Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  And now maybe he had waited too long.

  They’d rounded up all the valley people, and Kubion didn’t need him or Loxner to loot the village. It could be he intended to let them both keep on living a while longer; but he was totally unpredictable, and there was no way you could second-guess him. If this was it, Brodie’s only option was that desperate gamble; he wasn’t going to die a frozen target, any way but a frozen target. The only other thing he could do was to try to buy himself time, and the way to do that was to remind Kubion of the Mercantile’s safe.

  When they’d first taken Hughes’ wife, Kubion had asked her for the combination; she’d said she didn’t have any idea what it was, no one knew it except her husband and he had committed it to memory. Too scared to be lying, even Kubion had seen that. So the safe had to be cracked-and Kubion was no jugger, he didn’t know the first thing about busting a box. Brodie did, though. Jugging was a nowhere business these days, owing to modern improvements in safe-and-vault manufacturing: drill-and acetylene-resistant steel alloys and self-contained alarm systems and automatic relocking devices to help guard against lock blowing with nitro or plastic gelatine; but there were still a few old hands around, and Brodie had worked a couple of scores with one of them, Woody Huggins. Kubion was aware of that and had to be aware, too-made aware, convinced-that Brodie could open that box a hell of a lot quicker and surer than he could do it himself….

  Kubion returned to the pickup, which straddled the front walk thirty feet from the church entrance, and stopped by the tailgate. He said, “All of them now, all of them, didn’t I tell you the way it would be? You should have listened, you and Duff should’ve listened from the start.”

  “That’s right, Earl,” Brodie said, “we should’ve listened from the start.”

  “Now the gravy, eh Vic? Now the gravy.”

  “The safe in the Mercantile first?”

  Kubion gave him a sly look. “Could be.”

  “I hope it’s one I can jug without any sweat.”

  “Maybe I could jug it myself, you know?”

  “Maybe you couldn’t, Earl,” Brodie said slowly. He watched the automatic the way you would watch a coiled rattlesnake.

  “Yeah, maybe not,” Kubion agreed, and laughed.

  “Do we move out now?”

  “How come you’re so anxious, Vic, how come?”

  “I just want to see how much is in that safe.”

  The slyness vanished. “Well so do I. Let’s get to cracking.” He paused, realizing what he’d said, and found it to be funny; his laughter this time was loud and shrill, echoing on the wind. “Pretty good, hey? Let’s get to cracking.”

  Brodie relaxed a little, not much. “Pretty good, Earl,” he said.

  He watched Kubion go around to the passenger door, open it; they got into the cab simultaneously. So Kubion wasn’t worried about Loxner any more than Brodie was counting on him; he was giving them both some extra time. Well, screw Loxner, Loxner just didn’t figure to matter at all. What mattered was an opening, a mistake. And it would come, he had to keep telling himself that; it would come, it would come.

  Brodie started the engine, drove across the front churchyard and onto Sierra Street and up to the Mercantile. They got out of the pickup, climbed over the windrows onto the icy sidewalk. The wind hurled snow in gyrating flurries, moaned in building eaves, rattled boarding and glass, singingly vibrated the string of Christmas lights spanning the street. In its emptiness the village had an almost eerily desolate feel, like an Arctic ghost town.

  “Kick the doors open,” Kubion said.

  Brodie looked at the holly wreath and mistletoe decorating the two glass halves, over at the cardboard Santa Claus and cardboard reindeer in one of the windows. Then he tongued cold-chapped lips and stepped up to the entrance. Raising one foot, he drove it against the lock in the wooden frames where the two leaves joined; the doors held. He kicked again, and a third time, without being able to snap the lock.

  Impatiently, Kubion told him to break the pane out of one of the halves.

  He did that, and the holly wreath flew inside with splinters of glass and scattered berries and leaves across the floor. He used his foot to punch away the remaining shards, ducked through the open frame and into the semidarkened interior. When he was eight steps across the wooden floor, Kubion came in and said, “Light switches are on the wall over there, behind the counter.”

  Moving slowly, Brodie passed the potbellied stove and went around and found the metal control case and flipped the row of switches within. Warm yellow illumination flooded the store. Kubion waved him a short way along the aisle between the counter and wall shelves of liquor and other bottled goods; then, without taking eyes off him, he rang up No Sale on the cash register and rifled the drawer. Seventy or eighty dollars, if that much. He wadded the bills into his trouser pocket, made another waving motion, and they went down to where the office was located.

  The door was locked, but this one gave and bounced inward the first time Brodie slammed the bottom of his shoe against the wood above the latch. While Kubion stood watching from just outside the doorway, Brodie crossed to the heavy oak desk and put on the lamp there. The glass top held no potential weapon, not even a letter opener, but would Hughes have kept a gun in one of the drawers? Not likely-and Kubion wouldn’t let him into the desk anyway. He gave his attention to the safe. A cheesebox, it could be opened in a maximum of thirty minutes; all you had to do with one of these old one-pieces was to knock off the combination dial.

  Kubion said, “How long?”

  “I’m not sure. I might have to peel it.”

  “A crate like this?”

  “It’s more solid than it might look.”

  “I don’t want any bullshit, Vic.”

  “No bullshit.”

  “All right, what you need?”

  “Hammer, chisels, pry bar, maybe a high-speed drill.”

  “Nice and convenient hardware section out front, right?”

  Out of the office, around the counter, through the grocery section. “Hold it,” Kubion said.

  Brodie stopped immediately. “What?”

  On top of one of the shelves was a cardboard carton of paper towel rolls; Kubion motioned to it. “Dump out that carton and bring it along.”

  “What for?”

  “So you don’t get any ideas, baby.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No? I’ll lay it out for you then: I don’t want you carrying hammers and chisels and pry bars loose in your hands, I don’t want you even touching any of that stuff until we get back into the office, now do what I told you.”

  A tic fluttered one corner of Brodie’s mouth. He turned and took the carton down and emptied the paper towel rolls onto the floor. In the hardware department, Kubion instructed him to put the box down and then turn around and lace his hands behind him. After Brodie complied, he heard tools begin to clatter into the carton, Kubion’s voice calling off the name of each. Then: “Okay, that everything you need?”

  Brodie considered asking for an awl, because of the tool’s thin sharp-pointed blade; telling Kubion he might need it for work on the lock mechanism. But if Kubion saw through the lie, there was just no telling what he’d do; the last thing Brodie could afford now was to antagonize him. And Christ, even if Kubion let him have one, he’d never get close enough to stab him with it; and the round, beveled handles on the things made them too awkward for throwing, overbalanced them.

  He said, “That’s everything, Earl.”

  “Turn around and pick up the carton.”

  Wordlessly, Brodie carried the heavy container back into the office. He set it down in front of the safe, took off his coat and gloves, and knelt beside it. He could feel Kubion’s eyes on his back as he began to sort through the jumble of tools, lifting them out of the carton one by one, trying to stall without seeming to do so.

  “Vic,” Kubion said finally, “Vic baby.”

  Brodie stopped stalling then an
d went to work on the safe.

  Seven

  The moment Rebecca stepped inside the church she knew that Matt was dead.

  She felt it like a chill in the strained, hushed atmosphere, and saw it reflected in the staring faces of the people huddled throughout. Everyone who lived in the valley seemed to be there, everyone except Matt, and he was not there because he was dead; he had been killed somehow by the men who had kidnapped her and Zachary Cain and all these others, too. The presentiment of things being wrong, Matt’s unsatisfactorily explained absence, had planted the seed in her mind, and it had germinated swiftly with the appearance and actions of the wild-eyed gunman and his demands for information about the Mercantile’s safe. A kind of creeping mental numbness-a defensive barrier erected against the sharp stabbing edges of fear-had kept her from dwelling continually on the possibility, but now there could no longer be any resistance because there was no longer any doubt.

  Matt was dead.

  She stood very still and tried to feel grief, some sense of personal loss. There was only the terror and a hollow despair. Dreamlike, she watched people converging on her and felt Webb Edwards’ hand on her arm and heard him asking if she were all right, if she wanted to sit down; heard other voices murmuring but none of them saying anything about Matt, uneasily avoiding the inevitable, and so she said it for them, she said, “Matt’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Ann Tribucci was at her side now. “Becky, you’d better come and sit down…”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “He… yes. Oh Becky-”

  Woodenly, “How did it happen?”

  “You don’t want to know, not now.”

  “I have to know. I don’t know anything about what’s going on. Why are we here? Who are those men? How did Matt die?”

  In hesitant, succinct words they told her who the men were and what had occurred last night and today. Rebecca was beyond the point of shock; she comprehended the facts, accepted them, abhorred them automatically with a small part of her mind, but they had no immediate or cohesive impact on her and she registered no external reaction. She waited for someone to tell her about Matt, and when no one did she repeated her question: “How did Matt die?”

  “Come and sit down,” Ann said again.

  “I don’t want to sit down, will you stop asking me to sit down and please please tell me what happened to my husband?”

  Awkward silence. Rebecca sensed dimly that their hesitancy was not solely the result of a desire to spare her the specifics of Matt’s death, that there was something else they were reluctant to reveal and which they wanted to spare her. What? she thought-and then she guessed what it must be, but this also had little distinct impact on her. Like an anesthetic, the numbness had begun spreading through her mind again.

  She said in a barren tone, “Where was he killed?”

  Lew Coopersmith, slowly and resignedly: “At the lake.”

  “Last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “They shot him, is that it? Was he shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he alone?”

  The awkward silence.

  “Was he alone?” Rebecca repeated.

  “No one else was shot last night.”

  “That isn’t what I asked. Was Matt alone?”

  Pleadingly Ann said, “Becky, Becky…”

  “He wasn’t alone, was he? He was with another woman, together with another woman. Isn’t that right?”

  Silence.

  “Yes of course,” she said, “of course he was. Who was it? No, it doesn’t matter, I don’t want to know, it doesn’t matter.”

  Shuffling movement around her, toward her, away from her. Faces averted, faces staring. Pity touching her like fat, soft, unwelcome hands. She did want to sit down then and found a place without assistance. Head bowed, she thought dully: Well, that makes it all very simple, doesn’t it? No need for a decision now, no need for anything now. Matt was dead, and the truth was out; they all knew the truth at last: Matt Hughes a philanderer, Matt Hughes consorting with a local woman and doing it right here in Hidden Valley (even she would never quite have expected him to be that brash, that foolhardy; even she did not really know all of what had been concealed beneath his generous, boyish, pious exterior). How surprised they must have been-and how fitting that they should have learned it in this of all places. And what would they say if she were to tell them of the long, long line of other women, all the past deceits?

  Oh yes, there had been quite a bit of goodness in him, and his death was violent and premature, and she had lived with him and slept with him for seven years; but she could not now or ever grieve for him. The well of Matt-directed emotions had run dry. She had given him everything she knew how to give, and he had left her with nothing whatsoever of value. How could she possibly mourn an unfaithful husband who had even died in the company of another woman?

  Ann sat down beside her and covered one of her mittened hands, not speaking. Rebecca was grateful for that; she did not want dialogue of any kind. She sat without moving or thinking for several moments. Then, gradually, some of the numbness began to recede, and she became aware of the heavy tumescence that was Ann’s unborn child, of her surroundings, of why she and all the others were here in the church, of the things the three men outside had already done: the full horror of the situation penetrating for the first time. Fear surged consumingly in her stomach again; her fingers closed tightly around Ann’s and clung to them. Matt was dead, murdered-and what of Ann and her baby and everyone else in the valley? What of Rebecca Hughes?

  What was to become of them?

  Eight

  Cain sat on the far edge of the pulpit, spine curved to the outer organ casing, forearms resting on his pulled-up knees. It was warm enough inside the church, but his skin crawled with cold-the kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature.

  The dark gunman’s clearly homicidal dementia had prepared him for most any contingency on the ride down from the cabin, yet the magnitude of what was actually taking place in Hidden Valley-recounted to Rebecca Hughes while he had stood listening and ignored on the periphery-had stunned and repulsed him. The concept was monstrous; you could not immediately reconcile your mind to it. Things like this can’t happen, you thought; they can’t happen to you. And then you remembered men like Hitler and Richard Speck and Charles Manson, and that all their victims must have at first experienced the same staggering disbelief, and you understood that such things could and did happen at any time, at any place, to anyone.

  Anything can happen, Cain thought now; madness doesn’t have to have a thing to do with it. A man can get drunk to celebrate some great good fortune and run over a child while driving home. A man can send his wife out for a package of cigarettes, and she can be raped and murdered on the way to the corner grocery. Yes, and a man can repair a home appliance and make an unconscious error that causes the death of his entire family…

  He raised his head and looked toward the rear, to where Rebecca Hughes sat. Compassion moved through him, as it had minutes earlier. It was bad enough for himself and each of the others, but she had taken a vicious triple blow: the nightmare itself, the death of her husband, the fact that he had been killed during a blatant affair with another woman. Or maybe she had already known about his infidelity, and that was the underlying source of her confessed loneliness; she had almost instantly guessed what they were holding back from her.

  Cain’s eyes roamed over the other women, the men, the children. They were strangers to him; none of them seemed even to be aware of his presence at this moment, except for Frank McNeil, who stood but gave the impression of crouching against the near wall, mutely hating him with eyes like water-shiny pebbles. And yet Cain’s involvement with all of them-even McNeil, he could no longer seem to feel animosity toward the man-was the same as if they had been relatives or friends of long standing. He cared whether they lived or died, as he had realized at last that he cared intrinsically whether he lived or died
.

  At the upper edge of his vision he saw one of the stained-glass windows, and centered his gaze on it, and thought then of God. A full year since he had been inside a church, last Christmas with his family; six months since he had denied to himself the existence of a benign Deity. If there was a God, would He allow a gentle wife and mother and two small innocent children to die so cruelly and unnecessarily? Would He allow wars and poverty and racial hatred and the kind of wanton terrorism which had exploded here in Hidden Valley? Rhetorical questions. You believed or you didn’t believe: simple as that. Once Cain had believed; and now, here, he was not sure he had ever really stopped believing.

  On impulse he got to his feet and crossed slowly to the altar; looked at the open Bible on the prayer cloth, at the melting votive candles in their silver holders. And standing there, he grew conscious of low but discernible voices coming from inside the vestry, the door to which stood ajar a few feet distant. He recognized them as belonging to John Tribucci and Lew Coopersmith, recalled that he had seen Tribucci say something to the old man a minute or two earlier and then both of them step up onto the pulpit.

  “.. got to do something, Lew,” Tribucci was saying. “We can’t accept the word of a lunatic that nothing will happen to us; he’s psycho enough to have carried out this whole fantastic scheme and committed one brutal murder already, and that makes him psycho enough to slaughter us all. He could do it in a rage when he finds out just how little of value there is in the valley or because he knows we can identify him or even because he gets some kind of warped thrill out of killing. And I can’t believe those two partners of his would be able to stop him; for all we know he may be planning to kill them, too, he may have done it already.” Beat. “Mass murder isn’t the only threat, either; there’s a good possibility he intends to take hostages anyway when he leaves, to make sure we don’t sound the alarm right away. Kids, women — Ellen, or Judy, or Rebecca… or for God’s sake, even Ann. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them when he had no more use for them, you know he wouldn’t.”