find in their bedroom,” and hurried away.
The gray overcoat was knee-length, heavier than the shorter one Cain wore; he made the exchange and found that it fit him well enough. Once he had it on, he peeled off Coopersmith’s gloves, wiped his dark-stained right hand-the blood, coagulating, felt as viscous as liquid adhesive-and tried the new pair. They were a size too small, but not so tight that they would hamper free finger movement.
At the open front door, he looked out and down Shasta again. All that moved was the wind-hurled snow. Cain turned as Tribucci reentered the hall wearing a thick muffler and a woman’s fox-pelt cap pulled down over his ears; his own light-colored overcoat was heavy enough so that he hadn’t needed to replace it with another, but he’d put on a wool sweater beneath it. In one hand he carried a second muffler, a second sweater, and a man’s lamb-wool Cossack-style hat.
He gave those items to Cain, watched as he put them on. “Best way to do it now, I think, would be for the two of us to split up: you back to the church and me after the other guns at my brother’s. One of us has got to get into a protective position as quickly as possible.”
Cain weighed the proposal for several seconds. “Agreed,” he said then. “If there is a guard out front, I’ll see if I can locate his whereabouts. But I won’t make a move until you come-unless there’s a definite threat and I don’t have any choice.”
“I’ll make it back as fast as I can.” Tribucci held his wristwatch up to his eyes. “Six twenty. Figure less than half an hour. You’ll be along the church’s south wall?”
“Right,” Cain said. “We’d better have a signal, though. We won’t be able to recognize each other from a distance, and things are going to be tense enough as it is.”
“Suppose I stop in front of the cottage door and give a left-handed wave over my head.”
“Good. I’ll make the same gesture in return.”
“Split up in the wood; it’ll be safe if I go that way.”
They moved out of the hallway and down off the porch, climbed the wooden boundary fence, and retraced their original route into the trees. Once there, Tribucci put a hand on Cain’s arm, squeezed it, and then slipped away quickly and was swallowed by the heavy fir shadows. Cain turned in the opposite direction-and he was immediately conscious of being alone. When two or more men were working together, interacting, in a crucial situation, the unit they formed became an entity unto itself-stronger than each individual because it fused their strengths into the whole. You thought as part of the unit, and as a result, you were able to maintain rigid control over your own personality. But when the unit was temporarily disbanded, and you became a man alone, a little of that control began to slip; you tried to continue blocking out emotions, to keep your mind functioning as calculatingly as it had been, but a few inevitably, if dimly, seeped through: fear, anger and hatred, enormity of purpose.
And for Cain, too, a repulsion of-a reassurance from-the weapon that seemed to have become a sudden immense weight in his right coat pocket…
Thirteen
Brodie came out through the broken mouth of the Valley Cafe, braced his body against the force of the storm, and then stepped beyond the perimeter of the fluorescent light spill and started across Sierra Street. Behind him, Kubion trailed like a sentient and menacing shadow.
They had ripped off the Sport Shop and the Valley Inn and now the cafe, and the total take had been slightly more than four bills. Counting the fifteen hundred Kubion had taken from the people at Mule Deer Lake, he now had a little more than five thousand on him. At the outside there would be another grand in the flour sack of purses and wallets Loxner had collected in the church, and no more than a couple of thousand in all the village homes combined.
All of this, the whole puking business, for maybe eight thousandeight thousand dollars!
Kubion had worked himself up into another destructive rage, the way he had in the Mercantile, and had made a broken shambles of the cafe: smashing glasses and crockery and two wall mirrors. Watching him, Brodie had had to struggle to maintain a grip on his ragged control. Kubion was far over the edge now; all you had to do was look at him to see how much he wanted to start killing people. There just wasn’t any way Brodie was going to buy himself any more time than he’d already been allotted. The cafe hadn’t had a safe, and neither had the Sport Shop or the Valley Inn; he’d said there was still the Hughes’ house and the filling station and the other buildings in the village, and Kubion said, “There’s only the Hughes’ place and that’s it, that’s our next stop. We’re going up there now and there’d better be a safe, Vic, there’d better be a safe for you to open with those tools in the pickup, you hear me Vic there’d better be a safe.”
It didn’t make any difference whether there was a safe or not; the Hughes’ house was intended to be Brodie’s execution chamber.
But Kubion still hadn’t given him even the smallest of possible openings, and in the two hours since they had started looting the village there hadn’t been any sign of big stupid gutless Loxner, eliminating the last faint hope of help from that quarter. Kubion’s freaked-out head had forgotten all about Loxner-they hadn’t gone anywhere near the church in those two hours-and that was the closest he’d come to any sort of mistake. Brodie kept telling himself that Kubion getting crazier and crazier would work both ways, that it would make him careless as well as more dangerous; he kept telling himself the opening would come, don’t take a last desperate gamble because the opening would come.
He reached the windrow on the eastern side of Sierra, started along it toward the pickup in the next block. The surface snow there was freezing and slick; he walked it with slow, cautious steps, risked a glance over his shoulder. Kubion’s dark face stared back at him: no smile now, lips moving as if in silent monologue. Brodie told himself again that an opening would come.
And one came.
Just like that, with startlingly coeval suddenness, Kubion made the kind of mistake Brodie had been waiting for.
Thoughts and eyes focused elsewhere, he had not been paying any attention to his footing; his right shoe came down on one of the patches of glassy snow, found no traction and slipped, and the leg kicked up rigidly like a football placekicker following through. His left arm flailed at the air and his body jerked into a horizontal plane and he fell bellowing, landing heavily on his buttocks, left leg twisted slightly as he skidded sideways into the snowpack at the curbing.
Brodie’s reaction was almost instantaneous. Instinct obliterated surprise and fatigue, and when he saw that Kubion had managed to hold onto the gun, it rejected any effort of trying to jump him across the ten icy steps which separated them. He spun and ran, diagonally back the way they had come because Kubion’s body was bent toward the south and because Lassen Drive to the west was the nearest release street, the nearest shielded path of escape. He fled in a headlong, weaving crouch through the less treacherous snow which blanketed the middle of the street, coming on the far windrow near the corner of the inn. Another bellow sounded behind him, and then the flat wind-muffled explosion of a shot. Nothing touched him but the flakes of obscuring snow.
He leaped over the windrow, muscles hunched and rippling along his back, head tucked down against his chest. Sliding on the ice-quilted sidewalk, he lunged against the building wall, caught the corner, and heaved himself around it as a second shot echoed dimly and a bullet slapped into the boarding a foot or two to his left. He vaulted the ragged snowpack on Lassen Drive, to evade more sidewalk ice-lost his balance this time and sprawled out prone on the street and planed forward half a dozen yards like a man on an invisible sled before he was able to drag his feet under him again.
There were no more shots, but he did not look back; he stretched his body forward into the wind, summoning reserves of stamina, and kept on running.
Fourteen
