And the voice outside shouted, “Stand back in there!”
Six
Waiting beside the Ford half-ton, Brodie watched Kubion lock the last two valley residents-Hughes’ wife and the big bearded man-inside the church. His mind was still sharply alert, but physically he had begun to feel the effects of the long sleepless night, the constant tension; his eyes were sandy and his neck ached and fatigue leadened his arms and legs. The chill mountain weather made it worse. The wind was up now, and it kept getting colder, and snow fell in turbulent swirls of fat, dry flakes. Night shadows, thickened by the density of the bloated gray clouds overhead, crept rapidly through the village and across the valley.
Brodie turned his head to look toward the car parked sixty yards distant, and through the snow and the rimed windows Loxner was a blackish outline behind the wheel. He’d been visible there each of the times they’d brought prisoners back here to the church, probably hadn’t even got out of the car in all that time; no guts and no brains, Brodie couldn’t have asked for any worse an ally. Well, he hadn’t expected Loxner to try to take Kubion, had thought that if Duff did anything at all, it would be to run his ass into the woods somewhere and hide. The only way Brodie was going to get out of Hidden Valley alive was to handle Kubion himself.
He’d been in tight situations before, been under the gun before, but making a move against an armed man and making a move against an armed supercrazy and superdeadly psycho were two different things entirely. You just didn’t want to gamble, because when you got desperate around a maniac, you got dead-period. So you hung on grimly to your cool, and you waited for a mistake or some other clear-cut opportunity. Only Kubion hadn’t made any mistakes-his whip hand had been unbreakable so far-and there just hadn’t been any openings. What had seemed like one when Kubion pistol-whipped the pockmarked guy had turned out to be a blind corner instead, and he’d been within a half step, a half second of taking a bullet for his effort. Since then he’d been able to do nothing except to wait and keep on waiting.
And now maybe he had waited too long.
They’d rounded up all the valley people, and Kubion didn’t need him or Loxner to loot the village. It could be he intended to let them both keep on living a while longer; but he was totally unpredictable, and there was no way you could second-guess him. If this was it, Brodie’s only option was that desperate gamble; he wasn’t going to die a frozen target, any way but a frozen target. The only other thing he could do was to try to buy himself time, and the way to do that was to remind Kubion of the Mercantile’s safe.
When they’d first taken Hughes’ wife, Kubion had asked her for the combination; she’d said she didn’t have any idea what it was, no one knew it except her husband and he had committed it to memory. Too scared to be lying, even Kubion had seen that. So the safe had to be cracked-and Kubion was no jugger, he didn’t know the first thing about busting a box. Brodie did, though. Jugging was a nowhere business these days, owing to modern improvements in safe-and-vault manufacturing: drill-and acetylene-resistant steel alloys and self-contained alarm systems and automatic relocking devices to help guard against lock blowing with nitro or plastic gelatine; but there were still a few old hands around, and Brodie had worked a couple of scores with one of them, Woody Huggins. Kubion was aware of that and had to be aware, too-made aware, convinced-that Brodie could open that box a hell of a lot quicker and surer than he could do it himself….
Kubion returned to the pickup, which straddled the front walk thirty feet from the church entrance, and stopped by the tailgate. He said, “All of them now, all of them, didn’t I tell you the way it would be? You should have listened, you and Duff should’ve listened from the start.”
“That’s right, Earl,” Brodie said, “we should’ve listened from the start.”
“Now the gravy, eh Vic? Now the gravy.”
“The safe in the Mercantile first?”
Kubion gave him a sly look. “Could be.”
“I hope it’s one I can jug without any sweat.”
“Maybe I could jug it myself, you know?”
“Maybe you couldn’t, Earl,” Brodie said slowly. He watched the automatic the way you would watch a coiled rattlesnake.
“Yeah, maybe not,” Kubion agreed, and laughed.
“Do we move out now?”
“How come you’re so anxious, Vic, how come?”
“I just want to see how much is in that safe.”
The slyness vanished. “Well so do I. Let’s get to cracking.” He paused, realizing what he’d said, and found it to be funny; his laughter this time was loud and shrill, echoing on the wind. “Pretty good, hey? Let’s get to cracking.”
Brodie relaxed a little, not much. “Pretty good, Earl,” he said.
He watched Kubion go around to the passenger door, open it; they got into the cab simultaneously. So Kubion wasn’t worried about Loxner any more than Brodie was counting on him; he was giving them both some extra time. Well, screw Loxner, Loxner just didn’t figure to matter at all. What mattered was an opening, a mistake. And it would come, he had to keep telling himself that; it would come, it would come.
Brodie started the engine, drove across the front churchyard and onto Sierra Street and up to the Mercantile. They got out of the pickup, climbed over the windrows onto the icy sidewalk. The wind hurled snow in gyrating flurries, moaned in building eaves, rattled boarding and glass, singingly vibrated the string of Christmas lights spanning the street. In its emptiness the village had an almost eerily desolate feel, like an Arctic ghost town.
“Kick the doors open,” Kubion said.
Brodie looked at the holly wreath and mistletoe decorating the two glass halves, over at the cardboard Santa Claus and cardboard reindeer in one of the windows. Then he tongued cold-chapped lips and stepped up to the entrance. Raising one foot, he drove it against the lock in the wooden frames where the two leaves joined; the doors held. He kicked again, and a third time, without being able to snap the lock.
Impatiently, Kubion told him to break the pane out of one of the halves.
He did that, and the holly wreath flew inside with splinters of glass and scattered berries and leaves across the floor. He used his foot to punch away the remaining shards, ducked through the open frame and into the semidarkened interior. When he was eight steps across the wooden floor, Kubion came in and said, “Light switches are on the wall over there, behind the counter.”
Moving slowly, Brodie passed the potbellied stove and went around and found the metal control case and flipped the row of switches within. Warm yellow illumination flooded the store. Kubion waved him a short way along the aisle between the counter and wall shelves of liquor and other bottled goods; then, without taking eyes off him, he rang up No Sale on the cash register and rifled the drawer. Seventy or eighty dollars, if that much. He wadded the bills into his trouser pocket, made another waving motion, and they went down to where the office was located.
The door was locked, but this one gave and bounced inward the first time Brodie slammed the bottom of his shoe against the wood above the latch. While Kubion stood watching from just outside the doorway, Brodie crossed to the heavy oak desk and put on the lamp there. The glass top held no potential weapon, not even a letter opener, but would Hughes have kept a gun in one of the drawers? Not likely-and Kubion wouldn’t let him into the desk anyway. He gave his attention to the safe. A cheesebox, it could be opened in a maximum of thirty minutes; all you had to do with one of these old one-pieces was to knock off the combination dial.
Kubion said, “How long?”
“I’m not sure. I might have to peel it.”
“A crate like this?”
“It’s more solid than it might look.”
“I don’t want any bullshit, Vic.”
“No bullshit.”
“All right, what you need?”
“Hammer, chisels, pry bar, maybe a high-speed drill.”
“Nice and convenient hardware section out front, right?”
