Free Surrounded by Dean Koontz Page A

slob.
        "We only have to wait," Bates said, wiping perspiration from his wide forehead. He was never comfortable on a job until he was working on a safe, applying his skill. Then he was steady, self-assured, altogether at ease. "Just wait," he repeated.
        "I hope that's all," Tucker said.
        The warehouse was as large as any store in the mall, larger than most of them. It was fully four hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. Just inside the door stood a scarred workbench, a heavy-duty vise, a jigsaw, and all the other tools the maintenance men would need to keep the building in good repair. The remainder of the room was given over to storage. The floor was marked off into nineteen sections of varying size, one for each of the retail outlets in the mall, and every section was stacked with cartons, crates, and drums of goods that would eventually be taken via electric-powered carts and fork lifts to the many stores under this one roof. Those electric vehicles were parked in a row beside barrels of cleaning compounds and floor waxes. Two corrugated steel garage doors, each as high as the room and wide enough to admit the back end of a large truck, were set in the east wall. The warehouse had no windows. With the garage doors closed and dogged down tight, as they were now, all light came from fluorescent tubes framed in sheet-metal reflectors twenty feet overhead. This cold, blue-white glare, combined with the cinder-block walls and plain cement floor, too closely resembled the decor of hospitals and prisons. It made Tucker decidedly ill at ease.
        Tucker looked at his watch.
        "Ten o'clock on the nose," said Bates, who had looked at his own watch in chorus with Tucker. "Fifteen or twenty minutes and we should be able to move." He looked at Meyers. "Are you certain there aren't maintenance men on duty now?"
        Meyers laughed softly and slapped the smaller man on the back. The sound of that gentle blow whispered back from the ceiling and the cold cement walls. "Have I been wrong about anything else? Look, the maintenance men work a regular nine-to-five shift. They're long gone. No one's going to walk in on us unexpectedly."
        Bates ran one strong, stubby-fingered hand through his white hair and tried to smile. But he could not manage anything more than a pained grimace. "Don't mind me," he said. "I've never been much good at waiting around."
        Taking the Skorpion from his waistband and tightening his belt, Tucker said, "What about the guard dog?"
        "He's just where I told you he'd be," Meyers said, pointing over his shoulder.
        "Big brute," Edgar said.
        Tucker walked past the other two men, down a narrow aisle between ten-foot stacks of merchandise, all the way to the far end of the room. The dog, a healthy young German shepherd with a beautiful coat, was there and waiting at attention, alerted by Tucker's footsteps. It was chained to a thick iron ring that was set firmly in a cement-block wall. Ears flattened along its lupine skull, wicked teeth bared, it strained forward until the chain was taut, focusing its fierce black eyes on Tucker. It growled quietly in the back of its throat, but it did not bark or attempt to lunge at him.
        "Nice dog," Tucker said, hunkering down to the animal's level, though keeping a few feet between them.
        The dog growled a bit louder, a sound like a broken engine chugging away beneath layers and layers of insulation. Thick saliva glistened on its teeth and dripped from the corners of its black lips.
        "Good dog," Tucker said, though the damned thing frightened him. "Good, quiet dog."
        The shepherd snapped at him this time, scrabbled at the floor with its claws, and tried to close the gap between them.
        Tucker stood up again. "Lousy, rotten mutt," he said.
        The two night watchmen had brought the dog with them when they had come on duty at nine o'clock.