Snowbound (4 page)

McNeil came down to stand in front of Coopersmith, still chuckling, his face red and damp in the too-warm air circulating through the café’s suspended unit heater. “Need a warm-up, Lew?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks.”

McNeil leaned forward, eyes bright, eyes leering. “Say, Lew, you hear this one? I like to bust a gut laughing first time I heard it, and same goes for Greg and Walt there. There’s this eight-year-old kid, see, and he wakes up about 2 A.M. Christmas morning. So he goes downstairs to see if Santa Claus has come yet, and sure as hell old Santa is there. But what he’s doing, see—”

Coopersmith got abruptly to his feet, put a quarter on the counter, and went out wordlessly into the falling snow.

McNeil blinked after him for a moment and then turned to look imploringly at Novak and Halliday. He said, “Now what in Christ’s name is the matter with
him?”

Somebody knocked on the door, the one connecting the office and the interior of the store below.

The fat manager stopped moving, his head turned toward Kubion; the tableau froze again, thick and strained with suddenly heightened tension. There was a second knock, and Kubion thought: If we don’t open up, whoever it is is going to figure something’s wrong. He gestured to Brodie, who was nearest the door.

The guard who had let them in downstairs said in a liquid whisper, “It’s locked, I’ve got the key.”

Brodie stopped, half turning, and Kubion said to the guard, “Get the hell over there, then; watch where you put your hands. When you get the door open, stand back out of the way.”

The guard crossed the office, wetting his lips nervously, taking the key from the pocket of his trousers. Brodie stepped back three paces, up against the wall beyond the door. A third knock sounded, insistent now, and then ceased as the guard fitted his key into the lock. A moment later he pulled the door inward, stepping back away from it.

“What took you so long?” a voice said in mild reproof from the landing outside.

The guard shook his head, not speaking.

A shabbily-dressed, frightened-looking woman came first into the office, clutching a handbag in both hands; behind her was another uniformed security officer, one of the two normally stationed on the floor below. He was saying, “Caught this lady here shoplifting in Household Goods. She had—”

When he saw Kubion and Loxner and the guns they were holding, he frowned and stopped speaking. The guard who had opened the door said stupidly, “It’s a holdup, Ray,” and the floor cop reached automatically and just as stupidly for the gun holstered at his belt.

“Don’t do it!” Kubion yelled at him, and Brodie came away from the wall, trying to get around the shabby woman, trying to keep the operation from blowing. But the guard had committed himself; he got the revolver clear and brought it up. The shabby woman began to scream. Brodie knocked her viciously out of the way, and the cop fired once at Loxner, hitting him in the left arm, making it jerk like a puppet’s; then he swung the gun toward Brodie.

Kubion shot him in the throat.

Blood gouted from the wound, and he made a liquid dying sound and went stumbling backward into the fronting window; the barrel of his back-flung gun and the rear of his head struck the glass, webbing it with hairline cracks. The shabby woman sprawled against one of the desks, screaming like a loon. The manager was on his hands and knees crawling behind another of the desks, and the other employees had thrown themselves to the floor, hands over their heads, the two women moaning in terror. Like ash-gray sculptures, the two office guards stood motionless. The shrieks of the shabby woman and the echoes of the shots and the sudden startled shouts filtering up from the floor below filled the office with nightmarish sound.

There was no time for the money now, the whole thing was blown; they had no choice except to run. Brodie came over to the rear door immediately, went out onto the landing, but Loxner kept on standing by the cubicle with bright beads of sweat pimpling his face and his eyes glazed and staring at the dark-red stain spreading over his khaki uniform sleeve just below the elbow. Kubion shouted at him, “You stupid bastard, move it, move it!” Loxner’s head pulled around, and he made a face like a kid about to cry; but he came shambling forward then, cradling his left arm against his chest. Kubion caught his shoulder and shoved him through the door.

“Stay the fuck in this office, all of you,” he yelled. “We’ll kill anybody that shows his face!” He backed out and slammed the door, turning, and Brodie and Loxner were already running on the stairs. Kubion pounded down after them. Brodie reached the lower door first and threw it open and the three of them burst outside. Two warehousemen and a truck driver were coming toward them from the loading dock. Brodie fired wide at them, and they reversed direction in a hurry, scattering. Loxner tried to drag open the armored car’s front passenger door with his right hand still holding his gun; Kubion elbowed him viciously out of the way, opened the door, pulled him back and crowded him inside while Brodie ran around to the driver’s side. There were half a dozen men in the vicinity of the dock now, but they hung back wisely, not attempting to interfere.

The dummy armored car started instantly, and Brodie released the clutch; the tires bit screamingly into the pavement. He took the far corner of the building in a controlled power skid, went through the parking lot at fifty and climbing. At the nearest exit a new Ford had just begun to turn into the lot from the street. Brodie swung the wheel hard right and the armored car’s rear end slewed around and made contact with the Ford’s left front fender, punching the machine out of the way, spinning it in a half circle. Fighting the wheel, Brodie slid the heavy car sideways again as a Volkswagen swerved to avoid collision. The armored car straightened and began pulling away, made another power skid left at the first intersection, and all the while Kubion sat hunched forward on the seat, saying, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!” in a kind of savage litany.

Smiling with his usual charismatic boyishness, Matt Hughes handed the Reverend Peter Keyes his mail through the gated window of the Post Office enclosure. “Yesterday’s attendance in church was very good, Reverend,” he said. “Your idea of moving the commencement time up to noon was a good one.”

“I expect the fact that this is the Christmas season had more to do with the rise in attendance than the new hour,” the Reverend Mr. Keyes said. He was a short, round, benign-featured man, reminiscent of a somewhat scaled-down and clean-shaven Santa Claus: an accurate physical reflection of the inner man and of his spiritual leanings. Hughes thought of him fondly as the antithesis of the fire-and-brimstone mountain preacher of legend and fact. “But in any event, it was gratifying. One can only hope this coming Sunday’s attendance will be larger still, though I suppose one hundred percent of the able-bodied is too much to hope for.”

“Maybe not, Reverend. I’ll make a point to remind the good people of the valley as I see each of them this week.”

“Thank you, Matthew,” the Reverend Mr. Keyes said gravely. He was the only resident of Hidden Valley who called Hughes by his full given name. “Well, I’ve several things to attend to. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

When the Reverend Mr. Keyes had gone, Hughes left the Post Office enclosure and came around the long counter set parallel to the Mercantile’s rear wall. The store was empty now, except for his single full-time employee, matronly and white-haired Maude Fredericks, who was stacking canned goods in the grocery section which comprised the northern third of the wide, deep room. The old-fashioned potbellied stove set to the right of the counter glowed dull-red warmth through its isinglass door-window—putting that stove in three years ago had been a very wise idea, he thought; it gave the place a kind of country-general-store flavor that appealed to locals and tourists alike—and the Christmas music added a different but no less pleasant warmth to the surroundings.

Hughes smiled complacently and went to stand by the cardboard Santa Claus in one of the front windows. Outside the snow swirled and danced in gusts of wind like shifting patterns in a monochromatic kaleidoscope. Mountain winters had always fascinated him—the soft, fat, intricately shaped snowflakes; the trees bending under their heavy white coats, some whiskered with stalactitic icicles like strong old men braced against the winter wind; snow eddies such as those he was watching now, so capricious you felt like laughing in the same way you would at the antics of kittens. As a child, he had used to sit for hours, face pressed to window glass, absorbed in the white splendor without, and when his mother would come in and ask him what he found so intriguing, he would answer her the same way each time, a kind of game they had played: “Snow magic, Mom; snow magic.”

At the age of thirty-two, he still retained the aura of that same perpetually enthusiastic little boy. The slope-cornered tan mustache he had worn for two years added a certain maturity to his features—as did the vertical humor lines which extended downward from a Romanesque nose and, like a pair of calipers, partially encircled a wide, mobile mouth; but his bright blue eyes and the supple slimness of his body and the demonstrative way he used his hands when he talked were prominently indicative of bubbling and guileless youth.

Nonetheless, he was unquestionably Hidden Valley’s wealthiest and most respected citizen. In addition to owning the Mercantile, which he had inherited from an uncle ten years before, and in addition to having served two successive terms as mayor, he owned a thousand acres of mountain land lucratively leased to a private hunting club, a portfolio of blue-chip stocks, and a high five-figure bank account. He was married to a woman considered by most everyone both intelligent and enviably attractive: an equally substantial form of wealth. If he had been an ambitious man, he might have left Hidden Valley for less secluded surroundings—might have entered successfully into the larger business world or perhaps even into politics. But he was not ambitious, and he derived a great deal of contentment from his position of importance in the valley. To enhance it, he offered unlimited credit to regular customers, maintained a “banking” service for the cashing of personal and business checks, could be counted upon for a loan in any emergency, and regularly contributed money to the All Faiths Church and to civic betterment projects. It was, he sometimes thought, a little like being the benevolent young monarch of a very small, very scenic, and very agreeable kingdom.

Behind him, now, the telephone began ringing distantly in his private office. Without turning from the window, he called, “Maude, would you get that, please?”

“I’m on my way, Matt,” she answered. Her footsteps sounded on the wooden flooring, and after a moment the ringing ceased. The loudspeakers began to give out with “Deck the Halls.” Maude’s voice called above the music, “It’s your wife.”

Hughes sighed. “Okay, thanks.”

He crossed the store and stepped behind the counter again. Small and neat, his office was nestled in the far right-hand corner adjoining the storeroom; it contained a pair of file cabinets, a glass-topped oak desk, and an old-fashioned, black-painted Wells-Fargo safe, bolted to the floor and wall, in which he kept his cash on hand. Entering, closing the door behind him, he cocked a hip against the edge of the desk and picked up the phone receiver and said, “Yes, Rebecca?”

“I just called to tell you we’re out of coffee,” his wife’s voice said. “Would you bring a pound of drip grind home with you tonight?”

“I think you’d better come down and pick it up, dear. I won’t be home after closing.”

There was a brief silence; then Rebecca said, “Oh?”

“I have to go over to Coldville,” he told her. “I was going to call you a little later to let you know.”

“Why do you have to go to Coldville?”

“Neal Walker called and asked me to come. He wants to discuss some civic problem or other he’s having.”

“Mayor to mayor, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And wives aren’t allowed?”

“You’d be bored, dear, you know that.”

“I suppose I would.”

“I’ll probably be late. Don’t wait up.”

“No, I won’t,” she said, and broke the connection.

Hughes replaced the receiver, sighed again, and then went around the desk and sat down in his leather armchair. He pyramided his fingers under his chin and sat that way for several minutes, lost in thought. Then, abruptly, he straightened, picked up the telephone again, and dialed a Soda Grove number.

A woman’s soft young voice said, “Grange Electric, good afternoon.”

“Hello, Peggy. Can you talk?”

“Yes. Is something the matter?”

“No, not a thing. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, you’ll be seeing me in another three hours.”

“I know that. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

She laughed softly. “What were you thinking?”

“You
know
what I was thinking.”

“Yes, but tell me anyway.”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ll
show
you.”

“Oh, yes, I can imagine you will.”

Hughes moistened his lips, and his breathing was thick and rapid. “You know something?” he said. “This conversation is giving me an erection. I never thought a man could get an erection talking to a woman over the telephone.”