Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

“I told you I’d look into it,” Coopersmith said. “When I find out who did it, he’ll pay for the lock or he’ll find himself up in front of a county judge.”

“He’ll go straight to jail, I got anything to say.”

Coopersmith pursed his lips. “You want to do it the way I said, or you want to call in a deputy from the substation?”

“Oh, you handle it. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

“Thanks,” Coopersmith said dryly. “You going to open up now?”

“Might as well, I suppose.”

“Well, I’ll walk home then. Exercise’ll do me good.”

“You’ll be asking around right away, won’t you?”

“I will. And if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”

Coopersmith started for the door, and McNeil said abruptly, “Listen, Lew, I just thought of something.”

“What is it?”

“All of us who live in Hidden Valley, we know one another pretty well, and there’s none of us who’d pull a shitty trick like this. But there’s one person we don’t know nothing about. You understand who I’m talking about, Lew?”

“That Cain fella, I reckon.”

“That’s right. Maybe you’d better talk to him right off; maybe he’s the bastard who did this.”

“Why should he do it? You have some trouble with him?”

“Not exactly. But it could be he found out I asked you to run that check on him, it could be he’s got a hard-on for me over that.”

“I ran the check three months ago,” Coopersmith reminded him.

“Well, maybe he just found out about it. Anyhow, I don’t like that bird; I don’t trust him. Living up in the Hughes’ cabin all alone, don’t talk to nobody, walks around with his nose up like a dog just pissed on his leg. You can’t tell what somebody like that will do.”

Coopersmith thought about offering further words of reason, decided there was no point in reasoning with a man like McNeil, and said, “I’ll see what I can find out.” He nodded to the cafe owner and went out into the valley.

As he walked through the snow to Sierra Street, he realized that there was a certain purposeful spring in his step and that he felt better than he had in weeks. It was, he supposed, damned perverse of a man to feel good as a result of somebody else’s troubles, but he could not help himself; if only for a little while, and only on a very small scale, he was involved again, he was useful to others and to himself.

Kubion spent the morning prowling the large, slant-beam-ceilinged interior of the cabin at Mule Deer Lake: upstairs, downstairs, front and rear, smoking too much, drinking too much coffee. He no longer had the savage headache of the night before, but he felt restless and edgy-an impotent, caged kind of feeling. Two sticks of marijuana hadn’t helped either, although the joints he had blown after their arrival last night had dulled his proclivity for violence and allowed him to sleep. That was the problem with pot: sometimes it did for him, and sometimes it didn’t. As a result, he didn’t use it often, but he liked to keep a supply on hand; liquor soured his belly, and everybody needed some type of high once in a while-ease the pressure, get rid of the down feeling.

Neither Brodie nor Loxner had said anything about the near blowoff in the car coming in, and he hadn’t mentioned it either; all of them pretending it hadn’t happened. So he’d lucked out of another of those bastard headaches, but unless he could learn to hold himself in check, he couldn’t keep lucking out of them indefinitely. He’d wind up killing somebody, sure as hell, and when you killed people without good reason, you were as good as dead yourself. Well, he’d learn; he had to learn, and he would, and that was all there was to it. He just wasn’t going to do to himself what all the fuzz in the country hadn’t been able to do to him in seventeen years. No way. No frigging way.

Kubion came down the side hall from the rear porch into the living room. Loxner was sitting in one of the chairs grouped before a native-stone fireplace. He was his old bluff, stupid self today-pretending, too, that he hadn’t let his yellow show through when he’d taken the bullet at Greenfront. His left arm was suspended in a handkerchief sling; he’d found merthiolate and bandages in the bathroom medicine cabinet and had wrapped it up as soon as they’d come in. The bullet had missed bone, exiting cleanly, and he’d be able to use the arm again in a few days, once soreness and stiffness decreased.

In Loxner’s right hand was a bottle of Rainier Ale, and he was listening to the table model radio which had originally been in the kitchen-staticky country-and-western music, fading in and out at irregular intervals. The three of them had picked up a newscast on the radio over breakfast, and there were no fresh developments in Sacramento; the cops still hadn’t found the dummy car. The news announcer had no further information on the suspected whereabouts of the holdup men, but the implication was that local law enforcement officials figured they were still confined to the immediate Sacramento area. Which was fine, except that it didn’t change things much as far as they were concerned. Sure, the odds were good that they could leave today and make it to Vegas or L.A. without trouble and begin looking around for another score, a quick score; but when you’re wanted for Murder One, and one of you has a shot-up flipper, and you know how the little unforeseeable things can screw you up-like that security guard coming in at just the wrong time to screw up the Greenfront job-you don’t gamble, you don’t put your ass on the line.

Kubion wandered around the room and then stopped short near one of the front windows. Damn it, this aimless pacing back and forth wasn’t doing him any good. What he needed was to get out for a while: cold air, a sense of movement and activity. He went upstairs and got his coat off the floor in his room, where he’d thrown it last night. When he came down again, Brodie was standing with a paring knife in one hand and a potato in the other, talking to Loxner.

“You going out, Earl?” he asked as Kubion walked across to the door.

“That’s what it looks like, right?”

“For a walk, or into the village, or what?”

“Why?”

“Well, if you’re going into the village, I could use a couple of cans of tomato sauce. I want to make Veal Milanese for supper tonight.”

Tomato sauce, Kubion thought, Jesus Christ. Brodie had this thing for cooking- culinary art, he called it-and he was always making crap like Veal Milanese and baked stuffed chicken and pineapple glazed ham. He said it was a hobby with him-he’d gotten interested from his mother, who’d won some kind of national prize once. Some hobby for a man; it was more the kind of hobby you’d expect a fag to have; and Kubion wasn’t all that sure about Brodie. Vic had a reputation as a stud, Mr. Supercock, but with that pretty-boy face of his and this culinary art business, maybe underneath his hard professionalism he was Mr. Superqueer instead; you never knew these days who was taking it up the ass and who wasn’t.

“All right?” Brodie said.

“Yeah, all right,” Kubion said, and went out into the chill, rarefied air. When he got to the enclosed garage tacked onto the lakeward side of the cabin, he saw that snow had piled up in two-foot drifts against the doors. Shit. He stood staring at it for a moment and then lifted his eyes and looked down a long, gradual slope and across a white meadow at the frozen, snow-coated surface of Mule Deer Lake. Pines and taller firs crowded in close to the southern and western shores, but congregated along the eastern shore, where a row of white-fingered piers reached out into the water, were several other cabins and houses and summer lodges. Most of them were unoccupied now, abandoned-looking beneath canvases of snow.