Strangers

his own flashlight, Tommy rejoined them and took one of the bags from Jack, one from Mort.
        The clicking impact and susurrant slide of sleet upon the roof began to subside slightly as the storm entered a lull, and Jack thought he heard the screech of brakes outside. Could reinforcements have arrived so soon?
        The warehouse's interior loading zone contained four eighteen-wheelers: a Peterbilt, a White, and two Mack trucks. Each of them faced out toward a loading-bay door.
        Jack went to the nearest Mack, dropped his sack of money, stepped up on the running board, opened the door, and shone his flashlight inside, along the dashboard. The keys dangled from the ignition. He had expected as much. Confident of their multilayered security system, the warehouse employees did not believe there was any danger that one of these vehicles might be stolen during the night.
        Jack and Mort went to the other three trucks, found keys in all of them, and started the engines.
        In the cab of the first Mack, there was a sleeping berth behind the seat, where one member of a long-distance driving team could catch a nap while his partner took the wheel. Tommy Sung stowed the four bags of money in that recess.
        Jack returned to the Mack just as Tommy finished with the sacks. He settled in behind the wheel and switched off his flashlight. Mort got in on the passenger's side. Jack started the engine but did not switch on the headlights.
        All four trucks were idling noisily now.
        Carrying his flashlight, Tommy ran to the farthest of the four big roll-down doors of the interior loading zone and touched the control that started it moving laboriously upward on its track. Jack watched him tensely from the high seat of the big rig. Tommy hurried back along that outer wall, his progress marked by the bobbling beam of his flash, slapping his right hand against the door controls as he came to each of them. Then, snapping off his flashlight, he bolted toward the Mack as the four doors slowly lumbered open with much grating and clattering.
        Outside, the Morlocks would know the doors were going up, would hear the trucks' engines. But they'd be looking into a dark building, and until they could throw some light in here, they couldn't know which rig was the intended escape vehicle. They might spray all of the trucks with submachine-gun fire, but Jack was counting on gaining a few precious seconds before they opted for that violent course of action.
        Tommy clambered up into the cab of the Mack, pulling the door shut behind him, sandwiching Mort between himself and Jack.
        "Damn rollers move too slow," Mort said as the bay doors clattered toward the ceiling, gradually revealing the sleet-lashed night beyond.
        "Drive through the sucker," Tommy urged.
        Fastening his seatbelt, Jack said, "Can't risk getting hung up."
        The door was one-third open.
        Gripping the wheel with both hands again, Jack saw movement in the murky, wintry world beyond, where the few dim exterior security lights did little to push back the darkness. Two men hurried across the wet and icy blacktop, from the left, slipping and skidding, both of them armed, one of them with what appeared to be an Uzi. They were trying to stay low to make poor targets of themselves and trying to stay on their feet at the same time, squinting into the black warehouse under the rising bay doors, and as yet they had not thought of meeting the crisis with an indiscriminate spray of bullets.
        The first door, the one in front of Jack, was halfway up.
        Abruptly, angling in from the left, the same direction from which the two hoods had come, the gray Ford van appeared, its tires churning up silvery plumes of slush. It fishtailed to a stop between the second and third ramps, blocking those exits. Its front wheels were up on the lower edge of the third ramp, so its headlights speared into the fourth bay, revealing that the cab of that truck was untenanted.
        In front of Jack, the door was two-thirds up.
        "Keep your heads down," he said.
        Mort and Tommy squeezed down as low as they could, and Jack hunched over the wheel. The heavy rolling panel was not all the way up, but he thought he could slip under itwith a little luck. In quick succession he released the brakes, popped the clutch, and hit the accelerator.
        The instant he put the truck in gear, those outside