“So what? Come on, get your ass in gear.”
Halliday stared at the gun, at the face behind it, and turned instantly to the stairs. As he began to ascend, he could not seem to think of anything except the way Lil had been lying when he’d left her moments ago; and he found himself hoping almost desperately that she had covered herself. Whatever was about to happen, he did not want these two men to see his wife naked…
Joe Garvey opened his front door, and one of the two men standing on the porch outside showed him a gun and said, “Back off, we’re coming in; do what you’re told and you won’t get hurt.”
Garvey said incredulously, “What the hell! ” and stayed where he was. The fingers of his right hand still clutched the edge of the door.
“Inside,” Kubion said. “Move it.”
“Listen, what is this, you can’t come around my house waving a gun-”
Kubion kicked the door out of his hand, jarring loose the candle-festooned holly wreath which hung from the outer panel, and crowded forward. But instead of giving ground as he was expected to do, Garvey braced himself in anger and indignation and made a reflexive lunge at the extended automatic. Half turning, pulling the gun in against his body, Kubion blocked the sweeping arm with his shoulder and made a horizontal bar of his left arm and hit the other man across the chest with it. Garvey banged into one of the inside corridor walls, came off it again like a ball bouncing, and Kubion clubbed him full in the face with the barrel of the weapon.
Bawling with pain, broken nose spraying blood, Garvey staggered into the wall a second time and then went down hard to his knees. Kubion took four more steps into the corridor without breaking momentum and swung around in a crouch and said, “Don’t do it, Vic.”
Brodie was through the doorway, one arm upraised like a bludgeon, moving in a rush. He brought himself up three feet from the muzzle of Kubion’s gun and dropped his arm and backed away immediately, around the kneeling figure of Joe Garvey. His face, momentarily savage, became blank again; only his eyes maintained their polished amethyst shine.
Pat Garvey’s voice began calling in querulous alarm from somewhere in the house. “Joe? Joe?”
“Stupid, Vic,” Kubion said. “Stupid, stupid.”
Brodie said, “All right, I lost my head.”
“You’ll lose it permanently if you do something else that’s stupid. I need you to work the rest of the take- over, you’re still in for a third of the take, but I’ll make you a dead lump of shit if you push me. You’d better have that straight now.”
“Okay,” Brodie said. “Okay.”
Garvey took his hands away from his face and stared at the blood on them, at the blood dripping from his pulped nose to stain the white front of his shirt. Throbbing pain ringing in his ears, nausea in the back of his throat. What’s happening here? he thought dazedly. I don’t know what’s happening here.
His wife came running into the corridor, saw the two men, saw the gun, saw Garvey kneeling on the floor with the bright red fluid all over him. One hand came up to her mouth, and she screamed softly. “Joe, oh my God, Joe!” She started toward him.
Kubion stepped in front of her and caught her arm; she shrank back away from him, struggling vainly to release the grip, her eyes darting from his face to her husband. “He’ll be all right,” Kubion told her, “and so will you if you both keep your mouths shut, I mean shut, you hear?”
Leave her alone, you filthy son of a bitch! Garvey thought. He tried to put voice to the words, but there was blood in his throat; he began to cough instead.
The blood and the coughing saved his life.
Greg Novak wondered where the hell everybody was.
Sierra Street was deserted all the way up to the slide, and there was no sign of life anywhere else. He hadn’t seen a soul since he’d left his parents’ home on Modoc Street five minutes before.
For that matter, where were his father and mother? They’d gone to church at a quarter to twelve, and it was three o’clock when he came out of the house for a little fresh air, and they still hadn’t returned. He supposed they’d gone to visit somebody, though they didn’t usually do that on Sundays. Usually they came straight home and his mother fixed a light lunch and then they played canasta. Church and canasta were both a drag, as far as he was concerned. Sometimes he got pressured into both, because it was easier to give in than to start a hassle; but he’d stayed in bed this morning, and for a change his mother hadn’t tried to talk him out. All things considered, his folks were pretty good people, even if they were hung up on religion and canasta.
So where was everybody, anyway?
Novak felt as if he were walking in a village that had been abandoned, and the feeling made him oddly uncomfortable. He stopped and turned and looked back down Sierra-and a Ford pickup had swung out of the lane to the north of the church and was coming up toward him. Sid Markham’s pickup. The uneasiness left him, and he stood watching the half-ton approach, waiting for it.
When it had come close enough so that the two men in the cab were visible through the windshield, he realized that neither of them was Sid Markham. He began to frown. The pickup slewed over to him, and the passenger door opened; the guy on that side jumped out with a gun in his hand, vaulted the packed snow at the curbing, and said, “Stand right where you are, kid, don’t move a muscle.”
Novak did not even breathe.
Emily Bradford was seventy-five years of age, a thin and frail old woman confined by chronic arthritis either to her bed or to a wheelchair for the past eight years. She lived with her daughter and son-in-law, Sharon and Dave Nedlick: six months in the Macklin Lake hunting lodge which the Nedlicks owned and operated, and six months in the two-story frame house on the corner of Alpine and Modoc streets, where she now lay in her upstairs bedroom.
Sharon and Dave had left for church just before noon, and Emily had spent the next hour faithfully reading her buckram-bound Bible. She had long ago learned to live with her invalidism, but she was still bothered by the fact that she could no longer attend church. Reading the Bible for the length of a Sunday service compensated somewhat, although it was simply not the same thing and never would be. At one o’clock she had resumed her current crocheting project, waiting for her family to return home.
It was presently three thirty, and they had still not come back.
When Sharon and Dave planned to be away for any period of time, they always asked one of the neighbors- mostly an obliging Ellen Coopersmith-to stay with her; but Sharon had said this morning that they would return immediately after church, because they were having turkey for Sunday dinner and she wanted to get it into the oven by one thirty, and Emily never minded being alone for an hour or so. Almost four hours was something else entirely, particularly when the prolonged absence had no apparent explanation, and as a result, Emily had fretted herself into a state of acute anxiety. Something was wrong, she felt it in her bones. She could not imagine what it could be, what with the valley being snowbound as it was, but that only made her all the more apprehensive.
She reached out to the telephone on the bedside table, the third time she had done so in the past hour, and lifted the receiver to her ear. There was no dial tone, it was still not working, and why did there always have to be problems with the telephone when you needed it most? She dropped the handset back into its cradle, keenly aware of the stillness of the house and the quick beating of her heart. Why didn’t Sharon and Dave come home? Why didn’t they come home?
Something made a crashing, shattering noise downstairs.
Emily started violently. One of her veined hands flew up to clutch at the high neck of her nightdress, and her eyes widened behind the lenses of her glasses until they were like luminous brown-and-white pellets. She sat tensely, listening.
More sounds came from below, heavy footsteps. Sharon always walked softly, as did her husband, and Emily thought: Somebody else, there’s somebody else in the house! Her breath made a rasping sound in her throat, and her heart began to pound now like a fist within her thin breast.
The heavy footfalls were on the stairs now, ascending.
“Who is it?” she cried, but her tremulous voice was a whisper instead of a shout. “Who’s out there?”
The bedroom doorknob rattled-and then the door popped open, and she was looking at two men she had never seen before; men with hard, dark faces and the tangible aura of malevolence about them, one of them brandishing a gun-a gun! That one came into the bedroom, sweeping it with deranged eyes, looking at Emily as if she were just another of the room’s furnishings.
