Read Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) Online

Authors: Al Sarrantonio

Tags: #Mystery & Crime

Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) (10 page)

BOOK: Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries)
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"My God, Jack," she said, pushing him away, and Paine stood there as she ran from the office, leaving the door open, and he heard her running down the hallway and then the elevator came and she was gone.

Paine stood still in the center of his office, and felt the cloud that had enveloped him move away and the heat of the office moved in on him again. He felt changed. But the heat was there, and then the phone rang, and he picked it up.

"Paine," he said.

Someone was on the phone, but he heard no voice. He was about to hang the phone up when the voice came back. "Jack, it's Jim Coleman."

It was Jim Coleman, but it didn't sound like him. The bravado, the nervous swagger, the bluster had been replaced by the same purely frightened voice Paine had heard on the tape in Bryers’ office.

Paine said, "Do you know where Bob Petty is?"

"Listen to me," Coleman said. "Please. I want you to meet me. I'll tell you about Petty if you meet me."

"Where are you?"

The silence came back. "I. . ." Again silence. The sound of pure fear. "You know the place. The club. You remember the barbecues. I may already have been followed, I don't know. If I leave. . ." Again the silence.

"What does 'tiny' mean, Coleman?" Paine said. "Who or what is it?"

"Jesus," Coleman said. "Please, Jack. Just come. Now." Paine heard weeping, and then Coleman hung up the phone.

15
 

P
aine knew the place. There had been barbecues a long time ago, in another world, when Paine had been a rookie cop and Bob and Terry Petty had first been married, when Coleman had no lines on his face and didn't sweat, and all the other young and old cops had smiled and drunk beer and cooked hot dogs and the smell of hamburgers, which is like no other smell in the summer, filled the big backyard and drifted like smoke over them all, the young and the old cops, and up into the late summer afternoons. Paine remembered it well. He had enjoyed himself here, in the beginning, which was all there was, really, and later, after he was gone from the police, he had heard from Bob Petty that they still had their barbecues at this place but that it wasn't the same. There was no Paine and no Bob and Terry Petty, and Coleman had newer friends then and from what Petty had said they didn't laugh so much, and there was a lot of talk about who was making how much money and where he was getting it. These were the times before Bryers was brought in, and, for a time, there were cops who met at this place who thought they were God, but discovered otherwise.

Paine parked his car not in the empty lot, but around the corner. He had cruised past first, looking for a car that might be Coleman's but there were no cars in the empty lot and the club itself looked deserted, and the picnic tables on the roughly cut lawn sloping down to the railroad embankment, where the trains went by to New York City, were empty and forlorn looking. Beyond the railroad tracks was the Hudson River, and once, at one of those parties in that first and last summer, on the Fourth of July, Paine had sat on one of those picnic tables with Ginny, and watched the fireworks that the river towns sent up, and it had been hot but he had liked the heat, and he had sat with his arm around his wife and, being so young, had thought that this was as good as it got. Later that same night he had gotten very drunk, and tried to
kiss
Terry Petty.

The clubhouse was a building out in the open near the parking lot, with a bar and locker rooms inside. Paine approached it cautiously. There were no windows open, and Paine used the few trees nearby as cover.

The door was closed, but when Paine tried it, it opened inward into darkness. Paine stepped in and to the side, closing the door behind him.

The bar was deserted, chairs upended onto tables, cords from the bowling machine and the light above the shuffleboard table pulled from their sockets.

Paine moved to the bar and looked behind it. The lights over the mirror behind the bar were off, but he could see that there was no one there.

Paine crossed to the opening of the locker room, and called into the dark opening, "Coleman?"

There was no answer.

Paine moved around the opening into the locker room, snapping on the light switch.

A bank of overhead fluorescents went on, one after another. One rogue lamp began to blink fitfully.

The place smelled of men, and disinfectant, and powdered soap. The floor was tiled white, the walls painted a hearty green that had bleached with time.

"Coleman?"

No sound—not the breath of fear, the cock of the hammer of a.38 Special. Nothing.

Paine moved through the dressing area, past a row of urinals and wall-mounted white sinks. He checked the stalls behind the urinals, pushing the doors slowly back. They were empty.

"Coleman?"

Still no sound, but a coppery smell now, afresh, hard smell that overwhelmed the disinfectant and powdered soap from the teardrop dispensers on the walls over the sinks.

Paine moved into the shower area.

It was a large room, bleached green walls, gray-enameled cement floors, shower heads at head height in the walls, floor funneling gently to a drain in the center of the room. Something very red had ceased raining into the opening, and was beginning to dry up the slope of the gray floor to the shower wall.

Coleman's torso had been butchered like an ox. The bright smell of blood made Paine gag, but he saw enough of human organs in the split and opened thoracic cavity to fully illustrate a medical textbook. The limbs had been cleanly severed, and lay stacked against the wall. Coleman's head, showing grotesque surprise, had been mounted on one of the shower heads, looking down at the remains of the rest of the body.

Paine's legs grew weak. He turned and walked out, making it almost to the lockers before his stomach emptied. He stood under the flickering neon tube, and there was nothing but the sickening sound of vomitus hitting ceramic until his stomach was dry. It had been that look on Coleman's face, that grotesque look of surprise that said, "Is this how I go?" that did it.

After awhile, Paine stood, and pushed himself away from the lockers. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

He went back out into the barroom, and went behind the bar. There was a water tap over a deep rectangular aluminum sink, and he turned it on and took a glass from behind the bar and drank. He drank until the taste of vomit and copper receded from his mouth. The water got colder as it ran, and he continued to drink but the taste would not go away.

He left, finally, making his way cautiously back to his car, the taste of death still in his mouth.

16
 

T
hese three were much better than Koval and Kohl. They were waiting in the same alley beside Paine's building, and Paine never had a chance with them. They pulled him deep into the shadows at the back, and after softening him up with belly blows they laid him flat on the ground and one of them held the long cold muzzle of an AK-47 to this temple. A second backed up the first with a .44 Magnum, which he held at arm's length pointed at Paine's mouth.

"You move," the one with the AK-47 said matter- of-factly, "I put six semiautomatic rounds into your mind."

"I won't move," Paine said.

The third one straddled Paine's supine body, standing over him before leaning down to stare into his face. He studied Paine with the same detached interest he and the others had shown at Roberto Hermano's funeral. "I saw you at the church," he said, making it into a slight question.

"I was there."

"Also," the man said quietly, "you were seen talking with Roberto in your car the day before he was killed."

"That's true," Paine said.

The man cocked his head to one side; his face still wore mild interest. "Did you kill Roberto?"

"No."

"Why did you talk to him?"

"I'm looking for someone he knew. A man named Bobby Petty."

The man closed his eyes and nodded. Paine's scalp prickled under the pressure of the AK-47's muzzle.

"One more question," the man said mildly. "Do you know who killed Roberto?"

The muzzle pressed harder into Paine's head.

The man stared at him, searching, and then he straightened and nodded to the other two men, who pulled their weapons back. Paine felt relief at the withdrawal of pressure on his forehead.

The man folded his hands in front of him and looked down at Paine. "We would like to find the man who killed Roberto. He was our friend."

"Sure."

"If you should find this man, I would appreciate it if you would let us know."

Paine said nothing.

"I'm sorry to have bothered you," the man said.

The three of them turned and walked slowly out of the alley.

Paine lay back a moment, staring at the sky through the faraway slit at the top of the alley. Polite drug dealers with AK-47s was something he did not much want to think about. The AK-47s, he imagined, were what made it possible for them to be polite.

Perhaps if everyone had an AK-47, there would be much more politeness in the world.

It was a thought he entertained for a very short time before he got up.

The first phone message on his machine was from Anapolos, who made several loud threats and then hung up. There was another message after it, from Billy Rader, and Paine called him.

"Good night again last night," Rader yawned into the phone. "Maybe clouds tonight, though."

"What have you got for me, Billy?"

"First of all, your friend Landers is in trouble. Seems he was involved in a minor way with a parking violations thing some friend of his skimming meters in downtown Fort Worth, and he knew about it but did nothing. It might hurt him, might not. 'Cause of the way he treated you, I called a couple friends
of mine still on the
Morning News
and told them where to look for more. Just a hint, mind you, I didn't want to make it too easy. It might snowball, might not."

"Jesus, Billy, I didn't tell you to crucify the bastard."

"Why not? He's been a hard-on for a long time, and anyway, I told you he has enemies. He's not such a bad guy.
They used to hang you down here for stuff like that, but not anymore. He'll probably come through intact, but humbled. Humbled is what he needed."

"Is that why you called me?"

"Of course not. I wanted to tell you about my night at the telescope last night."

Paine waited; Rader laughed after a pause.

"Well, okay," Rader said. "Seems Bobby Petty flew back to New York yesterday, American Airlines flight number forty
seven. He used an alias, but one of my friends at the Amer
ican terminal asked around and found somebody who
recognized the description. 'Course it made it a little easier,
the alias he used."

"Which was?"

"Bob Paine."

Paine didn't laugh. "Christ."

"Sure, Jack. Want me to see if he left New York again?"

"You can do that?"

"Computers, Jack."

"Sure."

"There's something else, too. That fellow Parker Johnson,

I got some background stuff on him. Maybe you'll find it useful. He grew up in Fort Worth, went to school in Fort
Worth, was briefly married to a Fort Worth girl from his high school. Two tours of duty in Vietnam, marines, came back and had a hard time of it. Four or five jobs—cook, school
janitor, security guard at a mall, early shift at Burger King, that sort of thing. The past year he's been stacking cans in a supermarket. Like I said before, no record, no arrests, no drugs."

"Thanks again, Billy."

"This thing with Landers clears up, you can show your ass down here again. Maybe we can drive out to the desert, visit MacDonald Observatory in west Texas. I know some folks there, get you a look through the big scope."

"Sounds good, Billy."

"Listen, Jack, any idea why Petty would come back to New York?"

Paine told him about Coleman.

"Christ, Jack. That looks bad."

"I'd still like to think he wasn't involved."

"Well, you take care of yourself."

BOOK: Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries)
9.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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