Surrounded

over."
        Chet was too enraged to speak. He spluttered at them and nearly choked on his anger, half raised one fist in a useless threat that impressed no one.
        Tucker walked around behind them to pick the revolvers out of their holsters. "Be cool now."
        "Little bastard," Chet said, finally regaining his voice.
        Tucker was reaching for Artie's gun when he heard a strange guttural sound behimd him. Odd as it was, he knew immediately the source of it. That damned police dog was loose.
        

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        The German shepherd, which had been trained to follow well behind the night watchmen, had come out of the open warehouse door and was running for all its great strength, rapidly closing the distance between them. Its ears were pinned flat against its skull, and its long tail curved between its hind legs. The carpet gave the brute excellent purchase and considerably softened the sound of its thumping paws.
        Tucker turned completely around to face it and automatically swung up the Skorpion. But he hesitated, remembering what a friend in the business had once told him about guard dogs…
        Two years before Tucker had hooked up with three other men to knock over a major department store for its cash receipts on the last shopping day before Christmas. In the middle of that robbery one of the other men, an all-around professional named Osborne, had been attacked by a trained mutt. Using only his bare hands, he had quickly and efficiently killed it without sustaining a single tooth or claw mark. It was necessary, after that job, for them to hole up at an abandoned farmhouse for several days, and during that time Osborne explained to Tucker how to handle any dog. Osborne had learned his stuff in the army, where he had also learned to kill men, and he had not minded passing it along to Tucker.
        The dog was less than two hundred feet away.
        Most certainly this dog was not a killer. After all, it was trained to follow the guards and to be available in emergencies. Like this one. Nevertheless, Tucker had to deal with it as if it were a killer. It would worry him until it was either dead or badly hurt, and it might sow enough confusion to let Chet and Artie get control of the situation. Men had educated it in violence, had corrupted it, and now it was going to have to pay for its unwanted and unsought knowledge.
        "Look out!" Edgar shouted.
        Even as the jugger involuntarily cried out, Meyers said, "For Christ's sake, shoot!" Neither he nor Bates was in a position to use his Skorpion without killing the watchmen and Tucker, too. "Shoot!"
        According to Len Osborne, any gun you could name was useless against a well-trained guard dog. For one thing, a dog was too small a target, especially when it was coming at you head-on. Even a big shepherd was too damned narrow to get a sight on. Furthermore, it was too compact, vicious, and fast. Even a superior marksman would not have time to aim properly and squeeze off a shot before the dog was at his arm or throat. Shooting from the hip, figuratively speaking, without benefit of aiming, provided little accuracy. You might as well throw sticks, Osborne had said.
        Tucker dropped the Skorpion and heard Bates cry out. I hope this wetsuit doesn't slow me up, Tucker thought. If it did, he was dead, or at least badly mauled. And even if the dog held him without hurting him, he was certain to spend a long time in jail.
        There was only one moment, Osborne had said, when a dog was vulnerable: when it was in the air, after it had jumped, in the final seconds before it struck. Until that moment, it was totally mobile and could attack or evade or change its mind in an instant. But once it was committed, when it was in the air, launched at its victim, it was relatively defenseless. Its teeth were not yet within striking range, and its claws were harmless while it was in flight. Its front paws were tucked weakly back and would not spring forward and unsheath their claws until the bare instant before contact. If you moved quickly and surely enough… If you leaped forward to intercept instead of backing away from it, you could grab one of those front paws, twist it as you would a man's arm, let yourself fall to the ground, and throw the beast over your head just as hard as you could manage. Its own momentum would ensure that it would fall fairly far off and that it would hit the ground with