Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

Startled, they broke apart, and Charlene fumbled for her clothing and made the mistake of standing up to put it on. The moonlight had been bright, and as clearly as he could see the cycles approaching, the two riders could see him and Charlene and Charlene’s nakedness. The bikes swerved toward them. He had an instant premonition of danger; he grabbed her arm, tried to pull her away in a run toward the bluff path. But the cycles swung in hard turns, cut them off, forced them back to the overhang.

He saw, as the bikes pulled up in front of them and stopped, that the two riders were young, in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black metal-studded denim and heavy boots, one bearded, the other wearing a gold hoop earring. Charlene was crying, terrified; she had most of her clothing on again, but it was much too late-he knew it had been too late from the moment they’d been seen. He tried to talk to the two cyclists, and it was useless; they were either very drunk or flying on drugs. The bearded one told him to move away from Charlene, and he said no, he wasn’t going to do that, and the one wearing the earring dropped a hand to his boot and came up with a long, thin-bladed knife.

“Move now, boyfriend,” the bearded one said, “or both of you going to get cut. And we don’t want to cut nobody, really.”

Charlene screamed, clinging to him. The bearded one grabbed her wrist, spun her to him and held her. Instinctively he started to move to help her, but the knife jabbed forward, darting, pushing him back against the dirt and rock of the bluff. Charlene’s cries then were near hysterical.

“Soggy seconds for you, man,” the bearded one said to the other. “Watch boyfriend here until I’m done.” And turned to Charlene and slapped her several times and pulled her over to the blanket and threw her down on it; tore her clothes off again, dragged his own trousers down. She kept on shrieking, and he kept on hitting her, trying to force her legs apart to get himself inside her. The one with the knife divided his attention between them and Tribucci, giggling softly.

He stood it as long as he could, held at bay by the knife and by fear. And then he simply forgot about the knife and forgot about being afraid and waited until the earringed one’s attention had drifted once more to the struggle on the blanket, pushed out from the bluff at that moment, and kicked him between the legs with all his strength. The earringed man screamed louder than Charlene, dropped the knife, and bent over double. He kicked him in the face, kicked him in the head once he was down, turned. The bearded one had released Charlene and was trying to stand, trying to pull his pants up from around his ankles. He ran toward him, shouting, “Run, Charlene, run!” and saw her fleeing half-naked toward the path, and reached the bearded one and kicked him three times in the head and upper body and then threw himself on top of the man and hit him with his fists, rolled his face in the sand, hit him and hit him and hit him and hit him And stopped suddenly, because he had become aware of the man’s blood spattered warm over his hand and forearm. He struggled to his feet, gasping. The bearded cyclist did not move. He turned to look at the other one: not moving either. One or both of them might have been dead, but he did not care one way or the other then; he just did not care. He walked to where the surf frothed whitely over the sand, knelt and washed the blood off himself; then he found his shirt, put it on, and went slowly up the path to the road. Charlene and the car were gone. He walked along the road for a mile or so to where three teen-agers in a raked station wagon responded to his outthrust thumb and gave him a lift down the coast to Fort Ord. He had been very calm the entire time; reaction did not set in until he was in bed in his barracks.

When it did, he could not seem to stop trembling. He lay there the entire night trembling and thinking about what had happened on the beach and asking himself over and over why he had done what he had. He was not heroic or even particularly brave. He had no strong feelings for Charlene. The two riders very likely had had rape and nothing else on their minds. Why, then? Why?

He had had no answer that night, and he had none thirteen years later; he had done it, and that was all.

The next morning he had called Charlene, and she’d asked him briefly if he was all right and how he’d got away and for God’s sake he hadn’t called the police, had he? Because she didn’t want to get involved; if the police came around to her house, her father would-throw her out on the street. She did not thank him, and she did not tell him she was sorry for having left him maybe hurt or dying, for not having summoned help. He hadn’t seen her or spoken to her again.

For a week he combed every local newspaper he could find, and there was no mention of anyone answering the description of the cyclists having been found dead on the beach or anywhere else near Santa Cruz. So he hadn’t killed one or both of them, and that knowledge had taken away some of the haunting immediacy of the incident and he had been able to begin to forget; he’d told no one-not Ann, not Vince, not his parents-about that night, and he never would…

“… Johnny, what is it? What’s come over you?”

Ann had gotten up and crossed to stand beside him, and she was tugging at the sleeve of his shirt. Tribucci blinked and pivoted to her, saw the concern in her eyes-and the dark recollection faded immediately. He smiled and kissed her. “Nothing,” he said, “just one of those brooding spells a man gets from time to time. It’s finished with, now.”

“Well, I hope so.”

He put his arm around her and walked her back to the sofa. “I didn’t mean to upset you, honey; I’m sorry, I won’t let it happen again.”

“You had the oddest look on your face,” she said. “What could you possibly have begun brooding about when we-”

And the door to the adjoining family room opened, and Vince appeared, sparing him. Heavier and three years older, Vince wore thick glasses owing to a mild case of myopic astigmatism and was just beginning to lose his hair; for the past hour he and his wife, Judy, had been watching television, or what passed for television on a winter night in the Sierra.

“Just saw an early weathercast from Sacramento,” he said. “There’s a heavy stormfront moving in from the west, coming right at us. We’ll likely be hit with one and maybe two blizzards this week.”

“Oh fine,” Tribucci said. “Great. A few more heavy storms without a long letup, and we’ll sure as hell have slides before the end of winter.”

“Yeah, and I’m afraid at least one of them is liable to be major.”

“You two sound like prophets of doom,” Ann said. “Where’s your Christmas spirit? This is supposed to be the jolly season, you know.”

“Ho-ho-ho,” Vince said, and grinned. “You people decide on names for your offspring yet?”

“We sort of like Stephen if it’s a boy.”

“And if it’s a girl?”

Tribucci looked at Ann. “Henrietta Lou,” he said.

She threw a sofa pillow at him.

Earl Kubion had a savage, pulsing headache when Brodie finally brought them into Hidden Valley at twenty minutes past eight.

They had been on the road for more than five hours, fighting snow and ice from the time they reached Grass Valley, forced to stop in Nevada City to put on chains, forced to drive at a reduced speed over the treacherous state and county roads. And even though they hadn’t encountered any roadblocks or spot checks, and the three highway patrol units and two local county cruisers they had seen had paid no attention to them, Kubion sat tense and watchful the entire time, waiting for something that had not happened. Waiting and listening to the monotonous swish of the windshield wipers; listening to the radio newscasts on the robbery: Sacramento police and the highway patrol were making a concentrated search for the three holdup men, one of whom was reportedly wounded in the left arm; the armored car hadn’t been found yet; the one security cop was dead and the woman shoplifter had suffered a nervous breakdown; citizens warned to be on the lookout-the same bullshit over and over again. Waiting and smelling the heavy odor of Loxner’s blood from the back seat, nauseating in the warm confines of the car. Waiting and smoking two packs of cigarettes in short, quick inhalations. He felt now as if his nerves were humming like thin wires in a storm, as if he wanted to hit something, hurt somebody; headaches like this affected him the same way each time: making him irrational, poising him on the edge of pointless violence.