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
