Meyers picked up his Skorpion, holding it in both hands for a moment. "Anything else?"
"Maybe you should look out in the hall and see if everything's okay with Edgar."
"Should I tell him about this?" Meyers asked, gesturing toward the hole in the floor.
Tucker raised his head. "Yeah. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea. Even if it leads nowhere, it might cheer him up for a few minutes. He's probably feeling low right now."
"So am I," Meyers said.
"Sure," Tucker said. "We all are."
Tucker sat on the edge of the drain opening, then jumped down into the darkness, landing feet first on the corrugated steel floor. He switched on the flashlight that Meyers had brought him, and he discovered that the pipe was larger than he had expected it would, be, nearly high enough to allow him to stand upright, wide enough so that neither shoulder touched it.
"What do you think?" Frank Meyers asked. He was kneeling on the warehouse floor overhead, peering down through the circular entrance to the drain.
"Maybe we're on to something," Tucker said.
He directed the wide yellow beam of the flashlight over the walls. The tunnel was dirty, a bit rusted, and spotted with luminescent gray-green moss. Spiderwebs filled the shallow troughs between a few of the ripples in the steel. Centipedes clung to the metal ribs, long eyestalks flicking nervously up and down; and when the light touched them, they fled into the shadows. Though the walls were generally dry, the floor of the tube was puddled with filthy water. He was standing in an inch or two of dark, brackish sludge that gleamed like oil in the amber light.
"Want me to come down?" Meyers asked.
"Not just yet."
"I'll wait here for you."
"Do that."
Tucker held the flashlight out in front of himself, looked first south and then north. In both directions the tunnel bored away into unrelieved darkness, an artery in the earth. Tucker remembered that to the south there was no parking lot, and there the well-maintained mall property gave way to abrupt and ragged hills, rock formations, sun-bleached scrub, widely scattered palm trees, and ugly erosion gullies like dozens of dry stream beds. There the land fell sharply away to the main road and then down to the sea. If the storm drains emptied anywhere, they would pour forth into that chaotic jumble of useless land.
He turned south and started walking, stooping just enough to keep from striking his head on the ceiling. His footsteps rang on the metal floor, echoed in front and behind him. When he had to splash through a puddle, the noise was amplified until it sounded like the incessant roar of the giant fountain out in the mall's public lounge.
The air was stale but not unpleasant, like that in a closet full of old clothes. And if it led to the fresher air of freedom, then it was quite easily endured.
Ahead the tunnel angled to the left.
When Tucker turned the corner, the tainted air was freshened by a cool night breeze, and he knew that he was suddenly close to the end of the drainage system's main run. He switched off the flashlight at once, stood dead still until his eyes could adjust to the intense darkness. Gradually he was able to discern an area of lesser darkness perhaps fifty or sixty feet ahead, an ethereal, shimmering circle of extremely dim gray light that contrasted with the pitch-black tunnel walls, caught the eye and held it like a far-off beacon.
Cautiously he went forward again, making as little noise as possible. At the mouth of the drain, which opened at the brink of an erosion gully six feet above the ground, he stopped and hunkered down. He tried to press against one wall and make a smaller target of himself, though he was painfully aware of how bullets would ricochet off the rippled steel all around him
He stared out at the shadow-cloaked hills, down the rugged slope toward the inrushing night sea. Only two things moved out there: a thick cloud covering that drifted eastward from the ocean and a steady stream of automobiles on the main highway a hundred yards below.
Then, arising suddenly, there were voices.
Tucker stiffened.
A hundred feet downslope two flashlight beams appeared at the edge of the gully.
Tucker checked to be certain that the Skorpion was fully loaded. It was, of course.
Behind the flashlights three cops came into sight. They stood on the bank of the narrowly eroded channel looking upslope toward the mouth of the drain where Tucker sheltered. Apparently they could not penetrate the darkness in the tunnel well enough to see him, for they made no effort to protect themselves or to conceal their movements. Instead they clambered noisily down the side of the gully, slipping and stumbling into the dry stream bed where they took up positions behind a series of weathered boulders not seventy feet from the drain pipe. At almost the same instant, the two flashlights winked out.
The night fell back in like a collapsing roof.
Carefully, quietly unfolding the wire stock of the Skorpion, Tucker locked it into place in its extended form. Now he could use the pistol as a submachine gun if the cops came up the gully and tried to gain entrance to the mall through the drain tunnel. He ardently hoped they would stay where they were right now.
Their voices still carried through the night on the gentle sea breeze, but Tucker could not quite make out what they were saying. Several minutes passed as their conversation grew less boisterous and finally settled down to a constant murmur well beyond his understanding.
Cars continued to streak by on the highway.
In endless masses the gray-black clouds, like giant ships, came in from the sea.
Without wanting to, Tucker thought about Elise. He conjured up a vivid mental image of her face and sleek body, thought of the way she walked and talked, the many ways they joked together and made love and shared their lives He felt weak in his guts, cold and tired and terribly lonely. Losing Elise, he would be losing nearly everything that mattered most to him, a truth he had not often admitted to himself. For all his cool sophistication, for all their talk about wanting to be able to go their separate ways, they needed each other. And he needed her more, perhaps, than she needed him. When he contemplated the loss of her, the taste of that emptiness to come could almost paralyze him
Which was no good at all. He was not yet beaten, not if he got up and moved and tried. In fourteen other jobs he had made a name for himself, had proved the worth of the "Tucker" pseudonym. He was more proud of his false identity than of his real one. This was no time to throw all that away and let his life fall apart. He would get out of this somehow.
On the highway below a symphony of horns sounded and brakes squealed; the traffic flow went on.
After Tucker had watched the boulders and had listened to the three cops for almost five minutes, he was fairly sure they did not intend to come any farther. They were merely covering the drain to prevent anyone from escaping through it.
Tucker smiled grimly. Whoever was in charge of this police operation was a shrewd and dangerous man, someone who thought of the unlikely and prepared for even the improbable.
But it doesn't matter, Tucker thought, by way of an internal pep talk. Whoever the bastard is, he can be beaten. Everyone can be beaten, no matter how tough or smart he is. "Except me," he said softly, as an afterthought. He laughed quietly at himself, and that made him feel much better than the pep talk had done.
He got up and turned, stretched as best he could to get the kinks out of his legs and back. Then he walked north, the way he had come, not daring to switch on his flashlight until he was a good twenty steps past the bend in the pipe and back in the stale air of the main drainage line.
Frank Meyers was waiting for him at the hole in the warehouse floor, his harsh face peering anxiously down into the lightless pipe. "I was getting worried."