Snowbound
Bill Pronzini
Bill Pronzini
Snowbound
Book One
MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, THROUGH SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22
One
Whenever the door of hell opens, the voice you hear is your own
— Philip Wylie
Mantled with a smooth sheen of snow, decorated with tinsel and giant plastic candy canes and strings of colored lights, the tiny mountain village looked both idyllic and vaguely fraudulent, like a movie set carefully erected for a remake of White Christmas. The dark, winter-afternoon sky was pregnant with more snow, and squares of amber shone warmly in most of the frame and false-fronted buildings; despite the energy crisis, the bulbs strung across Sierra Street burned in steady hues. On the steep valley slopes to the west, south and east, the red fir and lodgepole pine forests were shadowed, white-garbed, and as oddly unreal as the village itself.
A car with its headlamps on came down through the long, cliff-walled pass to the north-County Road 235-A, the only road presently open into or out of the valley-and passed the pine board sign reading: HIDDEN VALLEY. POPULATION 74. ELEVATION 6,033. Just before Garvey’s Shell, where the county road became Sierra Street, the car moved slowly beneath the spanning Christmas decorations, past the Valley Cafe and Hughes’ Mercantile and the Valley Inn and Tribucci Bros. Sport Shop. When it reached the All Faiths Church, at the end of the three-block main street, it turned into the fronting lot and then swung around to the small cottage at the rear: the Reverend Peter Keyes, home from the larger town of Soda Grove, eight miles to the north, where he had relatives.
Diagonally across from the church-beyond the village proper, beyond Alpine Street and the house belonging to retired County Sheriff Lew Coopersmith-was a long, snow-carpeted meadow. In its center a boy and a girl were building a snowman, their breaths making puffs of vapor in the thin, chill air. Traditionally, they used sticks for ears and arms and a carrot for a nose and shiny black stones for vest buttons and eyes and to form a widely smiling mouth. Once they had finished, they stood back several paces and fashioned snowballs and threw them at the man-figure until they succeeded in knocking off its head.
Sierra Street continued on a steady incline for another one hundred and fifty yards and Y-branched then into two narrow roads. The left fork was Macklin Lake Road, which serpentined through the mountains for some fifteen miles and eventually emerged in another adjacent community known as Coldville; deep drifts made it impassable during the winter months. Three miles from the village was the tiny lake which gave the road its name, as well as a large hunting and fishing lodge-closed and deserted now, eight days before Christmas-that catered to spring and summer tourists and to seasonal sportsmen. The right fork, cleared by the town plow after each heavy snowfall, became Mule Deer Lake Road and led to a greater body of water two miles to the southwest, at the rearmost corner of the valley. Near this lake were several summer homes and cabins, as well as three year-round residences.
The third valley road was Lassen Drive. It began in the village, two blocks west of Sierra Street, extended in a gradual curve a mile and a half up the east slope, and then thinned out into a series of hiking paths and nature trails. Hidden Valley’s largest home was located on Lassen Drive, a third of the way up the incline; nestled in thick pine, but with a clear view of the village and the southern and western slopes, it was a two-storied rustic with an alpine roof and a jutting, Swiss-style veranda. Matt Hughes, the mayor of Hidden Valley and the owner of Hughes’ Mercantile, lived there with his wife, Rebecca.
Five hundred yards above was a small A-frame cabin, also nestled in pine, also with a clear view, also belonging to Matt Hughes. Neither the Hugheses nor any of the other residents of Hidden Valley knew much about the man who had leased the cabin late the previous summer-the man whose name was Zachary Cain. They had no idea where he had come from (other than it might have been San Francisco) or what he did for a living or why he had chosen to reside in this isolated valley high in the northwestern region of California’s Sierra Nevada; he offered no information, he was totally reticent and unknowable. All they knew for certain was that he never left the valley, ventured into the village only to buy food and liquor, received a single piece of mail every month and that a cashier’s check for three hundred dollars, drawn on a San Francisco bank, which he cashed at the Mercantile. Some said, because of the quantity of liquor he bought and apparently consumed each week, that he was an alcoholic recluse. Others believed he was an asocial and independently well-off eccentric. Still others thought he was in hiding, that maybe he was a fugitive of one type or another, and this had caused some consternation on the part of a small minority of residents; but when Lew Coopersmith, on the urging of Valley Cafe owner Frank McNeil, checked Cain’s name and description through the offices of the county sheriff, he learned enough to be sure that Cain was not wanted by any law enforcement agency-and then dropped the matter, because it would have been an invasion of privacy to pursue it further. As a result, the villagers finally, if somewhat grudgingly, accepted Cain’s presence among them and left him for the most part strictly alone.
Which was, of course, exactly the way he wanted it.
He sat now, as he often did, at the table by the cabin’s front window, looking down on Hidden Valley. He was a big, dark man with thick-fingered hands that gave the impression of power and, curiously, gentleness. The same odd mixture was in the long, squarish cast of his face and had once been in his bar-browed gray eyes, but the eyes now were haunted, filled with emptiness, like old old houses which had been abandoned by their owners. Brown-black hair grew thickly, almost furlike, on his scalp and arms and hands and fingers, giving him a faintly but not unpleasantly bearish appearance. The image was enhanced by the gray-flecked beard he had grown five months earlier for the simple reason that he no longer cared to continue the daily ritual of shaving. The waxy look of the skin pulled taut across his cheekbones and beneath his eyes added ten false years to his age of thirty-four.
The cabin had two rooms and a bath, with knotty pine walls and thick beams that crisscrossed the high, peaked ceiling. It was furnished spartanly: in the living room, a small stone fireplace, a settee with cushions upholstered in material the color of autumn leaves, a matching chair, a short waist-high pine breakfast counter behind which were cramped kitchen facilities; in the bedroom, visible through an open door on the far side of the room, an unmade bed and a dresser and a curve-backed wicker chair. There were no individual, homelike touches anywhere-no photographs or books or paintings or masculine embellishments of any kind; the cabin was still the same impersonal tourist and hunters’ accommodation it had been when he leased it.
On the window table in front of Cain was a bottle of bonded bourbon, a glass containing three fingers of the liquor, a package of cigarettes, and an overflowing ashtray. The only times he moved were to lift the glass to his mouth or to refill it when it became empty or to light another cigarette. It was very quiet in the cabin, but he could hear the cold clean humming of the wind as it blew across the face of the slope, fluttering snow from the branches of the trees and tugging querulously at the weatherstripping around the glass. And he could hear, too, from time to time, the faint strains of the recorded Christmas carols which constantly emanated from the Mercantile’s outside loudspeakers and which, owing to the thinness of the air, were sometimes audible even this far above the village.
As had happened before in the past two weeks, each of them brought forth memory fragments from the bright corners of his mind…
Oh come all ye faith-ful, joy-ful and tri-um-phant,
Oh come ye, oh co-o-me ye, to Be-e-eth-le-hem…
… Angie singing those words softly, sweetly, as they trimmed the tree the year before, smili
ng, that question-mark loop of gold hair hanging down over her left eye, her face slightly flushed from the hot-buttered rums they’d drunk earlier, and Lindy tugging at the hem of her dress, dancing up and down, saying, “Mommy, Mommy, let me put the angel on top, let me put the angel on top!” and Steve hanging his stocking on the mantel, very intent, very careful, the top of his small tongue held catlike in the open space between his missing front teeth…
Si-i-ilent night. Ho-o-ly night.
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon vir-r-gin, Mother and Child…
… Angie’s voice again, softer, reverent, while all of them sat in the darkened living room and looked at the winking lights of the tree, the kids drowsy but refusing to give in because they wanted to wait up for Santa Claus, Angie’s voice making the words into a lullaby that finally put them both to sleep, and he and Angie carrying them upstairs and putting them to bed and then tiptoeing downstairs again and setting out the presents, filling the stockings, and, when everything was arranged, going up to their own room and lying close, holding each other in the silent, holy night…
Cain got abruptly to his feet, shoving his chair back, and carried his glass away from the window. He stood unsteadily in the center of the room, looking at the fireplace, and it reminded him of the one in the house near San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, the house that no longer was. He turned away and went across to the breakfast counter and around it into the kitchen area for a fresh package of cigarettes. Spasmodically, he tore off the cellophane and got one of the cylinders into his mouth and began patting the pockets of his Pendleton shirt. His matches were on the table. He went over there again, sat down, lit the cigarette, drained the bourbon from his glass; then he stared again into the valley, refusing to hear the faint carols now, concentrating on what he saw spread out before him.
White world, soft world, clean world; snow had a way of hiding the ugliness and disguising the tawdry trappings of humanity, of creating the kind of beauty a whore creates with makeup and the right kind of lighting. Here, in this idyllic, fanciful little valley, you could almost believe again in Christmas and God and Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men; you could almost believe life had meaning and was worth living, and that there was hope and joy and justice in the world. But it was all illusion, it was all a lie. There was no God and there was no peace, and there was no justice; there was nothing to believe in, there was nothing left at all.
Cain picked up the bourbon bottle and poured himself another drink.
Sacramento
The three of them went in for the ripoff at two thirty, exactly half an hour before the scheduled arrival of the armored car.
The place was called Greenfront-one of those cash-and-carry super-department stores where you can buy anything from groceries to complete home furnishings-and it was located on the northern outskirts of Sacramento. A former employee had dropped word in the right places in L.A., eight weeks before, that he was willing to sell a detailed package on the complex. Kubion had picked up on it immediately; he was a planner, an organizer-between jobs and looking for something ripe and solid-and on paper the job looked pretty good. He gave the guy an initial finder’s fee of five hundred, told him there’d be another two thousand if a score developed, thought things over for a while and figured a three-man team, and went to talk to Brodie. He’d worked with Brodie before, and he was sharp and dependable and had a multitude of talents, like being a good wheel man and having contacts that could supply you with most anything short of a tank; Brodie was looking, too, and said he liked the sound of it so far, count him in. They talked over who to get for the third man. Both of them wanted Chadwick; but Chadwick was unavailable, and so were two others they tried, and finally they had to settle for Loxner. Loxner was big and bluff and slow-witted and knew how to take orders well enough, but the thing about him, like the thing about a lot of strong arms in the business, he was tough only when things were moving smoothly and he was behind the gun. If there was any kind of tight, the word was he went to mush inside and maybe you couldn’t depend on him to do anything except crap his shorts. Still, he’d been around a long time and had only taken one fall, and that said something for him right there. So they talked to him, and he was free and hungry, and that made the team complete.
That Monday the three of them had driven up to Sacramento to look things over. A single surveillance of the afternoon ritual with the armored car, using binoculars from a copse of trees to the rear, convinced them that the job was not only workable, it was a goddamn wonder somebody hadn’t ripped the place off long before this. Kubion evolved a full-scale plan right away, but they hadn’t wanted to use it if there was an alternative method; the financing would be heavy and would cut deeply into the take. They visited the store several times, individually and in pairs, and they camped in the trees for three successive Monday afternoons. But they couldn’t find another way to do it that was as clean and sure as the original. They even considered hitting the armored car instead, but that was a dangerous and by no means simple or guaranteed proposition-particularly since the car operated strictly within residential and business districts. And there wouldn’t be any more money in the store by doing it that way, since the car delivered each payload to one bank or another after making a pickup.
For reasons known only to its management, the armored car company didn’t necessarily use the same guards on the same run each Monday. And, conversely, their signal for admittance to Greenfront never varied: one long, two short, one long on the bell beside the rear entrance door. These two facts, discovered during surveillance, convinced the three of them finally to take Greenfront according to Kubion’s initial plan. With the method of operation settled, they agreed to pool their slim cash reserves in order to eliminate outside financing and an even larger slice off the top, and went to work setting it up.
Brodie knew something about photography and spent two days outside the car company’s offices in downtown Sacramento, taking unobtrusive color photographs of the guards and of the type of armored car used by the firm. When the pictures were developed and blown up, Kubion took the ones of the cars to a mechanic Brodie knew in San Francisco, and the mechanic thought it over and decided he could make a dummy, for around eight thousand, that would pass any but the closest inspection. Then Kubion went to L.A. with the photos of the guards, to a costumers again supplied by Brodie, and put out another two thousand on three duplicate guard uniforms, three sets of simple theatrical disguises, and six money sacks of the type utilized by the armored car concern. Brodie handled the weaponry, through a safe gunsmith in Sacramento; he bought three. 38 caliber Colt New Police revolvers, the same model carried by the guards, and a Smith amp; Wesson Model 39 automatic, 38 caliber, as a backup. On each of the subsequent three Mondays, Brodie followed the car which serviced Greenfront-one stop each week, using different rented vehicles on each occasion, to avoid the possibility of detection; by this means, he learned that the stop just prior to Greenfront was a place called Saddleman’s Supermarket, two miles from the department store complex.
The former Greenfront employee had supplied a detailed map of the office as part of his finder’s package, and the three of them went over it several times to be sure they knew exactly what to expect once they were inside. The rear entrance, through which the armored car guards were admitted to the building, opened on a set of stairs. At the top was a second door, also kept locked, and beyond there was the office: windowed cubicle occupied by the store manager, six desks manned by the general staff. One door leading down into the store proper, to the far left as you entered from the rear. Safe in the same wall as that door, vault type, to which both the manager and the chief accountant had the combination. Thick plate-glass window beginning waist-high in the fronting wall, which looked down on the aisles and departments and check-out counters on the main floor. Seven employees, plus two armed uniformed security officers-one of those the one who came downstairs to admit the armored car personnel. Two other guns in the building, on
e each to two additional security cops stationed on the main floor. No alarm system of any kind.
There was no problem in any of that, no problem at all once they got inside. The only sweat was the dummy armored car. They would have to drive it to Greenfront, leave it in plain sight in front of the door for the estimated fifteen minutes it would take them to complete the job, and then drive it away again afterward; but that couldn’t be helped, and the score was plenty large enough to warrant the risk.
With Greenfront being open twelve full hours on both Saturday and Sunday and with the armored car coming only once a week, they figured that between a hundred and a hundred and twenty thousand would be awaiting transfer on this Monday afternoon. There might have been more money in the safe the following Monday, Christmas Eve, but it wouldn’t be a great deal more; and on Christmas Eve there was always a traffic problem-last-minute shoppers, the big rush-which meant increased police patrols. And according to the finder’s package, Greenfront sometimes put on extra security guards just before Christmas. This Monday, then, was the best time for the hit.
Brodie found a garage for rent on a short-term lease, in an industrial area four blocks from Greenfront, and that minimized somewhat the risk with the dummy car; he wore one of the theatrical disguises while visiting the realtor and paid the deposit in cash. Also, as a final precaution, Loxner arranged for a safe place to ground, in an isolated section of the Sierra called Hidden Valley. It was there they figured to make the split and to spend a week or so letting things cool down before they separated.
The week before, Kubion and Brodie had driven up to this Hidden Valley and established residence-two San Francisco businessmen on a combination vacation and work conference, they said-so that they would not be complete strangers when they came back after the job; and when they came back, Loxner would keep out of sight: still two men, not three, to ensure further that none of the locals would tie them in with Greenfront. Brodie and Kubion returned to Sacramento on Friday, and the mechanic delivered the dummy car inside a storage van late Saturday night, directly to the rented garage. There had been nothing to do then but wait for Monday afternoon…
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