Snowbound (32 page)

A muscle in his left leg began to cramp with cold, and Cain straightened up again. A guard in one of those cars would logically keep at least one window facing the church clear of snow and ice, so he could watch the entrance doors; too, it was likely he’d have the engine running and the heater and defroster on, with a wing open or window rolled partway down to circumvent the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. There were no puffs of exhaust smoke, no sounds above the wind, no car windows open or clear. No other sheltered place in the vicinity. No tracks anywhere.

No guard.

Okay, Cain thought. Okay.

He craned his head forward a second time and swept his gaze over the parking lot, Sierra Street and the wind-shaped drifts in the meadow beyond. The lights shining farther into the village were all there was for him to see; the snow flurries continued to place visibility in a constant flux. Pulling back, he tugged the fur hat down tighter over his ears and rubbed at his cold-deadened face. The wiry beard hairs were like brittle threads of ice, and he imagined that in the rubbing he had depilitated part of the growth. He swallowed a nervously humorless laugh, shook himself mentally to keep his thoughts in tight check.

How do we deploy when Tribucci gets back? he asked himself. One of us here, one of us by that car nearest the entrance? That seemed the best way to do it, all right. They would be separated, but not so far apart that one would be unable to offer protection for the other or to minimize the potential advantage of a crossfire. And they would be positioned at the closest possible points to the doors, so as to guard the entrance fully and effectively. They’d have to figure a way to cover the tracks from here to the car, though; they couldn’t afford to wait for the storm to do it. Maybe there was something they could use in the cottage—a whisk broom, a trowel, something.

The wind began to gust, whistling mournfully, sweeping snow in misty sheets down close to the ground. Cain bunched the collar of his coat tighter against his throat with his left hand, repocketed the gun with his right. Minutes passed. Again he checked the area fronting the church; again he saw nothing. His feet were so achingly chilled now that he had almost no feeling in his toes; he lifted first one leg and then the other, like a man doing calisthenics in slow motion, to keep the blood circulating. The movement of time seemed to have slowed down to an inert crawl, as if the bitterly cold night had managed to wrap it, too, in a cloak of ice—

Time, Cain thought.

Abruptly he pushed back the left sleeve of his coat and squinted at the luminous numerals of his watch. It was seven five. Tribucci had said it would take him less than half an hour to get the guns from his brother’s house and return here, but it was nearly forty-five minutes since they had parted in the wood. If nothing had happened, he should have been here by now. If nothing had happened. . . .

The clot of anxiety under Cain’s breastbone expanded. He made one last quick and fruitless reconnaissance of Sierra Street and then hurried back to the rear corner and across to the cottage and along its façade again to the garage corner. He stared beyond the snowfield at the trees: black-and-white emptiness everywhere.

Where
was
he?

Where was Tribucci?

Moving through the familiar darkness inside his brother’s home, John Tribucci went from the rear porch into the downstairs study. At an antique sideboard along one wall, he bent and opened the facing doors and rummaged through the interior until his fingers located the cowhide case he knew Vince kept there. He took the case out, set it on top of the sideboard, and worked the catches to lift the lid.

Inside was a matched set of .22 caliber, nine-shot Harrington & Richardson revolvers—a gift from Vince’s father-in-law some three years earlier. One of Vince’s favorite all-weather pastimes was target shooting, and he preferred Western-style pistols such as these to automatic target weapons like the Colt Woodsman. Tribucci had done some shooting with his brother, with these guns, and knew the feel and action of the model. Both were loaded, safeties on; he put one into the left pocket of his coat, clutched the second firmly, and went out of the study and started back through the house.

As he came into the kitchen, he grew aware for the first time of the subtle, homely fragrances which lingered in the warm black: his wife’s Lanvin perfume, Vince’s after-breakfast cigar, the batch of Christmas
pfeffernüsse
cookies Judy had baked just before the four of them left for church. A vivid image of Ann entered his mind then, and his throat closed and his stomach twisted with a rush of emotion that was almost vertiginous. He leaned against the refrigerator for a moment, holding onto the image, trying to think of her laughing and happy instead of the way he had left her in church, the way she would be now that Coopersmith had surely told her what he and Cain were doing. Then, deliberately, he forced his mind blank of everything but his immediate purpose and stepped out onto the wide back porch.

He pushed through the door there—it had been customarily unlocked, and he’d come in that way initially—and hurried around to the front yard, into the deep shadows beneath one of the twin fir trees flanking the walk. The house was located on Eldorado Street, slightly more than half a block off Sierra; he peered eastward, then down the length of Shasta Street. The falling snow was like a huge, wind-billowed lace curtain that combined with the darkness to obscure anything more than fifty yards distant. A thin haze of light from the buildings on Sierra tinged the sky in that direction.

Tribucci moved out from beneath the fir and ran in long, light strides across Eldorado, coming up against the broad entrance doors of the building which fronted Placer on the east; owned by Joe Garvey, it served as a garage for extensive automobile and truck repairs and also as a storage shed for the village snowplow. On the opposite side of the street was a wide, bare hummock of ground, deep-drifted, that extended south to Lassen Drive and north to the beginnings of the pass cliffs—a shorter path into the wood higher up, but a slow and precarious one because of the snow depth. He would follow the longer but quicker route by which he had come: first down to the corner, to make sure Lassen was clear, and then traverse Placer and traverse Lassen and go up slantingly into the trees.

He was three steps from the corner when the dark figure came running at fly speed out of Lassen Drive.

Startled, Tribucci stood immobile for an instant; then, instinctively, he took a step back hard against the building, embracing the heavy darkness there. The running man crossed Placer—not looking back, not looking anywhere except straight ahead of him. When he reached the low picket fence enclosing the front yard of Webb Edwards’ house, he jumped it without slowing and disappeared around the screened-in side porch.

It all happened so quickly that Tribucci had been able to distinguish nothing of the fleeing man’s physical characteristics; but he had been hatless, and that meant it couldn’t have been Cain, wasn’t Cain. One of the looters . . . running from the psycho? You ran that way when somebody was after you, and maybe the maniac had tried to kill him—already killed the third one?—and he had broken away somehow. Was the psycho in close pursuit then? Was he just around the corner on Lassen? Tribucci worked saliva through his dry mouth, momentarily indecisive. Retreat or stay where he was? He might be seen either way, and this wasn’t the place for a fight; he had to get back to Cain and the church—

A new movement caught his eye through the storm, kept him hugging the garage wall: an indistinct shape running through the yard of the Beckman property adjacent to Edwards’; cutting back across Placer at an angle, obscured white face turned to the north but with the screening snow and the ebon shadows, not seeing him, Tribucci, from that distance; vanishing once again into the Modoc Street corner lot belonging to the Chiltons.

Urgency tugged commandingly at Tribucci’s mind, vanquishing the indecision. Get away from here, he thought. Get away from here now.

And the second figure appeared in the middle of Lassen fifteen feet away, oblong pointing finger of an automatic darkly defined in one hand, stalking—limping—in the runner’s snowtracks.

Tribucci stiffened again; his ears seemed suddenly filled with the thrumming of his pulse. The second one stopped, looked across at Edwards’ house—and then, as if with sixth sense, turned and stared north along Placer, stared right at him, could not miss seeing him across that short a span of ground. Tribucci recognized the charred, savage face immediately, confirmation of what he already knew, and a mixture of fear and hatred and fury constricted his anus and opened his jaws in a wolflike rictus. He had waited too long, it was too late to run, and he had no place to run to; he had to fight
now
.

Kubion took two steps toward him, gun arm leveled. Tribucci fired from in close to his chest, missed in his haste, saw the other jerk to a halt as if in surprise and then lunge to one side, onto his right knee with his favored left leg dragging. Moving sideways, Tribucci snapped his arm out and locked the elbow and braced his body; fired again—missed again, snow kicking up like a puff of white dust near the trailing leg. Damn you to hell damn you damn you! and started to squeeze off a third time, but the automatic in Kubion’s hand flashed then and

stab! in his chest,

and flashed again and

stab! in his chest,

the shock of the bullets’ impact driving away his breath—no no I blew it—and his legs buckled, the nerves in his gloved right hand were like filaments of ice. The revolver fell free, he felt his body slumping and heard the wind and the vague echoes of the shots as he toppled loosely into the half-frozen snow. I blew it good but oh
please
God don’t let me have blown it completely—and a congealing red-black haze formed and thickened inside his head, spinning him, spinning him, obliterating all sound and all feeling and the sudden bright image of Ann that clung to his last shred of consciousness. . . .

Kubion stared down at the snow-spattered form of the man he had shot, recognized him as the one brother from the Sport Shop. Savagely he said, “You fucking hick Eskimo son of a bitch!” and drove the point of his shoe into yielding flesh just below the ribs, did it a second time. Then he backed up against the wall of the garage and probed the night around him with slitted, restless eyes.

Despite the direction of the snow tracks, he’d thought at first it was Brodie there in the building shadows and then the bastard had plugged away at him with that horse gun and Brodie hadn’t had time to locate a weapon but Christ on a crutch he’d almost walked into it, the first bullet had missed him by a foot but the second had almost gotten him but he was ten feet tall and nobody could kill him least of all a lousy hick, but still it had been close.
Goddamn
it he’d been positive none of them would try to get out of the church and here this one was stupid stupid, not through the locked front doors not that stupid but maybe some other exit he’d overlooked when he’d examined the interior on Thursday or by breaking out the glass in one of the windows, and how many others were there? Oh there’d be at least one more that was certain because one alone was too much of a risk even for stupid Eskimo hicks but now Tribucci was a dead hero and he’d make the other one or two dead heroes too. And Brodie, he’d kill Brodie slow and painful when he found him the fag shit, all that crap about safes but the urge telling him no and he’d thought he had everything nailed down and then that lousy ice and not watching his footing and falling and twisting his ankle, sprained and hurting and swelling up and hobbling him, and Brodie getting away and things all of a sudden screwing up just like the Greenfront job, things you couldn’t figure ahead of time. But there was no way things were going to screw him out of this score no way because there’d be a fruit jar somewhere with the big money he
knew
it, and it was only a matter of time before he was back on top and killed Brodie and killed them all. . . .

The urge moaned and trembled inside him, softly, softly. He opened his mouth and pulled freezing air and flakes of snow into his lungs. Things screwing up sure but Tribucci was dead, and it was a good thing he’d had the shoot-out because now he knew some of them were free; coming after Brodie with the idea he could spot him on the run had been smart then but not now, no point in trying to trail him like a goddamn Indian and maybe walking into an ambush. Maybe Brodie’d try for the Sport Shop, he’d be after a weapon first thing all right, but it was too obvious and maybe he’d go somewhere else; still, the thing to do was check it out quick and careful and even if he couldn’t flush him he knew what Brodie would do after he was armed no question about that. He knew what the other hick heroes would be doing too, they’d want to protect those in the church and too many men running around in the village would increase chances of discovery and they’d be smart enough to understand that so they’d be waiting by or near the church for Tribucci to come with the guns that he wouldn’t be bringing. The church was the lay okay, all the way all the way.

Not looking at the motionless figure in the snow, Kubion sidestepped to the corner and went around it and ran limpingly back along Lassen Drive to Sierra Street.