Snowbound (19 page)

—and then a bright white beam sliced away the blackness like a sudden spotlight and pinned their glistening bodies on the bed.

For a single instant they were blindly motionless, still locked together, still one instead of two. Then Hughes made a startled, whimpering sound and rolled away from her, twisting, sitting up. Peggy threw an arm reflexively across her eyes; fright and confusion replaced the passion inside her, dulling her mind, stepping up the staccato pounding of her heart.

A voice—harsh, amused, unfamiliar—said from behind the light, “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the banker himself, by Christ, tearing off a nice little piece on the side.”

Hughes said in a stark, trapped tone, “Who are you, how did you get in here?”

“You left the front door unlocked. You must have been in some hurry, Banker, some big hurry.”

“You have no right to be here, you have no right! What do you want, why did you come in here, put out that light!”

“Hang loose, just keep your head together.”

At the periphery of her shielding arm, Peggy numbly saw Matt Hughes swing off the bed, shambling almost drunkenly, ludicrous in his nakedness. His face a matrix of fear, he started toward the white hole in the darkness.

“Stay where you are,” Kubion said sharply, “stand right there.”

“Put that light out, put it out I tell you!” And Hughes took another step toward the beam.

“Okay, you stupid hick bastard shit.”

There was a brief flame, like the flare of a match, to one side of the beam; there was a sudden roaring sound, localized thunder echoing in the confines of the room, and Peggy jerked on the bed as if she had been struck. Then she saw Matt stop moving, and saw part of his face disappear, and saw something red spurting, and saw his hands flick upward, and saw him begin to sag before the hands reached the level of his chest, and saw him fall into a loose wet naked pile on the floor.

“How about you, sweetheart?” Kubion’s voice said softly behind the light. “How about you?”

Peggy started to scream.

Loxner said, “It’s after seven, Vic, he’s been gone more than five hours now. Where the hell could he be for five hours? He don’t drink, and we got plenty of food right here, and there ain’t nothing in the village for him to do and noplace for him to be riding around.”

“I know,” Brodie said. “I know it.”

“Man I just don’t like the way he’s acting. Not a word to either of us since all that crap about ripping off the valley yesterday morning, gone most of yesterday afternoon, sitting up in his bedroom all of today until he finally went out. I seen him when he come downstairs, and his eyes were still funny; he was smiling funny, too, showing his teeth. I tell you I don’t like it, it’s got me all uptight.”

They were sitting in the living room, across a coffee table set in front of the fireplace. Up until a few minutes ago they had been playing gin rummy, but neither of them had had their thoughts on the game and they’d given it up finally by tacit consent. Brodie stood now and picked up a blackened poker and stirred the pitch-pine logs burning on the hearth; sparks danced, and the charred wood crackled loudly, like firecrackers going off. He set the poker down again, turned, and put voice to what had been on his mind for the past hour.

“You ever see anybody freak out, Duff? Like where they come all apart in the head, go crazy, do crazy things?”

Loxner blinked at him, scratching nervously at the bandage on his left arm. The arm was still stiff, and the skin under the bandage itched constantly, but he’d found he could use the limb for normal activity and had taken off the sling that morning. “No,” he said, “no, I never seen nothing like that.”

“I saw it happen twice, more or less saw it—both while I was doing time. The first guy was a lifer, been in for maybe fifteen years. Happened right out of the blue, one night in the dining hall. He just jumped up and started yelling and foaming at the mouth, got onto the table and ran down it with a fork in either hand and stabbed a con and a screw before they could put him down.

“The second guy was something else again. He’d been a bank teller or an accountant or something on the outside and got caught with his hand in the till; quiet type, mild-mannered, maybe thirty and good-looking. He’d been inside about six months when they switched cells on him, put him right down the block from the one I was in. The two cons in his new cell were hard cases, and on top of that they were fags, buggers. They got to him right away and raped his face and his ass and told him they’d kill him if he didn’t cooperate from then on. So he cooperated, and for maybe a couple of months they passed him back and forth like a private whore. He still didn’t say much, and he didn’t look any different; we thought maybe he’d had some fag in him all along and had gotten to like it. Then the word got around that there was going to be a break, that this guy had masterminded it for himself and the other two. Nobody paid much attention to it; you know how the grapevine’s always humming with word of a break. But they did it, they pulled some fancy moves and went over the wall from the roof of the library, where the accountant had been working. Only the next day the screws found the two hard cases lying in a ditch five miles from the prison—with their balls shot off. The guy stayed loose a week before they caught him, and in that week he offed six other fags in two cities, shot all their balls off. He’d freaked out too, is what I’m getting at, but it had all happened inside where you couldn’t really see it; and what it did was turn him into a machine with one thought in his head: kill the hard cases and kill as many other fags as he could before they got him. He was like supercrazy—ten times as dangerous as the other one I told you about, because he could still think and plan and nothing mattered to him except one crazy idea.”

Loxner said, “Jesus,” and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. “You think something like that’s happened to Earl? You think he’s really freaked out?”

“Maybe,” Brodie said. “And maybe
his
crazy idea is ripping off this valley.”

“Jesus,” Loxner said again. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and his hands twitched noticeably.

“It could be he’s still okay and it’s nothing but the pressure getting to him and he’ll snap out of it pretty soon. But if he has freaked, there’s no way we can know for sure until maybe it’s too late. We can’t afford to wait, Duff. There’s only one thing we can do; it’ll make problems for us in other ways, but it’s got to be done.”

“You mean—waste him?”

“I mean waste him.”

Loxner got to his feet and paced rapidly forth and back in front of the fireplace. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, we can’t take no chances, we got to think about our own asses.” He came to a standstill. “When do we do it?”

“Tonight. Just as soon as he gets back. I’ve still got the extra set of car keys he gave me, and when he’s inside here, I’ll go out and unlock the trunk and get one of the guns out of the suitcase.”

“You going to pull the trigger, then?”

“I’ll pull the trigger.”

Loxner looked relieved. “What about the body?”

“There’s no place to bury it with all the snow. We’ll wrap it in a blanket and put it in the garage; it’ll keep until we’re ready to leave.”

“Then what?”

“Put it in the trunk of the car. When we’re a few miles away, we’ll dump it into a canyon. There’re plenty of them in these mountains.”

Loxner sat down, got up again almost immediately, and said, “I need a goddamn drink.” He went into the kitchen.

Brodie stared into the fire with eyes that were, now, like chunks of amethyst quartz.

Kubion returned to the cabin at eight fifteen.

They heard the sound of the car coming up the access lane, and Loxner wet his lips and looked at Brodie. Brodie said, “Deal the cards”—they were playing gin again—and obediently Loxner dropped his gaze to the deck. He shuffled it awkwardly, dealt ten cards to each of them with diffident flicks of his wrist.

When the front door opened, Brodie did not glance up. But there were no footsteps, no sound of the door closing again. A cold prescience formed inside him, and his head lifted then, and Kubion was standing there smiling a skull grin and holding the .38 backup automatic. His eyes seemed huge, streaked with lines of blood, and neither they nor the lids above them moved. No part of him moved, he did not even seem to be breathing.

Brodie’s lips thinned, his body tensed. He thought: Oh fuck yes he’s blown out, I should have known it yesterday, I should have killed him yesterday; we waited too long.

Loxner saw the change in Brodie’s face and jerked his head around. Color drained out of his cheeks. He struggled to his feet, sweat once more breaking out on him, mouth opening as if he were going to speak, closing, opening again, closing again—all like a huge fish caught on an invisible line.

There was a long moment of silence, heavy and menacing. Snow fluttered across the threshold behind Kubion, like a sifting of white flour; chill, biting air rushing into the room robbed it of warmth, made the flames in the fireplace dance and gutter.

“We’re going down to the lake,” Kubion said finally. “Got a little something I want you to see.”

Brodie forced his voice to remain even. “What’s that, Earl?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

“All right—sure. But what’s the gun for? There’s no need for throwing down on us.”

“Isn’t there? Well we’ll see about that.”

Loxner began thickly, “Look, look now—”

“Shut up, you gutless prick!” Kubion said with sudden viciousness. “I don’t want any arguments, get over here and get your coats on, we’re going now right now.”

Brodie got up immediately and walked with careful strides to the closet; sweating heavily, not looking at Kubion, Loxner followed. They donned coats and gloves, and when they were ready, Kubion gestured outside and trailed them at a measured distance around to where the car waited, engine running and headlights burning, in front of the garage. He said there, “Vic, you take the wheel. Duff, you sit in front with him.” He waited until they had complied and then opened the right rear door and slid into the back seat. “Go. I’ll tell you where.”

Brodie drove down to Mule Deer Lake Road and turned right and went along the eastern lakeshore. The taut silence was broken only by Loxner’s asthmatic breathing. They passed the Taggart cabin and several other winter-abandoned structures; then Kubion said, “That house there on the left —pull up in front.”

The house—a two-story frame with green shutters—was set back from the road, inside a diamond-pattern, split-log fence. It was shrouded in darkness. Brodie stopped the car where he had been told, and the three of them got out, Kubion hanging back slightly. They stood at the open front gate.

“Go up there and look inside, both of you,” Kubion said. “The door’s not locked, and the light switch is on the left.”

They stopped through the gate opening and made their way slowly along the ice-slick front path; Kubion again followed at a distance. Brodie climbed the porch steps first, stopped at the door, and Loxner said, “I don’t want to do it, I don’t want no part of what’s in there. . . .”

Not listening to him, Brodie spun the knob and pushed the door inward. There was nothing immediate to see except darkness. He reached inside and felt along the wall and found the switch and snapped it upward; light spilled into the room, forcing the night back into crouching corner shadows.

Loxner said, “Oh
Christ!
”

There were seven people in the room—two men, three women, a boy of nine or ten, and a girl a few years older. All of them were tightly bound hand and foot with heavy-duty clothesline, gagged with torn strips of bedsheeting, lying on the carpeted floor near a tinseled Christmas tree with a nativity scene and several brightly wrapped presents at its cotton-draped base. They were all alive and apparently unharmed. Their eyes blinked against the sudden illumination, wide with terror. Two of the women whimpered; one of the men made a strangulated retching sound.

Cold fury knotted the muscles in Brodie’s stomach, and he had difficulty pulling air into lungs. He slammed the door violently, spun around. Kubion had come up the path and was standing at the foot of the porch steps; he held the .38 automatic with deceptive looseness.

“It took me about four hours,” he said through his fixed smile. “Duck soup, taking them over, but I had to bring the two from the house down the way to this place and that took a little extra time. Then I shook both houses down. I was just getting ready to start back when I made out this car without lights pulling into the first cabin on the lake, and I went to have a look. You know who it was? The banker, Matt Hughes; he’s been getting a little on the side from that blond bitch in there. So I had to bring her over here, too.”

He stopped speaking, watching them. Brodie said, “What about Hughes?”

“Well, he gave me a little trouble. You don’t have to worry about him anymore, not a bit you don’t.”

“You killed him, is that it?”

“That’s it. I killed him, all right.”

Brodie began to rub the palms of his hands along his trouser legs: a gesture of suppressed rage. Loxner said in a kind of whine, “Why? Why all of this?”