'On the floor,' Tucker said.
Meyers looked down, saw it, was still perplexed. 'It's a drain, that's all.'
Tucker knelt beside a drainage grill that had a diameter half again as large as that of the standard manhole. 'Outside, behind the mall, there are some pretty steep hills, nothing on them. When it rains, a great deal of water must collect on the parking lot. They'll have a system of storm drains to cope with it.'
'So what?' Meyers knelt down too.
'A storm drain is usually pretty large,' Tucker said thoughtfully. He stared into the tunnel below, through the holes in the heavy grilled cover. Beyond the metal grid there was only darkness, deep and velvety and black as a starless sky. 'It's designed to convey huge volumes of water for short periods of time. It ought to be big enough for us to crawl through.'
Meyers dug a finger in his ear as if he thought he had not heard Tucker properly. 'Are you serious?'
'It might work.'
'Go out through a sewer?'
'It isn't a sewer,' Tucker said impatiently. 'It only carries fresh rain water. Right now it ought to be dry-or nearly so.'
'But if we went down there,' Meyers said, 'where would we come out?' Clearly, he did not relish the idea of using the storm drains for a getaway.
'I don't know,' Tucker admitted. 'But I'm sure as hell going to find out.' He put his gun aside. 'Here. Help me get this grill out of the way.' He got to his feet and laced his fingers through the steel grid.
Unhappily, Meyers put his own Skorpion beside Tucker's, stood up, bent over, and grabbed the other side of the grill.
Between them they lifted it out of its hole, walked it across the floor, and set it down a few feet away.
Tucker went back and knelt by the hole again. 'I still can't see anything. Go over to the workbenches and get one of the flashlights.'
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
