The only light inside the warehouse came from the brightly lit office
far at the back of the building and from an overhead bank of widely
spaced, low-wattage bulbs set in tin shades, which were allowed to burn
all night. But there was sufficient illumination for Jack to see the
faces of his two companionsMort Gersh and Tommy Sung-who had been
following him. They did not look as happy as they had been only a couple
of minutes ago.
They had been happy because they had successfully hit a major way
station on the route of the mafia cash train, a collection point for
narcotics money from half the state of New Jersey. Suitcases and flight
bags and cardboard boxes and Styrofoam coolers full of cash arrived at
the warehouse from a score of couriers, most of it on Sunday and Monday.
Tuesdays, mob accountants in Pierre Cardin suits arrived to calculate
the week's profits from the pharmaceutical division. Every Wednesday,
suitcases full of tightly banded sacks of greenbacks went out to Miami,
Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and other centers of high finance, where
investment advisers with Harvard or Columbia MBAS, on retainer to the
mafia-or fratellanza, as the underworld referred to itselfwisely put it
to work. Jack, Mort, and Tommy had simply stepped in between the
accountants and the investment advisers, and had taken four heavy bags
full of cash for themselves. "Just think of us as one more layer of
middlemen," Jack had told the three glowering thugs who were, even now,
tied up in the warehouse office, and Mort and Tommy had laughed.
Mort was not laughing now. He was fifty years old, potbellied,
slump-shouldered, baking. He wore a dark suit, pork-pie hat, and gray
overcoat. He always wore a dark suit and pork-pie 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 rollup 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 modern 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 reechoed 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
submachinegun 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 sleetlashed night beyond.
"Drive through the sucker," Tommy urged.
Fastening his seatbelt, 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 itwith 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,
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 11