Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  “Not at all.”

  When Kubion had gone, Tribucci resumed stocking the tobacco shelves. It would have meant a not inconsiderable profit if he’d been able to sell the mobile, and with the baby due so soon, the money would have been more than welcome. But then, he hadn’t really expected to make the sale from the first-not under the present circumstances and having correctly assumed the reason for the dark man’s sudden interest.

  City people, he thought, have the damnedest ideas…

  Kubion spent another hour in the village-mainly at the foot of the east slope, beyond Alpine Street, where the telephone and power lines stretched downward into Hidden Valley-and then drove back to Mule Deer Lake. He parked the car in the cabin garage and went inside and directly up to his bedroom.

  The dull ache in his temples and forehead was still with him, no better and no worse than it had been the previous day. Last night he had dreamed of spiders again, the same dream, the same ugly black spiders with their redly gaping mouths. But he hadn’t thought of these things at all; his mind had been focused for the past twenty-four hours on the theoretical score-attacking it with a vengeance, just as if it were the real thing.

  He sat on the rumpled bed and took one of the thin brown marijuana cigarettes from the tin on the nightstand. Leaning back against the headboard, he lit the stick and sucked slowly on it, holding the mawkish smoke deep in his lungs. When the joint was ash against his fingers, he could feel the lift, he could feel his thoughts coming clear and sharp. Then he began putting it all together, everything he had learned from the valley and topographical maps and everything he had found out in the village today.

  And he knew it could be done.

  The knowledge excited him, stimulated him. It could be done, all right, it actually could be done with just three men. Still a few details to be worked out, still a few angles to consider, but he had the basics completely assembled. It hadn’t been much of a problem, not nearly as much a one as he’d first thought; the fact that the valley was snowbound was what made it all so simple.

  Kubion lit a second stick of pot and smoked it, working out the details carefully. Time passed-and he had it all then. the entire operation from beginning to end. Nothing left unconsidered, no flaws in the progression. All of it neat, clear, workable.

  Darkness settled outside and came into the room in slow, lengthening shadows; and with it came the letdown. The stimulation vanished; an empty flatness replaced it. He became aware of the dull throbbing in his head, and he could feel his nerves pulling taut again. He tried a third stick of grass, but this time it did nothing for him. The sudden downer was heavy and oppressive, and he knew the reason for it; sitting there on the bed, he knew exactly what was the matter.

  He’d figured the score, and it could be done, and they couldn’t do it.

  From the beginning it had been nothing more than a mental exercise, something to occupy his mind for a while. But he couldn’t forget it, now that he’d figured it; there would be nothing to do, nothing to focus on, and the pain in his head, and the spiders, the black red hungry spiders, and the blowoff that would surely come, the violence; he couldn’t forget the score even though it was useless thinking about it further. Frustration now, and the pain centering behind his eyes, pulsing, pulsing…

  Rapping on his door. He jerked slightly, irritably, at the interruption and called out, “What the hell is it?”

  “Supper’s ready, Earl,” Brodie’s voice said from outside.

  “I don’t want any goddamn supper, leave me alone.”

  Silence. Then, “All right, Earl.”

  “All right, all right, all right. ”

  Kubion stretched out full length on the bed. The room was completely dark now, and cold, and he put one of the blankets over him. It can be done, he thought, we can do it, go over it again and keep going over it, make it even more solid, cancel some of the risks but there are too many of them but the hicks keep money in fruit jars sometimes but they can identify us but a whole valley but this is safe ground but it can be done…

  The spiders came.

  They came out of the darkness, big ones, big black ones, crawling over the floor and up onto the bed. One of them crept upward along his leg, mouth opened redly, hungry mouth, saliva dripping, he could feel the saliva dripping like hot slime through the blanket and through his clothes and onto his naked flesh. No! but the room was filled with them now, coming for him, one on his arm, one on his chest, one on his neck, black and red and feather-legged with their hungry devouring mouths, get away from me, get away from me!

  He screamed, and screamed again, and woke up, and came off the bed in a convulsive jump. He stood shivering in the darkness, and the spiders were gone; it had been the dream again and the spiders were gone. Or-were they? What was that, there in the dark corner? Something moving, something crawling. Spider! No, they were gone, mind playing tricks, no spiders here, no spiders, but something was crawling, he could see it crawling there…

  He squeezed his eyes shut, nothing there, and slitted them open again, nothing there, nothing there. Think about the score, remember the score that can be done, that we can’t do, that can be done. He could not keep his hands quiet; his body was soaked in sweat. The pain in his head was raging now, he could feel himself losing control, his thoughts were wrapped in a gray floating mist and he wanted to smash something, kill something, kill the spiders, the filthy spiders crawling there in the dark corner, and he ran to the corner and killed one spider, and killed a second, and twisted panting toward the bed and suddenly they were all around him, scurrying over the walls and floor and furnishings, they were real and they were after him and all the pain in his head the pain and the spiders coming the red black hungry spiders coming the spiders the He stopped shaking.

  The pain went away.

  The spiders went away.

  Just like that, as if a bubble had burst inside him, it all went away, and he was calm again. He stood still for a moment, until his breathing returned to normal, and then bathed sweat from his face and walked slowly to the bed. Sitting on the edge of it, he switched on the lamp and looked around the room.

  Good-bye, spiders, he thought, good-bye forever because you’re not coming back, I’m not going to let you come back.

  And he began to laugh.

  He laughed for a long time, tears streaming down his cheeks, drool overflowing the corners of his mouth, stitches in his belly and both sides. Then, just as suddenly, the laughter cut off, and his head came up, and he sat staring straight ahead, lips still stretched in a wetly fixed grin. His eyes were brightly feverish, glowing like round black stones daubed with phosphorescent paint.

  He was thinking about the score again, the score, the big big big big score. Oh, there was no question about it now, oh no question; there had never been any question.

  It could be done-and they were going to do it.

  Seventeen

  As she stood ladling thick vegetable soup from a tureen into two serving bowls, Rebecca heard Matt come downstairs and then call along the hallway, “Dinner ready yet?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Fine, I’m starved.”

  He came into the kitchen, showered and shaved and cologned and wearing a clean shirt and slacks. But not for me, she thought; habit, personal hygiene-nothing more. He had been home for a little more than an hour, and the only other words he had spoken to her were “Hello, dear.”

  He sat at the table, sighed gustily, and said as if to himself, “Soup smells good.”

  She did not say anything. She placed one of the serving bowls in front of him, and another at her place directly opposite, and laid out a basket of bread and a plate of Cheddar cheese and took a bottle of Mosel from the refrigerator because Matt liked chilled white wine with soup. Then she sat and watched him uncork the bottle and pour their glasses full; and glance at her briefly, almost blankly; and pick up his spoon and begin to eat.

  Rebecca despised that look. It was the way he always looked
at her during one of his affairs: as if she were not a woman, not even a person, as if she were merely an inanimate object which he owned and could ignore at will. Zachary Cain had seemed to look at her yesterday with that same blank negation, when chance had taken her out of the house-she had been going into the village to visit with Ann Tribucci-at precisely the moment he was passing on the Drive. It might not have been so bad, seeing him again that soon after Tuesday night’s humiliation, if he had only paused and then kept on walking down the road, or if, in coming to a standstill, he had said something, anything, to her. But instead, he had looked at her that way, just stood there silently and looked at her.

  She had wanted to scream at him, just as she sometimes wanted to scream at Matt, that she was a human being with feelings and rights and she deserved to be treated accordingly. I’m not a bitch, she had wanted to tell him; I went up to see you for nothing more than a little fellowship, a little kindness. It would have been pointless, however-exactly as it would have been and would be pointless to verbalize her emotions to Matt. And so she hadn’t spoken either, had simply turned and fled his gaze like a frightened sparrow.

  Tuesday night’s misadventure and yesterday’s mute confrontation, while essentially immaterial in themselves, had combined with Matt’s affairs, his rejection, the emptiness, the emotional need-all of it-to compound and deepen her mental depression. She felt as though she were suffocating. Things could not continue as they had for so long; she could not allow them to continue this way.

  Rebecca stared at her soup, at the tissuey pieces of green and yellow and white vegetables floating in it, at the thin sheen of fat-eyes which coated the surface. Her throat closed nauseatingly, and she pushed the plate aside and folded her hands around her wine goblet. Lifting it, holding it without drinking, she watched Matt eat his soup and two slices of bread and a wedge of cheese. He did not once raise his eyes to her.

  She waited until he had begun helping himself to a second bowl of soup; then, slowly and deliberately, she said, “Matt, let’s go up to bed after supper.”

  He looked at her then, frowning slightly, poising the ladle over the tureen. “Bed? he said. ”It’s only six thirty”.

  “I want to make love,” she said. “It has been more than a month since we made love.”

  Matt lowered his gaze immediately and went on ladling soup. “That’s hardly dinner-table conversation. There’s a time and a place, after all…”

  “I want to make love tonight, Matt.”

  “Rebecca, please. I’ve had a long, hard day, and I’m exhausted.”

  “Which means you don’t want to have sex with me, not after supper and not later this evening.”

  “I wish you’d stop talking like that,” he said. “It isn’t like you to be so forward.”

  “Will you make love to me tonight?”

  “Now that’s enough.”

  “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? I want you, I need to feel a man inside me again. Damn you, I want to be fucked!”

  Matt’s spoon clattered to the table; his eyes went wide, and his mouth dropped open in a tragicomic caricature of surprise and shock. “Rebecca!”

  She stood up and went out of the kitchen, walking slowly. Upstairs in their bedroom, she took off her clothes and stood naked by the bed, listening, looking at the door. Matt did not come. When she was sure that he wouldn’t, she got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin and lay there staring blindly at the ceiling, trying to think, trying to find the strength to make a positive decision because things could not, they could not, go on this way.

  Eighteen

  Brodie was making Spanish omelets, and Loxner was watching him and drinking a bottle of ale, when Kubion came downstairs Friday morning and said he had something important to talk over with them.

  They took chairs around the kitchen table. Brodie did not like the way Kubion’s eyes looked; they seemed to have tiny burning lights far back in their depths, and it was like seeing a pair of bonfires through the wrong end of a telescope. A sudden uneasiness crept through him.

  And Kubion put his hands flat on the table and said, “We’ve got a new score.”

  It startled Brodie; it was the last thing he would have expected. He looked at Loxner and then back at Kubion. “I don’t follow. Where could you find a score? We haven’t been out of this valley since Monday night. Hell, we’re snowbound here; nobody can get out.”

  “Or in,” Kubion said, “and that’s it, that’s the whole thing right there. The valley is snowbound, and the valley is the score. We take it over and we clean it out store by store, house by house. Everything and everybody.”

  Loxner seemed about to laugh; his mouth curved upward at the corners, but then stayed that way-a rictus. He made no sound. Brodie stared at Kubion for a long moment, said finally, “Earl, you can’t be serious…”

  “Sure I’m serious, what do you think? It can be done, I’ve worked it all out and it can be done-no sweat, no sweat at all.”

  “For what?”

  “For forty or fifty grand and maybe more, that’s for what. The guy that owns the Mercantile runs an unofficial bank: a safe in his office. He cashed a check for one of the other hicks, a couple of days ago, four hundred and fifty dollars without even looking at it first. He’s the big man here, it figures they all go to him when they need ready cash; he’ll have thousands in there. And these hicks keep money in fruit jars under their beds, they got the family jewels in lockboxes on their dressers-you’re always hearing about crap like that.”

  Brodie and Loxner just stared at him.

  Kubion wet his lips; his eyes burned more brightly, now. “Listen,” he said, “listen, I know what you’re thinking. There’s only three of us, right? Seventy-five people in this valley and only three of us. But that’s no problem-no problem. We do it on Sunday. Now where do most hicks go on Sunday, where do they always go on the Sunday before Christmas?”

  Automatically Loxner said, “Church.”

  Brodie said, “Oh Christ…”

  “You see how simple it is? At least fifty or sixty of them are all together in the church: a bunch of sitting ducks. We wait until after the service starts at noon, and then we go in and take them over. We tell them to look around and see who’s not there; we make a list of names and addresses. Then we lock the front doors and go round up the rest of them house to house: ring their doorbells, put a gun in their faces; easy. Once we’ve got everybody penned up in the church-there’s no back exit, it’s a box-one of us watches the front doors with a rifle just to make sure none of them tries to get out, and the other two rip off the buildings. Ten to twelve hours, and we can strip this valley like a chicken bone.”

  Brodie started to speak, but Kubion made a silencing gesture with one hand and went on with it.

  “Okay, now you’re wondering about a getaway with the valley being snowbound. We can’t just sit around and wait until the road’s open again, right? So what we do, we leave here on snowmobiles-those little motorized scooters that run on skis and treads. The two brothers that operate the Sport Shop have one in stock, brand-new. One of them owns another. That’s two, that’s all we need.”

  “Snowmobiles,” Loxner said. Without seeming to taste it, he drained the last of his ale.

  Kubion was smiling now-an excited, unnatural smile. “One of the brothers told me it could be done; all you need is a compass and a topographical map. I’ve got maps already, and a route traced out, and the mobiles are equipped with compasses. It’s maybe fifteen miles east by northeast to a town called Coldville: four or five hours at the outside. The hicks say the road will be open the day after Christmas; that gives us at least two full days’ start if we leave at dawn Monday.”

  Brodie said, “Goddamn it-”

  “How do I figure two full days’ minimum?” Kubion said. “Well, we take a hostage or two not long before we go, and we tell the rest that the hostages are dead if anybody even puts his head out while we’re still in the valley, and they won’t ha
ve any way of knowing when we actually do leave. We tell them we’re going to take the hostages with us, too; we won’t do it, we’ll tie them up somewhere or off them, what the hell, but the others will believe what we say. They’ll keep right on sitting in the church until somebody comes and lets them out. Another thing we do is cut the telephone lines late tomorrow night; that isolates the valley completely and eliminates any threat of a phone call to the cops if anybody that isn’t in the church gets suspicious before we’ve got them all rounded up. So even if they did get out before the pass is open, what could they do?

  “Now: once we reach this Coldville, we buy a used car-they’ve got a dealership there, it’s listed in the phone book, and shagging one is too risky-and then we head for Reno or maybe Tahoe. A little of the blister from Sacramento should be off by next Monday; we play it careful on the road, we’re okay. In Reno or Tahoe, we split up and take separate planes south or east or north. We get off the West Coast entirely, relocate somewhere else.”

  Kubion moistened his smile again. “So there it is-all laid out. Simple, beautiful, a score like nobody ever pulled off before. Well? What do you think?”

  “I think you been blowing too much weed,” Loxner said, trying to make a joke of it. “Man, that ain’t a score, it’s like plain fucking suicide.”

  The smile vanished.

  Loxner laughed nervously. “This is safe ground, you don’t pull a job on safe ground no matter how good it is. Christ, Brendikian would never stand for having this place blown that way. And he’s got Circle connections, Earl, you know that.”

  “The Circle isn’t going to pick up on small-time crap like having an independent safe house blown, I don’t care what kind of connections Brendikian’s got. Screw Brendikian.”

  “You don’t know him, man, he ain’t anybody to fool with.”

  “Screw Brendikian,” Kubion said again.

  Brodie leaned forward. “Earl, the people here know your face and mine; disguises or masks wouldn’t be worth a thing. The cops would have those Identikit drawings on every front page in the country once the ripoff was reported. Our cover identities would be blown, that’s one thing. And we’ve all taken falls; they’d come up with our names sooner or later, they’d have mug shots out in addition to the composites.”