The town's lights all came on at once. A brilliant shower of electric radiance stung their eyes with surprise — then darkness again.
Jenny raised the revolver, not knowing where to point it.
Her throat was fear-parched, her mouth dry.
A blast of sound — an ungodly wall — slammed through Snowfield. Jenny and Lisa both cried out in shock and turned, bumping against each other, squinting at the moon-tinted darkness.
Then silence.
Then another shriek. Silence.
“What?” Lisa asked.
“The firehouse!”
It came again: a short burst of the piercing siren from the east side of St. Moritz Way, from the Snowfield Volunteer Fire Company stationhouse.
Bong!
Jenny jumped again, twisted around.
Bong! Bong!
“A church bell,” Lisa said.
“The Catholic church, west on Vail.”
The bell tolled once more — a loud, deep, mournful sound that reverberated in the blank windows along the dark length of Skyline Road and in other, unseen windows throughout the dead town.
“Someone has to pull a rope to ring a bell,” Lisa said, “Or push a button to set off a siren. So there must be someone else here beside us.”
Jenny said nothing.
The siren sounded again, whooped and then died, whooped and died, and the church bell began to toll again, and the bell and the siren cried out at the same time, again and again, as if announcing the advent of someone of tremendous importance.
In the mountains, a mile from the turnoff to Snowfield, the night landscape was rendered solely in black and moon-silver. The looming trees were not green at all; they were somber shapes, mostly shadows, with albescent fringes of vaguely defined needles and leaves.
In contrast, the shoulders of the highway were blood-colored by the light that splashed from the revolving beacons atop the three Ford sedans which all bore the insignia of the Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department on their front doors.
Deputy Frank Autry was driving the second car, and Deputy Stu Wargle was slouched down on the passenger's seat.
Frank Autry was lean, sinewy, with neatly trimmed salt and-pepper hair. His features were sharp and economical, as if God hadn't been in the mood to waste anything the day that He had edited Frank's genetic file: hazel eyes under a finely chiseled brow; a narrow, patrician nose; a mouth that was neither too parsimonious nor too generous; small, nearly lobeless ears tucked flat against the head. His mustache was most carefully groomed.
He wore his uniform precisely the way the service manual said he should: black boots polished to a mirrored shine, brown slacks with a knife-edge crease, leather belt and hoister kept bright and supple with lanolin, brown shirt crisp and fresh.
“It isn't fucking fair,” Stu Wargle said.
“Commanding officers don't always have to be fair — just right,” Frank said.
“What commanding officer?” Wargle asked querulously.
“Sheriff Hammond. Isn't that who you mean?”
“I don't think of him as no commanding officer.”
“Well, that's what he is,” Frank said.
“He'd like to break my ass,” Wargle said, “The bastard.”
Frank said nothing.
Before signing up with the county constabulary, Frank Autly had been a career military officer. He had retired from the United States Army at the age of forty-four, after twenty-five years of distinguished service, and had moved back to Santa Mira, the town in which he'd been born and raised. He had intended to open a small business of some kind in order to supplement his pension and to keep himself occupied, but he hadn't been able to find anything that looked interesting. Gradually, he had come to realize that, for him at least, a job without a uniform and without a chain of command and without an element of physical risk and without a sense of public service was just not a job worth having. Three years ago, at the age of forty-six, he had signed up with the sheriff's department, and in spite of the demotion from major, which was the rank he'd held in the service, he had been happy ever since.
That is, he had been happy except for those occasions, usually one week a month, when he'd been partnered with Stu Wargle. Wargle was insufferable. Frank tolerated the man only as a test of his own self-discipline.
Wargle was a slob. His hair often needed washing. He always missed a patch of bristles when he shaved. His uniform was wrinkled, and his boots were never shined. He was too big in the gut, too big in the hips, too big in the butt.
Wargle was a bore. He had absolutely no sense of humor. He read nothing, knew nothing — yet he had strong opinions about every current social and political issue.
Wargle was a creep. He was forty-five years old, and he still picked His nose in public. He belched and farted with aplomb.
Still slumped against the passenger-side door, Wargle said, “I'm supposed to go off duty at ten o'clock. Ten goddamned o'clock! It's not fair for Hammond to pull me for this Snowfield crap. And me with a hot number all lined up.”
Frank didn't take the bait. He didn't ask who Wargle had a date with. He just drove the car and kept his eyes on the road and hoped that Wargle wouldn't tell him who this “hot number” was.
“She's a waitress over at Spanky's Diner,” Wargle said. “Maybe you seen her. Blond broad. Name's Beatrice; they call her Bea.”
“I seldom stop at Spanky's,” Frank said.
“Oh. Well, she don't have a half-bad face, see. One hell of a set of knockers. She's got a few extra pounds on her, not much, but she thinks she looks worse than she does. Insecurity, see? So if you play her right, if you kind of work on her doubts about herself, see, and then if you say you want her, anyway, in spite of the fact that she's let herself get a little pudgy why, hell, she'll do any damned thing you want. Anything.”
The slob laughed as if he had said something unbearably funny.
Frank wanted to punch him in the face. Didn't.
Wargle was a woman-hater. He spoke of women as if they were members of another, lesser species. The idea of a man happily sharing his life and innermost thoughts with a woman, the idea that a woman could be loved, cherished, admired, respected, valued for her wisdom and insight and humor — that was an utterly alien concept to Stu Wargle.
Frank Autry, on the other hand, had been married to his lovely Ruth for twenty-six years. He adored her. Although he knew it was a selfish thought, he sometimes prayed that he would be the first to die, so that he wouldn't have to handle life without Ruth.
“That fuckin' Hammond wants my ass nailed to a wall. He's always needling me.”
“About what?”
“Everything. He don't like the way I keep my uniform. He don't like the way I write up my reports. He told me I should try to improve my attitude. Christ, my attitude! He wants my ass, but he won't get it. I'll hang in five more years, see, so I can get my thirty-year pension. That bastard won't squeeze me out of my pension.”
Almost two years ago, voters in the city of Santa Mira approved a ballot initiative that dissolved the metropolitan police, putting law enforcement for the city into the hands of the county sheriff's department. It was a vote of confidence in Bryce Hammond, who had built the county department, but one provision of the initiative required that no city officers lose their jobs or pensions because of the transfer of power. Thus, Bryce Hammond was stuck with Stewart Wargle.
They reached the Snowfield turnoff.
Frank glanced in the mirror mirror and saw the third patrol car pull out of the three-car train. As planned, it swung across the entrance to Snowfield road, setting up a blockade.