Bill Pronzini: Snowbound

“Stay the fuck in this office, all of you,” he yelled. “We’ll kill anybody that shows his face!” He backed out and slammed the door, turning, and Brodie and Loxner were already running on the stairs. Kubion pounded down after them. Brodie reached the lower door first and threw it open and the three of them burst outside. Two warehousemen and a truck driver were coming toward them from the loading dock. Brodie fired wide at them, and they reversed direction in a hurry, scattering. Loxner tried to drag open the armored car’s front passenger door with his right hand still holding his gun; Kubion elbowed him viciously out of the way, opened the door, pulled him back and crowded him inside while Brodie ran around to the driver’s side. There were half a dozen men in the vicinity of the dock now, but they hung back wisely, not attempting to interfere.

The dummy armored car started instantly, and Brodie released the clutch; the tires bit screamingly into the pavement. He took the far corner of the building in a controlled power skid, went through the parking lot at fifty and climbing. At the nearest exit a new Ford had just begun to turn into the lot from the street. Brodie swung the wheel hard right and the armored car’s rear end slewed around and made contact with the Ford’s left front fender, punching the machine out of the way, spinning it in a half circle. Fighting the wheel, Brodie slid the heavy car sideways again as a Volkswagen swerved to avoid collision. The armored car straightened and began pulling away, made another power skid left at the first intersection, and all the while Kubion sat hunched forward on the seat, saying, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!” in a kind of savage litany.

Smiling with his usual charismatic boyishness, Matt Hughes handed the Reverend Peter Keyes his mail through the gated window of the Post Office enclosure. “Yesterday’s attendance in church was very good, Reverend,” he said. “Your idea of moving the commencement time up to noon was a good one.”

“I expect the fact that this is the Christmas season had more to do with the rise in attendance than the new hour,” the Reverend Mr. Keyes said. He was a short, round, benign-featured man, reminiscent of a somewhat scaled-down and clean-shaven Santa Claus: an accurate physical reflection of the inner man and of his spiritual leanings. Hughes thought of him fondly as the antithesis of the fire-and-brimstone mountain preacher of legend and fact. “But in any event, it was gratifying. One can only hope this coming Sunday’s attendance will be larger still, though I suppose one hundred percent of the able-bodied is too much to hope for.”

“Maybe not, Reverend. I’ll make a point to remind the good people of the valley as I see each of them this week.”

“Thank you, Matthew,” the Reverend Mr. Keyes said gravely. He was the only resident of Hidden Valley who called Hughes by his full given name. “Well, I’ve several things to attend to. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

When the Reverend Mr. Keyes had gone, Hughes left the Post Office enclosure and came around the long counter set parallel to the Mercantile’s rear wall. The store was empty now, except for his single full-time employee, matronly and white-haired Maude Fredericks, who was stacking canned goods in the grocery section which comprised the northern third of the wide, deep room. The old-fashioned potbellied stove set to the right of the counter glowed dull-red warmth through its isinglass door-window-putting that stove in three years ago had been a very wise idea, he thought; it gave the place a kind of country-general-store flavor that appealed to locals and tourists alike-and the Christmas music added a different but no less pleasant warmth to the surroundings.

Hughes smiled complacently and went to stand by the cardboard Santa Claus in one of the front windows. Outside the snow swirled and danced in gusts of wind like shifting patterns in a monochromatic kaleidoscope. Mountain winters had always fascinated him-the soft, fat, intricately shaped snowflakes; the trees bending under their heavy white coats, some whiskered with stalactitic icicles like strong old men braced against the winter wind; snow eddies such as those he was watching now, so capricious you felt like laughing in the same way you would at the antics of kittens. As a child, he had used to sit for hours, face pressed to window glass, absorbed in the white splendor without, and when his mother would come in and ask him what he found so intriguing, he would answer her the same way each time, a kind of game they had played: “Snow magic, Mom; snow magic.”

At the age of thirty-two, he still retained the aura of that same perpetually enthusiastic little boy. The slope-cornered tan mustache he had worn for two years added a certain maturity to his features-as did the vertical humor lines which extended downward from a Romanesque nose and, like a pair of calipers, partially encircled a wide, mobile mouth; but his bright blue eyes and the supple slimness of his body and the demonstrative way he used his hands when he talked were prominently indicative of bubbling and guileless youth.

Nonetheless, he was unquestionably Hidden Valley’s wealthiest and most respected citizen. In addition to owning the Mercantile, which he had inherited from an uncle ten years before, and in addition to having served two successive terms as mayor, he owned a thousand acres of mountain land lucratively leased to a private hunting club, a portfolio of blue-chip stocks, and a high five-figure bank account. He was married to a woman considered by most everyone both intelligent and enviably attractive: an equally substantial form of wealth. If he had been an ambitious man, he might have left Hidden Valley for less secluded surroundings-might have entered successfully into the larger business world or perhaps even into politics. But he was not ambitious, and he derived a great deal of contentment from his position of importance in the valley. To enhance it, he offered unlimited credit to regular customers, maintained a “banking” service for the cashing of personal and business checks, could be counted upon for a loan in any emergency, and regularly contributed money to the All Faiths Church and to civic betterment projects. It was, he sometimes thought, a little like being the benevolent young monarch of a very small, very scenic, and very agreeable kingdom.

Behind him, now, the telephone began ringing distantly in his private office. Without turning from the window, he called, “Maude, would you get that, please?”

“I’m on my way, Matt,” she answered. Her footsteps sounded on the wooden flooring, and after a moment the ringing ceased. The loudspeakers began to give out with “Deck the Halls.” Maude’s voice called above the music, “It’s your wife.”

Hughes sighed. “Okay, thanks.”

He crossed the store and stepped behind the counter again. Small and neat, his office was nestled in the far right-hand corner adjoining the storeroom; it contained a pair of file cabinets, a glass-topped oak desk, and an old-fashioned, black-painted Wells-Fargo safe, bolted to the floor and wall, in which he kept his cash on hand. Entering, closing the door behind him, he cocked a hip against the edge of the desk and picked up the phone receiver and said, “Yes, Rebecca?”

“I just called to tell you we’re out of coffee,” his wife’s voice said. “Would you bring a pound of drip grind home with you tonight?”

“I think you’d better come down and pick it up, dear. I won’t be home after closing.”

There was a brief silence; then Rebecca said, “Oh?”

“I have to go over to Coldville,” he told her. “I was going to call you a little later to let you know.”