Surrounded by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

calmer heads.
        As usual there was a strange and mournful silence in the room. It was broken only by the hum of an electric fan that was standing on a platform by one of the doors and raking the totem poles with cool air. The lights were low, as always, the ceiling shrouded in mysterious shadows. One after another the mammoth totems rose, majestic, crude, and yet beautiful, the gnarled faces peering either straight ahead or glaring down at whatever puny men dared to walk beneath them.
        Edgar Bates was standing halfway along the main aisle, staring up at a fierce-looking bird-god that was staring right back down at him. "Those damned kids," he said when Tucker stopped beside him, "gave me a splitting headache."
        "They seldom come in here," Tucker said.
        Their voices, though whispers, shushed around the room and added to the funereal atmosphere.
        "Took four Anacins," Bates said. "But I feel like I'm about to lose the top of my scalp."
        "How you been?" Tucker asked.
        "Fine, until I ran into those kids. Screaming like banshees."
        "Doing much work lately?"
        "Whenever it looks good."
        "I need a jugger."
        "And I'm here to listen," Bates said.
        He was a solid man, an inch or two shorter than Tucker, at least forty pounds overweight, although he was not fat. With big rounded shoulders, broad chest, and short, thick legs, he might have been a Russian peasant who had spent most of his life in the fields. His face, too, was Slavic, square and well lined, capped with a shock of bushy white hair.
        Although he was sixty years old, not much younger than Clitus Felton, Edgar was a long way from retirement. He not only liked what he did, he defined himself almost entirely in terms of his unorthodox profession. He had no wife, no children. His talents meant so much to him not merely because they earned him large sums of money but because they made him valuable as a man, respected and appreciated by his peers. He was good, the best jugger Tucker had ever seen. He was almost an artist. He could break, file, acid-breach, finesse or blow a safe faster than any other man in the business. If he worked another twenty years, he would most likely still be the best safecracker in the country when he checked out of it.
        "There's a shopping center in California that was just made to be hit," Tucker said.
        "Shopping center?"
        "Hear me out."
        "Shopping center?" Bates wrinkled his flat face.
        "I know it sounds ridiculous. It isn't."
        "Go on then."
        "It's a very exclusive mall," Tucker explained quietly, his voice whispering unintelligibly around the long display room. "It doesn't cater to the average citizen. It's as if you were to round up twenty of the best businesses on Fifth Avenue and put them all under one roof. There are a handful of very exclusive dress shops-Markwood and Jame, Sasbury's… There's a furrier, an art gallery where the prices start at five hundred dollars a throw, a Rolls Royce dealership, a London-style tailor… best of all, there's a savings bank."
        "Ahhh," Bates said, nodding and smiling, still looking up at the bird-god.
        Tucker also looked at that evil wooden countenance rather than at Bates. From a distance they seemed to be discussing the totem. "We're going to hit the bank. But the vault's probably going to be open."
        Bates looked away from the totem, grimaced as if in imitation of the bird-god's face. "Open? You mean you're hitting it during business hours? Then why do you need me?"
        "It's an after-hours job," Tucker assured him.
        "And the safe will be open?"
        "Most likely. I'll explain why in due time. First-"
        "But if it's open," Bates said, "why take me along?"
        "Just in case it isn't open," Tucker explained. "And we'll also need you to break the safe in the jewelry store next door."
        "You're taking