the car keys; then he opened the door and slid into the front seat. He sat there with his hands splay-fingered on his thighs, staring through the snow-dappled windshield. Kubion said to Brodie, “Put that list of names and addresses on the roof, Vic, and then back off fifteen or twenty steps and keep still like a good boy.”
Brodie did as he was told. Kubion lifted the pad, took out the tourist brochure that had the village map on it, and alternately looked at those items and at Brodie standing well out away from the car. Nineteen names, ten houses, maybe seven trips in all; start with the places nearest the church and move outward until he had them all. He picked out their first three stops, tucked the list into his coat, paused, and then called to Brodie, “Okay, Vic, move out, around to the pickup again.”
Once Brodie had pivoted, Kubion told Loxner, “Get to work on that sack, Duff, take it out of the back and get to work-come on. ”
A moment later he slammed the car door, thinking, Now then, now then, and hurried, glitter-eyed, after Brodie’s retreating back.
Three
Frank McNeil was on his hands and knees in front of his old Magnavox radio-and-record player console, fiddling with the radio dials in an effort to tune in the AFL pro football play-off game, when the doorbell began ringing insistently. He looked up in irritation. “Now who goddamn it is that?”
His son, sitting on the living-room sofa, said, “You want me to answer it, Pa?”
“Well what do you think, dummy?”
Larry stood up and went out into the hallway. McNeil heard voices at the front door and paid them no mind. Damn these mountains sometimes; you could seldom get a decent picture on television even in the best of weather, and today the damned radio was too badly static-ridden to be intelligible. If he could at least…
Footsteps in the hallway, and Larry’s voice-high-pitched, frightened: “Pa? Pa?”
McNeil looked up again and saw the two men standing on either side of the youth; one of them was familiar, the other a complete stranger. And then he became aware of the gun in the hand of the dark familiar one, and his irritation dissolved into disbelief. He jerked awkwardly to his feet, flutter-eyed and gape-mouthed.
“No problems if you keep your cool,” Kubion told him, “no problems at all.”
McNeil continued to blink at him, almost spastically now. With impossible suddenness there was death in the room, his death-he could feel it, he could see it staring at him from the eyes of the dark one with the gun-and he began to shake his head, as if by doing that he could make the men and the gun and the stultifying presence of death vanish.
Kubion said, “Who else is here in the house?”
McNeil kept on shaking his head. His mouth and jaws worked soundlessly, as if in exaggerated pantomime of a man chewing gum; he was incapable of speech.
Larry said, “My mother… just my mother.”
“Where?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Call her in here.”
“You… listen, you won’t hurt her?”
“Now why would I hurt your old lady, get her in here.”
“Ma,” Larry called; then, louder: “Ma!”
“What is it?” a woman’s voice answered.
“Come into the living room.”
“Who was that at the door?”
“Ma, come in here, will you!”
Sandy McNeil-a dark-haired, soft-featured, harassed-looking woman wearing an apron over a faded housedress — appeared in the doorway. “What-” she began, and then stopped speaking and stopped walking as she saw the men, the gun Kubion held. Her eyes grew very round, and the intake of her breath was loudly sibilant, like the hiss of valvebled steam. The dishtowel she had been holding slipped loose and fell unnoticed to the floor.
Larry went to her and put a protective arm around her shoulders, partially shielding her body with his own. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “What do you want with us?”
Kubion said, “We’re going to take you to a party.”
“Party?” Sandy McNeil said blankly.
“At the church. A little party at the church.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand. ”
“You don’t have to understand. You just do what I tell you. Let’s go.”
Larry guided his mother toward the hallway. But McNeil stood frozen in front of the console, eyes glazed with terror; he couldn’t move, he could not make himself move.
Kubion looked at him, and then stepped quickly forward and cupped a hand around the back of McNeil’s neck and sent him reeling across the room. McNeil made a strangled, bleating sound, caught his balance, and groped sightlessly into the hall-pushing his wife and son out of the way as if they were bundles of sticks. His face was the wet dirty color of slush.
A small stain began to spread on the front of his trousers, and Kubion laughed when he saw it. “Well, if you aren’t a pisser,” he said. “If you aren’t a real pisser.” He kept on laughing all the way out to the pickup waiting in the side drive.
Somebody began pounding on the downstairs lobby door just as Walt Halliday and his wife finished making love.
“Oh for goodness sake,” Lil Halliday said drowsily. She was a thick-bodied woman with butter-yellow hair and a pleasantly homely face. Lying naked on the rumpled double bed, her husband’s balding head pillowed comfortably on her heavy breasts, she looked younger than her forty-two years.
Halliday raised his head and listened to the pounding — louder now, demanding-and finally sat up in annoyance. His nose began to run, and he reached one of the Kleenex off the nightstand and blew into it. He had awakened that morning with a sore throat and the runny nose and a slight fever and knew he was coming down with the flu; instead of getting up and dressing for church, as he might have done, he had decided to stay in bed. Lil, who was not much of a churchgoer and went only when he did-fifteen or twenty Sundays in any year, most of those during the quiet off-season months-had brought him a tray breakfast and had then come back to bed with him. They had dozed for a while, talked for a while, been leisurely in their lovemaking: a good Sunday, a fine Sunday. Until that damned persistent pounding on the door.
Standing, Halliday put on his glasses and pajamas and robe and slid his feet into ankle slippers. “Whoever that is,” he said, “is going to get a piece of my mind. There’s no need to beat on the door like that.”
“I’m just glad they didn’t start that racket about five minutes ago,” Lil said.
“That’s something, anyway,” Halliday agreed.
He went to the door and glanced back at his wife, and she was still lying there uncovered; she knew he liked to look at her that way. He gave her a broad wink and left their apartment, which was on the first floor of the inn, at the head of the stairs, and started down to the lobby. He shouted, “I’m coming, stop that hammering!” but the sound continued. It was heavy enough now to rattle the glass in the adjacent window.
More than a little irritated, Halliday unlocked the door and jerked it open and said, “What’s the idea of-” The rest of the sentence died when he saw the two men and the automatic one of them was pointing at him.
Kubion said, “Back inside, hurry it up, you kept us waiting too long already.”
Halliday did what he was told, rapidly, putting his hands up over his head. His mind, all at once, was wrapped in dreamlike confusion. “What do… what do you want?”
“You’ll find that out soon enough. Nothing will happen to you as long as you do what you’re told. You’ve got a wife-where is she?”
“Upstairs. She… but she…”
“Take us to her.”
“She’s in bed, my wife’s in bed.”
