Snowbound

Eighteen

As soon as he was sure the immediate area was clear, Brodie climbed over a five-foot boundary fence into the north-south alley bisecting the block between Modoc and Lassen and kicked open the back door of the Valley Inn. The wind muffled the sounds of splintering wood and snapping metal, sent swirls of snow into the heavily shadowed storeroom ahead of him. Directly opposite and to one side, he could make out a narrow corridor leading into the front of the building. He ran down there, came out in the restaurant kitchen, and crossed to a swing door in the far wall. When he had pushed through, he was in the inn’s darkened dining room.

Lights burned a pale amber in the lounge area beyond the center partitions. On the wall behind the far end of the bar, Brodie could see the glass-fronted guncase he had noticed earlier-and the twin, ornately scrolled shotguns shining dully within. Spread across the bottom of the interior shelf, just as he remembered, were boxes of shells.

He ran around into the lounge and swung his body up onto the bar, over behind it. With a heavy decanter from the backbar display, he broke the glass out of the guncase door and cleared clinging shards from the opening. The shotguns were. 12 gauge pumps with 26-inch barrels, three-shot Savages. Brodie pulled one of them loose from its clip fastenings, pawed open a box of cartridges, fed three into the magazine, and worked the slide to jack the first into firing position.

Despite the deadliness of the piece, it was cumbersome-and the storm would retard accurate shooting at any range over twenty yards. There were plenty of handguns in the Sport Shop, but once Brodie was certain he’d made good his escape and could think calculatingly again, he had decided against that objective. Kubion had to know that his first consideration would be to get himself a weapon and that the Sport Shop was the one sure place to pick up on guns and ammunition. Maybe Kubion would be following snow tracks, the way you’d expect, but then again, since Brodie hadn’t seen any sign of him when he’d looped around and doubled back across Placer Street, it could be he had gone to the Sport Shop instead. Christ, he could be anywhere, doing anything.

Brodie dropped a handful of extra shells into his coat pocket, went over the bar again, and ran through the dining room and kitchen. He slowed there and entered cautiously into the dark corridor, bringing the shotgun up so that the stock butted hard against his shoulder, moving to where he could see the open rear door. Snow still churned inside, blanketing a section of floor in an unbroken swath. He edged into the storeroom, circled silently around to the wall beside the door. Then, swiftly, he stepped over in front of the opening, still three paces inside, and fanned the pump across the fence. Nothing showed, nothing moved. He saw that the only tracks in the alley snow were his own, hesitated for a moment, and then ran out through the doorway to the left; pulled back to the building wall, sweeping the shotgun’s muzzle from the fence northward along the alley and back again. The narrow expanse was empty in both directions.

With the pump sighted once more on the fence, Brodie waded sideways through the snow to the south. Just prior to Modoc Street, the fence ended against a low line of shrubbery, and he could see a portion of the adjoining house’s front yard: smooth-swept whiteness. He went over there, fanned the area behind the fence, and then swung the weapon outward in an arc to Modoc. Clear. Carefully, he backed farther into the yard at an angle that allowed him to see down Modoc to Sierra in one direction, and back deeper along the fence in the other. He was completely alone.

His moves so far had been the right ones; he’d been inside the inn less than five minutes-not long enough to have trapped himself if Kubion was following his tracks, just long enough to have balanced the odds a little. There was no question what his next move had to be: the church. Loxner figured to be long gone, hiding out somewhere, but there was still an off-chance he’d remained in the car and even a mush-belly was better than no help at all. And doing the cat-and-mouse bit in the village was pure stupidity; you didn’t play games with a maniac. If he could get to the church before Kubion, and Loxner was gone, he could burrow in somewhere and try to pick Kubion off when he showed-and he would show all right, he could already be on his way there because he’d remember Loxner now. But that didn’t change matters. Any way you looked at it, the church was where Brodie had to go.

He hurried through the facing yards of two houses, watching his flank as well as what lay ahead. Then he cut across Modoc and went into another yard and along the side of a dark frame house. There was no fence separating that property from the one which fronted on Shasta; he passed beneath a row of bare-branched fruit trees, paralleled a second dark house, and came to a stop beside a wooden pony cart the owners had put in for landscaping decoration.

He squatted there to catch his breath, to momentarily relieve the sharp ache of fatigued muscles. The shotgun seemed to have grown heavier, more unwieldy. Opening the bottom two buttons of his coat, he used the lining on one of the flaps to wipe his wind-and snow-stung eyes.

As far as he could see, then, Shasta Street was clear both east and west. He levered up again and ran at an angle across the roadway, plowed through thick drifts to a fir tree at the edge of the church acreage. Kubion’s car was discernible from there; like all the others on the lot, it was draped in white, windshield and windows ice-veiled. It looked as if Loxner were gone, all right, but he was still going to have to make sure.

Brodie slogged forward through the surface pack with his body humped over and the pump gun up against his shoulder, covering both front and rear corners. When he had reached the near wall, he went to the corner and stared out into the lot. The snow everywhere was unmarred. If Kubion had managed to get there before him, he hadn’t come across the lot and he wasn’t in the lot.

Stepping out, Brodie moved to the front stairs and sat on his haunches next to them, fanning the shotgun from south to east to north. Then he looked down at Kubion’s car again, came up, and scurried crablike across the walk to the nearest vehicle; went around behind it, half turned back toward the church. Once he got to the car, he raised his left hand and rapped hard against the cold metal of the door. No response from within. He knew that the dome light in the car didn’t work, and he reached up and caught the handle and jerked outward. Ice seals crackled, breaking away from the metal; the door opened wide.

Brodie said “Jesus!” between suddenly clenched teeth, because Loxner hadn’t gone anywhere, because Loxner was still sitting there behind the wheel-with his mouth hanging open and both hands wrapped around the blood-coated haft of Kubion’s pocketknife embedded just under his breastbone.