Strangers (12 page)

Mort was not laughing now. He was fifty years old, potbellied, slump-shouldered, balding. He wore a dark suit, porkpie hat, and gray overcoat. He always wore a dark suit and porkpie hat, though not always the overcoat. Jack had never seen him in anything else. Tonight, Jack and Tommy were wearing jeans and quilted vinyl jackets, but there was Mort looking
like one of the guys in the background of an old Edward G. Robinson movie. The snapbrim of his hat had lost its sharp edge and gone slightly soft, rather like Mort himself, and the suit was rumpled. His voice was weary and dour. He said, “Who’s out there?” as Jack slammed the door and stepped hastily away from it.

“At least two guys in a Ford van,” Jack said.

“Mob?”

“I only saw one of them,” Jack said, “but he looked like one of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments that
didn’t
work out.”

“At least all the doors are locked.”

“They’ll have keys.”

The three of them moved quickly away from the exit, back into the deep shadows in an aisle between piles of wooden crates and cardboard cartons that were stacked on pallets. The merchandise formed twenty-foot-high walls. The warehouse was immense, with a wide array of goods stored under its vaulted ceiling: hundreds of TV sets, microwave ovens, blenders, and toasters by the thousands, tractor parts, plumbing supplies, Cuisinarts, and more. It was a clean, well-run establishment, but as with any giant industrial building at night, the place was eerie when all the workers were gone. Strange, whispery echoes floated along the maze of aisles. Outside, the sleet fell harder than before, rustling and ticking and tapping and hissing on the slate roof, as if a multitude of unknown creatures moved through the rafters and inside the walls.

“I told you it was a mistake to hit the mob,” Tommy Sung said. He was a Chinese-American, about thirty, which made him seven years younger than Jack. “Jewelry stores, armored cars, even banks, okay, but not the mob, for God’s sake. It’s stupid to hit the mob. Might as well walk into a bar full of Marines and spit on the flag.”

“You’re here,” Jack said.

“Yeah, well,” Tommy said, “I don’t always show good judgment.”

In a voice of doom and despair, Mort said, “A van shows up at this hour, it means one thing. They’re delivering one kind of shit or another, probably coke or horse. Which means there won’t be just the driver and the ape you saw. There’ll be two other guys in the back of the van with the merchandise, carrying converted Uzis or worse.”

Tommy said, “Why aren’t they already shooting their way in?”

“As far as they know,” Jack said, “there’s ten of us, and we have bazookas. They’ll move cautiously.”

“A truck used on dope runs is sure to have radio communications,” Mort said. “They’ll have already called for backup.”

Tommy said, “You telling me the mafia has a fleet of radio vans like the goddamned phone company or something?”

“These days, they’re as organized as any business,”’ Mort said.

They listened for sounds of purposeful human movement in farther reaches of the building, but all they heard was sleet hitting the roof.

The .38 in Jack’s hand suddenly felt like a toy. Mort was carrying a Smith & Wesson M39 9mm pistol, and Tommy had a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum that he had tucked inside his insulated jacket after the men in the office had been securely tied up, when it had seemed that the dangerous part of the job had been completed. They were well armed, but they were not ready to face down Uzis. Jack remembered old documentaries of hopelessly outclassed Hungarians trying to turn back invading Russian tanks with rocks and sticks. In times of trouble, Jack Twist had a tendency to melodramatize his plight and, regardless of the situation, to cast himself in the role of the noble underdog battling the forces of evil. He was aware of this tendency, and he thought it was one of his most endearing qualities. At the moment, however, their position was so tenuous that there was no way to melodramatize it.

Mort’s thoughts had led him to precisely the same consideration, for he said, “There’s no use trying to get out by any of the back doors. They’ll have split up by now—two in front, two in back.”

The front and rear exits—both the regular doors and roll-up cargo bay doors—were the only ways out. There were no openings, not even windows or vents, on the sides of the enormous building, no basement and therefore no basement exit, no way to get onto the roof. In preparation for the robbery, the three of them had studied detailed plans of the building, and now they knew they were trapped.

Tommy said, “What are we going to do?”

The question was addressed to Jack Twist, not to Mort, because Jack organized any robbery he took part in. If unanticipated events required improvisation, Jack was expected to come up with the brilliant ideas.

“Hey,” Tommy said, taking a stab at brilliance himself, “why don’t we go out the same way we got in!”

They had entered the building with a variation on the Trojan Horse ploy, which was the only way to bypass the elaborate security systems that were in operation at night. The warehouse was a front for the illegal drug trade, but it was also a real, functioning, profitable warehouse that accepted regular shipments from legitimate businesses in need of temporary storage for excess inventory. Therefore, with the personal computer and modem in his apartment, Jack had tapped into the computers of both the warehouse and one of its reputable clients, and had created the file of electronic paperwork that would legitimize the delivery of a huge crate, which had arrived this morning and had been stored per instructions. He, Mort, and Tommy had been inside the crate, which had been designed
and constructed with five concealed exits, so they could get out of it quietly even if it was blocked by other crates on four sides. A few minutes after eleven o’clock tonight, they had slipped out and had surprised the tough guys in the office, who had been quite confident that their multiple alarm systems and locked doors had transformed the warehouse into an inviolable fortress.

“We could get back in the crate,” Tommy said, “and when they finally come in and don’t find us, they’ll go crazy trying to figure how we got away. By tomorrow night the heat’ll be off. Then we can slip out and make our getaway.”

“No good,” Mort said sourly. “They’ll figure it out. They’ll search this place until they find us.”

“No good, Tommy,” Jack agreed. “Now, here’s what I want you to do….” He quickly improvised an escape plan, and they assented to it.

Tommy hurried to the master panel of light switches in the office, to kill every light in the warehouse.

Jack and Mort dragged the four heavy bags of money toward the south end of the long building, and the dry sound of canvas scraping along the concrete floor echoed and re-echoed through the chilly air. At that far end of the building, instead of more stacks of merchandise, there were several trucks that had been parked in the interior staging area, where, first thing in the morning, they would be loaded. Jack and Mort were less than halfway through the maze, still half a city block from the semis, when the dim lights winked out and the warehouse was plunged into unrelieved darkness. They paused long enough for Jack to switch on his Eveready before continuing through the gloom.

Bearing 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 seat belt, 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 it—with 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 knew that the break was being made from the first bay, and the night was shaken with the rattle of gunfire. Jack heard slugs slam into the truck as he reached the exit, drove through, and headed down the concrete ramp, but none penetrated the cab or shattered the windshield.

Below, another van, this one a Dodge, swept in at the foot of the incline, trying to block his path. Reinforcements had, indeed, arrived.

Instead of braking, Jack tramped down harder on the accelerator and grinned at the horrified expressions of the men in the Dodge as the massive grille of the Mack slammed into them. The rig rammed the van backward so hard that the smaller vehicle tipped over on its side and slid fifteen or twenty feet across the macadam.

The impact jolted Jack, but his safety belt held him in check. Mort and Tommy were thrown forward, against the lower part of the dash and into the cramped space below. They protested with cries of pain.

To execute that maneuver, Jack had been forced to descend the ramp faster than he should have done, and now as he tried to wheel the truck to the left, toward the lane leading away from the warehouse, the rig lurched, swayed, threatened to either tear itself out of his control or tip over as the Dodge had done. Cursing, he held on to it, brought it around with an effort that made his arms feel as if they were pulling out of his shoulders, and then he was headed straight into the lane.

Ahead of him, three men stood around a midnight-blue Buick, and at least two of them were armed. They opened fire as he bore down on them. One man aimed too low, and bullets snapped off the top of the Mack’s grille, sparking brightly where they struck. The other guy aimed too high; Jack heard slugs ricocheting off the brow of the cab, above the windshield. One of the two overhead-mounted air-horns was hit and torn loose; it fell down along the side of the cab, thumped against Tommy’s window, hanging from its wires.

Jack was almost on top of the Buick, and the gunmen realized he meant to hit it, so they stopped shooting and scattered. Handling the
huge rig as if it were a tank, he broadsided the car, shoving it out of the way. He kept going, past the end of the warehouse, toward another warehouse, past that one, still accelerating.

Mort and Tommy pushed themselves back onto the seat, groaning. Both were battered. Mort had a bloody nose, and Tommy was bleeding from a small cut over his right eye, but neither of them was seriously hurt.

“Why does every job go sour?” Mort asked morosely, his voice more nasal than usual because of his injured nose.

“It hasn’t gone sour,” Jack said, switching on the windshield wipers to clear away the glimmering beads of sleet. “It’s just turned out to be a little more exciting than we expected.”