Snowbound (5 page)

The girl named Peggy laughed again. “Well, don’t lose it, okay? I’ll see both of you at six or a little after.”

“At six,” Hughes said. He waited until she had rung off and then reached out almost reluctantly to recradle the receiver for the second time. Using a handkerchief from the pocket of his gray wool slacks, he wiped away a thin sheen of perspiration which had formed on his forehead; then he stood up and went out again into the front of the store.

Over the loudspeakers, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was singing about love and faith and the spirit of Christmas.

When they were two blocks from Greenfront and he was certain they had no immediate pursuit, Brodie slowed the armored car to the legal speed limit. Time was a precious commodity, but they couldn’t buy any of it if they drew attention to themselves getting the dummy back to the rented garage.

The alley off which the garage was located had both its entrances on parallel industrial streets crowded with trucks and vans. Brodie made the turn onto the nearest of them without seeing any sign of a police car and drove a block and a half to where the alley mouth bisected the block to the left. Kubion, watching the street in a flatly unblinking stare, said, “It looks okay; nobody paying any attention”—and Brodie nodded and made the swing into the narrow opening between two high, blank warehouse walls.

Midway through the block, the alley widened to the right to form a small parking area; it fronted a weathered brick structure which had been independently erected between the rear walls of two warehouses. One-half of the building had a sign on it that said BENSON SOLENOID, MANUFACTURER’ S REP. The other half was the garage.

They had left the doors open, and the area was deserted; Brodie drove the armored car inside without slowing. Kubion was out of the passenger side before the car had come to a full stop, closing the two wooden halves of the doors, barring them with a two-by-four set into iron brackets. Turning, he began to strip off his guard uniform, the false mustache and sideburns and bulbous putty nose he had been wearing. Brodie and Loxner, out of the car now, were also shedding their uniforms and disguises—Loxner one-handed, his left arm hanging useless at his side and ribboned with blood. His eyes still had a glazed look, etched with pain, and they wouldn’t meet either Kubion’s or Brodie’s; but he’d kept his mouth shut, and he was functioning all right.

Their regular clothing was in a locked storage box at the upper end of the garage, along with the suitcases in which they had planned to carry the money. Kubion unlocked the box and took out one of the cases. Into it they put the disguises, because they didn’t want the cops discovering they had worn them, and the .38 automatic Kubion had had tucked into his belt under the uniform jacket; the uniforms, which were untraceable, were allowed to remain discarded on the oil-splattered floor.

Brodie and Kubion got immediately into slacks, shirts, winter coats; then they transferred the New Police Colts into their coat pockets. Loxner took off his undershirt and tore it into strips with his teeth and his right hand and bound the wound in his arm. He had difficulty getting into his own clothing, but neither Kubion nor Brodie went to help him. With Kubion carrying the suitcase, the two of them moved past the dummy car—it, too, was untraceable, and they had worn gloves from the moment it was delivered to make sure it stayed clean of prints—and crossed to the double doors.

Loxner joined them, struggling into his coat, as Brodie took the bar away and cracked one of the halves. The area was still deserted. Hands resting on their pocketed guns, Kubion and Brodie led the way out and over to where they could look both ways along the alley. Clear. In the distance there was the fluctuating wail of sirens, but the sounds were muted, growing fainter, moving elsewhere.

Slightly more than six minutes had passed since their arrival at the garage.

They went to the right, straight through the block to the next street over. Kubion’s car was where he had parked it that morning, a hundred feet from the alley mouth. When they reached the car, Kubion unlocked the doors and put the suitcase on the floor in back; then he went to the trunk, opened it, removed a folded blanket, closed it again. He gave the blanket to Loxner.

“Lie down on the rear seat with this over you,” he said. “Cops will be looking for a car with three men in it, not two.”

Loxner still wouldn’t meet his eyes. He said, “Right,” and stretched out on the seat under the blanket, holding his wounded arm like a woman holding a baby. Brodie took the wheel. Sitting beside him, Kubion opened the glove box and took out the California road map and Sacramento city street map stored within. He folded them open on his lap.

If the job had gone off as planned, they would have taken Interstate Highway 80 straight through to Truckee and then swung north on State Highway 89—the quickest approach to Hidden Valley. But because they were professionals, covering against just such a blown operation as this, they’d also worked out a more circuitous route to minimize the danger of spot checks by the Highway Patrol. There was an entrance to Interstate 80 not far from where they were now, and they could still use that all right; it was only twenty-five minutes since the abortive ripoff, and the cops would need more time than that to organize and set up effective roadblocks. As soon as they reached the Roseville turnoff, eight miles distant, they would cut north on State 65 to Marysville, pick up State 20 to Grass Valley, and then take State 49 through Downieville and Whitewater and, finally, Soda Grove. It would double their time on the road, making the trip to Hidden Valley a minimum of four hours, but it would also put them well clear of the police search and surveillance area.

It took Brodie seven minutes to get them out of the warehouse district, swinging wide of Greenfront, and onto the cloverleaf that fed Interstate 80 eastbound. They saw no police cars until they came out of the cloverleaf and merged with the flow of traffic, and then it was a highway patrol unit traveling westbound with red light and siren, exiting the freeway on the same cloverleaf—alerted but no longer an immediate threat. Kubion had had his gun out and hidden beneath the bottom folds of his coat, but now he slid it back into the pocket. He lit a cigarette and made sucking sounds on the filter, pulling smoke into his lungs.

Brodie accelerated to pass a slow-moving truck. “So far so good,” he said, to break the tense silence.

“We’re not out of it yet,” Kubion said thinly.

“Don’t I know it?”

“Hold your speed down, for Christ’s sake.”

“Take it easy, Earl. You don’t have to tell me how to drive.”

From the back seat Loxner said, “You got anything in the glove box for this arm? It hurts like hell, and it’s still bleeding.”

“No,” Kubion said.

“The bullet went clean through, but Jesus, it hurts.”

“Yeah.”

“I never been shot before,” Loxner said defensively. “That’s why I maybe froze up a little back there. You get shot like that, for the first time, it shakes the crap out of you.”

“Yeah, yeah, shut up about it.”

“Fucking security cop, fucking cop,” Loxner said, and lapsed into silence.

Brodie held the speedometer needle on sixty. “A hundred grand, maybe more, shot straight up the ass. And we’re out better than ten on top of it. Now what the hell do we do for a stake?”

“We’ll make a score somewhere,” Kubion said.

“Sure—but where?”

“You leave that to me. I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something, all right.”

The light began to go out of the somber afternoon sky at four o’clock, dimming rapidly behind a thick curtain of snow, turning the pines and fir trees into wraithlike silhouettes on the steep slopes of Hidden Valley. Distorted by the snowfall, the brightening village lights—the multihued Christmas bulbs strung across Sierra Street—were hazy aureoles that seemed somehow to lack warmth and comfort in the encroaching darkness. And the thin, sharp wind sang lonely and bitter, like something lost in the wilderness and resigned to its fate.

That’s me, Rebecca Hughes thought as she sat listening to the wind in the big, empty Lassen Drive house: something lonely and bitter and lost and resigned. A dull candle sitting in the window, waiting for the return of the prodigal. Alas, poor Rebecca, I knew her well. . . .

She reached out in the darkness and located her cigarettes on the coffee table. In the flame of her lighter, the six-foot Christmas tree across the living room looked bleak and forlorn —colored ornaments gleaming blackly, silver tinsel like opalescent worms hanging from the dark branches: a symbol of joy that was completely joyless in the shadowed room. The furnishings, too, seemed strange and unused, as if they were parts of a museum exhibit; she had picked out the decor herself when she and Matt were married seven years before—Pennsylvania Dutch with copper accessories—and she had loved it then, it represented home and happiness then. Now it was meaningless, like the tree, perhaps even like life itself.

Turning slightly to light her cigarette, Rebecca saw her reflection in the hoar-frosted window behind the couch. She paused, staring at herself in the flickering glow. A pretty face once, an animated face, with laughter in the gray eyes and a suggestion of passion in the soft mouth. But in this moment, with her chestnut-colored hair pulled back into a tight chignon at the back of her neck, the face looked severe and weary and deeply lined; in this moment, she was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who was forty years of age.

She moved her gaze from the window, snapping the lighter shut and putting the room in heavy darkness again, thinking: I wonder who she is this time? Not that it matters, but you can’t help wondering. Probably not a valley resident; Matt has always been so very careful to preserve his saintly image here. Young, of course. Large breasts, of course, he always did like large breasts, mine never quite appeared to suit him. My God—how insanely ironic if that were the reason behind it all! I’m sorry, Rebecca, your tits are much too small, I’m going to have to find a mistress or two or twenty, you
do
understand, don’t you? Yes, certainly I understand, dear; I couldn’t possibly expect you to be faithful to me when my boobs are so small, I’m only sorry they didn’t grow larger so we could have had a perfectly happy marriage.

Well what difference did it make, really, why he did it? He did it, that was all. Pathetically, in her eyes—like a child who thinks he’s being very clever with his mischief; yes, like a child: pleasant, good-hearted, pious, playing an adventurous game and not quite realizing the wrongness of it, not quite realizing his own hypocrisy. When she had found out about the waitress in Soda Grove six years ago and confronted him with the knowledge, he had broken down and cried, head against her bosom, saying, “I don’t know why I did it, Becky, it just happened, and I’m sorry, forgive me, I love you,” and she had forgiven him, and four months later it had happened again; it had been happening ever since.

This particular little affair had been going on for about a month now. It had started like all the others, with a transparent excuse for not coming home in the evening, and it had progressed like all the others: Matt returning after midnight two and three and four times a week, with perfume lingering on his body and long hairs on his clothes (blond this time), falling into bed exhausted. He had not touched her, of course, since it began; he never touched her, never wanted her, never had anything left for her in any way. It would be like this for a while yet, a few more weeks. Then he would tire of the new girl, or she would tire of him, and the cycle would begin anew: an apology for his neglect, a few less than ardent nights
(she
had always been passionate, that couldn’t be the reason for the endless string of mistresses), expensive gifts, a period of attentiveness—and then, just when she would begin to think she had a husband again, he would call her to say that he would not be home until late. . . .

She had not bothered to confront him again after the Soda Grove waitress. He would have told her the same thing he had that first time, and have begged her forgiveness, and have professed his love for her. And the terrible thing was, she knew he
did
love her in some way she could never understand and did not want to lose her. He would never, as a result, leave her for one of the girls with whom he slept. Things would have been so much easier if there had been that possibility, Rebecca often thought; the decision would have been taken out of her hands. But it would never happen, and she had simply been unable to take the initiative herself: Little Orphan Rebecca with no place to go, no particular skills, a little afraid of the big wide world beyond these mountains where she had been born and reared; who could not seem to stop believing in love-conquers-all and happy endings and other fairy tales. So she forgave him tacitly each time and remained with him—enduring, pretending. Withering.

She felt suddenly very cold, as if the wind had managed to get inside the warm house; gooseflesh formed on her bare upper arms, beneath the short sleeves of the blouse she wore. Standing, putting out her cigarette in the cloisonné table tray, she went out of the dark room to the stairs in the main hall. The bedroom she shared with Matt was at the front of the house, directly above the living room. It, too, seemed cold and dismal to Rebecca tonight—and the wide, antique-framed double bed was a kind of index of her melancholy.