Snowbound (28 page)

Cain fell silent but continued to stare unseeingly at the wall. Tribucci moved his head slightly and once more looked at Coopersmith.

Do you believe him? Coopersmith’s eyes asked.

I believe him, Tribucci’s eyes answered, and Coopersmith dipped his head almost imperceptibly. They had just witnessed the laying bare of a man’s heart and soul, and the sincerity of his confession was to both of them unquestionable.

Turning, Cain met their gazes again. “I’ve been in the Army,” he said, “so I know the principles of seek-and-destroy and I know how to use a handgun. I’m not in the best of shape, but I think I can climb down a rope all right. I’m also afraid, I can’t lie to you about that, but I’m as sure now as any man can be without having been tested that when the time comes, I’ll be able to stand my ground and pull the trigger on any of those three men.”

Tribucci believed him about that, too. All doubt had vanished now; his instincts told him what type of man Cain was, and he had always implicitly trusted his instincts. The two of them, he thought insightfully, were of the same basic nature: they felt things deeply, they loved and hated deeply, and when a crisis arose they could not be passive or indecisive, they were compelled to act. And these character traits, for better or worse, were of course the reason why (he understood this for the first time) he had taken on the two cyclists thirteen years ago. If Cain had been with Charlene that night on the beach, he might have done the same thing; and if Tribucci had lost his family as Cain had lost his, he might have reacted in much the same fashion as Cain—when it happened and right now.

“Do I go with you?” Cain asked him.

Tribucci had made his decision. “Yes,” he said simply. And then pivoted to Coopersmith.

Eyes steady and penetrating, features set in hard, perceptive lines, the old man was not old at all; except for the flesh-and-bone shell in which the essence of him was trapped, he was young and strong and sagacious. But it was that shell which meant so much now, that shell which prevented him from leading the kind of assault he had been trained for, that shell which had forced him into an admission a few minutes ago that his pride and his spirit had never previously allowed. But he was not old; he had never been old, and he would never be old.

“All right,” he said, as Tribucci had known he would, “I’m in it anyway, so I might as well be in it all the way. With both of you.”

Cain said, “When do we go?”

“As soon as possible. But there’s some talking out to be done first. You don’t rush into a situation like this without planning strategy; too many things can go wrong as it is. First consideration is the two of you getting out of the belfry and away without being spotted.”

“Well if there’s still a guard,” Tribucci said, “it figures he’ll be in front in one of the cars. With the storm that’s up and howling out there, he’s not going to be walking around. And the storm itself is all in our favor; it’ll cover any noise we make breaking out the belfry window, fill in our tracks before too long, keep visibility down to a minimum.”

“It’s not going to cover the sound of breaking glass here in the church.”

“There’s the organ,” Cain said. “If you could get somebody to play a few hymns, the music should be loud enough to drown splintering glass.”

“Okay—good. I’ll talk to Maude, and if she won’t do it, Ellen will. I’ll try to get as many people singing as I can, too; that’ll keep them all together out front, so no one wanders in here at the wrong time.”

Tribucci said, “Second consideration is weapons. We can’t take the chance of going to the Sport Shop, but we can circle through the trees on the west slope, to the houses along Shasta. Joe Garvey’s got a Walther automatic that he brought back from Europe a few years ago and uses for hunting small game. And Vince keeps a pair of target revolvers.”

“That leaves the big question,” Cain said. “How do we deploy once we’re armed?”

“Only one way to handle it,” Coopersmith told them. “Come back here, so you’re in a position to protect the church; don’t try to do any stalking, that’d be like playing Russian roulette. If there’s a guard, take him first—as quietly as possible, maybe with a knife if you can get close enough to do it that way.” He studied the impassive faces of the two younger men. “Shooting a man is one thing, stabbing him with a knife is another—you know that, don’t you?”

“We know it,” Tribucci said thinly.

“All right. Next thing you do is set up in ambush and wait, and keep on waiting no matter how long it takes. But not both of you in the same place, and I don’t have to tell you the reason for that. You’ll have to figure your exact positions once you get to that point.”

Cain nodded, and Tribucci said, “Agreed on all of it. Anything else?”

“One thought,” Cain said. “If we’re going to be waiting in that snowstorm, we’d better put on hats and mufflers and as much extra clothing as we can handle while we’re at Garvey’s place.”

“Right.” Tribucci’s mouth quirked. “Lew—Ann and Vince are going to miss me pretty fast, even if nobody else does. I’d tell them beforehand, but I’m afraid there’d be a scene. . . .”

“There’s liable to be a scene anyway, sooner or later, but that’s my problem; I’ll tell them once you’re gone. You just leave this end of things to me; you’re going to have enough to worry about outside.”

Tribucci exhaled heavily through his nostrils, looked down at his watch. “Five oh five. It’s dark now, but it’ll be darker still in another half hour. Go at five thirty-five?”

“Five thirty-five,” Cain said.

Coopersmith said, “That covers just about everything, then. We’d all better wait out front until it’s time; leave now one by one. The two of you come back in here, separately, between half past and twenty-five to. I’ll have Maude or Ellen playing the organ as soon afterward as I can manage it.”

The three men stood for several silent pulsebeats. Tribucci wanted to say something to Cain, to tell him he was sorry about the tragic loss of his family, to thank him for the choice he had made; but he had no words, it was not the time for words like that. Later, he thought, when it’s over. Later. . . .

He moved first to the closed vestry door.

There was $3,247 in the Mercantile’s safe.

Brodie had taken too much time getting the box open, and Kubion’s patience had ebbed away finally and he’d told him to quit diddling around, quit diddling
around
you queer bastard, and Brodie said he was doing it as fast as he could, and Kubion just looked at him over the raised muzzle of the automatic. Six minutes later Brodie had the combination dial punched out with hammer and chisel and the safe door open wide. Inside were sheafs of papers and some ledger books and a key-type strongbox. With Kubion watching him closely, Brodie snapped the lock on the strongbox and counted out the money it contained onto the desk’s glass top.

$3,247.

Kubion stared at the thin piles of currency. Three thousand lousy goddamn lousy dollars! He had figured ten grand at least, maybe fifteen or twenty, some banker Hughes had been some hick banker son of a bitch. If he wasn’t dead already he’d be dead right now, just like all the hicks were going to be dead pretty soon, pretty soon.

He centered his gaze on Brodie standing by the desk in a litter of tools and bits and pieces of safe metal. Brodie’s face was stoic, but those purple eyes of his were like windows and you could see what he was thinking, you could hear we-told-you-so-didn’t-we running around inside his head as plainly as if he were saying it aloud. Kubion shouted, “Shut up, shut the fucking hell up!”

“I didn’t say anything, Earl.”

“This is only the beginning, you hear, there’ll be more in the other stores and in the houses, plenty more.”

“Sure there will.”

“Plenty more,” Kubion said again. The impulse, the need, had begun whispering to him; the ball of his index finger moved tightly back and forth across the automatic’s curved trigger.

Brodie said quickly, “I’d better gather up the tools before we leave here. We might need them again.”

Kubion’s temples throbbed. His finger continued to slide across the trigger, increasing pressure.

“Did you hear what I said, Earl?”

“I heard you.”

“There’s probably other safes in the valley: the inn, the Sport Shop, the café, the Hughes’ house or one of the other houses. I can’t open them without tools.”

“There won’t be any other safes.”

“We can’t know that for sure, not yet.”

“If there are I’ll get combinations or keys from whoever they belong to, I don’t need you for that.”

“Suppose whoever it is gives you trouble and you have to kill him before you find out a combination? Suppose there’s a safe at the Hughes’ house and the wife doesn’t know that combination either? Could be Hughes kept a spare bundle at home, some of these guys don’t like to keep it all in one place, right?”

Kubion’s finger became still. The impulse was still whispering to him, but it was saying now: Don’t kill him yet . . . he’s right, you might need him . . . don’t kill him yet, soon but not yet. . . .

He said, “Put the tools back in the box, hurry it up, shag your ass.”

Brodie let breath spray inaudibly between his teeth. Immediately, carefully, he knelt and put on his coat and gloves and then began feeding the scattered tools back into the cardboard carton. When he was finished, Kubion ordered him to lace his hands behind him again; stepped forward and scooped the bills off the desk top left-handed and wadded them into his trousers. He went back to the doorway, told Brodie to pick up the carton and come out. A moment later, following him down the aisle between the counter and the wall shelves of liquor and bottled goods, Kubion felt the chill breath of the wind that came stabbing through the glassless door half. Snow whipped in the darkness outside, eddied into the store; the cry of the storm was like that of something alive and in pain.

Kubion’s mouth twisted into a vicious grimace. Snow, wind, cold, goddamn Eskimo village with wooden igloos, and three thousand in the safe and have to keep Brodie alive and Brodie’s back like a target in front of him, urge saying don’t kill him but then saying smash something else, smash something! He stopped moving, smash something do it
now
, and transferred the automatic to his left hand and swept his right through the bottles of liquor on the nearest of the shelves, driving a dozen or more to the floor. Glass shattered, dark liquid splashed and flowed. Brodie whirled and stared at him, carton held up at chest level, and Kubion yelled, “Don’t say a word, don’t move I’ll kill you if you move,” and picked a bottle off the shelf and threw it into the grocery section, toppling a pyramid of canned goods in another banging, clattering counterpoint to the shriek of the wind. He caught up a second bottle and pitched it at the gated Post Office window, missing low, this one not breaking, and a third bottle was in his hand and he flung that across the store at the left front window. The heavy bottom struck the cardboard replica of Santa Claus at the base of the spine and drove it and exploding fragments of glass outward to the sidewalk. One of the torn reindeer clung to a jagged piece of window, flapping in a sudden gust that hurled more flurries of snow through the opening.

The impulse grew silent then, momentarily satisfied, and he leaned panting against the counter. After several moments the smile reappeared on his mouth, and he straightened up again and returned the automatic to his right hand.

“We’ll hit the Sport Shop now,” he said. “Then the inn and the café and the rest of the buildings along here. Then the Hughes’ house.”

“However you want to do it,” Brodie said carefully.

“That’s right, Vic, however I want to do it.”

They went out into the sharp white wind.

The interior of the church had grown progressively duskier with the coming of night. The votive candles on the altar had melted down, and the filtered daylight shining through the stained-glass windows had faded and then disappeared altogether. Spaced at intervals along the side walls, brass-armed electric candles burned palely, cheerlessly, and did little to dispel the pockets of grayish shadow forming on the pulpit and along the front wall.

In one of those pockets, by the peg-hung garments at the south front corner, Rebecca stood alone and wished that she could cry. Crying was a purge, in the same way vomiting was a purge, and it would get rid of some of the nauseating dread that persisted malignantly inside her. But there was no emetic for tears. You could cry or you couldn’t, and even as a child she had rarely wept. Once she had considered this a sign of inner efficacy; in truth, however, it was nothing more than a simple incapacity, like not being able to sing on key or stand on your head or perform backflips.

A voice beside her said softly, “Mrs. Hughes?”

She had not heard anyone approach, and she blinked and half turned. Zachary Cain was standing there. She searched his bearded face briefly and found no pity; empathy, yes, but mercifully, no pity. She thought then that he seemed
different
somehow. She hadn’t noticed it at the cabin earlier or on the ride down, she had been too frightened to notice anything; but there was a definite strength in him only hinted at previously, and the haunted irresolution which had ravaged his features last night had been effaced. It was as if he had undergone some sort of tangible metamorphosis; and today’s ordeal had had no apparent effect, or possibly some esoteric fortifying rather than weakening effect, on that change.