Snowbound (21 page)

Beside her, Verne Mullins took hold of her shoulders and eased her down again. Agnes buried her face in her hands and began moaning softly. Coopersmith said in a carefully expressionless voice, “What do you mean we can forget about those people? What have you done to them?”

Kubion’s gaze shifted to him. “Nothing to any of them, old man—except Hughes. We’ll bring them in later.”

“Except Hughes?”

“He’s dead,” Kubion said, and the smile transformed on his mouth and made it look like an open wound. His voice was savage with impatience. “I killed him last night and he’s dead, you’ll all be dead you stupid hicks unless you shut up and listen to me and do what I say I don’t want any more questions I don’t want any more crap you understand me!”

The aura of horror had reached the point of tangibility now: it could be felt, it could be tasted, it lay like a pall of invisible mist inside the church. No one moved, no one made a sound; even the children and Agnes Tyler were silent. The Reverend Mr. Keyes shot in his own church, the valley about to be taken over and looted, Matt Hughes—their mayor, their friend, their benefactor—inexplicably murdered, all their lives suddenly in the hands of three armed men and one of whom was nothing less than a psychotic: they were literally petrified with fear.

Coopersmith swallowed against the rage and revulsion which burned in his throat, struggling to maintain calm and a clear head, and looked at each of the other two men, the ones with the rifles. Neither of them had made a single motion since their entrance; they were like wooden sentinels. But there was sanity in their faces, and the big heavy one was sweating copiously, and the fair-haired one, despite a guarded, stoic expression, appeared to be tensely uneasy as well. Why were they a part of this? he thought.

Merciful God, why
any
of this?

Kubion was smiling again, and when he spoke his voice was once more controlled, matter-of-fact. “Now like I said, once we have the list of names two of us will go round up the other people and bring them back here, and when everybody is in the church we go to work on the buildings—just two of us, the other one will be out front with a rifle, watching. We figure it’ll take us most of today to get the job done, but when we’re finished we might not be leaving right away, we might stay one day or two or even three before we go, and the way we’ll go is on snowmobiles so don’t get the idea we’re trapped in the valley until the pass is open. But
you’ll
wait until it’s cleared, you’ll stay in here until the day after Christmas. We’ll bring in some food later and some water and you’ll be nice and comfortable as long as you don’t try any stupid tricks. The important thing for you to remember is that you won’t know when we’ll be leaving, you won’t know when we’re gone, and if you try to break down the front doors or knock out a window before the day after Christmas and we’re still here, we’ll kill everybody we see. Clear? All of that clear?

Figures in stone.

Kubion said, “Good, we’re going to get along fine now; you keep on sitting there like you are now and we’re going to get along just fine.” He looked at the heavy, dull-faced rifleman and made a gesture with his free hand. Loxner came over and put the weapon down against the wall, moving mechanically, using his left arm as if it were stiff and sore; then he took a folded flour sack from under his coat and walked up the center aisle. Coopersmith watched him as he passed down to the end of the right front pew; his damp face contained what might have been a kind of masked fear of his own.

When Coopersmith faced front again, he saw that the fair-haired rifleman had also set his weapon against the wall and had produced a pencil and a pad of paper. Kubion said, “Names now, everybody not here and where they live in the village.” His eyes rested on Coopersmith. “You, old man, start it off. Who’s not here?”

Coopersmith hesitated. Then, because there was nothing else he could do, he began in a leaden voice to recite. And all the while he was talking the same cold, voracious thought kept running through his mind: I wish I had my gun now because I would kill you, I think God forgive me I would kill you right where you stand, right here in church, and sleep tonight with a clear conscience. . . .

When Brodie and Loxner had preceded him out of the church and gone halfway along the front walk—holding the rifle barrels down against their legs as he had instructed them to do—Kubion stepped out and shut the doors and locked them. His watch said that it was one fifteen. Very good: fifty-five minutes, five minutes less than he had anticipated. You couldn’t do much better than that, bet your ass you couldn’t.

He went down the steps and followed Loxner and Brodie to where his car was parked eastward of six others in the fronting lot; the automatic rested in his coat pocket now, his hand lightly gripping the butt. Sierra Street was still deserted, he saw with satisfaction, and there was no sign of activity anywhere else in the village. It had begun to snow thinly from a silky gray sky, but the drifting clouds to the west were black-bordered and pregnant; it would snow much more heavily before long.

Brodie and Loxner stopped beside the car, and Kubion halted ten feet away. “You see?” he said to them. “Easy, easy, no sweat at all.”

“Why did you shoot the Reverend?” Brodie asked tautly. “You didn’t have to do any shooting in there; it wasn’t necessary.”

“Don’t tell me what was necessary and what wasn’t, I know exactly what I’m doing. You got religion now, maybe?”

Brodie said nothing more. His fingers caressed the stock of the rifle, one of the three taken from the Markham and Donnelly houses; but it, like the one Loxner carried, was empty. Empty! Kubion laughed out loud. They had done the church scene with just his automatic, one loaded gun was going to take over the entire valley, and that was funny when you thought about it, that was a real gutbuster when you thought about it.

For a while yesterday he’d considered wasting Brodie and Loxner and ripping off the valley all by himself. The idea of that appealed to him all right, but he’d finally decided against it. Hicks would be more afraid of three men with guns than one man with a gun, the old psychological advantage—that was one thing; another was that he might need some help in rounding up the rest of the hicks, maybe in other areas too; a third, and this had been the main deciding point, was that he liked the idea of keeping the two of them alive as long as he felt like it, playing with them a little, hamstringing them, using them to prolong the score because the longer it lasted, the sweeter it would be. And there wasn’t a shred of doubt that he could handle the two of them—stupid gutless Loxner and culinary fairy Brodie; he could handle anybody and anything, he was like ten feet tall and nobody could touch him with all the power he possessed, the power that had been there all the time if only he’d recognized it for what it was and let it come free.

What it was, this new outlook of his, was like being on a perpetual grass high: you saw everything crystal clear, inside yourself and outside yourself, and you didn’t worry about shit like headaches and spiders (
they’d
never come back again; he’d killed every last one of
them
), and you didn’t worry about violence either. If you had to do something violent, why then you just did it and it was
all right;
in fact it gave you a kind of release, it made you feel loose again like you felt after you’d popped your cork into one of those big-assed black chicks. So when the impulse came over him, the way it had last night when he’d found Hughes and the blond bitch together, he’d just let it tell him what to do and then followed orders. It had come on again in the church, just a little, but it told him not to kill the Reverend because that might have led to hysteria and the hicks had to be kept docile until the ripoff was completed, so he’d put one through that preacher man’s hand. When it came on again, and sooner or later it would, it’d tell him just the right time to waste Brodie and Loxner and he’d do that; and maybe it would tell him to waste all the hicks too and he’d do
that
, a bunch of Eskimos like that were better off dead anyway. Right? Right on.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s get to work. Put the rifles in the back seat. Duff, the flour sack, too.”

Brodie opened the rear door, and they tossed the weapons inside. Loxner laid the sackful of wallets and purses and other items on the floor matting, threw the door closed.

“Now we get those other hicks out of the pickup and into the church,” Kubion told them.

They moved out silently, went around the south side of the building and along to the rear wall of the minister’s cottage. The battered Ford half-ton belonging to Sid Markham was parked in close to the cottage wall, the glass in its rear window broken out at Kubion’s instructions, its bed draped and tied securely with a heavy tarpaulin.

At the Donnelly house last night, with Loxner and Brodie under control, Kubion had first considered what to do about the families of Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler. Go in and take them over too, bring them out to the lake? Too much extra hassle, he’d concluded; he had enough hicks under wraps as it was, and he didn’t want to risk jeopardizing the operation planned for Sunday. Better to use the telephone and make excuses as to why Hughes and the blonde wouldn’t be home that night, didn’t really matter what kind of excuses because nobody was going to figure special trouble with the valley snowbound and they would accept anything that sounded halfway reasonable. He had had Brodie ungag Peggy Tyler; but she’d just sat there like a damned dummy, and slapping her hadn’t done any good. He’d told Brodie to gag her again anyway and then to untie Martin Donnelly. Donnelly hadn’t given any trouble; he had answered all of Kubion’s questions about Hughes and Tyler and their people, and agreed to do and say exactly what he was told. So they took him to the Markham house—Kubion had disabled the Donnelly phone—and he called the blonde’s mother and told her her daughter wouldn’t be home until the next day because Donnelly’s wife and both his kids were sick and he had seen Peggy in the village when he’d gone for the doctor and asked her to spend the night; the mother grumbled a little and finally said okay. Then they telephoned Rebecca Hughes, and Donnelly told her Hughes had come out for a visit and that a tree had fallen across the road in the interim, and Hughes was out with Sid Markham trying to do something about it but they didn’t know if it could be gotten off the road tonight, don’t worry if he doesn’t make it home until tomorrow sometime. She didn’t question the explanation. And that took care of that.

Later, past midnight, the three of them had driven into the village, and at Kubion’s direction Brodie had climbed one of the utility poles beyond Alpine Street and cut the telephone lines. The remainder of the night was spent in the kitchen of the Donnelly house, going over details and then just sitting there and waiting: each of them wide awake and watchful, Kubion not even tired because he had slept most of Saturday morning in preparation for the all-night vigil. After a late, cold breakfast, which Kubion had eaten with relish and Brodie and Loxner had barely touched, they’d loaded the seven captives into the pickup; then, at exactly noon, they had come into the village again—Brodie driving the half-ton, Loxner driving Kubion’s car and Kubion in the back. The streets had been completely empty when they reached All Faiths Church. Brodie had pulled the pickup around here to the blind side of the cottage, and Loxner had parked the car in the lot, and then they had met at the steps to begin the take-over.

Now Kubion stood to one side while Brodie and Loxner started untying the tarpaulin. When they had it off he could see the seven people lyingjust as they had been placed earlier, shivering with cold, their bloodless faces like those in the church: masks of crippling fear. He smiled across at them.

Loxner dropped the tailgate, and he and Brodie dragged the seven from the bed and put them on the snow-covered ground. Kubion took out his heavy, thick-bladed pocketknife and tossed it to Loxner, told him to cut the clothesline bonds and remove the gags. He said when that had been done, “Close it up and toss it back, nice and careful,” and Loxner obeyed instantly.

Sid Markham and Martin Donnelly rubbed circulation into their stiffened limbs and then moved to help the women and children; no one looked at Kubion. The little Donnelly girl began to cry, and her mother held her tightly, crooning into her hair. Peggy Tyler sat slump-bodied in the snow, lips moving in a soundless monologue, eyes wide and glistening like bright wet agates. Markham could not seem to get her on her feet, and Kubion finally had Brodie do it—stupid little bitch.

Once all of them were up and walking, he made a motion with his left hand. Brodie and Loxner prodded them down and around to the front entrance, where they stopped and huddled together in a knot. Kubion went up and unlocked the doors, calling out, “Stand back in there, you’ve got company.” Then he looked at the seven hicks—and they mounted the stairs with the resigned, mechanical movements of condemned prisoners climbing a gallows.

Kubion relocked the doors after them, returned the ring of keys to his coat pocket; he could hear but did not pay any attention to voices rumbling within, the thin, sharp cry of a woman. He came down off the steps and told Brodie and Loxner to move over to the car.

When they reached it, he said, “Duff, you’ll stay here and start emptying out that sack so we can see what we’ve got to start with. Vic and I will go after the rest of the hicks. And Duff—if you’re gone any of the times we come back, I’ll kill Vic first thing and then I’ll go inside the church and shoot five of the women. You understand me?”