Surrounded

grinned idiotically once more.
        A moment later the laughter and conversation in the corridor stopped. Now there were only Chet and Artie swapping jokes while they locked and tested the glass doors.
        Edgar swallowed loudly.
        "Here they come," Tucker whispered.
        Meyers stiffened.
        The two watchmen opened the warehouse door and walked inside. They were both about six feet, both middle-aged men who had retired after twenty years on a real police force, both of them going to flab and both a great deal slower to react than they once had been. They were so engrossed in the dirty story one of them was telling that neither was immediately aware of the presence of the three intruders. They took half a dozen steps into the room before they realized there was something wrong. Then, just at the punch line, they looked up and froze, shocked at the sight of three men with automatic weapons.
        "Take it easy," Tucker said in a reassuringly mellow voice. "Don't go for your guns."
        The guards blinked stupidly. They still did not get it. They had evidently been off a regular police force more than a few months. They were acting like amateurs.
        "If you try for a gun," Meyers said, leveling the Skorpion, "I'll have to blow your brains out." In his gravel-toned voice, the threat sounded genuine.
        With that, they were committed. They were in it too deep now to just walk away and forget the whole thing. They had gained control of Oceanview Plaza without spilling a drop of blood, just as Frank Meyers had promised. It was easy. Indeed, it seemed almost too easy. Tucker was worried about that.
        

----
        
        Morose as a pair of slack-faced hound dogs, the watchmen were sitting on the floor, their shoulders against the wall, legs straight out in front of them. Their hands were bound behind their backs, ankles securely tied together with strong copper wire Edgar Bates had produced from his battered black satchel full of safecracking tools.
        The largest of the guards, who was two inches taller and fifteen pounds flabbier than his companion, was a florid man in his late forties or early fifties. Beneath the beer belly and the glowing nose of the quasi-alcoholic, he looked grizzled and mean. His eyes were bracketed by hard folds of flesh, and laugh lines slashed his drooping cheeks like sword wounds. Tucker thought the man had probably been a high school football jock in his day, a combat soldier, and a real sonofabitch in a police uniform. Like most of his type, a large part of his hard-nosed image would be a bluff. However, deep inside somewhere he would have that peculiar, violent, dangerous American sense of machismo. Because of that he might do something foolish. He looked up at Tucker as Bates put away what was left of the roll of copper wire, and he said, "You won't get away with this, you little bastard."
        Tucker smiled. "You watch a lot of television, don't you? You have your lines down just pat."
        The watchman colored. He narrowed his eyes and made a tight, grim line of his mouth. "I've got your face filed away. I have absolutely every detail of it memorized. Hell, I have all of your faces memorized."
        His Skorpion casually pointed at the man's face, Frank Meyers stepped forward, a singularly menacing presence with his horror-movie voice. "You're pretty damn dumb," he said nastily, meeting the guard's hostile stare.
        "He'll be okay," Tucker said, quickly dismissing Meyers before the watchman could respond and exacerbate the situation. Tucker could sense an almost natural antagonism between these two men. They were the sort who seemed to react chemically from the moment of first contact, the sort who would be at one another's throats with little provocation. And that could not be allowed. He knelt down beside the guard and smiled at him. "Which one are you-Chet or Artie?"
        Both of the watchmen were surprised. "How'd you know our names?" the mean one demanded.
        Tucker sighed. "I stood at that door and listened to everyone in the mall say good night to you."
        The ex-cop was disgusted with himself for not figuring it out right away.
        "Which are you?" Tucker insisted quietly.
        "Chet," the mean one said.
        The important thing, Tucker knew, was to soothe Chet's battered pride, doctor his bruised machismo. The less like a fool that Chet felt, the more cooperative he would