Bill Pronzini - Snowbound

A muscle in his left leg began to cramp with cold, and Cain straightened up again. A guard in one of those cars would logically keep at least one window facing the church clear of snow and ice, so he could watch the entrance doors; too, it was likely he’d have the engine running and the heater and defroster on, with a wing open or window rolled partway down to circumvent the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. There were no puffs of exhaust smoke, no sounds above the wind, no car windows open or clear. No other sheltered place in the vicinity. No tracks anywhere.

No guard.

Okay, Cain thought. Okay.

He craned his head forward a second time and swept his gaze over the parking lot, Sierra Street and the wind-shaped drifts in the meadow beyond. The lights shining farther into the village were all there was for him to see; the snow flurries continued to place visibility in a constant flux. Pulling back, he tugged the fur hat down tighter over his ears and rubbed at his cold-deadened face. The wiry beard hairs were like brittle threads of ice, and he imagined that in the rubbing he had depilitated part of the growth. He swallowed a nervously humorless laugh, shook himself mentally to keep his thoughts in tight check.

How do we deploy when Tribucci gets back? he asked himself. One of us here, one of us by that car nearest the entrance? That seemed the best way to do it, all right. They would be separated, but not so far apart that one would be unable to offer protection for the other or to minimize the potential advantage of a crossfire. And they would be positioned at the closest possible points to the doors, so as to guard the entrance fully and effectively. They’d have to figure a way to cover the tracks from here to the car, though; they couldn’t afford to wait for the storm to do it. Maybe there was something they could use in the cottage-a whisk broom, a trowel, something.

The wind began to gust, whistling mournfully, sweeping snow in misty sheets down close to the ground. Cain bunched the collar of his coat tighter against his throat with his left hand, repocketed the gun with his right. Minutes passed. Again he checked the area fronting the church; again he saw nothing. His feet were so achingly chilled now that he had almost no feeling in his toes; he lifted first one leg and then the other, like a man doing calisthenics in slow motion, to keep the blood circulating. The movement of time seemed to have slowed down to an inert crawl, as if the bitterly cold night had managed to wrap it, too, in a cloak of ice Time, Cain thought.

Abruptly he pushed back the left sleeve of his coat and squinted at the luminous numerals of his watch. It was seven five. Tribucci had said it would take him less than half an hour to get the guns from his brother’s house and return here, but it was nearly forty-five minutes since they had parted in the wood. If nothing had happened, he should have been here by now. If nothing had happened…

The clot of anxiety under Cain’s breastbone expanded. He made one last quick and fruitless reconnaissance of Sierra Street and then hurried back to the rear corner and across to the cottage and along its facade again to the garage corner. He stared beyond the snowfield at the trees: black-and-white emptiness everywhere.

Where was he?

Where was Tribucci?

Moving through the familiar darkness inside his brother’s home, John Tribucci went from the rear porch into the downstairs study. At an antique sideboard along one wall, he bent and opened the facing doors and rummaged through the interior until his fingers located the cowhide case he knew Vince kept there. He took the case out, set it on top of the sideboard, and worked the catches to lift the lid.

Inside was a matched set of. 22 caliber, nine-shot Harrington amp; Richardson revolvers-a gift from Vince’s father-in-law some three years earlier. One of Vince’s favorite all-weather pastimes was target shooting, and he preferred Western-style pistols such as these to automatic target weapons like the Colt Woodsman. Tribucci had done some shooting with his brother, with these guns, and knew the feel and action of the model. Both were loaded, safeties on; he put one into the left pocket of his coat, clutched the second firmly, and went out of the study and started back through the house.

As he came into the kitchen, he grew aware for the first time of the subtle, homely fragrances which lingered in the warm black: his wife’s Lanvin perfume, Vince’s after-breakfast cigar, the batch of Christmas pfeffernusse cookies Judy had baked just before the four of them left for church. A vivid image of Ann entered his mind then, and his throat closed and his stomach twisted with a rush of emotion that was almost vertiginous. He leaned against the refrigerator for a moment, holding onto the image, trying to think of her laughing and happy instead of the way he had left her in church, the way she would be now that Coopersmith had surely told her what he and Cain were doing. Then, deliberately, he forced his mind blank of everything but his immediate purpose and stepped out onto the wide back porch.

He pushed through the door there-it had been customarily unlocked, and he’d come in that way initially-and hurried around to the front yard, into the deep shadows beneath one of the twin fir trees flanking the walk. The house was located on Eldorado Street, slightly more than half a block off Sierra; he peered eastward, then down the length of Shasta Street. The falling snow was like a huge, wind-billowed lace curtain that combined with the darkness to obscure anything more than fifty yards distant. A thin haze of light from the buildings on Sierra tinged the sky in that direction.

Tribucci moved out from beneath the fir and ran in long, light strides across Eldorado, coming up against the broad entrance doors of the building which fronted Placer on the east; owned by Joe Garvey, it served as a garage for extensive automobile and truck repairs and also as a storage shed for the village snowplow. On the opposite side of the street was a wide, bare hummock of ground, deep-drifted, that extended south to Lassen Drive and north to the beginnings of the pass cliffs-a shorter path into the wood higher up, but a slow and precarious one because of the snow depth. He would follow the longer but quicker route by which he had come: first down to the corner, to make sure Lassen was clear, and then traverse Placer and traverse Lassen and go up slantingly into the trees.

He was three steps from the corner when the dark figure came running at fly speed out of Lassen Drive.

Startled, Tribucci stood immobile for an instant; then, instinctively, he took a step back hard against the building, embracing the heavy darkness there. The running man crossed Placer-not looking back, not looking anywhere except straight ahead of him. When he reached the low picket fence enclosing the front yard of Webb Edwards’ house, he jumped it without slowing and disappeared around the screened-in side porch.

It all happened so quickly that Tribucci had been able to distinguish nothing of the fleeing man’s physical characteristics; but he had been hatless, and that meant it couldn’t have been Cain, wasn’t Cain. One of the looters… running from the psycho? You ran that way when somebody was after you, and maybe the maniac had tried to kill him-already killed the third one? — and he had broken away somehow. Was the psycho in close pursuit then? Was he just around the corner on Lassen? Tribucci worked saliva through his dry mouth, momentarily indecisive. Retreat or stay where he was? He might be seen either way, and this wasn’t the place for a fight; he had to get back to Cain and the church A new movement caught his eye through the storm, kept him hugging the garage wall: an indistinct shape running through the yard of the Beckman property adjacent to Edwards’; cutting back across Placer at an angle, obscured white face turned to the north but with the screening snow and the ebon shadows, not seeing him, Tribucci, from that distance; vanishing once again into the Modoc Street corner lot belonging to the Chiltons.