Snowbound

Sixteen

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.

Urgency tugged commandingly at Tribucci’s mind, vanquishing the indecision. Get away from here, he thought. Get away from here now.

And the second figure appeared in the middle of Lassen fifteen feet away, oblong pointing finger of an automatic darkly defined in one hand, stalking-limping-in the runner’s snowtracks.

Tribucci stiffened again; his ears seemed suddenly filled with the thrumming of his pulse. The second one stopped, looked across at Edwards’ house-and then, as if with sixth sense, turned and stared north along Placer, stared right at him, could not miss seeing him across that short a span of ground. Tribucci recognized the charred, savage face immediately, confirmation of what he already knew, and a mixture of fear and hatred and fury constricted his anus and opened his jaws in a wolflike rictus. He had waited too long, it was too late to run, and he had no place to run to; he had to fight now.

Kubion took two steps toward him, gun arm leveled. Tribucci fired from in close to his chest, missed in his haste, saw the other jerk to a halt as if in surprise and then lunge to one side, onto his right knee with his favored left leg dragging. Moving sideways, Tribucci snapped his arm out and locked the elbow and braced his body; fired again-missed again, snow kicking up like a puff of white dust near the trailing leg. Damn you to hell damn you damn you! and started to squeeze off a third time, but the automatic in Kubion’s hand flashed then and stab! in his chest, and flashed again and stab! in his chest, the shock of the bullets’ impact driving away his breath-no no I blew it-and his legs buckled, the nerves in his gloved right hand were like filaments of ice. The revolver fell free, he felt his body slumping and heard the wind and the vague echoes of the shots as he toppled loosely into the half-frozen snow. I blew it good but oh please God don’t let me have blown it completely-and a congealing red-black haze formed and thickened inside his head, spinning him, spinning him, obliterating all sound and all feeling and the sudden bright image of Ann that clung to his last shred of consciousness….