Surrounded

looked like the bodyguard type. Another dead man was sitting in a swivel chair behind the desk. He was about fifty years old, thickset and ugly. He had two holes in his chest and one in his neck, and he was grinning at Tucker.
        Tucker felt sick. He wanted to turn and cut Meyers down as the big man had done with these two. But he was incapable of that, just as he would have been incapable of the senseless murders Meyers had just committed.
        He turned away from the carnage, for he could not look at a dead man without suffering intimations of his own mortality. Facing Meyers, struggling to keep his anger and disgust in check, he said, "Who was he?"
        "Rudolph Keski," Meyers said. "The other one was his protection. Some protection." He laughed. Tucker winced.
        "Why did you want him?" Tucker's voice was low and cold. No one should have had to die.
        "Keski gave me this voice," Meyers said. "He put me in the hospital for months." For the first time he realized that Tucker didn't take killing quite so lightly as he did. Now Meyers was trying to justify himself.
        "Mafia?" Tucker asked.
        Meyers was amused by that. "Hell, no."
        "Our friend in Harrisburg said you got mixed up with Sicilians."
        "That's just a rumor, then," Meyers said. "Keski headed the local organization. But he was Polish, not Mafia. There's no connection between him and any national group. He wasn't exactly small time, but he wasn't big, either."
        "Why didn't you tell me about him?" Tucker asked.
        "You wouldn't have thrown in with me," Meyers said. He was smiling jauntily. The personality change that had occurred between New York and Los Angeles was now firmly established. "No one would have come in on the job… So I said it was just robbery-which it still is, by the way."
        "I'll want to hear the whole story. Later." He looked at the woman, tried to smile even though he was frightened and sickened by the slaughter. "You okay?"
        "I didn't touch her," Meyers said.
        "You okay?" Tucker asked again, ignoring Meyers.
        She nodded, tried to speak, could not. She made a little croaking noise and twisted her fingers together even tighter than they had been.
        "Don't worry," Tucker assured her, striving for a calm and gentle voice. "You won't be hurt."
        She looked at him as if she were deaf and dumb.
        "You really won't," he said. "You'll have to come with us to the storage room and let us tie you up. But we won't hurt you."
        "He killed Mr. Keski," she said. Her voice was low, sultry, delightful. It was out of place in this morgue.
        "I know he did," Tucker said, going over to her and prying her hands apart. He held her right hand as tenderly as if they were lovers. "But that was something between him and Keski. It had nothing to do with you. Right now, all he cares about, all I care about, is taking some money out of the bank safe up the hall. We'll have to tie you up while we do that. You understand?"
        Her hand was cold and motionless in his.
        "You understand?"
        "Yes."
        "Good," Tucker said. He let go of her hand and walked around behind her and pulled back her chair as she got up. "Don't try to run. There's nowhere to go. Just cooperate and you won't get hurt. Under-" He stopped talking when she stepped away from the big desk, and he moved in closer to it, bending down to look into the cavity beneath the work surface. What he thought he had seen turned out to be no illusion, no trick of shadows, no stain on the carpet. It was there. "Christ!"
        "What?" Meyers asked.
        "You stupid ox," Tucker said. In the knee hole underneath the desk the green carpet had been cut away in a neat circle and molded down with metal tacking strips. In the center of that cleared space there was a small rectangular foot pedal, like a miniaturized automobile accelerator. "It's a pump-action alarm pedal," Tucker said. He stood up and looked at the woman. He felt like a wire being drawn tighter and tighter between two winches. "Did you use it?"
        She backed away from him and came up against the wall, bumping her head on an oil painting in a rococo frame.
        "Did you use it?" he repeated.
        "Don't kill me."
        "We aren't going to kill you," Tucker said.
        "Please…" Her eyes were wide again. All the blood had drained out of her lovely face. Beneath that natural