Snowbound

Ten

There was $3,247 in the Mercantile’s safe.

Brodie had taken too much time getting the box open, and Kubion’s patience had ebbed away finally and he’d told him to quit diddling around, quit diddling around you queer bastard, and Brodie said he was doing it as fast as he could, and Kubion just looked at him over the raised muzzle of the automatic. Six minutes later Brodie had the combination dial punched out with hammer and chisel and the safe door open wide. Inside were sheafs of papers and some ledger books and a key-type strongbox. With Kubion watching him closely, Brodie snapped the lock on the strongbox and counted out the money it contained onto the desk’s glass top.

$3,247.

Kubion stared at the thin piles of currency. Three thousand lousy goddamn lousy dollars! He had figured ten grand at least, maybe fifteen or twenty, some banker Hughes had been some hick banker son of a bitch. If he wasn’t dead already he’d be dead right now, just like all the hicks were going to be dead pretty soon, pretty soon.

He centered his gaze on Brodie standing by the desk in a litter of tools and bits and pieces of safe metal. Brodie’s face was stoic, but those purple eyes of his were like windows and you could see what he was thinking, you could hear we-told-you-so-didn’t-we running around inside his head as plainly as if he were saying it aloud. Kubion shouted, “Shut up, shut the fucking hell up!”

“I didn’t say anything, Earl.”

“This is only the beginning, you hear, there’ll be more in the other stores and in the houses, plenty more.”

“Sure there will.”

“Plenty more,” Kubion said again. The impulse, the need, had begun whispering to him; the ball of his index finger moved tightly back and forth across the automatic’s curved trigger.

Brodie said quickly, “I’d better gather up the tools before we leave here. We might need them again.”

Kubion’s temples throbbed. His finger continued to slide across the trigger, increasing pressure.

“Did you hear what I said, Earl?”

“I heard you.”

“There’s probably other safes in the valley: the inn, the Sport Shop, the cafe, the Hughes’ house or one of the other houses. I can’t open them without tools.”

“There won’t be any other safes.”

“We can’t know that for sure, not yet.”

“If there are I’ll get combinations or keys from whoever they belong to, I don’t need you for that.”

“Suppose whoever it is gives you trouble and you have to kill him before you find out a combination? Suppose there’s a safe at the Hughes’ house and the wife doesn’t know that combination either? Could be Hughes kept a spare bundle at home, some of these guys don’t like to keep it all in one place, right?”

Kubion’s finger became still. The impulse was still whispering to him, but it was saying now: Don’t kill him yet… he’s right, you might need him… don’t kill him yet, soon but not yet…

He said, “Put the tools back in the box, hurry it up, shag your ass.”

Brodie let breath spray inaudibly between his teeth. Immediately, carefully, he knelt and put on his coat and gloves and then began feeding the scattered tools back into the cardboard carton. When he was finished, Kubion ordered him to lace his hands behind him again; stepped forward and scooped the bills off the desk top left-handed and wadded them into his trousers. He went back to the doorway, told Brodie to pick up the carton and come out. A moment later, following him down the aisle between the counter and the wall shelves of liquor and bottled goods, Kubion felt the chill breath of the wind that came stabbing through the glassless door half. Snow whipped in the darkness outside, eddied into the store; the cry of the storm was like that of something alive and in pain.

Kubion’s mouth twisted into a vicious grimace. Snow, wind, cold, goddamn Eskimo village with wooden igloos, and three thousand in the safe and have to keep Brodie alive and Brodie’s back like a target in front of him, urge saying don’t kill him but then saying smash something else, smash something! He stopped moving, smash something do it now, and transferred the automatic to his left hand and swept his right through the bottles of liquor on the nearest of the shelves, driving a dozen or more to the floor. Glass shattered, dark liquid splashed and flowed. Brodie whirled and stared at him, carton held up at chest level, and Kubion yelled, “Don’t say a word, don’t move I’ll kill you if you move,” and picked a bottle off the shelf and threw it into the grocery section, toppling a pyramid of canned goods in another banging, clattering counterpoint to the shriek of the wind. He caught up a second bottle and pitched it at the gated Post Office window, missing low, this one not breaking, and a third bottle was in his hand and he flung that across the store at the left front window. The heavy bottom struck the cardboard replica of Santa Claus at the base of the spine and drove it and exploding fragments of glass outward to the sidewalk. One of the torn reindeer clung to a jagged piece of window, flapping in a sudden gust that hurled more flurries of snow through the opening.

The impulse grew silent then, momentarily satisfied, and he leaned panting against the counter. After several moments the smile reappeared on his mouth, and he straightened up again and returned the automatic to his right hand.

“We’ll hit the Sport Shop now,” he said. “Then the inn and the cafe and the rest of the buildings along here. Then the Hughes’ house.”

“However you want to do it,” Brodie said carefully.

“That’s right, Vic, however I want to do it.”

They went out into the sharp white wind.