Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Seven of the twelve pews on each side of the center aisle were completely full, but the last five on either side were only partially taken. The Reverend Mr. Keyes had entertained little hope for a capacity attendance, but he had expected a larger turnout than this. He scanned the congregation-the women and girls in their warm, brightly colored winter finery (you did not see somber hues in church these days, which was, he thought, as it should be); the men and boys in carefully pressed suits and bright ties, to which they were for the most part unaccustomed-and a small frown tugged at the corners of his mouth. He did not see Matthew Hughes, and Matthew never missed Sunday services, was in fact always one of the first to arrive; very odd indeed that he was not present on this particular Sunday, two days before Christmas. He also did not see the Markhams or the Donnelly family, who rarely failed to attend as well; nor the San Francisco businessman, Charley Adams, to whom he had spoken on Thursday afternoon.

  Maude Fredericks turned slightly on the organ bench and glanced at him, and he indicated that she should begin playing; it was just noon. Deep-toned chords, reverent and felicitous, filled the wide interior. The Reverend Mr. Keyes waited, looking out through the open half of the double doors at the empty, snow-dappled walk beyond; the Hugheses and the Markhams and the Connellys did not arrive. Finally, sighing inaudibly, he nodded to this Sunday’s usher, Dr. Webb Edwards. The middle-aged physician returned his nod, stepped out to look both ways along Sierra Street, and apparently saw no late arrivals in the vicinity; he came back inside, closed the open door, and took a place in one of the rear pews. The time was twelve five.

  When the organ music had crescendoed into silence, the Reverend Mr. Keyes offered a brief invocation; a moment of silent and conjoined prayer followed. Then he led the congregation in the singing of “O Jesus, We Adore Thee” and “Saviour, Blessed Saviour” and “Joy to the World.” Time: twelve twenty. He arranged his notes on the lectern, cleared his throat, and prepared to deliver his traditional pre-Christmas sermon, the Bible text of which had been taken from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke.

  Time: twelve twenty-one.

  And the double doors burst apart, the two halves thudding loudly against the interior wall, and three men came quickly inside. Two of them held deer rifles and fanned one to either side along the coat-draped wall. The third, pointing a handgun, stood with his feet braced apart just inside the entrance.

  Heads swiveled around; faces blanched with incredulity and nascent fear. Kubion, who had the handgun, called out in a sharp, commanding voice, “All right, everybody just sit still. We don’t want to hurt any of you but I’ll shoot the first one who makes a move in this direction, let’s get that understood right from the start.”

  The Reverend Mr. Keyes stared at the man he knew as Charley Adams, the man whom he had thought to be a good and devout Christian, stared at the two strangers with the rifles-and he could not believe what he saw or what he had just heard. It simply could not be happening; it was utterly impossible. He felt an unfamiliar but suddenly acute sense of outrage; his round cheeks flamed with it, his fingers gripped the edges of the lectern until the knuckle joints seemed about to pop through the stretched white skin. “How dare you!” he shouted. “How dare you come in here with guns! This is a house of God! ”

  “Calm down, Reverend,” Kubion said. He seemed to be smiling. “All of you calm down, keep your heads, and then I’ll tell you what it’s all about.”

  The command turned the Reverend Mr. Keyes’ outrage to blind fury. He pushed away from the lectern and came down off the pulpit. Lew Coopersmith, sitting in the right front pew, said, “No, Reverend!” but Keyes did not even hear the words. He started into the center aisle, his eyes fixed on Kubion.

  “Hold it right there, preacher man.”

  Reverend Keyes brushed past the arm Coopersmith put out to restrain him and walked slowly and grimly down the aisle. He was not afraid because he knew he would not be harmed, not here; his anger was righteous, his position was sacrosanct, and he said, “I won’t have guns in my church, I won’t have you bringing weapons of destruction in God’s house,” and Kubion unhesitatingly shot him through the right hand.

  The hushed, strained silence dissolved first into the hollow roar of the gunshot and then into terrified screams and cries from women and children, shocked articulations from the men. The Reverend Mr. Keyes had stopped moving. He held his hand up in front of him and stared at the blood beginning to stream from the hole just below the thumb: numbly, not believing what he saw any more than he quite believed, even now, that any of this was actually happening.

  “Dear God,” he said then, and fainted.

  Lew Coopersmith was on his feet and three steps into the center aisle before he realized he had moved at all. Abruptly he stopped and allowed his hands to unknot at his sides, standing rigidly. Others were on their feet now as well, faces stricken-John and Vince Tribucci, Webb Edwards, Verne Mullins-but none of them had moved from their places. The whimperings of the women and children intensified the atmosphere of horror which now pervaded the church.

  Kubion said, “When I say something I mean it, you’d all better get that straight right now, the next one that makes a funny move I’ll shoot his face off. Okay-one of you’s the doctor, which one?”

  “Here,” Edwards said.

  “Get out here and tend to the Reverend.”

  “I don’t have my bag. I’ll need-”

  “You’ll need nothing. Get out here.”

  Edwards went to where Reverend Keyes lay inert on the floor, knelt beside him, and examined the bullet-torn hand; it was still bleeding heavily. He used his belt as a tourniquet, his handkerchief to swab the wound.

  Kubion said, “He got a key on him to the church doors?”

  “I don’t know,” Edwards answered woodenly.

  “Well look through his pockets and find out!”

  Edwards probed quickly, gently, through the minister’s dark-gray suit and discovered a ring of keys. He held them up. Kubion made a tossing motion, and Edwards flipped the key ring underhand, as carefully as he would have thrown a ball to a three-year-old child. Making the catch with his left hand, Kubion turned and pulled the entrance doors nearly closed. He probed at the latch on one with three of the keys, found one that fitted, and then dropped the ring into the pocket of his coat. He faced the congregation again.

  “Couple of you pick the Reverend up and put him on one of the benches.”

  Coopersmith came forward, and Harry Chilton stepped out. With Edwards’ help, they lifted Keyes gently and laid him supine in the nearest pew.

  “The rest of you men-shut those women and kids up,” Kubion said. “I want it quiet in, here, I want every one of you to hear what I’m going to say, and I don’t want to have to say it more than once, you got that?”

  While husbands and parents did what they had been ordered to do, Coopersmith retreated a few steps and glanced over his shoulder to where Ellen was sitting; she was motionless, hands pressed against her white cheeks, her eyes round and glistening wet with tears. He saw Ann Tribucci sitting near Ellen, one arm wrapped in an unconsciously-or perhaps consciously-protective way around the huge convexity that was her unborn child, her other hand holding tightly to one of her husband’s. John Tribucci’s face, unlike most of the others, was as stiff and empty of expression as a store mannequin’s.

  Kubion said as the congregation quieted, “That’s better. Here it is, then, plain and simple: we’re here because we’re taking over the valley and everybody in it and once we’ve got complete control we’re going to loot it, building by building. Money and expensive jewelry, that’s all we’re interested in, and if you people cooperate that’s all we’ll take, nobody else will get hurt.”

  He paused to let the concept sink in fully. Then: “All right, now some details. When I’m done talking one of us will come around with a sack and you put your wallets and purses into it and anything else you’ve got in your pockets, don’t hold anything out, turn y
our pockets. After that’s done we’ll want a list of names of everybody who lives in the valley that’s not here right now, I mean everybody, because we’re going to go round them up one by one after we leave here and if we find anybody whose name isn’t on the list he’s dead. You can forget about the Markhams and the Donnellys and Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler; we’ve-”

  Agnes Tyler’s shrill, near hysterical voice cried, “Peggy? Peggy? Oh my God I should have known something was wrong, I should have known that telephone call last night was a lie!” She was standing, one hand clutching her breast, eyes like a pair of too-ripe grapes pressed into a lump of gray dough. “You’ve hurt her, you’ve hurt my daughter….”

  Kubion looked at her and said, “Somebody shut that bitch the hell up.”

  Beside her, Verne Mullins took hold of her shoulders and eased her down again. Agnes buried her face in her hands and began moaning softly. Coopersmith said in a carefully expressionless voice, “What do you mean we can forget about those people? What have you done to them?”

  Kubion’s gaze shifted to him. “Nothing to any of them, old man-except Hughes. We’ll bring them in later.”

  “Except Hughes?”

  “He’s dead,” Kubion said, and the smile transformed on his mouth and made it look like an open wound. His voice was savage with impatience. “I killed him last night and he’s dead, you’ll all be dead you stupid hicks unless you shut up and listen to me and do what I say I don’t want any more questions I don’t want any more crap you understand me!”

  The aura of horror had reached the point of tangibility now: it could be felt, it could be tasted, it lay like a pall of invisible mist inside the church. No one moved, no one made a sound; even the children and Agnes Tyler were silent. The Reverend Mr. Keyes shot in his own church, the valley about to be taken over and looted, Matt Hughes-their mayor, their friend, their benefactor-inexplicably murdered, all their lives suddenly in the hands of three armed men and one of whom was nothing less than a psychotic: they were literally petrified with fear.

  Coopersmith swallowed against the rage and revulsion which burned in his throat, struggling to maintain calm and a clear head, and looked at each of the other two men, the ones with the rifles. Neither of them had made a single motion since their entrance; they were like wooden sentinels. But there was sanity in their faces, and the big heavy one was sweating copiously, and the fair-haired one, despite a guarded, stoic expression, appeared to be tensely uneasy as well. Why were they a part of this? he thought.

  Merciful God, why any of this?

  Kubion was smiling again, and when he spoke his voice was once more controlled, matter-of-fact. “Now like I said, once we have the list of names two of us will go round up the other people and bring them back here, and when everybody is in the church we go to work on the buildings-just two of us, the other one will be out front with a rifle, watching. We figure it’ll take us most of today to get the job done, but when we’re finished we might not be leaving right away, we might stay one day or two or even three before we go, and the way we’ll go is on snowmobiles so don’t get the idea we’re trapped in the valley until the pass is open. But you’ll wait until it’s cleared, you’ll stay in here until the day after Christmas. We’ll bring in some food later and some water and you’ll be nice and comfortable as long as you don’t try any stupid tricks. The important thing for you to remember is that you won’t know when we’ll be leaving, you won’t know when we’re gone, and if you try to break down the front doors or knock out a window before the day after Christmas and we’re still here, we’ll kill everybody we see. Clear? All of that clear?

  Figures in stone.

  Kubion said, “Good, we’re going to get along fine now; you keep on sitting there like you are now and we’re going to get along just fine.” He looked at the heavy, dull-faced rifleman and made a gesture with his free hand. Loxner came over and put the weapon down against the wall, moving mechanically, using his left arm as if it were stiff and sore; then he took a folded flour sack from under his coat and walked up the center aisle. Coopersmith watched him as he passed down to the end of the right front pew; his damp face contained what might have been a kind of masked fear of his own.

  When Coopersmith faced front again, he saw that the fair-haired rifleman had also set his weapon against the wall and had produced a pencil and a pad of paper. Kubion said, “Names now, everybody not here and where they live in the village.” His eyes rested on Coopersmith. “You, old man, start it off. Who’s not here?”

  Coopersmith hesitated. Then, because there was nothing else he could do, he began in a leaden voice to recite. And all the while he was talking the same cold, voracious thought kept running through his mind: I wish I had my gun now because I would kill you, I think God forgive me I would kill you right where you stand, right here in church, and sleep tonight with a clear conscience…

  Two

  When Brodie and Loxner had preceded him out of the church and gone halfway along the front walk-holding the rifle barrels down against their legs as he had instructed them to do-Kubion stepped out and shut the doors and locked them. His watch said that it was one fifteen. Very good: fifty-five minutes, five minutes less than he had anticipated. You couldn’t do much better than that, bet your ass you couldn’t.

  He went down the steps and followed Loxner and Brodie to where his car was parked eastward of six others in the fronting lot; the automatic rested in his coat pocket now, his hand lightly gripping the butt. Sierra Street was still deserted, he saw with satisfaction, and there was no sign of activity anywhere else in the village. It had begun to snow thinly from a silky gray sky, but the drifting clouds to the west were black-bordered and pregnant; it would snow much more heavily before long.

  Brodie and Loxner stopped beside the car, and Kubion halted ten feet away. “You see?” he said to them. “Easy, easy, no sweat at all.”

  “Why did you shoot the Reverend?” Brodie asked tautly. “You didn’t have to do any shooting in there; it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Don’t tell me what was necessary and what wasn’t, I know exactly what I’m doing. You got religion now, maybe?”

  Brodie said nothing more. His fingers caressed the stock of the rifle, one of the three taken from the Markham and Donnelly houses; but it, like the one Loxner carried, was empty. Empty! Kubion laughed out loud. They had done the church scene with just his automatic, one loaded gun was going to take over the entire valley, and that was funny when you thought about it, that was a real gutbuster when you thought about it.

  For a while yesterday he’d considered wasting Brodie and Loxner and ripping off the valley all by himself. The idea of that appealed to him all right, but he’d finally decided against it. Hicks would be more afraid of three men with guns than one man with a gun, the old psychological advantage-that was one thing; another was that he might need some help in rounding up the rest of the hicks, maybe in other areas too; a third, and this had been the main deciding point, was that he liked the idea of keeping the two of them alive as long as he felt like it, playing with them a little, hamstringing them, using them to prolong the score because the longer it lasted, the sweeter it would be. And there wasn’t a shred of doubt that he could handle the two of them-stupid gutless Loxner and culinary fairy Brodie; he could handle anybody and anything, he was like ten feet tall and nobody could touch him with all the power he possessed, the power that had been there all the time if only he’d recognized it for what it was and let it come free.

  What it was, this new outlook of his, was like being on a perpetual grass high: you saw everything crystal clear, inside yourself and outside yourself, and you didn’t worry about shit like headaches and spiders (they’d never come back again; he’d killed every last one of them), and you didn’t worry about violence either. If you had to do something violent, why then you just did it and it was all right; in fact it gave you a kind of release, it made you feel loose again like you felt after you’d popped your cork into one of those
big-assed black chicks. So when the impulse came over him, the way it had last night when he’d found Hughes and the blond bitch together, he’d just let it tell him what to do and then followed orders. It had come on again in the church, just a little, but it told him not to kill the Reverend because that might have led to hysteria and the hicks had to be kept docile until the ripoff was completed, so he’d put one through that preacher man’s hand. When it came on again, and sooner or later it would, it’d tell him just the right time to waste Brodie and Loxner and he’d do that; and maybe it would tell him to waste all the hicks too and he’d do that, a bunch of Eskimos like that were better off dead anyway. Right? Right on.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s get to work. Put the rifles in the back seat. Duff, the flour sack, too.”

  Brodie opened the rear door, and they tossed the weapons inside. Loxner laid the sackful of wallets and purses and other items on the floor matting, threw the door closed.

  “Now we get those other hicks out of the pickup and into the church,” Kubion told them.

  They moved out silently, went around the south side of the building and along to the rear wall of the minister’s cottage. The battered Ford half-ton belonging to Sid Markham was parked in close to the cottage wall, the glass in its rear window broken out at Kubion’s instructions, its bed draped and tied securely with a heavy tarpaulin.

  At the Donnelly house last night, with Loxner and Brodie under control, Kubion had first considered what to do about the families of Matt Hughes and Peggy Tyler. Go in and take them over too, bring them out to the lake? Too much extra hassle, he’d concluded; he had enough hicks under wraps as it was, and he didn’t want to risk jeopardizing the operation planned for Sunday. Better to use the telephone and make excuses as to why Hughes and the blonde wouldn’t be home that night, didn’t really matter what kind of excuses because nobody was going to figure special trouble with the valley snowbound and they would accept anything that sounded halfway reasonable. He had had Brodie ungag Peggy Tyler; but she’d just sat there like a damned dummy, and slapping her hadn’t done any good. He’d told Brodie to gag her again anyway and then to untie Martin Donnelly. Donnelly hadn’t given any trouble; he had answered all of Kubion’s questions about Hughes and Tyler and their people, and agreed to do and say exactly what he was told. So they took him to the Markham house-Kubion had disabled the Donnelly phone-and he called the blonde’s mother and told her her daughter wouldn’t be home until the next day because Donnelly’s wife and both his kids were sick and he had seen Peggy in the village when he’d gone for the doctor and asked her to spend the night; the mother grumbled a little and finally said okay. Then they telephoned Rebecca Hughes, and Donnelly told her Hughes had come out for a visit and that a tree had fallen across the road in the interim, and Hughes was out with Sid Markham trying to do something about it but they didn’t know if it could be gotten off the road tonight, don’t worry if he doesn’t make it home until tomorrow sometime. She didn’t question the explanation. And that took care of that.