Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

They were sitting in the living room, across a coffee table set in front of the fireplace. Up until a few minutes ago they had been playing gin rummy, but neither of them had had their thoughts on the game and they’d given it up finally by tacit consent. Brodie stood now and picked up a blackened poker and stirred the pitch-pine logs burning on the hearth; sparks danced, and the charred wood crackled loudly, like firecrackers going off. He set the poker down again, turned, and put voice to what had been on his mind for the past hour.

“You ever see anybody freak out, Duff? Like where they come all apart in the head, go crazy, do crazy things?”

Loxner blinked at him, scratching nervously at the bandage on his left arm. The arm was still stiff, and the skin under the bandage itched constantly, but he’d found he could use the limb for normal activity and had taken off the sling that morning. “No,” he said, “no, I never seen nothing like that.”

“I saw it happen twice, more or less saw it-both while I was doing time. The first guy was a lifer, been in for maybe fifteen years. Happened right out of the blue, one night in the dining hall. He just jumped up and started yelling and foaming at the mouth, got onto the table and ran down it with a fork in either hand and stabbed a con and a screw before they could put him down.

“The second guy was something else again. He’d been a bank teller or an accountant or something on the outside and got caught with his hand in the till; quiet type, mild-mannered, maybe thirty and good-looking. He’d been inside about six months when they switched cells on him, put him right down the block from the one I was in. The two cons in his new cell were hard cases, and on top of that they were fags, buggers. They got to him right away and raped his face and his ass and told him they’d kill him if he didn’t cooperate from then on. So he cooperated, and for maybe a couple of months they passed him back and forth like a private whore. He still didn’t say much, and he didn’t look any different; we thought maybe he’d had some fag in him all along and had gotten to like it. Then the word got around that there was going to be a break, that this guy had masterminded it for himself and the other two. Nobody paid much attention to it; you know how the grapevine’s always humming with word of a break. But they did it, they pulled some fancy moves and went over the wall from the roof of the library, where the accountant had been working. Only the next day the screws found the two hard cases lying in a ditch five miles from the prison-with their balls shot off. The guy stayed loose a week before they caught him, and in that week he offed six other fags in two cities, shot all their balls off. He’d freaked out too, is what I’m getting at, but it had all happened inside where you couldn’t really see it; and what it did was turn him into a machine with one thought in his head: kill the hard cases and kill as many other fags as he could before they got him. He was like supercrazy-ten times as dangerous as the other one I told you about, because he could still think and plan and nothing mattered to him except one crazy idea.”

Loxner said, “Jesus,” and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. “You think something like that’s happened to Earl? You think he’s really freaked out?”

“Maybe,” Brodie said. “And maybe his crazy idea is ripping off this valley.”

“Jesus,” Loxner said again. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and his hands twitched noticeably.

“It could be he’s still okay and it’s nothing but the pressure getting to him and he’ll snap out of it pretty soon. But if he has freaked, there’s no way we can know for sure until maybe it’s too late. We can’t afford to wait, Duff. There’s only one thing we can do; it’ll make problems for us in other ways, but it’s got to be done.”

“You mean-waste him?”

“I mean waste him.”

Loxner got to his feet and paced rapidly forth and back in front of the fireplace. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, we can’t take no chances, we got to think about our own asses.” He came to a standstill. “When do we do it?”

“Tonight. Just as soon as he gets back. I’ve still got the extra set of car keys he gave me, and when he’s inside here, I’ll go out and unlock the trunk and get one of the guns out of the suitcase.”

“You going to pull the trigger, then?”

“I’ll pull the trigger.”

Loxner looked relieved. “What about the body?”

“There’s no place to bury it with all the snow. We’ll wrap it in a blanket and put it in the garage; it’ll keep until we’re ready to leave.”

“Then what?”

“Put it in the trunk of the car. When we’re a few miles away, we’ll dump it into a canyon. There’re plenty of them in these mountains.”

Loxner sat down, got up again almost immediately, and said, “I need a goddamn drink.” He went into the kitchen.

Brodie stared into the fire with eyes that were, now, like chunks of amethyst quartz.

Kubion returned to the cabin at eight fifteen.

They heard the sound of the car coming up the access lane, and Loxner wet his lips and looked at Brodie. Brodie said, “Deal the cards”-they were playing gin again-and obediently Loxner dropped his gaze to the deck. He shuffled it awkwardly, dealt ten cards to each of them with diffident flicks of his wrist.

When the front door opened, Brodie did not glance up. But there were no footsteps, no sound of the door closing again. A cold prescience formed inside him, and his head lifted then, and Kubion was standing there smiling a skull grin and holding the. 38 backup automatic. His eyes seemed huge, streaked with lines of blood, and neither they nor the lids above them moved. No part of him moved, he did not even seem to be breathing.

Brodie’s lips thinned, his body tensed. He thought: Oh fuck yes he’s blown out, I should have known it yesterday, I should have killed him yesterday; we waited too long.

Loxner saw the change in Brodie’s face and jerked his head around. Color drained out of his cheeks. He struggled to his feet, sweat once more breaking out on him, mouth opening as if he were going to speak, closing, opening again, closing again-all like a huge fish caught on an invisible line.

There was a long moment of silence, heavy and menacing. Snow fluttered across the threshold behind Kubion, like a sifting of white flour; chill, biting air rushing into the room robbed it of warmth, made the flames in the fireplace dance and gutter.

“We’re going down to the lake,” Kubion said finally. “Got a little something I want you to see.”

Brodie forced his voice to remain even. “What’s that, Earl?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.”

“All right-sure. But what’s the gun for? There’s no need for throwing down on us.”

“Isn’t there? Well we’ll see about that.”

Loxner began thickly, “Look, look now-”

“Shut up, you gutless prick!” Kubion said with sudden viciousness. “I don’t want any arguments, get over here and get your coats on, we’re going now right now.”

Brodie got up immediately and walked with careful strides to the closet; sweating heavily, not looking at Kubion, Loxner followed. They donned coats and gloves, and when they were ready, Kubion gestured outside and trailed them at a measured distance around to where the car waited, engine running and headlights burning, in front of the garage. He said there, “Vic, you take the wheel. Duff, you sit in front with him.” He waited until they had complied and then opened the right rear door and slid into the back seat. “Go. I’ll tell you where.”

Brodie drove down to Mule Deer Lake Road and turned right and went along the eastern lakeshore. The taut silence was broken only by Loxner’s asthmatic breathing. They passed the Taggart cabin and several other winter-abandoned structures; then Kubion said, “That house there on the left — pull up in front.”