Past the window the street was a blur of blowing snow, and a vague anger touched him. He ought to be feeling cozy and Badgerlike with the exquisite feeling of being snowed in and the world snowed out, but he was not. He ought to be sitting before the fire with the Tyler girl against his shoulder and a demitasse of Cognac in his hand and soft music adding ambience to the room, but he was not that either. He was drifting in the icechoked backwaters of paranoia, and he could feel them, cold and black, rising about his upper thighs. He’d been navigating these perilous seas for some time, and every knock was a man in khakis with a warrant in his hand, every phone call the IRS auditing him for the last twenty-five years, every letter in the mailbox a note saying flee, all is discovered. I’ve just got to put it out of my mind, he thought. Either that or I’ve got to do something. He adjusted the reading glasses back on his nose, and he had read two paragraphs when someone began to pound on the front door. He rose. He hesitated and then remembered the slick streets: it’s been a bad wreck, two or three dead, he told himself comfortingly. But he took up the Luger anyway and shoved it into the pocket of his dressing gown before he went to answer the door.
The oak door was latched with a security chain that he left in place, opening the door a scant three inches.
A motley crew indeed. Twelve or fifteen felthatted and overalled men bundled against the cold assembled with the stoop full and more aligned tense and silent about them. Young or old, they all had in common the set anger in their faces and the utter implacability of their manner. Jaws knotted with lumps of chewing tobacco, and they all seemed to be armed, some clutching rifles and others just sticks, and he thought he saw a ballbat or two. The foremost, who seemed the leader, opened his mouth to speak, and for an insane moment Breece thought he might break into song, for save the fierce outrage of their eyes, they looked not unlike perverse and rustic carolers come to herald the yuletide.
He didn’t know from where the strength to speak came, but it did. I’ll be right with you, he said brightly. He smiled, gestured toward the robe. I’m not dressed to receive company.
He slammed the door to and threw the deadbolt and went in an awkward fat man’s run through the foyer and lounge, behind him he heard the impact of shoulders slamming against the door. He went down a hall into the back. He locked that door behind him and ran past gleaming tables bloodgrooved like the sacrificial tables of ancient pagans andpast bizarre tubeappended contraptions like the props to a madman’s dreams and through one last door to the garage bay where the hearse sat waiting. He pushed a red button mounted on the wall and the bay door rose electrically to the snow blowing slantwise in the streetlamps. He climbed hastily into the hearse and cranked the engine and had already rolled four or five feet when he abruptly slammed on the brakes and cut the switch. He pounded his forehead hard with a fist. Sweet Jesus, he said. He clambered back out and went back into the embalming area.
He’d taken to carrying the girl with him to work and driving her home at night, and she was here today. He uncovered her where she napped on the couch and caught her up, half-carrying and half-dragging her toward the hearse. It was hard going for she was slack and lolled loosely and he was breathing hard. Hurry, hurry, he kept telling her. He opened the door on the passenger side and shoved her in. Her head swung bonelessly and she sat erect a moment then her upper torso dropped and she slid onto the steering wheel. The door slammed hard on her ankle. Jesus, baby, he said, contrite. I’m so sorry. He tried to move the foot but each time he moved it it slid back before he could get the door closed.
Goddamn it, he screamed at her. What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I’m in a hurry here? Can’t you do anything for yourself? Can you not do so simple a thing as pick up your foot?
He left with the tires smoking bluely and her ankle still dangling from the door, steering lefthanded and holding her about the shoulders with his right. When the hearse hit the icy pavement it slewed sickeningly broadside but miraculously pointed the way he intended going, and he floored the accelerator and shot past the front of the funeral home. He glanced toward it. They had the door battered down until it hung crazily on one hinge, and their heads all turned as one when he streaked past, and they were running yelling to their cars.
He ran the stop sign at the intersection but he had to brake to make the left turn at the next block and when he did he could see already a faint wash of light approaching through the snow. He kept fumbling for the windshield wipers. He chanced releasing her long enough to steady the wheel with his right hand and turn on the lights and windshield wipers and grab her again before she slid out the flapping door.
Coming off the Centre hill he was going over seventy miles an hour and snow was coming so hard he could barely see the road. Telephone poles were coming like pickets in a fence when the dead girl suddenly folded forward into the steering wheel. When he jerked her back the steering wheel cocked and the hearse went drifting across the ice in a caterwauling of protesting rubber. It went over the embankment in a sudden eerie silence save the small explosions of sumac branches splintering then struck a utility pole. There was a simultaneous sound of splintering pine he felt in his solar plexus and folding wrenching metal and all the glass going and tortured wire pulled tight as a catapult, then the swinging upper half of the utility pole, sharp end first, slammed into and through the hood.
He leapt out into the brush and immediately pitched forward onto the earth. Something was wrong with his left leg, it accordioned somehow beneath him and he could not rise. He crawled around the front through a frozen field of last year’s cornstalks and to the other side and grasped the dead girl andpulled her out into the snow. Already he could see the play of lights and hear men yelling, and the first of them were slamming cardoors and starting down the embankment. Above the hearse two electrical wires were touching and shorting out, and they kept snapping and sending arcs of bright blue fire off into the night. He locked his left elbow about her throat and began to drag her into the frozen field.
Breece had never done much physical work as he had the wherewithal to hire everything done and he’d had no idea crawling brokenlegged across frozen cornrows dragging a dead girl entailed so much physical exertion. Could he have hired this done he would have in a flash but he could not. He made it perhaps forty or fifty feet into the field, not knowing where he was going, for he was fleeing from not to: then the men ran yelling out of the brush into the field.
Breece remembered the gun. He could feel it cold against his belly where the robe twisted beneath him. He released the girl and withdrew the gun and sat holding it uncertainly for a moment, then holding the gun bothhanded he took the barrel tentatively into his mouth. It was smooth and cold but somehow not unpleasant. There was a faint taste of acrid gunpowder, gun oil, old violence.
You stop right there, he told them around the gun barrel. You come any closer and I’ll blow my head off.
They hesitated, more dumbfounded than intimidated: they’d expected to be shot at but here he was crouched in the blowing snow with the pistol in his mouth threatening to do what they’d traveled so hard and fast this night to do themselves.
The foremost man halted before Breece and leant forward with his hands on his overalled knees. He had a florid faceand washedout outraged eyes, and Breece knew he’d seen him somewhere before, perhaps the Bellystretcher. You go ahead, you worthless son of a bitch, the man said. And save me the fifteen cents it would cost to bust a cap on you.