The only bad moment in this brief idyll was a vivid nightmare from which Tucker woke early on Sunday morning. He had dreamed, once again, about the shopping mall they were going to hit and about his father and about dozens of policemen who pursued him down endless glass-walled corridors and around counters heaped high with jewelry and other merchandise. This time there was a great deal of gun play and blood. He could not easily get back to sleep. Lingering impressions of the nightmare haunted him. The following day, Elise and life seemed twice as precious as they ever had before.
Monday morning, after Elise had left to attend several interviews for commercial work, Tucker put his real credentials in the living-room closet safe and removed those bearing the Tucker name. Then he went out and caught a cab and went to Radio City Music Hall where he called Clitus Felton from a telephone booth.
First thing when he phoned back, Felton said, "I'm afraid this is a waste of money."
"You didn't learn anything?"
"I asked around. But there wasn't anything to learn."
"Maybe you didn't ask enough people."
"I asked everyone I could find. Everyone. Hell, you know how I work, Mike." He sounded hurt that Tucker would question his thoroughness. As inactive as he was these days, his reputation was all that Clitus Felton had, and he guarded it jealously.
The receiver still pressed to his ear, Tucker sighed loudly and closed his eyes and put his forehead against the phone box and thought about things for a long moment. "Do you happen to know what his last job was?"
"Oh," Felton said, "Frank worked with that armored car company out in Milwaukee."
"When was this?"
"Six months ago."
"I believe I remember now."
"You should remember," Felton said. "Frank did extremely well out there."
"Who were his consultants on that one?" Tucker asked, opening his eyes and staring down at the crushed cigarette butts and chewing-gum wrappers that littered the booth floor.
"Lindsay, Phillips, Spooner, and Pierce," Felton said, as if he were reading off the name of a high-powered stock brokerage.
"You talked to each of them?"
"To Lindsay and Pierce," Felton said. "I couldn't get hold of the other two."
"What did Lindsay and Pierce have to say?"
"I already told you, Mike. Nothing. They think Frank's a fine man, a real pro."
Tucker leaned back away from the phone box, looking at the booth's ceiling now instead of at the filthy floor. "Dammit, I know there's something wrong with him!"
"Listen," Clitus said, "there is one thing-"
The long-distance operator interrupted, asking for more money. Felton grumbled, fumbled noisily with a pile of change, fed the machine what she said he must.
"What one thing?" Tucker asked when the operator cut out of the line.
"You notice the way Frank talks?" the old man asked.
"Like a frog."
"He was treated very badly about two-and-a-half years back. Got mixed up with the wrong crowd-the organized group. You know who I mean?"
"Italian fellows," Tucker said.
"Most of them," Felton agreed. "Anyway, he was hurt badly. He was in the hospital more than eight weeks, couldn't talk again for six months. That kind of thing can change a man. It can put some fear into him."
"This is more than fear," Tucker said.
"Maybe not," Felton said. "And even if Frank's a little more nervous than he used to be, he's a good man."
"I guess I'll have to hope you're right," Tucker said.
Felton said, "If you aren't sure of this, why don't you just; forget it?"
"Because I'm desperate," Tucker said.
"Sorry to hear that."
"It's not your fault," Tucker said. "Good-by, Clitus." He hung up and pushed open the booth door.
Out on the street again, he flagged down a taxi and gave the driver a Queens' address that was only a few blocks away from his real destination-Imrie's place.
"I don't like to go out to Queens," the driver said. He was a big, good-looking man with neatly clipped salt-and-pepper hair. He bore a strong resemblance to Peter Lawford, looked more like an executive who had escaped from the corporate grind than like a cabby.
"You'll get a fifty per cent tip," Tucker said.
The driver smiled. "Well, that's mighty decent of you. It's about impossible to pick up a return fare from out there. And every minute I ride around empty, I'm losing money."
"Sure," Tucker said. When they had pulled into the traffic flow, he said, "You always been a cab driver?"
"About a year now," the driver said, smiling into the rear-view mirror.
"I'll bet you were a corporation executive."
"Wrong," the driver said. "I was a physicist with NASA. But everyone stopped caring about the future."
"Isn't that the truth," Tucker agreed.
In Queens, when he had paid the driver and watched the cab pull out of sight, Tucker looked at his watch: 12:01. He was anxious to pick up the Skorpions. Once he had those, once he was taking the risk of possessing illegal weaponry, he knew that he would feel more committed to the operation and more sure of himself.
By 12:45 he had tested the guns in Imrie's basement range and had paid for them. Imrie packed the three Skorpions in an old, battered Samsonite suitcase, added several boxes of ammunition and cushioned everything with old newspapers. Tucker took the suitcase outside, walked four blocks to the bus stop, and caught a bus into Manhattan. In Penn Station he fished a quarter from his pocket and rented a locker, slid the case inside, closed the double-strength door and tested it, then pocketed the red key.
Shortly after three o'clock, back at the apartment on Park Avenue, he packed a second bag, this one full of his own clothes and toiletries. When he was satisfied that he had not forgotten anything, he sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a notepad and a pen. He wrote a short note to Elise:
A sudden business deal has come up. I'm flying out to San Francisco this afternoon to negotiate the sale of a twelfth-century jade figurine. Northern Sung Dynasty. Should fetch a good price. Should be back in a few days. If not, I'll call.
Love,
Mike
Displeased by the need to lie, Tucker got up, picked up his suitcase, and left the apartment. Outside, the doorman got a cab for him, and he went back down to Penn Station. He retrieved the Skorpions from the rented locker and caught a late-afternoon train to Philadelphia. That was the first step of a complex, carefully planned journey to Santa Monica, California.
Facing the main highway and the Pacific Ocean just beyond, the shopping mall stood on a large chunk of choice real estate. It was approximately three hundred yards on a side, a big square structure of pebbled white concrete and gleaming glass doors. Although the stores inside were all on a single floor, the roof rose in a sweep of fake grass, in imitation of the thatched, peaked top of a South Seas islander's hut. It should have been tasteless. However, the architect had fortunately been a man with some talent and a good eye for harmony. Sheltered by stands of thriving palm trees and well-tended hedgerows, Oceanview Plaza looked cool and pleasant-and decidedly exclusive. There was no gaudy billboard out front, no sign advertising stores and special sales. A single line of parking spaces flanked the tree-shrouded walk in front of the building. On the south side there was only a two-lane drive, no parking spaces whatsoever. Instead, here the land grew jumbled, rocky, and spotted with palms and scrub, dropping to the highway and then down to the glaringly white beach. On the north there was parking for perhaps five hundred cars, which was also the case behind the mall on its east face. Most of the automobiles parked there right now were Cadillacs, Mark-IVs, Thunderbirds, and expensive sports cars.