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.