Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

Footsteps in the hallway, and Larry’s voice-high-pitched, frightened: “Pa? Pa?”

McNeil looked up again and saw the two men standing on either side of the youth; one of them was familiar, the other a complete stranger. And then he became aware of the gun in the hand of the dark familiar one, and his irritation dissolved into disbelief. He jerked awkwardly to his feet, flutter-eyed and gape-mouthed.

“No problems if you keep your cool,” Kubion told him, “no problems at all.”

McNeil continued to blink at him, almost spastically now. With impossible suddenness there was death in the room, his death-he could feel it, he could see it staring at him from the eyes of the dark one with the gun-and he began to shake his head, as if by doing that he could make the men and the gun and the stultifying presence of death vanish.

Kubion said, “Who else is here in the house?”

McNeil kept on shaking his head. His mouth and jaws worked soundlessly, as if in exaggerated pantomime of a man chewing gum; he was incapable of speech.

Larry said, “My mother… just my mother.”

“Where?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Call her in here.”

“You… listen, you won’t hurt her?”

“Now why would I hurt your old lady, get her in here.”

“Ma,” Larry called; then, louder: “Ma!”

“What is it?” a woman’s voice answered.

“Come into the living room.”

“Who was that at the door?”

“Ma, come in here, will you!”

Sandy McNeil-a dark-haired, soft-featured, harassed-looking woman wearing an apron over a faded housedress — appeared in the doorway. “What-” she began, and then stopped speaking and stopped walking as she saw the men, the gun Kubion held. Her eyes grew very round, and the intake of her breath was loudly sibilant, like the hiss of valvebled steam. The dishtowel she had been holding slipped loose and fell unnoticed to the floor.

Larry went to her and put a protective arm around her shoulders, partially shielding her body with his own. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “What do you want with us?”

Kubion said, “We’re going to take you to a party.”

“Party?” Sandy McNeil said blankly.

“At the church. A little party at the church.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand. ”

“You don’t have to understand. You just do what I tell you. Let’s go.”

Larry guided his mother toward the hallway. But McNeil stood frozen in front of the console, eyes glazed with terror; he couldn’t move, he could not make himself move.

Kubion looked at him, and then stepped quickly forward and cupped a hand around the back of McNeil’s neck and sent him reeling across the room. McNeil made a strangled, bleating sound, caught his balance, and groped sightlessly into the hall-pushing his wife and son out of the way as if they were bundles of sticks. His face was the wet dirty color of slush.

A small stain began to spread on the front of his trousers, and Kubion laughed when he saw it. “Well, if you aren’t a pisser,” he said. “If you aren’t a real pisser.” He kept on laughing all the way out to the pickup waiting in the side drive.

Somebody began pounding on the downstairs lobby door just as Walt Halliday and his wife finished making love.

“Oh for goodness sake,” Lil Halliday said drowsily. She was a thick-bodied woman with butter-yellow hair and a pleasantly homely face. Lying naked on the rumpled double bed, her husband’s balding head pillowed comfortably on her heavy breasts, she looked younger than her forty-two years.

Halliday raised his head and listened to the pounding — louder now, demanding-and finally sat up in annoyance. His nose began to run, and he reached one of the Kleenex off the nightstand and blew into it. He had awakened that morning with a sore throat and the runny nose and a slight fever and knew he was coming down with the flu; instead of getting up and dressing for church, as he might have done, he had decided to stay in bed. Lil, who was not much of a churchgoer and went only when he did-fifteen or twenty Sundays in any year, most of those during the quiet off-season months-had brought him a tray breakfast and had then come back to bed with him. They had dozed for a while, talked for a while, been leisurely in their lovemaking: a good Sunday, a fine Sunday. Until that damned persistent pounding on the door.

Standing, Halliday put on his glasses and pajamas and robe and slid his feet into ankle slippers. “Whoever that is,” he said, “is going to get a piece of my mind. There’s no need to beat on the door like that.”

“I’m just glad they didn’t start that racket about five minutes ago,” Lil said.

“That’s something, anyway,” Halliday agreed.

He went to the door and glanced back at his wife, and she was still lying there uncovered; she knew he liked to look at her that way. He gave her a broad wink and left their apartment, which was on the first floor of the inn, at the head of the stairs, and started down to the lobby. He shouted, “I’m coming, stop that hammering!” but the sound continued. It was heavy enough now to rattle the glass in the adjacent window.

More than a little irritated, Halliday unlocked the door and jerked it open and said, “What’s the idea of-” The rest of the sentence died when he saw the two men and the automatic one of them was pointing at him.

Kubion said, “Back inside, hurry it up, you kept us waiting too long already.”

Halliday did what he was told, rapidly, putting his hands up over his head. His mind, all at once, was wrapped in dreamlike confusion. “What do… what do you want?”

“You’ll find that out soon enough. Nothing will happen to you as long as you do what you’re told. You’ve got a wife-where is she?”

“Upstairs. She… but she…”

“Take us to her.”

“She’s in bed, my wife’s in bed.”

“So what? Come on, get your ass in gear.”

Halliday stared at the gun, at the face behind it, and turned instantly to the stairs. As he began to ascend, he could not seem to think of anything except the way Lil had been lying when he’d left her moments ago; and he found himself hoping almost desperately that she had covered herself. Whatever was about to happen, he did not want these two men to see his wife naked…

Joe Garvey opened his front door, and one of the two men standing on the porch outside showed him a gun and said, “Back off, we’re coming in; do what you’re told and you won’t get hurt.”

Garvey said incredulously, “What the hell! ” and stayed where he was. The fingers of his right hand still clutched the edge of the door.

“Inside,” Kubion said. “Move it.”

“Listen, what is this, you can’t come around my house waving a gun-”

Kubion kicked the door out of his hand, jarring loose the candle-festooned holly wreath which hung from the outer panel, and crowded forward. But instead of giving ground as he was expected to do, Garvey braced himself in anger and indignation and made a reflexive lunge at the extended automatic. Half turning, pulling the gun in against his body, Kubion blocked the sweeping arm with his shoulder and made a horizontal bar of his left arm and hit the other man across the chest with it. Garvey banged into one of the inside corridor walls, came off it again like a ball bouncing, and Kubion clubbed him full in the face with the barrel of the weapon.

Bawling with pain, broken nose spraying blood, Garvey staggered into the wall a second time and then went down hard to his knees. Kubion took four more steps into the corridor without breaking momentum and swung around in a crouch and said, “Don’t do it, Vic.”

Brodie was through the doorway, one arm upraised like a bludgeon, moving in a rush. He brought himself up three feet from the muzzle of Kubion’s gun and dropped his arm and backed away immediately, around the kneeling figure of Joe Garvey. His face, momentarily savage, became blank again; only his eyes maintained their polished amethyst shine.