and spear, several other more minor treasures that he possessed… But he could not make himself feel better. His eyes continually drifted to the trails of fat bubbles rising from Meyers and Bates, then followed the bubbles to the shimmering, foaming surface

3:40.

3:50.

4:00.

He worried.

There was really nothing else to do.

And his anxiety seemed justified when, at 4:40, the fountain was shut off. The surface of the pool stopped shimmering. The milkiness gave way to light. The film of spume fizzed and dissolved. In two minutes the surface was fully transparent. Tucker could look up and see the peaked ceiling, the fake rocks at the edge of the water… He figured it was only a matter of seconds before uniformed police appeared on all sides, staring down at him.

However, five minutes passed without incident. And then another five

At 4:50, with only three or four minutes of air remaining in his tank, he pushed up and, hugging the pool wall, ascended to the surface as slowly and cautiously as he could manage in this unfamiliar element. Sheltered against the low fake rocks, he lifted his head until he could look down the east corridor. He would not have been surprised if he had collected a bullet in the face, but nothing like that happened. The hall was deserted, and most of the ceiling lights had been turned off. The same was true of the other three corridors. The silence was almost unnatural, gravelike. He waited, watching the recessed store entrances for movement, but he saw nothing. Evidently the police had packed up and gone home not long ago-probably just before the fountain had been shut off.

He sank back down to the bottom and gave Bates and Meyers the thumbs-up sign. With a minimum of thrashing about, mindful of the continuing need for silence, they rose until their heads were out of the water.

Tucker pulled away his mouthpiece and lifted his mask to his forehead. "They're gone," he whispered. "But the watchmen will still be here."

Without removing their masks or mouthpieces, Meyers and Bates nodded to let him know they understood. Bates wiped beads of water from his pale cheeks.

"We've got to be absolutely quiet," Tucker whispered. "We aren't out of this yet."

They nodded again.

He worked his mask down over his eyes, made sure that the seal was firm all the way around the faceplate, then slipped the rubber air feed into his mouth and clamped it tightly between his teeth once more. The foul taste filled his mouth again, but he tried to ignore it. He went to the bottom with Bates and Meyers to gather up their clothes, the Skorpions, and the loot.

Ten minutes later they had left the pool and had carried all of their belongings to the shadows in the recessed entrance to Shen Yang's Orient. They had shed their cumbersome aqualungs and masks but not their wetsuits, which were rapidly dripping dry.

"The guns," Meyers whispered.

Tucker knelt and opened a yellow waterproof bag in which, they had stashed the Skorpions, and he passed the pistols around. They were bone dry.

They dressed, pulling their clothes on over the black rubber scuba gear. Without anyone having to say as much, each of them knew that there was not nearly enough time for them to strip out of these clinging suits.

"Now what?" Meyers asked when he was dressed.

Tucker finished tying his shoes and stood up. "We wait."

"For the watchmen?"

Tucker nodded: Yes.

"How long?" Meyers whispered.

"Until they come."

Meyers raised one eybrow. "You think they'll make their regular rounds tonight?"

Tucker nodded.

"After what's happened?"

"Especially after what's happened," Tucker whispered.

"If they don't?"

"We'll worry about that later."

Meyers remained in the shadows in front of Shen Yang's, out of sight of anyone who might walk up the east corridor from the mall's warehouse. Planting his feet wide apart to give himself good balance, he gripped his Skorpion in both hands, held it across his broad chest, and settled down for a long wait.

Stepping across the lounge to stand in the darkened entranceway to Young Maiden on the other flank of the east corridor, Tucker and Bates also took up the vigil.

At 5:30, Chet and Artie came out of the warehouse and started up the corridor toward the lounge. They were arguing about the way the police had handled things, and from the spirited way they were going at each other it was obvious that they did not expect any more trouble.

Meyers raised one hand.

Tucker nodded affirmatively.

When the two watchmen reached the lounge and stepped out of the hall, Meyers moved in on their right and Bates covered them on the left, pinning them between the two Skorpions.

"If you go for your guns," Tucker said, "you're both dead. You played it cool and smart the first time. Don't be foolish now."

The quiet one, Artie, groaned. "Hey… Hey, I feel like I'm having the same nightmare over and over."

Chet was too enraged to speak. He spluttered at them and nearly choked on his anger, half raised one fist in a useless threat that impressed no one.

Tucker walked around behind them to pick the revolvers out of their holsters. "Be cool now."

"Little bastard," Chet said, finally regaining his voice.

Tucker was reaching for Artie's gun when he heard a strange guttural sound behimd him. Odd as it was, he knew immediately the source of it. That damned police dog was loose.

The German shepherd, which had been trained to follow well behind the night watchmen, had come out of the open warehouse door and was running for all its great strength, rapidly closing the distance between them. Its ears were pinned flat against its skull, and its long tail curved between its hind legs. The carpet gave the brute excellent purchase and considerably softened the sound of its thumping paws.

Tucker turned completely around to face it and automatically swung up the Skorpion. But he hesitated, remembering what a friend in the business had once told him about guard dogs

Two years before Tucker had hooked up with three other men to knock over a major department store for its cash receipts on the last shopping day before Christmas. In the middle of that robbery one of the other men, an all-around professional named Osborne, had been attacked by a trained mutt. Using only his bare hands, he had quickly and efficiently killed it without sustaining a single tooth or claw mark. It was necessary, after that job, for them to hole up at an abandoned farmhouse for several days, and during that time Osborne explained to Tucker how to handle any dog. Osborne had learned his stuff in the army, where he had also learned to kill men, and he had not minded passing it along to Tucker.

The dog was less than two hundred feet away.

Most certainly this dog was not a killer. After all, it was trained to follow the guards and to be available in emergencies. Like this one. Nevertheless, Tucker had to deal with it as if it were a killer. It would worry him until it was either dead or badly hurt, and it might sow enough confusion to let Chet and Artie get control of the situation. Men had educated it in violence, had corrupted it, and now it was going to have to pay for its unwanted and unsought knowledge.

"Look out!" Edgar shouted.

Even as the jugger involuntarily cried out, Meyers said, "For Christ's sake, shoot!" Neither he nor Bates was in a position to use his Skorpion without killing the watchmen and Tucker, too. "Shoot!"

According to Len Osborne, any gun you could name was useless against a well-trained guard dog. For one thing, a dog was too small a target, especially when it was coming at you head-on. Even a big shepherd was too damned narrow to get a sight on. Furthermore, it was too compact, vicious, and fast. Even a superior marksman would not have time to aim properly and squeeze off a shot before the dog was at his arm or throat. Shooting from the hip, figuratively speaking, without benefit of aiming, provided little accuracy. You might as well throw sticks, Osborne had said.

Tucker dropped the Skorpion and heard Bates cry out. I hope this wetsuit doesn't slow me up, Tucker thought. If it did, he was dead, or at least badly mauled. And even if the dog held him without hurting him, he was certain to spend a long time in jail.

There was only one moment, Osborne had said, when a dog was vulnerable: when it was in the air, after it had jumped, in the final seconds before it struck. Until that moment, it was totally mobile and could attack or evade or change its mind in an instant. But once it was committed, when it was in the air, launched at its victim, it was relatively defenseless. Its teeth were not yet within striking range, and its claws were harmless while it was in flight. Its front paws were tucked weakly back and would not spring forward and unsheath their claws until the bare instant before contact. If you moved quickly and surely enough… If you leaped forward to intercept instead of backing away from it, you could grab one of those front paws, twist it as you would a man's arm, let yourself fall to the ground, and throw the beast over your head just as hard as you could manage. Its own momentum would ensure that it would fall fairly far off and that it would hit the ground with considerable impact. At the very least, it would be badly stunned, too confused to attack again immediately. More likely than not, one of its legs would break. A cripple was no threat. And if you tossed it right, the neck would snap or the spine would splinter like a stick of dry wood.

These things flicked through Tucker's mind, each part of the lesson like a silhouette against the strong light of fear. Then there was no time to recall any more of Osborne's advice because the shepherd jumped at him.

Against all instinct, Tucker stepped into it, grabbed desperately for one of the animal's forelegs, closed his hand around the bone and muscle and fur, twisted, fell, and threw. He saw a fierce, wall-eyed face, bared fangs… He was certain his timing could not be right, though his body evidenced a natural timing in the maneuver.

There were shouts behind him.

Also behind him, something crashed heavily to the floor.

Rolling against the corridor wall, pushing away from it with both hands, Tucker scrambled to his feet. He was breathing hard, and his shoulders hurt like hell; but so far he did not think that he was bleeding. Not much, anyway. He looked toward the others and saw that they had made room for the shepherd, which was struggling to stand on its shattered foreleg. It snapped at the air and glared with bloodshot eyes at Tucker. Then it made a strange, pathetic mewling sound and rolled over on its side and died. Though. to a lesser extent than he had when he discovered Meyers' victims in the mall office, Tucker felt sick to his stomach.

For a long moment, stunned by the sudden violence, no one spoke. They stared at the dead shepherd, watching the blood spread out around it. Though they had all witnessed its demise, the entire episode seemed unreal.

"Whew!" Meyers said finally.

Tucker wiped his face, came away with a hand sheathed in sweat. "Whew!" he agreed.

Edgar Bates said, "Where on earth did you learn to do a thing like that?"

They all stared at him, even the two watchmen, interested in his answer.

"Milwaukee," Tucker said.

"Milwaukee?" Bates asked.

"Spent Christmas Day with an ex-commando officer."

"But you never did it before?"

"Only in my mind, theoretically," Tucker said. He bent over and picked up the Skorpion, which he had thrown aside when he recalled Osborne's advice. "Let's tie up Chet and Artie here so we can get out of this damned place."

"I'm for that," Meyers said.

As Tucker relieved the watchmen of their guns, Chet said, "You won't get away with this."

Tucker burst out laughing.

Frank Meyers could not see why they had to go out of the mall through the storm drain. With the claustrophobe's classic expression of fear, his face deeply lined with apprehension and downright terror, he gazed into the black hole in the warehouse floor and shook his head. "It doesn't make sense to me. Why don't we just walk out the door, like we came in?"

"It's ten minutes after six in the morning," Tucker explained patiently. "It's almost broad daylight. If the cops left a squad car behind to cover the Plaza, they'll spot us the minute we step outside."

"It's a chance we shouldn't take," Edgar Bates said. Even now, despite all that had gone wrong with other aspects of the job, he was floating along on the memory of his successes.

Meyers frowned, as if he felt they were ganging up on him without reason. "You think the cops would stake this place out after they searched it and came up empty handed?"

"Yes," Tucker said.

"Why?" Meyers asked. "Why would they?"

"Kluger's the type to cover all bets," Tucker said. "I wouldn't even be surprised if he was out there himself."

"Well," Meyers said, scratching his chin and thinking it over, "you haven't been wrong about anything you've done."

"That's right."

He stopped scratching his chin. "So… I guess I'll go down the drain with you."

"You don't have to phrase it quite as pessimistically as that," Tucker said, smiling.

"We're home free," Bates said.

Tucker said, "Not yet."

Meyers sighed, rubbed the back of his neck. "You think this Kluger might have put a man on the end of this drain pipe, even after the mall search failed?"

"If I thought that," Tucker said, "we wouldn't be going out this way."

"Well, then, aren't we home free, like Edgar said?"

"I just don't like to hear a lot of talk about how we're out of it-until we really are out of it." He fished in his jacket pocket and found a roll of Life Savers. "Lime," he told them. "Anybody want one?"

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.

"What'll we do with the extra ten?" Meyers asked, pointing at the last bill left alone on the center of the bedspread.

"Leave it for the room maid," Tucker said, placing it in the center of the blotter on the desk.

"Now what about the jewels?" Edgar asked, lifting two handfuls of them and letting them trickle out between his fingers. "You're the one who knows the fence. You going to take these back to New York?"

"They'd make for a damned heavy suitcase," Tucker said. "Besides, certain models of airport metal detectors will pick up on diamonds."

"What, then?"

"In the morning," Tucker said, "I'll get three or four one-pound cans of pipe tobacco. I'll empty the tobacco out, fill the tins with the stones, pack the tins in a box, and mail it all to myself."

Meyers frowned. "Is that safe?"

"I might insure it," Tucker said, "for a thousand bucks."

They looked at him, open-mouthed, then caught on and laughed.

"If the post office loses them," Meyers said, "I'll expect my three hundred and thirty-three dollars."

They drank a few more bottles of Coors, talked about other people in the business, and broke up shortly past midnight.

At the door of Tucker's room Meyers said, "You leaving first thing tomorrow?"

"I've got reservations for the two o'clock flight," Tucker said.

"I'll probably stay over a few days. Just through the weekend. I'll be at the same apartment when I come back to New York. At least I will be for a few weeks. When you get yours from the fence, you know where to reach me."

"Okay," Tucker said.

"It's been a pleasure."

Tucker nodded.

"Maybe we'll do it again soon."

"Maybe," Tucker said, though he knew that he would never get involved in another job with Frank Meyers.

Early Friday evening, Tucker walked into his Park Avenue apartment, closed the door, and called for Elise. When he found that she was not home, he opened the front closet, stepped inside, and worked the combination dial of the wall safe. His Tucker wallet full of Tucker papers went into the safe, and his real wallet full of his real papers came out. He unlatched the smallest of the two suitcases, the one he had bought in Los Angeles, and he transferred the seventy thousand dollars to the small vault.

In the kitchen he found the accumulated mail from the last four days laid out for him on the table, and he looked through it. There were several bills, advertisements, a bookclub selection, magazines, nothing really important.

He made himself a cold roast beef sandwich with a slice of cheese, mixed a drink, and went out into the main hall. He stood in front of the Edo shield and spear, eating and drinking as his eyes roved over the familiar lines of the artifacts.

When Elise had not shown up by nine-thirty, he knew that she was either working on a night filming assignment or was out to dinner and a show with friends. She would probably not get back until midnight or after.

In the den he picked up Smith and Wan-go's China: A History in Art, but his mind kept wandering, and his eyes would not focus on the printed words. He put the book aside and switched on the television set.

Watching the screen without actually paying attention to the images moving upon it, he began to think about those two bloody bodies in the mall's business office. He shuddered uncontrollably and felt nauseous. He always tried to set up a job in such a way that no killing was required. He was not quick to point a gun, and he rarely used one. In the past he had found himself incapable of extreme violence except when it was absolutely necessary to save his own life. That had happened only twice. The first time, he had been forced into a corner by a crooked and brutal cop who wanted to cut himself in on a piece of the action-Tucker's piece; and once there had been a partner who had decided to kill Tucker and avoid the unpleasant ritual of splitting the take from a robbery. Both times, Tucker had taken the only option that they had left open to him: he had killed. But the nightmares had haunted him for months afterward, and the guilt was still with him. Although he had not had a hand in the deaths of Keski and the bodyguard at Oceanview Plaza, he knew he would always feel some responsibility for them. There would be new nightmares.

Suddenly the color picture on the television screen came through to him for the first time-and there was Elise spraying perfume on her slender wrists and pretty neck. As the male voice-over sold the product, Elise smiled at the camera, smiled at Tucker… She seemed perfectly real, not an image on a strip of film but a flesh-and-blood woman.

Tucker wanted to reach out and touch her. When he had been sitting at the bottom of the pool in Oceanview Plaza, he had been worried about losing her, and he was plagued by the same anxiety now. He needed her more than he had ever previously admitted to himself. She had nursed him through those nightmares and through so much more. When everyone else was considered, she was his only friend.

The commercial ended. Elise vanished.

Before his thoughts could slip back to the dead men in his past, he went out and mixed himself another drink. He stood by the spear and shield in the main hall. There, he could turn and look at Elise the moment she came through the front door, which could not be too soon.

Brian Coffey is the pen name of a young American writer whose fiction has sold over two million copies throughout the world.

Surrounded is the second (the first was Blood Risk) in a series featuring Mike Tucker, a man with two identities and a Robin Hood attitude to crime.