Surrounded

found out that he'd gone straight, just like he'd wanted to do. He'd bought the majority stock in this mall, owned motels and restaurants up and down the coast, a dozen other things. I followed him to his office here in the mall every day for two months, looking for an opening. But he was packing two bodyguards then."
        "He never saw you?" Tucker asked.
        "If he did, he wouldn't have recognized me," Meyers said. "I used to be more of a dresser. And I didn't have a crew cut. I even had a mustache. But that got shaved off in the hospital, and I never felt like growing it back."
        "So while you followed Keski around, you learned the layout of the mall."
        "I started to see what a beautiful job it was," Meyers said, nodding his bristled head. "I figured I could combine the job with getting Keski. I knew the bastard would be surprised when I walked into his office an hour after closing time and pointed a gun at him. Then, ripping off his mall after I'd fingered him seemed like a real nice touch."
        "It was Keski who stayed late every Wednesday," Tucker said, "not the bank manager."
        "Sure."
        "You lied."
        "I didn't have a choice."
        "That doesn't make any difference," Tucker said. "You lied to Felton. You lied to me. If you get out of this, you're finished in the business."
        "I had to lie to make it sound sweet enough to get you into it," Meyers said earnestly. He saw the anger in Tucker's eyes, a subdued but steady flame. "I was a man on the ropes, Tucker. I could still get up for a job, but between jobs I was a mess. I just sat in that apartment in New York letting myself go to hell thinking about it. I had to get Keski before the whole thing ate me up." He cleared his throat and looked nervously at the smaller man. "You understand that, don't you?"
        "No."
        "He nearly killed me. He-"
        "He was your problem," Tucker said. "Not mine or Edgar's."
        "Hey, look," Meyers said. "Whether or not the manager is here, that bank can be knocked over."
        "Could have been," Tucker said, stressing each word. "But you overlooked that alarm pedal beneath Ledderson's desk…"
        "Christ, what a mess!" Meyers said, as if he had, for most of their conversation, forgotten that they were in a bind, that carloads of police now surrounded Oceanview Plaza. Gaining his revenge, killing Rudolph Keski, Frank Meyers had not regained his old common sense and self-control. His wit and his nerves would never be what they had been before Keski had slit his throat. He was still a ruined man, operating on the remembrance of courage. "We should have shot our way out while we had the chance."
        "It's too late for that now," Tucker said.
        "I know. If you'd let me-"
        "And I think I may have come up with something better," Tucker said, stepping away from the wall of boxes, straightening his coat with a quick shrug of his shoulders. "You see what's right there beside you?"
        Meyers turned right and left, perplexed.
        "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.