Snowbound (16 page)

Brodie and Loxner just stared at him.

Kubion wet his lips; his eyes burned more brightly, now. “Listen,” he said, “listen, I know what you’re thinking. There’s only three of us, right? Seventy-five people in this valley and only three of us. But that’s no problem—no problem. We do it on Sunday. Now where do most hicks go on Sunday, where do they always go on the Sunday before Christmas?”

Automatically Loxner said, “Church.”

Brodie said, “Oh
Christ. . . .”

“You see how simple it is? At least fifty or sixty of them are all together in the church: a bunch of sitting ducks. We wait until after the service starts at noon, and then we go in and take them over. We tell them to look around and see who’s not there; we make a list of names and addresses. Then we lock the front doors and go round up the rest of them house to house: ring their doorbells, put a gun in their faces; easy. Once we’ve got everybody penned up in the church—there’s no back exit, it’s a box—one of us watches the front doors with a rifle just to make sure none of them tries to get out, and the other two rip off the buildings. Ten to twelve hours, and we can strip this valley like a chicken bone.”

Brodie started to speak, but Kubion made a silencing gesture with one hand and went on with it.

“Okay, now you’re wondering about a getaway with the valley being snowbound. We can’t just sit around and wait until the road’s open again, right? So what we do, we leave here on snowmobiles—those little motorized scooters that run on skis and treads. The two brothers that operate the Sport Shop have one in stock, brand-new. One of them owns another. That’s two, that’s all we need.”

“Snowmobiles,” Loxner said. Without seeming to taste it, he drained the last of his ale.

Kubion was smiling now—an excited, unnatural smile. “One of the brothers told me it could be done; all you need is a compass and a topographical map. I’ve got maps already, and a route traced out, and the mobiles are equipped with compasses. It’s maybe fifteen miles east by northeast to a town called Coldville: four or five hours at the outside. The hicks say the road will be open the day after Christmas; that gives us at least two full days’ start if we leave at dawn Monday.”

Brodie said, “Goddamn it—”

“How do I figure two full days’ minimum?” Kubion said. “Well, we take a hostage or two not long before we go, and we tell the rest that the hostages are dead if anybody even puts his head out while we’re still in the valley, and they won’t have any way of knowing when we actually do leave. We tell them we’re going to take the hostages with us, too; we won’t do it, we’ll tie them up somewhere or off them, what the hell, but the others will believe what we say. They’ll keep right on sitting in the church until somebody comes and lets them out. Another thing we do is cut the telephone lines late tomorrow night; that isolates the valley completely and eliminates any threat of a phone call to the cops if anybody that isn’t in the church gets suspicious before we’ve got them all rounded up. So even if they did get out before the pass is open, what could they do?

“Now: once we reach this Coldville, we buy a used car—they’ve got a dealership there, it’s listed in the phone book, and shagging one is too risky—and then we head for Reno or maybe Tahoe. A little of the blister from Sacramento should be off by next Monday; we play it careful on the road, we’re okay. In Reno or Tahoe, we split up and take separate planes south or east or north. We get off the West Coast entirely, relocate somewhere else.”

Kubion moistened his smile again. “So there it is—all laid out. Simple, beautiful, a score like nobody ever pulled off before. Well? What do you think?”

“I think you been blowing too much weed,” Loxner said, trying to make a joke of it. “Man, that ain’t a score, it’s like plain fucking suicide.”

The smile vanished.

Loxner laughed nervously. “This is
safe
ground, you don’t pull a job on safe ground no matter how good it is. Christ, Brendikian would never stand for having this place blown that way. And he’s got Circle connections, Earl, you know that.”

“The Circle isn’t going to pick up on small-time crap like having an independent safe house blown, I don’t care what kind of connections Brendikian’s got. Screw Brendikian.”

“You don’t know him, man, he ain’t anybody to fool with.”

“Screw Brendikian,” Kubion said again.

Brodie leaned forward. “Earl, the people here know your face and mine; disguises or masks wouldn’t be worth a thing. The cops would have those Identikit drawings on every front page in the country once the ripoff was reported. Our cover identities would be blown, that’s one thing. And we’ve all taken falls; they’d come up with our names sooner or later, they’d have mug shots out in addition to the composites.”

“I thought of that, I told you I thought of everything. The hell with it. It’s not that hard to build a new cover somewhere. And the FBI’s been looking for Ben Hammel for eight years for the bank job he was in on in Texas. He’s still walking around.”

“I’m not Ben Hammel, and I don’t want my ass in that kind of sling. There’s a damned good chance the cops would connect us up with Greenfront, too—and the chance we’d run into trouble taking over here and people would get killed. Murder One heat, either way. We wouldn’t last a week anywhere in the country.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Kubion said. “How much play can a thing like this get in Connecticut? In Florida? In goddamn Puerto Rico? A few days and it dies off. Sure, the fuzz keeps right on looking. But you both know how simple it is to change what you look like. You grow a beard for a while; half the men in the nation wear beards these days, and how can some cop identify you when you’re wearing a face full of whiskers? You cut your hair or let it grow or dye it another color. You gain weight or you lose weight or you wear padding. You live quiet, don’t spread any money around. You know all the tricks as well as I do. And we’re split up, that’s another thing; three guys in three different parts of the country who don’t look anything like the ones who ripped off Hidden Valley, California.”

Brodie said, “Damn it, none of it makes
sense
. Even if we could stay on the loose, where are we? Say we could take as much as thirty grand out of here: that’s only ten thousand apiece. How long is ten bills going to last each of us? We’d have to look for a new score inside of three months, and with all the heat still on. How many pros are going to want one of us in on a job carrying that kind of blister?”

“So we play it solo for a while. We’ve all worked solo before. The heat will die, it always dies sooner or later.”

“For God’s sake, they’d have our
names;
they’d know exactly who did the job. That kind of heat doesn’t die.”

“Hell no, it don’t,” Loxner said.

“I’ll tell you a way the cops won’t get our names at all, a way to come out of it free and clear and to hell with this cabin,” Kubion said.

“What way?”

“Set fire to the church or blow it up before we go on the snowmobiles. Don’t leave
any
witnesses who can identify us, waste them all.”

Loxner gaped at him the way you would at something under a decaying log. Brodie’s shoulders jerked involuntarily. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said. His voice was incredulous. “What kind of freaky talk is that? Jesus, what do you think we are?”

“Okay, okay, then forget that. But listen—”

“We listened enough already,” Loxner said, “I don’t want to listen to no more. We don’t want no part of what you’re laying down here, no part of it.”

Brodie said, “Earl, what’s got into you? You’re all of a sudden after this valley like you got a hard-on for the place, you’re acting like a crazy amateur—”

Kubion was on his feet in one swift motion, upsetting his chair. His cheeks had suffused with dark blood, and his eyes were like a pair of live embers. He slapped the table with the flat of one palm, hard enough to topple Loxner’s empty ale bottle and send it clattering to the floor. “Call me a crazy amateur, you son of a bitch, call
me
a crazy amateur!”

Loxner and Brodie were standing now as well, backed off a couple of steps, muscles tensed.

“You stupid pricks, can’t you see the kind of thing this is? A whole valley, a whole valley, nobody ever did anything like it. Well? Well?”

Watching him, Brodie and Loxner remained silent.

Kubion took a breath, released it sibilantly—and as suddenly as it had come, the rage drained out of his face. “All right,” he said, quiet-voiced, “all right then, all right,” and turned and walked out of the kitchen.

Very softly Loxner said, “Oh man!” He went to the refrigerator and took out another ale and popped the cap and swallowed half of it without lowering the bottle. Then: “Things are bad enough without shit like that. The last thing we need is shit like that, Vic.”

Brodie did not say anything.

“He gave me the creeps with all that crazy talk,” Loxner said, “that funny look in his eyes. It was like he’s a different person all of a sudden, you know what I mean?”

Brodie’s mouth was pinched in at the corners, his eyes grimly reflective. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Black-edged clouds began to drift over Hidden Valley Friday afternoon, obliterating the pale sun and giving the air a dry, ice-tinged quality; but it did not snow again until very early Saturday morning, and then nothing more than a light dusting which would not interfere with work on the slide. When Matt Hughes came down Lassen Drive a few minutes past 8 A.M., the village seemed bathed in a soft luminosity created by the snow’s whiteness reflecting light filtered through the low cloud ceiling. Under normal circumstances, such a view would have pleased him—the serene beauty of a mountain valley, his valley, in literally its best light—but he barely noticed it now; he had too many divergent things preying on his mind.

There was the slide, of course: all the problems it had caused, the extra work it made for him as mayor. There was Peggy Tyler, whom he had seen several times since their lovemaking in Whitewater Tuesday night but whom he had not spoken to for their mutual protection; whose lush and eager body glowed in his memory, exciting him with fresh and consuming desire and filling him with a sense of frustration because he could do nothing about it.

And, finally, there was Rebecca.

Her sudden outburst Thursday evening at dinner had upset him considerably. He loved her deeply, and yet it was a kind of reverent, detached love: the love of an art connoisseur for a masterpiece which he alone possesses. From the moment he had met her, Hughes had never been able to think of her in sexual terms; the act of physically entering her body had never given him pleasure or satisfaction—just as fondling the fragile surfaces of his masterpiece would give the art connoisseur no pleasure and no satisfaction. Sex for Matt Hughes was a savage, primitive urge totally disassociated from love. It was sweating flesh and moaning frenzy and animalistic release with women like Peggy Tyler, women who instilled no reverence in him, women who dazzled his senses and sated completely his carnal hunger.

He wanted only to have Rebecca near him, to know that she was there and that she was his; he wanted only to believe in her and worship her in some of the same way he believed in and worshiped God. He wished desperately that he could explain this to her, but of course he had never tried; she would not have understood. And he lived in constant fear that she would find out about his continual affairs—as she had found out about the Soda Grove waitress several years ago—and that she would, instead of once again forgiving him, decide to leave him. He couldn’t bear that. But still he yielded each time the primitive forces inside him demanded it, as if he were two different men, as if he were a kind of sensually emotional schizophrenic.

Did she suspect the current affair with Peggy? Or had her outburst Thursday only been the result of neglect and some of those same base desires which were present in all beings? The latter, of course; he refused to think otherwise. After he had recovered from his initial shock, he had tried to make himself go upstairs and take Rebecca into his arms and make love to her, but he had not been able to do it. He had never been able to correlate the primitive with the reverent; it was one or the other, and he simply could not touch or devote himself to his wife during those times when he was pouring out his lust into the bodies of other females.

The situation had grown worse over the past two days. Rebecca had not spoken a word to him since Thursday, and the atmosphere at home was strained and uncomfortable. The careful juxtaposition of his two lives had been momentarily and maddeningly imbalanced; he needed both Rebecca and Peggy now, he needed the status quo, and he did not have any of them. There had to be an answer, a way to restabilize things, but he had not as yet been able to figure out what it was.

Maude Fredericks had already opened the Mercantile, as she did on most mornings, when Hughes arrived. He went into his office and put through a call to Soda Grove. The slide status, at least, was still quo: progress slow but steady, no fresh snow slides to complicate matters. He came out into the store again, built a fire in the potbellied stove, and went to work.

The day seemed to drag on interminably. Rebecca and Peggy, Peggy and Rebecca—first one and then the other, endlessly cycling in his thoughts. He found himself wishing Peggy would come in and was both relieved and disappointed when she did not. He thought of calling Rebecca but didn’t; there would have been no point in it, there was nothing he could say to her yet. Depression formed inside him like a thick, damp mist.