Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Coopersmith said, “Don’t you think all of that’s been preying on my mind, same as yours? But what can we do, Johnny, trapped like we are?”

  “There’s one thing we can do,” Tribucci said, “one thing he overlooked: a way out of here.”

  “What? What way?”

  “Through the belfry up there. Go up the ladder and break out one of the windows; then cut the bell rope-I managed to hold out my penknife when they were collecting our belongings-and tie the rope around a bell support and climb out and down the rear wall.”

  “And you’re thinking of going after help, is that it? Johnny, even if you could get away from the church without being seen, how would you get out of the valley? Snowmobile, the way they’re planning to? What are the odds of you reaching one undetected? Of getting it out of the village undetected? Of making it clear to Coldville in the middle of a stormy night with the temperature at zero or below? And suppose you did manage all that-the county couldn’t get men back here before morning, except by helicopter, and if the storm holds, a chopper wouldn’t be able to get off the ground at all.”

  “Lew, listen to me-”

  “Suppose you didn’t make it out of the village in the first place? Or suppose you did and the psycho discovered one of the mobiles missing? What do you think he’d do then?”

  With deceptive calm Tribucci said, “I’m not talking about trying to go for help, Lew.”

  Nothing from Coopersmith.

  “That was the first thing I thought of when I remembered the belfry,” Tribucci said, “and I rejected the idea for the same reasons you just gave. The idea I didn’t reject involves me and one or two others, and we don’t leave the valley once we get out of here.”

  Cain, listening, knew all at once what Tribucci was getting at; he realized he was breathing heavily, if silently, through parted lips.

  Coopersmith-knew it too, now. He said, “Go after weapons and try to take them head to head.”

  “That’s it, Lew.”

  “You realize what that would mean?”

  “It’s kill or be killed, and you can’t argue with that morally or otherwise-not with all the lives at stake. I’m not a killer, any more than an eighteen-year-old soldier forced to fight in an alien jungle is a killer, but I can do what that kid has to do for some of the same reasons and for some that are a lot better.”

  “Maybe you can,” Coopersmith said. “And I can too, because I’ve spent my life in the kind of job that requires a man to be ready to kill other men if he has to; but I’m sixty-six years old, I’m an old man-it’s taken me a long time to admit that to myself but I’m admitting it now; I’m an old man with slow reflexes and brittle bones and if I tried climbing out of the belfry I’d probably break a leg, if not my neck. Who else is there, Johnny? Vince, maybe, only I don’t have to tell you how poor his eyesight is. Joe Garvey? He’s been hurt already, and while he’s got the courage, he hasn’t got the caution or the patience; he’d be a bull in a china shop. Martin Donnelly? He can’t kill a fly without flinching. Dave Nedlick? Greg Novak? Walt Halliday? Doc Edwards? There’s nobody but you and me, and that means there’s nobody but you.”

  “Then I’ll go alone.”

  “Against three professional hard cases, against a madman? What chance do you think you’d really have?”

  “A better chance than we’ve got sitting in here waiting to be slaughtered.” Thick, desperate rage surrounded Tribucci’s words. “I’ve got to try it, Lew, don’t you see that? Somebody has to do something, and that somebody is me.”

  “What about all the others? Some of them-McNeil, for instance-would vote to do nothing, wait it out, take the psycho’s word. Have you got the right to make a decision for seventy-five people? Because if you do go, you’re going to have to do it without telling anybody else; you’re going to have to make that decision.”

  “You know the answer to that as well as I do, Lew: if my going can mean saving the lives of everyone in the valley-my family’s lives-then yes, yes, I’ve got the right…”

  Cain had heard enough. He moved away from the altar and stopped by the organ. Tribucci’s right, he thought, one look at that dark one’s eyes is enough to tell anybody he’s right; it has to be done, one way or another. Anger stirred inside him again, began to burn with increasing candescence. His eyes wandered the oppressively silent room, located Rebecca Hughes again, rested on her bloodless face-and she reminded him of Angie; she did not resemble Angie in any way, but she might have been Angie. The children, too, the huddling children were little boys who might have been Steve and little girls who might have been Lindy. And what if it was them sitting out there? What if they were alive and they were here now, the way Tribucci’s family was here now?

  Sweat formed a thin beaded mosaic on Cain’s forehead, trickled down along his cheeks. No, he thought then. No, no.

  Yes, the other half of him said.

  No I’d freeze up, I’d panic, I’d We’d do what has to be done.

  Before he quite realized what he was doing, he had turned and taken two steps in the direction of the vestry door. And when his foot lifted for the third step, the back of his neck prickled and a tingling sensation washed down through his groin. His mind opened, like a blossom, in epiphany.

  Forward, he thought, walking forward. I’ve been walking backward for six months, and I’ve just taken my first forward steps in all that time.

  Yes! the other half of him said again, and the two halves remerged spiritually at last and made a bonded whole. Without hesitation, he kept on walking forward.

  Nine

  Tribucci and Coopersmith, still debating in low, taut voices, lapsed into immediate silence when Zachary Cain came into the vestry. He stood in front of them, arms slack at his sides, bearded face and gray eyes animate with not quite definable emotions.

  He said, “Can I talk to both of you for a minute?”

  Tribucci frowned, the cords in his neck bulging like elongated ribs. Coopersmith had to be on his side, to handle things here in the church once he set out on the recon, to help him plan out a course of action, and he was close to convincing the old man now; Cain’s surprising instrusion — the man had never spoken directly to anyone, except to make a purchase, in all the time he’d been in the valley — could not have been more ill-timed.

  And Cain said to him, “I overheard you talking a couple of minutes ago-about the belfry, about what you want to try to do. No one else heard it; I was alone by the altar.”

  Tribucci exchanged a quick look with Coopersmith. He said then, “Well?”

  Cain held a breath, released it slowly. “I want to go with you.”

  They stared at him-and a kind of low-key electrical tension developed among the three men. None of them moved for a long moment.

  “I mean it,” Cain said finally. “I want to go with you.”

  Unlike some of his neighbors, Tribucci had never resented or disliked or mistrusted Cain; although he was an odd sort in a lot of ways, there had always seemed to be a gentleness and a basic decency beneath his eccentric taciturnity. But now he was immediately suspicious. How could Cain possibly care enough about the people of Hidden Valley to want to risk his life for them? Did he have some idea of pretending to join forces just so he could get out of the church and save himself? And yet-that didn’t make sense either. If he wanted to escape in order to run away, coming to them as he had just done was pointless; all he would have had to do, now that he knew about the belfry, was to wait until he, Tribucci, was gone and then sneak in here and leave in the same fashion…

  Coopersmith, studying Cain probingly, said, “Why? Why do you want to go?”

  “Because I think Tribucci’s right, I think that madman wouldn’t hesitate to commit mass butchery, I think the only alternative is to go after him and the other two. Tribucci might be able to pull it off alone, but his chances are twice as good if there are two of us.”

  “That doesn’t exactly explain why you’re volunteering.”

  “Y
ou said it yourself: there isn’t anybody else.”

  “Not what I meant. Look Cain, we don’t know a thing about you. Since you came to the valley, you’ve taken pains to keep to yourself. I respect a man’s right to live his life the way he sees fit, as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody else, but in a crisis like this, where the lives of so many people are in jeopardy, we’ve got to know you before we can put any trust in you.”

  “That’s right,” Tribucci agreed grimly. “Who are you, Cain? Why do you want to put your life on the line for people you hardly know, people you’ve shunned?”

  A long, still hesitation. Then, staring at the wall to one side of them, Cain said very softly, “The reason I came to Hidden Valley, the reason I’ve lived here as I have, is that I was responsible for the deaths of my wife and two children this past June.”

  Tribucci winced faintly; Coopersmith’s hand lifted, as if to rumple his dusty hair, and then fell across and down his shirt front. But there was nothing for either of them to say just yet.

  Still talking to the wall, Cain went on, “I was one of these do-it-yourself people, don’t waste money on plumbers and electricians and repairmen when I could take care of what needed to be done with my own hands and enjoyed the work besides. We had a fairly old house with a fairly new gas stove in the kitchen, and it developed a minor gas leak and I fixed it one night-thought I’d fixed it okay, there didn’t seem to be any more problems. The following Saturday I went bowling in a tournament, and when I got home there were… there…”

  His voice had grown heavy and liquid, and he broke off and swallowed audibly. When he was able to go on with it: “I came back and there were fire trucks and police cars and an ambulance and a hundred or more people on the street, and the house… it was burning, there had been an explosion, one wall was blown out. My wife and son and daughter were… they were inside when it happened and there was nothing anyone could do, they never even knew what hit them, and their bodies… I saw their bodies…”

  A shudder went through him; he shook his head a single time as though to erase the mental picture of that scene. “When I’d fixed the stove leak,” he said, “I unknowingly twisted or bent the gas line fitting at the baseboard somehow and caused another leak, one of those slow ones that you can’t smell because it all builds in the walls; that was the official verdict, and that’s the way it had to have been. It was my fault, my carelessness, that caused the deaths of the only three people in the world I loved. I didn’t want to go on living either, not then. Committing suicide was… impossible, and yet I thought staying in San Francisco was impossible, too. So I quit my job, I’m an architect, and made arrangements with our bank to send me a small allotment every month-we’d saved more than twenty thousand dollars toward a new home-and I came here because it was a place I knew, I’d done some fishing and hunting in this area.

  “For six months I’ve been in a kind of coma, drinking too much to numb the pain and guilt, never really numbing it at all. I didn’t care about anything, I didn’t want contact with you people, I thought I could exist in that coma forever because I thought it was what I wanted. But it wasn’t and it isn’t, I’ve come to realize that now; I’m lonely, I’m terribly lonely, I need to start living again. If I go out there to face those men, I might die, but if I do nothing in here I might die too; and if I’m killed out there, it will be in a cause worth dying for. I want you people to live too, caring for myself has made me start caring for others again and I don’t want to see women and children die as helplessly as my family died. There was nothing I could do to save them, but maybe I can help to save your wives and your children. That’s why I want to go, that’s why I need to go….”

  Cain fell silent but continued to stare unseeingly at the wall. Tribucci moved his head slightly and once more looked at Coopersmith.

  Do you believe him? Coopersmith’s eyes asked.

  I believe him, Tribucci’s eyes answered, and Coopersmith dipped his head almost imperceptibly. They had just witnessed the laying bare of a man’s heart and soul, and the sincerity of his confession was to both of them unquestionable.

  Turning, Cain met their gazes again. “I’ve been in the Army,” he said, “so I know the principles of seek-and-destroy and I know how to use a handgun. I’m not in the best of shape, but I think I can climb down a rope all right. I’m also afraid, I can’t lie to you about that, but I’m as sure now as any man can be without having been tested that when the time comes, I’ll be able to stand my ground and pull the trigger on any of those three men.”

  Tribucci believed him about that, too. All doubt had vanished now; his instincts told him what type of man Cain was, and he had always implicitly trusted his instincts. The two of them, he thought insightfully, were of the same basic nature: they felt things deeply, they loved and hated deeply, and when a crisis arose they could not be passive or indecisive, they were compelled to act. And these character traits, for better or worse, were of course the reason why (he understood this for the first time) he had taken on the two cyclists thirteen years ago. If Cain had been with Charlene that night on the beach, he might have done the same thing; and if Tribucci had lost his family as Cain had lost his, he might have reacted in much the same fashion as Cain-when it happened and right now.

  “Do I go with you?” Cain asked him.

  Tribucci had made his decision. “Yes,” he said simply. And then pivoted to Coopersmith.

  Eyes steady and penetrating, features set in hard, perceptive lines, the old man was not old at all; except for the flesh-and-bone shell in which the essence of him was trapped, he was young and strong and sagacious. But it was that shell which meant so much now, that shell which prevented him from leading the kind of assault he had been trained for, that shell which had forced him into an admission a few minutes ago that his pride and his spirit had never previously allowed. But he was not old; he had never been old, and he would never be old.

  “All right,” he said, as Tribucci had known he would, “I’m in it anyway, so I might as well be in it all the way. With both of you.”

  Cain said, “When do we go?”

  “As soon as possible. But there’s some talking out to be done first. You don’t rush into a situation like this without planning strategy; too many things can go wrong as it is. First consideration is the two of you getting out of the belfry and away without being spotted.”

  “Well if there’s still a guard,” Tribucci said, “it figures he’ll be in front in one of the cars. With the storm that’s up and howling out there, he’s not going to be walking around. And the storm itself is all in our favor; it’ll cover any noise we make breaking out the belfry window, fill in our tracks before too long, keep visibility down to a minimum.”

  “It’s not going to cover the sound of breaking glass here in the church.”

  “There’s the organ,” Cain said. “If you could get somebody to play a few hymns, the music should be loud enough to drown splintering glass.”

  “Okay-good. I’ll talk to Maude, and if she won’t do it, Ellen will. I’ll try to get as many people singing as I can, too; that’ll keep them all together out front, so no one wanders in here at the wrong time.”

  Tribucci said, “Second consideration is weapons. We can’t take the chance of going to the Sport Shop, but we can circle through the trees on the west slope, to the houses along Shasta. Joe Garvey’s got a Walther automatic that he brought back from Europe a few years ago and uses for hunting small game. And Vince keeps a pair of target revolvers.”

  “That leaves the big question,” Cain said. “How do we deploy once we’re armed?”

  “Only one way to handle it,” Coopersmith told them. “Come back here, so you’re in a position to protect the church; don’t try to do any stalking, that’d be like playing Russian roulette. If there’s a guard, take him first-as quietly as possible, maybe with a knife if you can get close enough to do it that way.” He studied the impassive faces of the two younger men. “Shooting a man is one thing
, stabbing him with a knife is another-you know that, don’t you?”

  “We know it,” Tribucci said thinly.

  “All right. Next thing you do is set up in ambush and wait, and keep on waiting no matter how long it takes. But not both of you in the same place, and I don’t have to tell you the reason for that. You’ll have to figure your exact positions once you get to that point.”

  Cain nodded, and Tribucci said, “Agreed on all of it. Anything else?”

  “One thought,” Cain said. “If we’re going to be waiting in that snowstorm, we’d better put on hats and mufflers and as much extra clothing as we can handle while we’re at Garvey’s place.”

  “Right.” Tribucci’s mouth quirked. “Lew-Ann and Vince are going to miss me pretty fast, even if nobody else does. I’d tell them beforehand, but I’m afraid there’d be a scene…”

  “There’s liable to be a scene anyway, sooner or later, but that’s my problem; I’ll tell them once you’re gone. You just leave this end of things to me; you’re going to have enough to worry about outside.”

  Tribucci exhaled heavily through his nostrils, looked down at his watch. “Five oh five. It’s dark now, but it’ll be darker still in another half hour. Go at five thirty-five?”