He opened the glove compartment and removed a flashlight and got out of the car. His eyes, wide and unblinking, shone like a cat’s in the darkness.
The interior of the cabin was winter-chilled and subterranean black. Hughes closed the door and said softly, “We’ll stay here for a minute, until we can see well enough to walk without banging into things.”
They stood pressed together, waiting, and eventually Peggy could make out the distorted shapes of furniture, the doors in two walls which would lead to other rooms. Watchfully, they crossed to one of the doors, and Matt widened it and said, “Kitchen,” and led her to another. Beyond this one was a short hallway, with a door in each wall; the one on the left opened on the larger of the cabin’s two bedrooms.
The bed was queen-sized and unmade, but folded across the foot of the mattress was a thin patchwork quilt; they would need that because of the cold, Peggy thought-later, afterward. They stood by the bed and kissed hungrily, undressing each other in the darkness with fumbling urgency, and then they fell onto the bed, kicking the last of their clothing free, their mouths still melded together. Peggy took hold of his erection in both her hands and heard him moan, and he broke the kiss to whisper feverishly, “Put it in, put it in, I can’t wait!” clutching at her breasts as if bracing himself, and she guided him over her and into the waiting wetness of her and he made a jerking, heaving motion as she drew her legs back and said, “Peggy, ah ah ah Peggy!” and came shudderingly.
The rigidity left all his body at once, and he was dead weight on top of her, his face pressed to her neck. Peggy’s lips pursed in mild annoyance, but when he raised his head finally to tell her he was sorry, he just couldn’t hold himself back, she said, “It’s all right, we have plenty of time, baby, we have plenty of time.” She held him flaccid inside her, moving her hips, seeking to make him hard again, and when she began to succeed she said smilingly, “That’s it, that’s my Matt,” and he commenced rocking over her and into her, expertly now, and it was the way it had been in Whitewater, it was perfectly synchronized and wildly good, and she could feel the beginnings of orgasm fluttering and building in her and flung herself upward at him, reaching for it, reaching for it — and then a bright white beam sliced away the blackness like a sudden spotlight and pinned their glistening bodies on the bed.
For a single instant they were blindly motionless, still locked together, still one instead of two. Then Hughes made a startled, whimpering sound and rolled away from her, twisting, sitting up. Peggy threw an arm reflexively across her eyes; fright and confusion replaced the passion inside her, dulling her mind, stepping up the staccato pounding of her heart.
A voice-harsh, amused, unfamiliar-said from behind the light, “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the banker himself, by Christ, tearing off a nice little piece on the side.”
Hughes said in a stark, trapped tone, “Who are you, how did you get in here?”
“You left the front door unlocked. You must have been in some hurry, Banker, some big hurry.”
“You have no right to be here, you have no right! What do you want, why did you come in here, put out that light!”
“Hang loose, just keep your head together.”
At the periphery of her shielding arm, Peggy numbly saw Matt Hughes swing off the bed, shambling almost drunkenly, ludicrous in his nakedness. His face a matrix of fear, he started toward the white hole in the darkness.
“Stay where you are,” Kubion said sharply, “stand right there.”
“Put that light out, put it out I tell you!” And Hughes took another step toward the beam.
“Okay, you stupid hick bastard shit.”
There was a brief flame, like the flare of a match, to one side of the beam; there was a sudden roaring sound, localized thunder echoing in the confines of the room, and Peggy jerked on the bed as if she had been struck. Then she saw Matt stop moving, and saw part of his face disappear, and saw something red spurting, and saw his hands flick upward, and saw him begin to sag before the hands reached the level of his chest, and saw him fall into a loose wet naked pile on the floor.
“How about you, sweetheart?” Kubion’s voice said softly behind the light. “How about you?”
Peggy started to scream.
Twenty-Two
Loxner said, “It’s after seven, Vic, he’s been gone more than five hours now. Where the hell could he be for five hours? He don’t drink, and we got plenty of food right here, and there ain’t nothing in the village for him to do and noplace for him to be riding around.”
“I know,” Brodie said. “I know it.”
“Man I just don’t like the way he’s acting. Not a word to either of us since all that crap about ripping off the valley yesterday morning, gone most of yesterday afternoon, sitting up in his bedroom all of today until he finally went out. I seen him when he come downstairs, and his eyes were still funny; he was smiling funny, too, showing his teeth. I tell you I don’t like it, it’s got me all uptight.”
They were sitting in the living room, across a coffee table set in front of the fireplace. Up until a few minutes ago they had been playing gin rummy, but neither of them had had their thoughts on the game and they’d given it up finally by tacit consent. Brodie stood now and picked up a blackened poker and stirred the pitch-pine logs burning on the hearth; sparks danced, and the charred wood crackled loudly, like firecrackers going off. He set the poker down again, turned, and put voice to what had been on his mind for the past hour.
“You ever see anybody freak out, Duff? Like where they come all apart in the head, go crazy, do crazy things?”
Loxner blinked at him, scratching nervously at the bandage on his left arm. The arm was still stiff, and the skin under the bandage itched constantly, but he’d found he could use the limb for normal activity and had taken off the sling that morning. “No,” he said, “no, I never seen nothing like that.”
“I saw it happen twice, more or less saw it-both while I was doing time. The first guy was a lifer, been in for maybe fifteen years. Happened right out of the blue, one night in the dining hall. He just jumped up and started yelling and foaming at the mouth, got onto the table and ran down it with a fork in either hand and stabbed a con and a screw before they could put him down.
“The second guy was something else again. He’d been a bank teller or an accountant or something on the outside and got caught with his hand in the till; quiet type, mild-mannered, maybe thirty and good-looking. He’d been inside about six months when they switched cells on him, put him right down the block from the one I was in. The two cons in his new cell were hard cases, and on top of that they were fags, buggers. They got to him right away and raped his face and his ass and told him they’d kill him if he didn’t cooperate from then on. So he cooperated, and for maybe a couple of months they passed him back and forth like a private whore. He still didn’t say much, and he didn’t look any different; we thought maybe he’d had some fag in him all along and had gotten to like it. Then the word got around that there was going to be a break, that this guy had masterminded it for himself and the other two. Nobody paid much attention to it; you know how the grapevine’s always humming with word of a break. But they did it, they pulled some fancy moves and went over the wall from the roof of the library, where the accountant had been working. Only the next day the screws found the two hard cases lying in a ditch five miles from the prison-with their balls shot off. The guy stayed loose a week before they caught him, and in that week he offed six other fags in two cities, shot all their balls off. He’d freaked out too, is what I’m getting at, but it had all happened inside where you couldn’t really see it; and what it did was turn him into a machine with one thought in his head: kill the hard cases and kill as many other fags as he could before they got him. He was like supercrazy-ten times as dangerous as the other one I told you about, because he could still think and plan and nothing mattered to him except one crazy idea.”
Loxner said, “Jesus,” and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. “You think something like that’s happened to Earl? You think he’s really freaked out?”
“Maybe,” Brodie said. “And maybe his crazy idea is ripping off this valley.”
“Jesus,” Loxner said again. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and his hands twitched noticeably.
“It could be he’s still okay and it’s nothing but the pressure getting to him and he’ll snap out of it pretty soon. But if he has freaked, there’s no way we can know for sure until maybe it’s too late. We can’t afford to wait, Duff. There’s only one thing we can do; it’ll make problems for us in other ways, but it’s got to be done.”
