sometimes put on extra security guards just before Christmas. This Monday, then, was the best time for the hit.
Brodie found a garage for rent on a short-term lease, in an industrial area four blocks from Greenfront, and that minimized somewhat the risk with the dummy car; he wore one of the theatrical disguises while visiting the realtor and paid the deposit in cash. Also, as a final precaution, Loxner arranged for a safe place to ground, in an isolated section of the Sierra called Hidden Valley. It was there they figured to make the split and to spend a week or so letting things cool down before they separated.
The week before, Kubion and Brodie had driven up to this Hidden Valley and established residence-two San Francisco businessmen on a combination vacation and work conference, they said-so that they would not be complete strangers when they came back after the job; and when they came back, Loxner would keep out of sight: still two men, not three, to ensure further that none of the locals would tie them in with Greenfront. Brodie and Kubion returned to Sacramento on Friday, and the mechanic delivered the dummy car inside a storage van late Saturday night, directly to the rented garage. There had been nothing to do then but wait for Monday afternoon…
They left the garage at two twenty-five, with Brodie driving and Kubion beside him and Loxner in back. Each of them wore one of the disguises: false mustaches and sideburns and eyebrows, putty noses, cotton wadding to fatten cheeks and distort the shape of the mouth. They saw no police units in the four blocks to Greenfront. Fifty yards beyond the office entrance at the rear was the loading dock, with a couple of semis drawn up to it and warehousemen pushing dollies back and forth on the ramp; none of the men glanced at the armored car as it pulled up and parked.
Brodie went around and opened the rear doors, and Loxner came out with the empty money sacks. The two of them stepped up to the door, while Kubion stood watching by the right rear fender. Loxner pressed the bell, one long and two short and one long, and they stood there under the dark afternoon sky, waiting for the security cop to come down.
It took him two minutes, twenty or thirty seconds longer than usual because they weren’t expecting the armored car for another half hour. He opened the peephole in the door and stared out through the thick glass covering it and saw the car and the three uniformed men-everything exactly as it was supposed to be. Satisfied, he worked the locks and swung the door open and said, “You guys are pretty early, aren’t you?”
“There’s a fire over on Kingridge,” Brodie told him. “Big warehouse right across the street from Saddleman’s. They’ve got the streets blocked off, hoses and pumpers everywhere, and we can’t get in. So the company told us we might as well go ahead with our other rounds.”
“Fires in the middle of December,” the guard said, and shook his head. “Well, everything’s just about ready upstairs, but you might have to wait five or ten minutes.”
“Sure, we expected that.”
The guard stepped aside to let Brodie and Loxner enter. When they were past him, he turned and started to close the door-and Brodie’s left hand slapped across his mouth, jerking his head back; the swiftly drawn revolver jabbed him sharply in the small of the back. Softly, Brodie said, “You make a funny move or say anything above a whisper when I take my hand away, and I’ll kill you first thing. Believe it. ”
The guard stood motionless, his eyes wide and abruptly terrified; he had a wife and three kids, and he was no hero.
Kubion glanced out at the loading dock and saw that no one on the ramp was looking in his direction. The area was otherwise deserted. He drew his own gun and shut the door, leaving it unlocked. “All right,” he said to the guard, “who opens the door up there? You or the other guy in the office?”
Brodie took his hand away, increasing the pressure of the Colt. The guard’s throat worked three times before he found words, thickly hushed. “My partner. I tell him it’s okay and he opens up.”
“That better be right,” Kubion said. “If it isn’t, you’re a dead man.”
“It’s right.”
“Fine. Now when we go into the office, you keep your mouth shut. Don’t do or say anything. We’ll take it from there.”
Convulsively, the guard nodded. Kubion pushed him over to the stairs, and they went up single file. At the top, the guard called out, “Okay, Ben,” and there was the scrape of a key in the lock. The heavy steel-ribbed door opened, and the other security cop stood before them with his hands in plain sight. Kubion shoved the first one into the office, moving to one side so that Brodie and Loxner could enter, covering the startled second guard.
“Everybody just sit tight,” Kubion said sharply. “No panic, no screams, no heroics.”
“It’s a holdup, my God!” somebody said, and one of the two women employees gasped-but the two guards just stood there staring at Kubion’s gun. Brodie fanned immediately to the left and watched the rigid office staff sitting at their desks; none of them made further sounds. Loxner was at the open door to the manager’s cubicle, eyes and gun on the fat, white-faced man who had gotten to his feet within.
For a long moment the office was a fixed tableau fashioned of fear and disbelief. Then Kubion-smiling, thinking that they were going to get it done well within their allotted fifteen minutes-gestured to the manager and said, “Come out here and open the safe. Quick, no arguments.” Obediently, woodenly, the fat man stepped out of his cubicle and started across the office.
And that was when the whole thing went suddenly and completely sour…
Two
It began to snow again just after Lew Coopersmith left his house and walked over to Sierra Street.
He pulled the collar of his mackinaw high on the back of his neck, moving more quickly under the thickening flakes. Like most residents of Hidden Valley, he did not particularly mind the snow, but then neither did he relish walking or driving in it, especially when the snowfall had been as heavy as it had this winter.
Lean and tall and durable, like the lodgepole pines on the valley’s eastern slopes, he was sixty-six years old, felt forty-six, and surprised his wife, Ellen, every now and then by knocking on the door of her room just after bedtime and asking her if she felt like having a go. There were squint lines at the corners of his alert green eyes and faint creases paralleling a stubby nose, but his narrow face was otherwise unlined. His hair, covered now by a woolen cap, was a dusty gray and showed no signs of thinning. Only the liver spots on the backs of his hands and fingers hinted of his age.
For twenty-two years, up to his retirement four years before, he had served as county sheriff. Police work had been his entire life-he had been a highway patrolman in Truckee and Sacramento and then a county deputy for eleven years before finally being elected sheriff-but he had always looked forward with a kind of eagerness to what were euphemistically termed his Leisure Years. And yet retirement had developed into something of a hollow reward. Shortly after he finished his final term, he and Ellen had moved from the county seat to Hidden Valley-an area both of them had decided upon sometime earlier-and almost immediately he had felt a sense of impotence, of uselessness. He found himself constantly wondering how his former deputy and the new county sheriff, Ed Patterson, was handling things and took to driving over to the county seat periodically and stopping in to talk about this and that, strictly social, Ed, you understand. Even after four years, he still dropped in on Patterson now and then, as he had done when Frank McNeil and some of the others had gotten their backs up about Zachary Cain, the loner type who had moved into the valley the previous summer.
The trouble was, he didn’t know what to do with himself. There was always plenty to do when you were an officer of the law, dozens of things to occupy your time, some excitement to life; but in Hidden Valley, what the hell was there? Reading and smoking your pipe in front of the fireplace and puttering in the basement workshop and watching television and bulling with the locals and the seasonal tourists at the Valley Inn and driving up to Soda Grove occasionally to take in a movie-weekend and evening pastimes, shallow pursuits void of significance or commitment. He felt severed from the ebb and flow of life, put out to pasture. Good Lord, sixty-six wasn’t old, not when you felt forty-six and your mind was just as sharp as ever and you had always been a doer, a man involved, a man empowered. His retirement very definitely had been premature, but the decision could not be unmade and he would have to go on making the best of it, just as he had done for the past four years.
When he reached Sierra, Coopersmith turned right off Shasta Street and went into Tribucci Bros. Sport Shop.
