Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Later, past midnight, the three of them had driven into the village, and at Kubion’s direction Brodie had climbed one of the utility poles beyond Alpine Street and cut the telephone lines. The remainder of the night was spent in the kitchen of the Donnelly house, going over details and then just sitting there and waiting: each of them wide awake and watchful, Kubion not even tired because he had slept most of Saturday morning in preparation for the all-night vigil. After a late, cold breakfast, which Kubion had eaten with relish and Brodie and Loxner had barely touched, they’d loaded the seven captives into the pickup; then, at exactly noon, they had come into the village again-Brodie driving the half-ton, Loxner driving Kubion’s car and Kubion in the back. The streets had been completely empty when they reached All Faiths Church. Brodie had pulled the pickup around here to the blind side of the cottage, and Loxner had parked the car in the lot, and then they had met at the steps to begin the take-over.

  Now Kubion stood to one side while Brodie and Loxner started untying the tarpaulin. When they had it off he could see the seven people lyingjust as they had been placed earlier, shivering with cold, their bloodless faces like those in the church: masks of crippling fear. He smiled across at them.

  Loxner dropped the tailgate, and he and Brodie dragged the seven from the bed and put them on the snow-covered ground. Kubion took out his heavy, thick-bladed pocketknife and tossed it to Loxner, told him to cut the clothesline bonds and remove the gags. He said when that had been done, “Close it up and toss it back, nice and careful,” and Loxner obeyed instantly.

  Sid Markham and Martin Donnelly rubbed circulation into their stiffened limbs and then moved to help the women and children; no one looked at Kubion. The little Donnelly girl began to cry, and her mother held her tightly, crooning into her hair. Peggy Tyler sat slump-bodied in the snow, lips moving in a soundless monologue, eyes wide and glistening like bright wet agates. Markham could not seem to get her on her feet, and Kubion finally had Brodie do it-stupid little bitch.

  Once all of them were up and walking, he made a motion with his left hand. Brodie and Loxner prodded them down and around to the front entrance, where they stopped and huddled together in a knot. Kubion went up and unlocked the doors, calling out, “Stand back in there, you’ve got company.” Then he looked at the seven hicks-and they mounted the stairs with the resigned, mechanical movements of condemned prisoners climbing a gallows.

  Kubion relocked the doors after them, returned the ring of keys to his coat pocket; he could hear but did not pay any attention to voices rumbling within, the thin, sharp cry of a woman. He came down off the steps and told Brodie and Loxner to move over to the car.

  When they reached it, he said, “Duff, you’ll stay here and start emptying out that sack so we can see what we’ve got to start with. Vic and I will go after the rest of the hicks. And Duff-if you’re gone any of the times we come back, I’ll kill Vic first thing and then I’ll go inside the church and shoot five of the women. You understand me?”

  Loxner looked at a point several feet to the right of Kubion. “Yeah. Yeah, I understand.”

  “Give me the car keys.”

  As carefully as Edwards had tossed the keys inside the church, Loxner threw him the leather case containing the car keys; then he opened the door and slid into the front seat. He sat there with his hands splay-fingered on his thighs, staring through the snow-dappled windshield. Kubion said to Brodie, “Put that list of names and addresses on the roof, Vic, and then back off fifteen or twenty steps and keep still like a good boy.”

  Brodie did as he was told. Kubion lifted the pad, took out the tourist brochure that had the village map on it, and alternately looked at those items and at Brodie standing well out away from the car. Nineteen names, ten houses, maybe seven trips in all; start with the places nearest the church and move outward until he had them all. He picked out their first three stops, tucked the list into his coat, paused, and then called to Brodie, “Okay, Vic, move out, around to the pickup again.”

  Once Brodie had pivoted, Kubion told Loxner, “Get to work on that sack, Duff, take it out of the back and get to work-come on. ”

  A moment later he slammed the car door, thinking, Now then, now then, and hurried, glitter-eyed, after Brodie’s retreating back.

  Three

  Frank McNeil was on his hands and knees in front of his old Magnavox radio-and-record player console, fiddling with the radio dials in an effort to tune in the AFL pro football play-off game, when the doorbell began ringing insistently. He looked up in irritation. “Now who goddamn it is that?”

  His son, sitting on the living-room sofa, said, “You want me to answer it, Pa?”

  “Well what do you think, dummy?”

  Larry stood up and went out into the hallway. McNeil heard voices at the front door and paid them no mind. Damn these mountains sometimes; you could seldom get a decent picture on television even in the best of weather, and today the damned radio was too badly static-ridden to be intelligible. If he could at least…

  Footsteps in the hallway, and Larry’s voice-high-pitched, frightened: “Pa? Pa?”

  McNeil looked up again and saw the two men standing on either side of the youth; one of them was familiar, the other a complete stranger. And then he became aware of the gun in the hand of the dark familiar one, and his irritation dissolved into disbelief. He jerked awkwardly to his feet, flutter-eyed and gape-mouthed.

  “No problems if you keep your cool,” Kubion told him, “no problems at all.”

  McNeil continued to blink at him, almost spastically now. With impossible suddenness there was death in the room, his death-he could feel it, he could see it staring at him from the eyes of the dark one with the gun-and he began to shake his head, as if by doing that he could make the men and the gun and the stultifying presence of death vanish.

  Kubion said, “Who else is here in the house?”

  McNeil kept on shaking his head. His mouth and jaws worked soundlessly, as if in exaggerated pantomime of a man chewing gum; he was incapable of speech.

  Larry said, “My mother… just my mother.”

  “Where?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “Call her in here.”

  “You… listen, you won’t hurt her?”

  “Now why would I hurt your old lady, get her in here.”

  “Ma,” Larry called; then, louder: “Ma!”

  “What is it?” a woman’s voice answered.

  “Come into the living room.”

  “Who was that at the door?”

  “Ma, come in here, will you!”

  Sandy McNeil-a dark-haired, soft-featured, harassed-looking woman wearing an apron over a faded housedress — appeared in the doorway. “What-” she began, and then stopped speaking and stopped walking as she saw the men, the gun Kubion held. Her eyes grew very round, and the intake of her breath was loudly sibilant, like the hiss of valvebled steam. The dishtowel she had been holding slipped loose and fell unnoticed to the floor.

  Larry went to her and put a protective arm around her shoulders, partially shielding her body with his own. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “What do you want with us?”

  Kubion said, “We’re going to take you to a party.”

  “Party?” Sandy McNeil said blankly.

  “At the church. A little party at the church.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand. ”

  “You don’t have to understand. You just do what I tell you. Let’s go.”

  Larry guided his mother toward the hallway. But McNeil stood frozen in front of the console, eyes glazed with terror; he couldn’t move, he could not make himself move.

  Kubion looked at him, and then stepped quickly forward and cupped a hand around the back of McNeil’s neck and sent him reeling across the room. McNeil made a strangled, bleating sound, caught his balance, and groped sightlessly into the hall-pushing his wife and son out of the way as if they were bundles of sticks. His face was t
he wet dirty color of slush.

  A small stain began to spread on the front of his trousers, and Kubion laughed when he saw it. “Well, if you aren’t a pisser,” he said. “If you aren’t a real pisser.” He kept on laughing all the way out to the pickup waiting in the side drive.

  Somebody began pounding on the downstairs lobby door just as Walt Halliday and his wife finished making love.

  “Oh for goodness sake,” Lil Halliday said drowsily. She was a thick-bodied woman with butter-yellow hair and a pleasantly homely face. Lying naked on the rumpled double bed, her husband’s balding head pillowed comfortably on her heavy breasts, she looked younger than her forty-two years.

  Halliday raised his head and listened to the pounding — louder now, demanding-and finally sat up in annoyance. His nose began to run, and he reached one of the Kleenex off the nightstand and blew into it. He had awakened that morning with a sore throat and the runny nose and a slight fever and knew he was coming down with the flu; instead of getting up and dressing for church, as he might have done, he had decided to stay in bed. Lil, who was not much of a churchgoer and went only when he did-fifteen or twenty Sundays in any year, most of those during the quiet off-season months-had brought him a tray breakfast and had then come back to bed with him. They had dozed for a while, talked for a while, been leisurely in their lovemaking: a good Sunday, a fine Sunday. Until that damned persistent pounding on the door.

  Standing, Halliday put on his glasses and pajamas and robe and slid his feet into ankle slippers. “Whoever that is,” he said, “is going to get a piece of my mind. There’s no need to beat on the door like that.”

  “I’m just glad they didn’t start that racket about five minutes ago,” Lil said.

  “That’s something, anyway,” Halliday agreed.

  He went to the door and glanced back at his wife, and she was still lying there uncovered; she knew he liked to look at her that way. He gave her a broad wink and left their apartment, which was on the first floor of the inn, at the head of the stairs, and started down to the lobby. He shouted, “I’m coming, stop that hammering!” but the sound continued. It was heavy enough now to rattle the glass in the adjacent window.

  More than a little irritated, Halliday unlocked the door and jerked it open and said, “What’s the idea of-” The rest of the sentence died when he saw the two men and the automatic one of them was pointing at him.

  Kubion said, “Back inside, hurry it up, you kept us waiting too long already.”

  Halliday did what he was told, rapidly, putting his hands up over his head. His mind, all at once, was wrapped in dreamlike confusion. “What do… what do you want?”

  “You’ll find that out soon enough. Nothing will happen to you as long as you do what you’re told. You’ve got a wife-where is she?”

  “Upstairs. She… but she…”

  “Take us to her.”

  “She’s in bed, my wife’s in bed.”

  “So what? Come on, get your ass in gear.”

  Halliday stared at the gun, at the face behind it, and turned instantly to the stairs. As he began to ascend, he could not seem to think of anything except the way Lil had been lying when he’d left her moments ago; and he found himself hoping almost desperately that she had covered herself. Whatever was about to happen, he did not want these two men to see his wife naked…

  Joe Garvey opened his front door, and one of the two men standing on the porch outside showed him a gun and said, “Back off, we’re coming in; do what you’re told and you won’t get hurt.”

  Garvey said incredulously, “What the hell! ” and stayed where he was. The fingers of his right hand still clutched the edge of the door.

  “Inside,” Kubion said. “Move it.”

  “Listen, what is this, you can’t come around my house waving a gun-”

  Kubion kicked the door out of his hand, jarring loose the candle-festooned holly wreath which hung from the outer panel, and crowded forward. But instead of giving ground as he was expected to do, Garvey braced himself in anger and indignation and made a reflexive lunge at the extended automatic. Half turning, pulling the gun in against his body, Kubion blocked the sweeping arm with his shoulder and made a horizontal bar of his left arm and hit the other man across the chest with it. Garvey banged into one of the inside corridor walls, came off it again like a ball bouncing, and Kubion clubbed him full in the face with the barrel of the weapon.

  Bawling with pain, broken nose spraying blood, Garvey staggered into the wall a second time and then went down hard to his knees. Kubion took four more steps into the corridor without breaking momentum and swung around in a crouch and said, “Don’t do it, Vic.”

  Brodie was through the doorway, one arm upraised like a bludgeon, moving in a rush. He brought himself up three feet from the muzzle of Kubion’s gun and dropped his arm and backed away immediately, around the kneeling figure of Joe Garvey. His face, momentarily savage, became blank again; only his eyes maintained their polished amethyst shine.

  Pat Garvey’s voice began calling in querulous alarm from somewhere in the house. “Joe? Joe?”

  “Stupid, Vic,” Kubion said. “Stupid, stupid.”

  Brodie said, “All right, I lost my head.”

  “You’ll lose it permanently if you do something else that’s stupid. I need you to work the rest of the take-over, you’re still in for a third of the take, but I’ll make you a dead lump of shit if you push me. You’d better have that straight now.”

  “Okay,” Brodie said. “Okay.”

  Garvey took his hands away from his face and stared at the blood on them, at the blood dripping from his pulped nose to stain the white front of his shirt. Throbbing pain ringing in his ears, nausea in the back of his throat. What’s happening here? he thought dazedly. I don’t know what’s happening here.

  His wife came running into the corridor, saw the two men, saw the gun, saw Garvey kneeling on the floor with the bright red fluid all over him. One hand came up to her mouth, and she screamed softly. “Joe, oh my God, Joe!” She started toward him.

  Kubion stepped in front of her and caught her arm; she shrank back away from him, struggling vainly to release the grip, her eyes darting from his face to her husband. “He’ll be all right,” Kubion told her, “and so will you if you both keep your mouths shut, I mean shut, you hear?”

  Leave her alone, you filthy son of a bitch! Garvey thought. He tried to put voice to the words, but there was blood in his throat; he began to cough instead.

  The blood and the coughing saved his life.

  Greg Novak wondered where the hell everybody was.

  Sierra Street was deserted all the way up to the slide, and there was no sign of life anywhere else. He hadn’t seen a soul since he’d left his parents’ home on Modoc Street five minutes before.

  For that matter, where were his father and mother? They’d gone to church at a quarter to twelve, and it was three o’clock when he came out of the house for a little fresh air, and they still hadn’t returned. He supposed they’d gone to visit somebody, though they didn’t usually do that on Sundays. Usually they came straight home and his mother fixed a light lunch and then they played canasta. Church and canasta were both a drag, as far as he was concerned. Sometimes he got pressured into both, because it was easier to give in than to start a hassle; but he’d stayed in bed this morning, and for a change his mother hadn’t tried to talk him out. All things considered, his folks were pretty good people, even if they were hung up on religion and canasta.

  So where was everybody, anyway?

  Novak felt as if he were walking in a village that had been abandoned, and the feeling made him oddly uncomfortable. He stopped and turned and looked back down Sierra-and a Ford pickup had swung out of the lane to the north of the church and was coming up toward him. Sid Markham’s pickup. The uneasiness left him, and he stood watching the half-ton approach, waiting for it.

  When it had come close enough so that the two men in the cab were visible through the win
dshield, he realized that neither of them was Sid Markham. He began to frown. The pickup slewed over to him, and the passenger door opened; the guy on that side jumped out with a gun in his hand, vaulted the packed snow at the curbing, and said, “Stand right where you are, kid, don’t move a muscle.”

  Novak did not even breathe.

  Emily Bradford was seventy-five years of age, a thin and frail old woman confined by chronic arthritis either to her bed or to a wheelchair for the past eight years. She lived with her daughter and son-in-law, Sharon and Dave Nedlick: six months in the Macklin Lake hunting lodge which the Nedlicks owned and operated, and six months in the two-story frame house on the corner of Alpine and Modoc streets, where she now lay in her upstairs bedroom.

  Sharon and Dave had left for church just before noon, and Emily had spent the next hour faithfully reading her buckram-bound Bible. She had long ago learned to live with her invalidism, but she was still bothered by the fact that she could no longer attend church. Reading the Bible for the length of a Sunday service compensated somewhat, although it was simply not the same thing and never would be. At one o’clock she had resumed her current crocheting project, waiting for her family to return home.