Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  They left the garage at two twenty-five, with Brodie driving and Kubion beside him and Loxner in back. Each of them wore one of the disguises: false mustaches and sideburns and eyebrows, putty noses, cotton wadding to fatten cheeks and distort the shape of the mouth. They saw no police units in the four blocks to Greenfront. Fifty yards beyond the office entrance at the rear was the loading dock, with a couple of semis drawn up to it and warehousemen pushing dollies back and forth on the ramp; none of the men glanced at the armored car as it pulled up and parked.

  Brodie went around and opened the rear doors, and Loxner came out with the empty money sacks. The two of them stepped up to the door, while Kubion stood watching by the right rear fender. Loxner pressed the bell, one long and two short and one long, and they stood there under the dark afternoon sky, waiting for the security cop to come down.

  It took him two minutes, twenty or thirty seconds longer than usual because they weren’t expecting the armored car for another half hour. He opened the peephole in the door and stared out through the thick glass covering it and saw the car and the three uniformed men-everything exactly as it was supposed to be. Satisfied, he worked the locks and swung the door open and said, “You guys are pretty early, aren’t you?”

  “There’s a fire over on Kingridge,” Brodie told him. “Big warehouse right across the street from Saddleman’s. They’ve got the streets blocked off, hoses and pumpers everywhere, and we can’t get in. So the company told us we might as well go ahead with our other rounds.”

  “Fires in the middle of December,” the guard said, and shook his head. “Well, everything’s just about ready upstairs, but you might have to wait five or ten minutes.”

  “Sure, we expected that.”

  The guard stepped aside to let Brodie and Loxner enter. When they were past him, he turned and started to close the door-and Brodie’s left hand slapped across his mouth, jerking his head back; the swiftly drawn revolver jabbed him sharply in the small of the back. Softly, Brodie said, “You make a funny move or say anything above a whisper when I take my hand away, and I’ll kill you first thing. Believe it. ”

  The guard stood motionless, his eyes wide and abruptly terrified; he had a wife and three kids, and he was no hero.

  Kubion glanced out at the loading dock and saw that no one on the ramp was looking in his direction. The area was otherwise deserted. He drew his own gun and shut the door, leaving it unlocked. “All right,” he said to the guard, “who opens the door up there? You or the other guy in the office?”

  Brodie took his hand away, increasing the pressure of the Colt. The guard’s throat worked three times before he found words, thickly hushed. “My partner. I tell him it’s okay and he opens up.”

  “That better be right,” Kubion said. “If it isn’t, you’re a dead man.”

  “It’s right.”

  “Fine. Now when we go into the office, you keep your mouth shut. Don’t do or say anything. We’ll take it from there.”

  Convulsively, the guard nodded. Kubion pushed him over to the stairs, and they went up single file. At the top, the guard called out, “Okay, Ben,” and there was the scrape of a key in the lock. The heavy steel-ribbed door opened, and the other security cop stood before them with his hands in plain sight. Kubion shoved the first one into the office, moving to one side so that Brodie and Loxner could enter, covering the startled second guard.

  “Everybody just sit tight,” Kubion said sharply. “No panic, no screams, no heroics.”

  “It’s a holdup, my God!” somebody said, and one of the two women employees gasped-but the two guards just stood there staring at Kubion’s gun. Brodie fanned immediately to the left and watched the rigid office staff sitting at their desks; none of them made further sounds. Loxner was at the open door to the manager’s cubicle, eyes and gun on the fat, white-faced man who had gotten to his feet within.

  For a long moment the office was a fixed tableau fashioned of fear and disbelief. Then Kubion-smiling, thinking that they were going to get it done well within their allotted fifteen minutes-gestured to the manager and said, “Come out here and open the safe. Quick, no arguments.” Obediently, woodenly, the fat man stepped out of his cubicle and started across the office.

  And that was when the whole thing went suddenly and completely sour…

  Two

  It began to snow again just after Lew Coopersmith left his house and walked over to Sierra Street.

  He pulled the collar of his mackinaw high on the back of his neck, moving more quickly under the thickening flakes. Like most residents of Hidden Valley, he did not particularly mind the snow, but then neither did he relish walking or driving in it, especially when the snowfall had been as heavy as it had this winter.

  Lean and tall and durable, like the lodgepole pines on the valley’s eastern slopes, he was sixty-six years old, felt forty-six, and surprised his wife, Ellen, every now and then by knocking on the door of her room just after bedtime and asking her if she felt like having a go. There were squint lines at the corners of his alert green eyes and faint creases paralleling a stubby nose, but his narrow face was otherwise unlined. His hair, covered now by a woolen cap, was a dusty gray and showed no signs of thinning. Only the liver spots on the backs of his hands and fingers hinted of his age.

  For twenty-two years, up to his retirement four years before, he had served as county sheriff. Police work had been his entire life-he had been a highway patrolman in Truckee and Sacramento and then a county deputy for eleven years before finally being elected sheriff-but he had always looked forward with a kind of eagerness to what were euphemistically termed his Leisure Years. And yet retirement had developed into something of a hollow reward. Shortly after he finished his final term, he and Ellen had moved from the county seat to Hidden Valley-an area both of them had decided upon sometime earlier-and almost immediately he had felt a sense of impotence, of uselessness. He found himself constantly wondering how his former deputy and the new county sheriff, Ed Patterson, was handling things and took to driving over to the county seat periodically and stopping in to talk about this and that, strictly social, Ed, you understand. Even after four years, he still dropped in on Patterson now and then, as he had done when Frank McNeil and some of the others had gotten their backs up about Zachary Cain, the loner type who had moved into the valley the previous summer.

  The trouble was, he didn’t know what to do with himself. There was always plenty to do when you were an officer of the law, dozens of things to occupy your time, some excitement to life; but in Hidden Valley, what the hell was there? Reading and smoking your pipe in front of the fireplace and puttering in the basement workshop and watching television and bulling with the locals and the seasonal tourists at the Valley Inn and driving up to Soda Grove occasionally to take in a movie-weekend and evening pastimes, shallow pursuits void of significance or commitment. He felt severed from the ebb and flow of life, put out to pasture. Good Lord, sixty-six wasn’t old, not when you felt forty-six and your mind was just as sharp as ever and you had always been a doer, a man involved, a man empowered. His retirement very definitely had been premature, but the decision could not be unmade and he would have to go on making the best of it, just as he had done for the past four years.

  When he reached Sierra, Coopersmith turned right off Shasta Street and went into Tribucci Bros. Sport Shop. In season, the Tribuccis dispensed large quantities of bait, outdoor wear, licenses, and fishing and hunting accessories to visiting sportsmen; now, in winter, the bulk of their business was in winter sports equipment (on a limited local basis), as well as in tobacco products, newspapers, magazines, and paperback books.

  The younger of the two brothers who operated the store, John Tribucci, was alone behind the counter at the far end. In his middle thirties, he had a strong, athletic body and shaggy black hair and warm brown eyes under slightly canted lids; he also had a ready smile and a large amount of infectious energy. When he wasn’t tending the shop, he was usually skiing or ice skat
ing or tramping around the woods in a pair of snowshoes or fly fishing for trout or, when he could find the time, backpacking into the higher wilderness elevations of the southern Sierra: Owens Lake and Mount Baxter and the John Muir Wilderness. In an age of electronic depersonalization and ecological apathy and teeming cities and developments which had begun to spread over the land like malignant fungi, Coopersmith thought that any man who took pains to maintain his own identity, who loved and thrived on nature in all her majesty, was worthy of admiration and respect; he accorded both to John Tribucci.

  Coopersmith asked, after they had exchanged greetings, “How’s Ann today, Johnny?”

  “Fat and impatient, same as ever,” Tribucci said, and grinned. His wife was eight and a half months pregnant with their first child-a major event in their lives after eleven years of nonconception. “Make you a bet she gives birth on Christmas Day.”

  “As much as you want a son for Christmas? No way.” Coopersmith winked at him. “Give us a can of Raleigh and a couple packages of pipe cleaners, would you, Johnny?”

  “Coming up.” Tribucci took the items from the shelf behind the counter, dropped them into a plastic sack, and made change from the five Coopersmith handed him. He said then, “Snowing again, I see. If it keeps up like this, we’re liable to have a slide to contend with.”

  “Think so?” Coopersmith asked, interested.

  “Well, the last time we had this much snow-back in sixty-one-there was a small one that blocked part of the pass road; those cliffs will only hold so much before some section or other weakens and gives way. Took the county road crews four days to clear through, the longest we’ve ever been snowbound.”

  ‘Seems I recall, now that you mention it. Nice prospect.“

  “Inconvenient, all right, but there’s nothing you can do to stop an avalanche if one decides to happen. With less snow, though, we should make it through okay.”

  “Ah, the joys of mountain living,” Coopersmith said dryly. He picked up the plastic sack. “See you later, Johnny.”

  Tribucci laughed. “Ciao. Give my best to Ellen.”

  “Will do.”

  Coopersmith went out and walked farther north on Sierra, crossing Mooc Street. The snow, slanting down off the western slope on the cold wind, clung icily to his mackinaw and trousers. Except for two cars and a delivery van parked against the two-foot windows along each curb, packed by the village’s single snowplow, the street and sidewalks were empty. But he saw three customers inside the Mercantile as he passed: Webb Edwards, Hidden Valley’s only physician-a quiet, elderly man given to wearing Western-style string ties; Sally Chilton, Edwards’ part-time nurse; and Verne Mullins, another retiree in his sixties who had spent forty-five years with the Southern Pacific Railroad. The store was the largest in the village and supplied groceries and hardware items and drug sundries; it also housed the Hidden Valley Post Office. Holly wreaths and sprigs of mistletoe decorated both halves of the front doors, and a huge, flat cardboard Santa Claus and two cardboard reindeer had been erected in one of the long facing windows.

  Between Lassen Drive and Eldorado Street, diagonally across from Garvey’s Shell, the windows of the Valley Cafe cast scintillas of bright light into the dark afternoon. Within the glow, the flakes of falling snow were like particles of white glitter. Coopersmith paused under the jutting front eaves of the building, brushed his clothing and stamped clinging snow from his booted feet, and then pushed the door open and went inside.

  The interior was a single elongated room, with yellow plastic-covered booths and vinyl-topped tables along the left wall and a long lunch counter fronted by plastic stools along the right. In the center of the wall above the counter was a huge, varnished, bark-rimmed plaque, cut from a giant sequoia, on which was lettered the menu in neat white printing. The glaring fluorescent tubes overhead gave the cafe a sterile, slightly self-conscious appearance.

  None of the booths was occupied, and only two of the stools; sitting side by side midway along the counter were Greg Novak, a long-haired, brittle-featured youth in his early twenties who worked for Joe Garvey and who also operated the village snowplow, and Walt Halliday, owner of the Valley Inn-plump, mild-eyed, wearing black-rimmed glasses which gave him a falsely studious look. Behind the counter were Frank McNeil and his sixteen-year-old son, Larry; the youth, recruited to help out during Soda Grove High School’s Christmas vacation, as he had been during each summer vacation the past few years, was washing dishes in a stainless-steel sink at the far end, and McNeil stood talking to Novak and Halliday. Dressed all in white, like a hospital orderly, the cafe owner was a ruddy complexioned man in his mid-forties, with a blunt face and bristle-cut red hair. In addition, he possessed a sordid sense of humor and a complaining attitude: Coopersmith did not much care for him. But his food was good, his coffee even better than Ellen’s, and he was therefore tolerable for short periods of time.

  The three men glanced up as Coopersmith entered and called out greetings. He lifted his hand in acknowledgment, slid onto a stool three away from Halliday. “Coffee, Frank,” he said.

  “Sure thing.” McNeil drew a mug from the urn on the back counter, set it before Coopersmith, put a spoon beside it, and immediately went back to stand in front of Novak arid Halliday.

  “As I was saying,” he said to them, “Christmas shopping is a pain in the ass.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Halliday said. “I kind of get a boot out of it. How come you’re so down on Christmas, Frank?”

  “It’s all a bunch of commercialized bullshit, that’s why.”

  “Listen to Scrooge here.”

  Novak said, “So what did you find for your wife in Soda Grove, Mr. Halliday?”

  “One of those clock radios, the kind that comes on automatically like an alarm in the mornings and plays music instead of ringing a bell in your ear.”

  “Sounds like a nice gift.”

  “She’ll like it, I think.”

  “You’d probably of done better to get the same thing I’m giving my old lady,” McNeil said.

  “What would that be?”

  Without bothering to lower his voice in deference to the presence of his son, McNeil answered, “Well, I’ll tell you. It’s maybe six, seven inches long and what you call durable, guaranteed not to wear out if you treat it with care. You can use it any time of the year, and the old lady appreciates it more than anything else you can give her. And the best thing about it, it doesn’t cost you a cent.”

  “That’s what you think,” Halliday said, smiling.

  “Only one problem with a gift like that, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I ain’t figured out how the hell I’m going to wrap it.”

  The three men burst out laughing, and Coopersmith sipped his coffee and wondered what had happened to the spirit of Christmas. When he had been young, Yuletide was a time of innocent joy and genuine religious feelings. Now it was as if Christmas had evolved, in no more than half a century, into a kind of wearisome though bearable space-age anachronism: people going through the motions because it was what was expected of them, worshiping mechanically and superficially if they worshiped at all, no longer caring, no longer seeming to understand what it was all about. And so there were dirty jokes and scatological remarks told in all manner of company, and everybody laughed and pretty much agreed that it was just a bunch of commercialized bullshit, can’t wait until it’s over for another year; it made you feel angry and sad and a little ashamed.

  McNeil came down to stand in front of Coopersmith, still chuckling, his face red and damp in the too-warm air circulating through the cafe’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 down
stairs 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?”

  Sacramento

  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.