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.