Snowbound

Thirteen

Brodie came out through the broken mouth of the Valley Cafe, braced his body against the force of the storm, and then stepped beyond the perimeter of the fluorescent light spill and started across Sierra Street. Behind him, Kubion trailed like a sentient and menacing shadow.

They had ripped off the Sport Shop and the Valley Inn and now the cafe, and the total take had been slightly more than four bills. Counting the fifteen hundred Kubion had taken from the people at Mule Deer Lake, he now had a little more than five thousand on him. At the outside there would be another grand in the flour sack of purses and wallets Loxner had collected in the church, and no more than a couple of thousand in all the village homes combined.

All of this, the whole puking business, for maybe eight thousandeight thousand dollars!

Kubion had worked himself up into another destructive rage, the way he had in the Mercantile, and had made a broken shambles of the cafe: smashing glasses and crockery and two wall mirrors. Watching him, Brodie had had to struggle to maintain a grip on his ragged control. Kubion was far over the edge now; all you had to do was look at him to see how much he wanted to start killing people. There just wasn’t any way Brodie was going to buy himself any more time than he’d already been allotted. The cafe hadn’t had a safe, and neither had the Sport Shop or the Valley Inn; he’d said there was still the Hughes’ house and the filling station and the other buildings in the village, and Kubion said, “There’s only the Hughes’ place and that’s it, that’s our next stop. We’re going up there now and there’d better be a safe, Vic, there’d better be a safe for you to open with those tools in the pickup, you hear me Vic there’d better be a safe.”

It didn’t make any difference whether there was a safe or not; the Hughes’ house was intended to be Brodie’s execution chamber.

But Kubion still hadn’t given him even the smallest of possible openings, and in the two hours since they had started looting the village there hadn’t been any sign of big stupid gutless Loxner, eliminating the last faint hope of help from that quarter. Kubion’s freaked-out head had forgotten all about Loxner-they hadn’t gone anywhere near the church in those two hours-and that was the closest he’d come to any sort of mistake. Brodie kept telling himself that Kubion getting crazier and crazier would work both ways, that it would make him careless as well as more dangerous; he kept telling himself the opening would come, don’t take a last desperate gamble because the opening would come.

He reached the windrow on the eastern side of Sierra, started along it toward the pickup in the next block. The surface snow there was freezing and slick; he walked it with slow, cautious steps, risked a glance over his shoulder. Kubion’s dark face stared back at him: no smile now, lips moving as if in silent monologue. Brodie told himself again that an opening would come.

And one came.

Just like that, with startlingly coeval suddenness, Kubion made the kind of mistake Brodie had been waiting for.

Thoughts and eyes focused elsewhere, he had not been paying any attention to his footing; his right shoe came down on one of the patches of glassy snow, found no traction and slipped, and the leg kicked up rigidly like a football placekicker following through. His left arm flailed at the air and his body jerked into a horizontal plane and he fell bellowing, landing heavily on his buttocks, left leg twisted slightly as he skidded sideways into the snowpack at the curbing.

Brodie’s reaction was almost instantaneous. Instinct obliterated surprise and fatigue, and when he saw that Kubion had managed to hold onto the gun, it rejected any effort of trying to jump him across the ten icy steps which separated them. He spun and ran, diagonally back the way they had come because Kubion’s body was bent toward the south and because Lassen Drive to the west was the nearest release street, the nearest shielded path of escape. He fled in a headlong, weaving crouch through the less treacherous snow which blanketed the middle of the street, coming on the far windrow near the corner of the inn. Another bellow sounded behind him, and then the flat wind-muffled explosion of a shot. Nothing touched him but the flakes of obscuring snow.

He leaped over the windrow, muscles hunched and rippling along his back, head tucked down against his chest. Sliding on the ice-quilted sidewalk, he lunged against the building wall, caught the corner, and heaved himself around it as a second shot echoed dimly and a bullet slapped into the boarding a foot or two to his left. He vaulted the ragged snowpack on Lassen Drive, to evade more sidewalk ice-lost his balance this time and sprawled out prone on the street and planed forward half a dozen yards like a man on an invisible sled before he was able to drag his feet under him again.

There were no more shots, but he did not look back; he stretched his body forward into the wind, summoning reserves of stamina, and kept on running.