Snowbound (30 page)

“Doesn’t reach all the way to the ground,” he said. “There’ll be a drop of six or seven feet, but the snow’ll help cushion our landing.”

“You’d better go first,” Cain said. “I cut my right palm on a piece of glass, sliced a tear in the glove, and blood leaking through will make the rope slippery.”

“Can you hold onto it? Is the cut deep?”

“I’ll manage somehow. Go ahead.”

Tribucci climbed onto the windowsill, facing into the belfry, and gathered up slack in the rope and made a loop around his right wrist; then he leaned back and swung out against the steeple wall. Shoes sliding on the snow-slick boards, body stretched back into an almost horizontal plane, he went down with quick agility. When he reached the last foot of rope, he hung for an instant and then let go. His feet disappeared ankle-deep into the surface snow, and he went to one knee; but he was up again immediately, thrusting his right thumb upward, moving in close to the wall and toward the north corner.

Cain ran his right gloved palm gingerly along one trouser leg, to clear away some of the blood. The organ stopped again as he stood up into the frame, and he waited tense-bodied until it resumed with “God of Mercy.” He wiped his right glove a second time, took up the rope and looped it around his left wrist. And went out the way Tribucci had.

The pressure of the rope against his palm made the glass cut burn hellishly; long-unused muscles strained, wrenched, in his armpits and across his shoulders. He felt his grip begin slipping before he had gone halfway, held on desperately until he was ten or twelve feet above the ground. The instant he felt the rope slide irreclaimably through his knotted fingers. he willed his body to relax. There was a moment of giddying free fall, then solid impact that stabbed pain upward through both legs to his groin and hips. He toppled forward, sprawling. Snow clogged his nose and mouth, and he spat it out soundlessly as he pulled himself up onto hands and knees. The pain in his legs had begun to decrease; he had not broken or sprained anything.

Tribucci caught his arm and helped him upright. He asked urgently, “Okay?”

“Okay,” Cain said.

A short exhalation of breath plumed like smoke from between Tribucci’s lips. He said, “North and south walls are clear. So far, so good.”

“I’ll follow your lead.”

As he trailed Tribucci along the side of the cottage, its attached garage, Cain flexed his arms and shoulders to loosen the taut-stretched musculature; his right glove seemed filled with flowing, sticky-cold blood. The line of trees began a hundred yards beyond, and they crossed the sloping open space at a shuffle-stepped run. The storm lashed at them, surrounded them with dancing skeins of whiteness as nearly impenetrable as the curtain of night itself. Cain’s face started to numb, and his feet were wet and chilled inside his boots; his ears ached, his eyes burned.

They reached the wood finally, and its density cut off some of the storm’s tumult. There was no movement along their backtrail—or at least none visible through the flurries. Tribucci set a lateral course a few short yards inside the timber, so that the church and the village buildings remained dimly perceptible on their right. Minutes later they reached a point from which they could look down the two-block length of Shasta Street. Most of the houses were dark, but two showed lights; the illumination there and on Sierra was blurred by the fluxing snow. They went farther north, until they were on a line with the side wall of the nearest, completely dark house, and then followed the line down and across a bare yard to a rose trellis at the house’s front corner.

The neighboring dwelling was one of those that showed light in some of its windows. Tribucci said against Cain’s ear, “That’s Joe Garvey’s place.”

“Doesn’t seem to be any tracks out front.”

“The Garveys were among those picked up in the canvass. It should be empty.”

“We’ve got to make sure before we try going in.”

“Yeah. Best if we come up to it from the rear.”

They went along the side of the dark house, into its back yard. A waist-high wooden fence separated the two adjoining properties, and they crossed to it in a humpbacked run, passed over it one leg at a time in low profile. A check of the two lighted windows in the western wall revealed an empty kitchen and an empty bedroom; they looped around past the back stairs and along the eastern wall and looked into an empty living room through the only illumined window on that side.

When they saw no activity on Shasta to the immediate east, they edged around to the front and past another living-room window and came up to the roofed porch. The entrance door was standing wide open, rattling in the wind; thickly undisturbed snow overlaid the inside hallway floor. Cain said, “Empty,” and Tribucci repeated the word in accord. They climbed the steps quickly and entered the hallway, the living room.

“Garvey keeps his gun in a cabinet in the washroom,” Tribucci said. “I know that because I’ve gone fishing with him a couple of times, and he stores all his sporting equipment there.”

The washroom was located off the kitchen, and the cabinet—four by six feet, made of metal, door unlocked —took up half of an end wall. The Walther automatic, a .380 PPK, lay wrapped in chamois cloth on an interior shelf, clean and well cared for. Its butt magazine was empty, but on the same shelf Tribucci found two full clips in a cigar box containing gun oil and other cleaning accessories.

He said, “You want to take this one?”

Cain nodded, accepted the weapon and the two clips, fitted one into the butt, and put the other into his left coat pocket. The gun was light for an automatic of that caliber, compact; its plastic grips felt cold and rough. He dropped it into his right coat pocket, and they moved back into the lighted kitchen.

A utensil drawer under the drainboard yielded a pair of narrow-bladed, eight-inch carving knives. Another drawer held a ball of string, and Tribucci cut off three pieces and tied the blade of one of the knives to his right thigh beneath his coat, leaving the handle free: a makeshift sheath. Cain did the same with the second knife.

In the front hallway again, Cain said, “Next step is to find extra clothing. I need another pair of gloves, too; my right one is full of blood from that glass cut.”

“You won’t have any trouble using the gun?”

“No. Cut seems to’ve stopped bleeding now, and it’s in the fleshy part of the palm.”

There was a closet in the hall, and inside was an old gray overcoat with a pair of cracked-leather gloves stuffed into one of the pockets. But that was all: no mufflers or hats of any kind. Tribucci said, “I’ll see what I can find in their bedroom,” and hurried away.

The gray overcoat was knee-length, heavier than the shorter one Cain wore; he made the exchange and found that it fit him well enough. Once he had it on, he peeled off Coopersmith’s gloves, wiped his dark-stained right hand—the blood, coagulating, felt as viscous as liquid adhesive—and tried the new pair. They were a size too small, but not so tight that they would hamper free finger movement.

At the open front door, he looked out and down Shasta again. All that moved was the wind-hurled snow. Cain turned as Tribucci reentered the hall wearing a thick muffler and a woman’s fox-pelt cap pulled down over his ears; his own light-colored overcoat was heavy enough so that he hadn’t needed to replace it with another, but he’d put on a wool sweater beneath it. In one hand he carried a second muffler, a second sweater, and a man’s lamb-wool Cossack-style hat.

He gave those items to Cain, watched as he put them on. “Best way to do it now, I think, would be for the two of us to split up: you back to the church and me after the other guns at my brother’s. One of us has got to get into a protective position as quickly as possible.”

Cain weighed the proposal for several seconds. “Agreed,” he said then. “If there is a guard out front, I’ll see if I can locate his whereabouts. But I won’t make a move until you come—unless there’s a definite threat and I don’t have any choice.”

“I’ll make it back as fast as I can.” Tribucci held his wristwatch up to his eyes. “Six twenty. Figure less than half an hour. You’ll be along the church’s south wall?”

“Right,” Cain said. “We’d better have a signal, though. We won’t be able to recognize each other from a distance, and things are going to be tense enough as it is.”

“Suppose I stop in front of the cottage door and give a left-handed wave over my head.”

“Good. I’ll make the same gesture in return.”

“Split up in the wood; it’ll be safe if I go that way.”

They moved out of the hallway and down off the porch, climbed the wooden boundary fence, and retraced their original route into the trees. Once there, Tribucci put a hand on Cain’s arm, squeezed it, and then slipped away quickly and was swallowed by the heavy fir shadows. Cain turned in the opposite direction—and he was immediately conscious of being alone. When two or more men were working together, interacting, in a crucial situation, the unit they formed became an entity unto itself—stronger than each individual because it fused their strengths into the whole. You thought as part of the unit, and as a result, you were able to maintain rigid control over your own personality. But when the unit was temporarily disbanded, and you became a man alone, a little of that control began to slip; you tried to continue blocking out emotions, to keep your mind functioning as calculatingly as it had been, but a few inevitably, if dimly, seeped through: fear, anger and hatred, enormity of purpose.

And for Cain, too, a repulsion of—a reassurance from—the weapon that seemed to have become a sudden immense weight in his right coat pocket. . . .

Brodie came out through the broken mouth of the Valley Café, braced his body against the force of the storm, and then stepped beyond the perimeter of the fluorescent light spill and started across Sierra Street. Behind him, Kubion trailed like a sentient and menacing shadow.

They had ripped off the Sport Shop and the Valley Inn and now the café, and the total take had been slightly more than four bills. Counting the fifteen hundred Kubion had taken from the people at Mule Deer Lake, he now had a little more than five thousand on him. At the outside there would be another grand in the flour sack of purses and wallets Loxner had collected in the church, and no more than a couple of thousand in all the village homes combined.

All of this, the whole puking business, for maybe eight thousand—
eight thousand dollars!

Kubion had worked himself up into another destructive rage, the way he had in the Mercantile, and had made a broken shambles of the café: smashing glasses and crockery and two wall mirrors. Watching him, Brodie had had to struggle to maintain a grip on his ragged control. Kubion was far over the edge now; all you had to do was look at him to see how much he wanted to start killing people. There just wasn’t any way Brodie was going to buy himself any more time than he’d already been allotted. The café hadn’t had a safe, and neither had the Sport Shop or the Valley Inn; he’d said there was still the Hughes’ house and the filling station and the other buildings in the village, and Kubion said, “There’s only the Hughes’ place and that’s it, that’s our next stop. We’re going up there now and there’d better be a safe, Vic, there’d better be a safe for you to open with those tools in the pickup, you hear me Vic there’d better be a safe.”

It didn’t make any difference whether there was a safe or not; the Hughes’ house was intended to be Brodie’s execution chamber.

But Kubion still hadn’t given him even the smallest of possible openings, and in the two hours since they had started looting the village there hadn’t been any sign of big stupid gutless Loxner, eliminating the last faint hope of help from that quarter. Kubion’s freaked-out head had forgotten all about Loxner—they hadn’t gone anywhere near the church in those two hours—and that was the closest he’d come to any sort of mistake. Brodie kept telling himself that Kubion getting crazier and crazier would work both ways, that it would make him careless as well as more dangerous; he kept telling himself the opening would come, don’t take a last desperate gamble because the opening would come.

He reached the windrow on the eastern side of Sierra, started along it toward the pickup in the next block. The surface snow there was freezing and slick; he walked it with slow, cautious steps, risked a glance over his shoulder. Kubion’s dark face stared back at him: no smile now, lips moving as if in silent monologue. Brodie told himself again that an opening would come.

And one came.

Just like that, with startlingly coeval suddenness, Kubion made the kind of mistake Brodie had been waiting for.

Thoughts and eyes focused elsewhere, he had not been paying any attention to his footing; his right shoe came down on one of the patches of glassy snow, found no traction and slipped, and the leg kicked up rigidly like a football placekicker following through. His left arm flailed at the air and his body jerked into a horizontal plane and he fell bellowing, landing heavily on his buttocks, left leg twisted slightly as he skidded sideways into the snowpack at the curbing.

Brodie’s reaction was almost instantaneous. Instinct obliterated surprise and fatigue, and when he saw that Kubion had managed to hold onto the gun, it rejected any effort of trying to jump him across the ten icy steps which separated them. He spun and ran, diagonally back the way they had come because Kubion’s body was bent toward the south and because Lassen Drive to the west was the nearest release street, the nearest shielded path of escape. He fled in a headlong, weaving crouch through the less treacherous snow which blanketed the middle of the street, coming on the far windrow near the corner of the inn. Another bellow sounded behind him, and then the flat wind-muffled explosion of a shot. Nothing touched him but the flakes of obscuring snow.