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.
'Frank, just look at all these wonderful luxurious cars,' Edgar Bates said from the back seat as they approached Ocean view Plaza.
'What about them?' Meyers asked, braking their own car.
'Why couldn't you steal us a nice comfortable Cadillac?' Bates asked as their weak-springed, half-rusted station wagon bounced sickeningly from the highway to the mall's entrance drive.
'I'm truly sorry, Edgar,' Meyers said. He was in better form now than he had been back East. 'But this was the only one I found that had keys in it.'
The three of them had driven out here in Edgar's rented Pontiac that afternoon, and now they were back in a stolen car, which could not be traced to any of them. If something went wrong and the wagon had to be abandoned in a moment of crisis, it would not be any danger to them. The cops would learn nothing from it. Of course by tomorrow morning it would be a very hot item. That did not matter. They were only going to need it for an hour or two.
Meyers pulled the slightly battered, peach-colored Oldsmobile into the northside parking area, went past all the Cadillacs, which gleamed in the darkness with purple reflections of the overhead mercury vapor lights. He drove around behind the mall and stopped in a space next to several medium-line Fords, Chevrolets, and cheap foreign imports. 'Just like I said,' he told the other two. 'Here's the employee parking.' He pointed straight ahead through the windshield at the mall's rear entrance. 'All the clerks and managers will come out of that door.'
Tucker looked at his watch. 'Nine-thirty,' he said. 'They'll be closing in half an hour. We'd better move ass.' He opened the Samsonite suitcase that was on the seat between him and Frank Meyers, passed out the Skorpions and the ammunition.
'Hellish-looking things,' Edgar Bates said. Like Tucker, he worked with guns quite often but had never come to trust or like them. 'Are you sure we wouldn't be better off carrying a couple of good old-fashioned forty-fives, Mike?'
'I'm sure,' Tucker said without turning around to look at the jugger. 'This is best.'
Meyers held his gun below the window level and stared hard at the shadowed lines of it, traced the folded wire stock with his blunt fingers. 'Now I see what you meant about psychology, Tucker. Who in the hell would ever try to go up against something this damned ugly?'
'No one,' Tucker said, 'I hope.'
'I've never used anything like this before,' Bates said. 'How does it handle?'
'Point it and pull the trigger,' Tucker said.
'Really?'
'How else?'
'How's the kick?' Bates asked skeptically.
'Not bad.'
'You've tried one?'
'I've tried all three,' Tucker said.
'Which way does mine pull-left or right?' Bates asked.
'It doesn't.'
'Not even a little bit?'
'No.'
'I've never used a gun that held perfectly steady on the target,' the jugger said doubtfully.
Tucker said, 'The fellow who provided these is a first-rate gunsmith. He cleaned these up, even rebored the barrels. The guns are better than new.' He was aware of Edgar's nervousness and sympathized with him. He hoped his calm, almost whispered explanations would soothe the older man.
In the dull violet light that filtered through the windows, they finished loading and pocketed more ammunition. Frank Meyers was breathing too heavily but seemed much improved otherwise. In fact, he seemed too improved in too short a time. Perhaps he was the sort of man who wasted away from inactivity but regained his gloss when he was in the midst of action. Nevertheless, Tucker distrusted sudden personality changes even when he thought he knew the reasons for them.
'Didn't you have to pass through a metal detector at the airport?' Bates asked, leaning forward from the rear seat. 'Didn't they examine your luggage? The way they screen for hijackers these days, I don't see how you could have gotten these things all the way across the country.'
'I took a train to Philadelphia,' Tucker said, stuffing the bulky pistol into his waistband and buttoning his loose jacket over it. 'Then I hopped a chartered shuttle for Cleveland.'
'And they don't search your baggage on a shuttle flight?' Bates asked.
'Not on the really small regional airlines,' Tucker said. 'They don't have the resources or the time.'
Meyers worked his Skorpion under his wide belt, concealed it with his blue-and-white-striped seersucker jacket. 'Where did you go from Cleveland?'
'I took another chartered plane to Kansas City,' Tucker said. In Kansas City he had caught the first flight out to Denver, had gone from Denver to Reno on a third plane. In Reno he had boarded a Greyhound bus for the short trip in to San Francisco. 'From there I caught another plane down to Los Angeles,' he said. 'It took a lot longer than a through flight from New York would have taken, but then I couldn't have gotten aboard a through flight with the Skorpions.'
Bates shook his head admiringly. 'And you didn't have to pass through a metal detector or open a single suitcase for inspection?'
'That's right.'
'I think I see why no one ever objects to your being the boss,' Meyers said. His voice contained a note of genuine amusement, something of which he had seemed incapable when Tucker had met with him back in New York. Why this change in the man? And how long could it be expected to last?
Tucker looked at his watch again. 'We're wasting time. Is everybody ready?'
They got out of the car and closed the doors. Edgar Bates put down his briefcaselike satchel full of tools, and they all stripped off the thin cotton gloves they had worn while in the stolen station wagon, putting the gloves into their pockets for use later in the night. The chance of leaving behind an identifiable fingerprint on anything but a just-washed drinking glass was negligible. Television and movies had greatly exaggerated the threat of fingerprint science to the modern criminal. Nevertheless, they took the precaution of wearing gloves. Tucker insisted on it.
'Well,' Meyers said, 'shall we go earn a living?'
