Hughes said in a stark, trapped tone, “Who are you, how did you get in here?”
“You left the front door unlocked. You must have been in some hurry, Banker, some big hurry.”
“You have no right to be here, you have no right! What do you want, why did you come in here, put out that light!”
“Hang loose, just keep your head together.”
At the periphery of her shielding arm, Peggy numbly saw Matt Hughes swing off the bed, shambling almost drunkenly, ludicrous in his nakedness. His face a matrix of fear, he started toward the white hole in the darkness.
“Stay where you are,” Kubion said sharply, “stand right there.”
“Put that light out, put it out I tell you!” And Hughes took another step toward the beam.
“Okay, you stupid hick bastard shit.”
There was a brief flame, like the flare of a match, to one side of the beam; there was a sudden roaring sound, localized thunder echoing in the confines of the room, and Peggy jerked on the bed as if she had been struck. Then she saw Matt stop moving, and saw part of his face disappear, and saw something red spurting, and saw his hands flick upward, and saw him begin to sag before the hands reached the level of his chest, and saw him fall into a loose wet naked pile on the floor.
“How about you, sweetheart?” Kubion’s voice said softly behind the light. “How about you?”
Peggy started to scream.
Twenty-Two
Loxner said, “It’s after seven, Vic, he’s been gone more than five hours now. Where the hell could he be for five hours? He don’t drink, and we got plenty of food right here, and there ain’t nothing in the village for him to do and noplace for him to be riding around.”
“I know,” Brodie said. “I know it.”
“Man I just don’t like the way he’s acting. Not a word to either of us since all that crap about ripping off the valley yesterday morning, gone most of yesterday afternoon, sitting up in his bedroom all of today until he finally went out. I seen him when he come downstairs, and his eyes were still funny; he was smiling funny, too, showing his teeth. I tell you I don’t like it, it’s got me all uptight.”
They were sitting in the living room, across a coffee table set in front of the fireplace. Up until a few minutes ago they had been playing gin rummy, but neither of them had had their thoughts on the game and they’d given it up finally by tacit consent. Brodie stood now and picked up a blackened poker and stirred the pitch-pine logs burning on the hearth; sparks danced, and the charred wood crackled loudly, like firecrackers going off. He set the poker down again, turned, and put voice to what had been on his mind for the past hour.
“You ever see anybody freak out, Duff? Like where they come all apart in the head, go crazy, do crazy things?”
Loxner blinked at him, scratching nervously at the bandage on his left arm. The arm was still stiff, and the skin under the bandage itched constantly, but he’d found he could use the limb for normal activity and had taken off the sling that morning. “No,” he said, “no, I never seen nothing like that.”
“I saw it happen twice, more or less saw it-both while I was doing time. The first guy was a lifer, been in for maybe fifteen years. Happened right out of the blue, one night in the dining hall. He just jumped up and started yelling and foaming at the mouth, got onto the table and ran down it with a fork in either hand and stabbed a con and a screw before they could put him down.
“The second guy was something else again. He’d been a bank teller or an accountant or something on the outside and got caught with his hand in the till; quiet type, mild-mannered, maybe thirty and good-looking. He’d been inside about six months when they switched cells on him, put him right down the block from the one I was in. The two cons in his new cell were hard cases, and on top of that they were fags, buggers. They got to him right away and raped his face and his ass and told him they’d kill him if he didn’t cooperate from then on. So he cooperated, and for maybe a couple of months they passed him back and forth like a private whore. He still didn’t say much, and he didn’t look any different; we thought maybe he’d had some fag in him all along and had gotten to like it. Then the word got around that there was going to be a break, that this guy had masterminded it for himself and the other two. Nobody paid much attention to it; you know how the grapevine’s always humming with word of a break. But they did it, they pulled some fancy moves and went over the wall from the roof of the library, where the accountant had been working. Only the next day the screws found the two hard cases lying in a ditch five miles from the prison-with their balls shot off. The guy stayed loose a week before they caught him, and in that week he offed six other fags in two cities, shot all their balls off. He’d freaked out too, is what I’m getting at, but it had all happened inside where you couldn’t really see it; and what it did was turn him into a machine with one thought in his head: kill the hard cases and kill as many other fags as he could before they got him. He was like supercrazy-ten times as dangerous as the other one I told you about, because he could still think and plan and nothing mattered to him except one crazy idea.”
Loxner said, “Jesus,” and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. “You think something like that’s happened to Earl? You think he’s really freaked out?”
“Maybe,” Brodie said. “And maybe his crazy idea is ripping off this valley.”
“Jesus,” Loxner said again. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and his hands twitched noticeably.
“It could be he’s still okay and it’s nothing but the pressure getting to him and he’ll snap out of it pretty soon. But if he has freaked, there’s no way we can know for sure until maybe it’s too late. We can’t afford to wait, Duff. There’s only one thing we can do; it’ll make problems for us in other ways, but it’s got to be done.”
“You mean-waste him?”
“I mean waste him.”
Loxner got to his feet and paced rapidly forth and back in front of the fireplace. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right, we can’t take no chances, we got to think about our own asses.” He came to a standstill. “When do we do it?”
“Tonight. Just as soon as he gets back. I’ve still got the extra set of car keys he gave me, and when he’s inside here, I’ll go out and unlock the trunk and get one of the guns out of the suitcase.”
“You going to pull the trigger, then?”
“I’ll pull the trigger.”
Loxner looked relieved. “What about the body?”
“There’s no place to bury it with all the snow. We’ll wrap it in a blanket and put it in the garage; it’ll keep until we’re ready to leave.”
“Then what?”
“Put it in the trunk of the car. When we’re a few miles away, we’ll dump it into a canyon. There’re plenty of them in these mountains.”
Loxner sat down, got up again almost immediately, and said, “I need a goddamn drink.” He went into the kitchen.
Brodie stared into the fire with eyes that were, now, like chunks of amethyst quartz.
Kubion returned to the cabin at eight fifteen.
They heard the sound of the car coming up the access lane, and Loxner wet his lips and looked at Brodie. Brodie said, “Deal the cards”-they were playing gin again-and obediently Loxner dropped his gaze to the deck. He shuffled it awkwardly, dealt ten cards to each of them with diffident flicks of his wrist.
When the front door opened, Brodie did not glance up. But there were no footsteps, no sound of the door closing again. A cold prescience formed inside him, and his head lifted then, and Kubion was standing there smiling a skull grin and holding the. 38 backup automatic. His eyes seemed huge, streaked with lines of blood, and neither they nor the lids above them moved. No part of him moved, he did not even seem to be breathing.