Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

Kubion looked at her and said, “Somebody shut that bitch the hell up.”

Beside her, Verne Mullins took hold of her shoulders and eased her down again. Agnes buried her face in her hands and began moaning softly. Coopersmith said in a carefully expressionless voice, “What do you mean we can forget about those people? What have you done to them?”

Kubion’s gaze shifted to him. “Nothing to any of them, old man-except Hughes. We’ll bring them in later.”

“Except Hughes?”

“He’s dead,” Kubion said, and the smile transformed on his mouth and made it look like an open wound. His voice was savage with impatience. “I killed him last night and he’s dead, you’ll all be dead you stupid hicks unless you shut up and listen to me and do what I say I don’t want any more questions I don’t want any more crap you understand me!”

The aura of horror had reached the point of tangibility now: it could be felt, it could be tasted, it lay like a pall of invisible mist inside the church. No one moved, no one made a sound; even the children and Agnes Tyler were silent. The Reverend Mr. Keyes shot in his own church, the valley about to be taken over and looted, Matt Hughes-their mayor, their friend, their benefactor-inexplicably murdered, all their lives suddenly in the hands of three armed men and one of whom was nothing less than a psychotic: they were literally petrified with fear.

Coopersmith swallowed against the rage and revulsion which burned in his throat, struggling to maintain calm and a clear head, and looked at each of the other two men, the ones with the rifles. Neither of them had made a single motion since their entrance; they were like wooden sentinels. But there was sanity in their faces, and the big heavy one was sweating copiously, and the fair-haired one, despite a guarded, stoic expression, appeared to be tensely uneasy as well. Why were they a part of this? he thought.

Merciful God, why any of this?

Kubion was smiling again, and when he spoke his voice was once more controlled, matter-of-fact. “Now like I said, once we have the list of names two of us will go round up the other people and bring them back here, and when everybody is in the church we go to work on the buildings-just two of us, the other one will be out front with a rifle, watching. We figure it’ll take us most of today to get the job done, but when we’re finished we might not be leaving right away, we might stay one day or two or even three before we go, and the way we’ll go is on snowmobiles so don’t get the idea we’re trapped in the valley until the pass is open. But you’ll wait until it’s cleared, you’ll stay in here until the day after Christmas. We’ll bring in some food later and some water and you’ll be nice and comfortable as long as you don’t try any stupid tricks. The important thing for you to remember is that you won’t know when we’ll be leaving, you won’t know when we’re gone, and if you try to break down the front doors or knock out a window before the day after Christmas and we’re still here, we’ll kill everybody we see. Clear? All of that clear?

Figures in stone.

Kubion said, “Good, we’re going to get along fine now; you keep on sitting there like you are now and we’re going to get along just fine.” He looked at the heavy, dull-faced rifleman and made a gesture with his free hand. Loxner came over and put the weapon down against the wall, moving mechanically, using his left arm as if it were stiff and sore; then he took a folded flour sack from under his coat and walked up the center aisle. Coopersmith watched him as he passed down to the end of the right front pew; his damp face contained what might have been a kind of masked fear of his own.

When Coopersmith faced front again, he saw that the fair-haired rifleman had also set his weapon against the wall and had produced a pencil and a pad of paper. Kubion said, “Names now, everybody not here and where they live in the village.” His eyes rested on Coopersmith. “You, old man, start it off. Who’s not here?”

Coopersmith hesitated. Then, because there was nothing else he could do, he began in a leaden voice to recite. And all the while he was talking the same cold, voracious thought kept running through his mind: I wish I had my gun now because I would kill you, I think God forgive me I would kill you right where you stand, right here in church, and sleep tonight with a clear conscience…

When Brodie and Loxner had preceded him out of the church and gone halfway along the front walk-holding the rifle barrels down against their legs as he had instructed them to do-Kubion stepped out and shut the doors and locked them. His watch said that it was one fifteen. Very good: fifty-five minutes, five minutes less than he had anticipated. You couldn’t do much better than that, bet your ass you couldn’t.

He went down the steps and followed Loxner and Brodie to where his car was parked eastward of six others in the fronting lot; the automatic rested in his coat pocket now, his hand lightly gripping the butt. Sierra Street was still deserted, he saw with satisfaction, and there was no sign of activity anywhere else in the village. It had begun to snow thinly from a silky gray sky, but the drifting clouds to the west were black-bordered and pregnant; it would snow much more heavily before long.

Brodie and Loxner stopped beside the car, and Kubion halted ten feet away. “You see?” he said to them. “Easy, easy, no sweat at all.”

“Why did you shoot the Reverend?” Brodie asked tautly. “You didn’t have to do any shooting in there; it wasn’t necessary.”

“Don’t tell me what was necessary and what wasn’t, I know exactly what I’m doing. You got religion now, maybe?”

Brodie said nothing more. His fingers caressed the stock of the rifle, one of the three taken from the Markham and Donnelly houses; but it, like the one Loxner carried, was empty. Empty! Kubion laughed out loud. They had done the church scene with just his automatic, one loaded gun was going to take over the entire valley, and that was funny when you thought about it, that was a real gutbuster when you thought about it.

For a while yesterday he’d considered wasting Brodie and Loxner and ripping off the valley all by himself. The idea of that appealed to him all right, but he’d finally decided against it. Hicks would be more afraid of three men with guns than one man with a gun, the old psychological advantage-that was one thing; another was that he might need some help in rounding up the rest of the hicks, maybe in other areas too; a third, and this had been the main deciding point, was that he liked the idea of keeping the two of them alive as long as he felt like it, playing with them a little, hamstringing them, using them to prolong the score because the longer it lasted, the sweeter it would be. And there wasn’t a shred of doubt that he could handle the two of them-stupid gutless Loxner and culinary fairy Brodie; he could handle anybody and anything, he was like ten feet tall and nobody could touch him with all the power he possessed, the power that had been there all the time if only he’d recognized it for what it was and let it come free.

What it was, this new outlook of his, was like being on a perpetual grass high: you saw everything crystal clear, inside yourself and outside yourself, and you didn’t worry about shit like headaches and spiders (they’d never come back again; he’d killed every last one of them), and you didn’t worry about violence either. If you had to do something violent, why then you just did it and it was all right; in fact it gave you a kind of release, it made you feel loose again like you felt after you’d popped your cork into one of those big-assed black chicks. So when the impulse came over him, the way it had last night when he’d found Hughes and the blond bitch together, he’d just let it tell him what to do and then followed orders. It had come on again in the church, just a little, but it told him not to kill the Reverend because that might have led to hysteria and the hicks had to be kept docile until the ripoff was completed, so he’d put one through that preacher man’s hand. When it came on again, and sooner or later it would, it’d tell him just the right time to waste Brodie and Loxner and he’d do that; and maybe it would tell him to waste all the hicks too and he’d do that, a bunch of Eskimos like that were better off dead anyway. Right? Right on.