“There won’t be any other safes.”
“We can’t know that for sure, not yet.”
“If there are I’ll get combinations or keys from whoever they belong to, I don’t need you for that.”
“Suppose whoever it is gives you trouble and you have to kill him before you find out a combination? Suppose there’s a safe at the Hughes’ house and the wife doesn’t know that combination either? Could be Hughes kept a spare bundle at home, some of these guys don’t like to keep it all in one place, right?”
Kubion’s finger became still. The impulse was still whispering to him, but it was saying now: Don’t kill him yet… he’s right, you might need him… don’t kill him yet, soon but not yet…
He said, “Put the tools back in the box, hurry it up, shag your ass.”
Brodie let breath spray inaudibly between his teeth. Immediately, carefully, he knelt and put on his coat and gloves and then began feeding the scattered tools back into the cardboard carton. When he was finished, Kubion ordered him to lace his hands behind him again; stepped forward and scooped the bills off the desk top left-handed and wadded them into his trousers. He went back to the doorway, told Brodie to pick up the carton and come out. A moment later, following him down the aisle between the counter and the wall shelves of liquor and bottled goods, Kubion felt the chill breath of the wind that came stabbing through the glassless door half. Snow whipped in the darkness outside, eddied into the store; the cry of the storm was like that of something alive and in pain.
Kubion’s mouth twisted into a vicious grimace. Snow, wind, cold, goddamn Eskimo village with wooden igloos, and three thousand in the safe and have to keep Brodie alive and Brodie’s back like a target in front of him, urge saying don’t kill him but then saying smash something else, smash something! He stopped moving, smash something do it now, and transferred the automatic to his left hand and swept his right through the bottles of liquor on the nearest of the shelves, driving a dozen or more to the floor. Glass shattered, dark liquid splashed and flowed. Brodie whirled and stared at him, carton held up at chest level, and Kubion yelled, “Don’t say a word, don’t move I’ll kill you if you move,” and picked a bottle off the shelf and threw it into the grocery section, toppling a pyramid of canned goods in another banging, clattering counterpoint to the shriek of the wind. He caught up a second bottle and pitched it at the gated Post Office window, missing low, this one not breaking, and a third bottle was in his hand and he flung that across the store at the left front window. The heavy bottom struck the cardboard replica of Santa Claus at the base of the spine and drove it and exploding fragments of glass outward to the sidewalk. One of the torn reindeer clung to a jagged piece of window, flapping in a sudden gust that hurled more flurries of snow through the opening.
The impulse grew silent then, momentarily satisfied, and he leaned panting against the counter. After several moments the smile reappeared on his mouth, and he straightened up again and returned the automatic to his right hand.
“We’ll hit the Sport Shop now,” he said. “Then the inn and the cafe and the rest of the buildings along here. Then the Hughes’ house.”
“However you want to do it,” Brodie said carefully.
“That’s right, Vic, however I want to do it.”
They went out into the sharp white wind.
Eleven
The interior of the church had grown progressively duskier with the coming of night. The votive candles on the altar had melted down, and the filtered daylight shining through the stained-glass windows had faded and then disappeared altogether. Spaced at intervals along the side walls, brass-armed electric candles burned palely, cheerlessly, and did little to dispel the pockets of grayish shadow forming on the pulpit and along the front wall.
In one of those pockets, by the peg-hung garments at the south front corner, Rebecca stood alone and wished that she could cry. Crying was a purge, in the same way vomiting was a purge, and it would get rid of some of the nauseating dread that persisted malignantly inside her. But there was no emetic for tears. You could cry or you couldn’t, and even as a child she had rarely wept. Once she had considered this a sign of inner efficacy; in truth, however, it was nothing more than a simple incapacity, like not being able to sing on key or stand on your head or perform backflips.
A voice beside her said softly, “Mrs. Hughes?”
She had not heard anyone approach, and she blinked and half turned. Zachary Cain was standing there. She searched his bearded face briefly and found no pity; empathy, yes, but mercifully, no pity. She thought then that he seemed different somehow. She hadn’t noticed it at the cabin earlier or on the ride down, she had been too frightened to notice anything; but there was a definite strength in him only hinted at previously, and the haunted irresolution which had ravaged his features last night had been effaced. It was as if he had undergone some sort of tangible metamorphosis; and today’s ordeal had had no apparent effect, or possibly some esoteric fortifying rather than weakening effect, on that change.
She said, “Don’t say you’re sorry. Please don’t.”
“All right. I… know how you must feel.”
“Do you?”
“I think I do.”
“Nobody can know how I feel right now, Mr. Cain.”
“I can, because I’ve been through it-some of it.”
“What do you mean?”
He said slowly, “I lost my wife and two children six months ago, in San Francisco. My carelessness caused the deaths of all three of them.”
Rebecca stared at him.
“That’s why I came to Hidden Valley,” Cain said, and told her briefly what had occurred and the way it had been for him since.
The only words which came to her when he stopped talking were the same emptily condolent ones she had just asked him not to say to her. She moved her head slightly from side to side, right thumb and index finger worrying one of the buttons on her open parka.
At length she found other words and her voice. “Why did you tell me all that? Why now?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe… well maybe because of what you’re going through and will keep on going through for a while, the similarities of the things that have hurt both of us.”
“Keep my chin up, roll with the punches, don’t let happen to me what happened to you-is that it?”
“I didn’t mean it exactly that way.”
Rebecca looked away from him. “No, of course you didn’t,” she said, and then, in an undertone: “It’s just that everything seems so hopeless now. What’s the use of thinking about the future when there might not be any tomorrow for any of us? We might all be killed today, just as my husband was killed.”
“We’re not going to die,” Cain said.
“I wish I could really believe that.”
“You can. You have to.”
He extended a hand, as if to touch her and transmit by osmosis some of his own conviction; but he did not make contact, and his arm lowered and dropped again to his side. He held her eyes for a long moment, and Rebecca once more felt the new strength in him, felt some of the same intimacy they had shared the night before.
He said finally, “You’re going to be okay, all of us are going to be okay,” and one corner of his mouth spasmed upward in what might have been half of an ethereal smile. He moved past her and away along the front wall.
Rebecca watched him stop in front of the entrance doors and stand there staring straight ahead; watched him for a full thirty seconds. Then she thought that she wanted to sit down again and took a place in the nearest pew. She looked at the round whiteness of her joined knees, saw them mistily-and realized that the eyes which never cried were suddenly brimming with tears.
Cain waited gravely, leaning against the locked doors, for it to be time to go into the vestry.
His nerves jangled now and then, as if in reaction to a silent alarm bell, and a clot of fear existed parasitically
