Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) (17 page)

Paine rose and was moving to the ladder when the leader of the black men came down it. "Sit on the mattress," he said in a flat voice. His two compatriots followed him down, one bearing a pitcher of water, the other a bowl of fruit—bananas, an apple, two oranges.

They refilled his water bowl and Paine drank half of it; the water had been iced and tasted good. The fruit bowl was put down beside the mattress. Paine ate a banana immediately
under the watchful eyes of the black leader
_;
the others stood to either side of Paine, brandishing their weapons.

There came a sound from above, and the black leader immediately took the fruit bowl away from Paine. He handed
it to one of the others,
who
put it out of reach, and as he did this a figure climbed quickly down the ladder. When he turned around and smiled, Paine knew it must be Kwan.

He
was
tiny, perhaps four foot ten or eleven. He wore
baggy
khaki trousers and a loose T-shirt that had a picture of a bottle of Coca Cola on it. He moved gracelessly, all jerks and angles. His face was wide, flat, and empty, a clean slate with eyes, flat nose, prim mouth. He wore no facial hair, and was balding on top, a monk's fringe of black hair framing his head.

When he walked from the ladder to the bundle against the far wall, Paine saw the source of his gracelessness: one of his feet was turned out from the ankle at an odd angle, apparently broken and badly reset.

"Mr. Paine, I wanted you to see this," Tiny Man said. His voice was startlingly American inflected. He produced a
small penknife, bent to the canvas-enclosed bundle on the floor, made a small incision at one end and ripped a line all the way down. He pulled the sack aside and there was the unmoving figure of Philly Ramos.

"Wake him up," Tiny Man said to the leader of the blacks,
who
immediately went over to Philly, bent, and began to slap his face. The blows had no effect at first. Then Philly seemed to swim out of the place he had been. He looked drugged. He focused on the black man standing over him and smiled. "Poppa, how are you, man?"

Poppa hit him again, hard, with the flat of his palm across the face, and Philly's eyes became clearer and focused on Tiny Man.

"Jesus," he said. "Christ, man, you promised me."

"When I promise, sometimes I lie," Tiny Man said. He turned away from Philly as if he were of no further importance.

"Sit him up," he said to Poppa, and Poppa obliged, sitting
Philly up away from the wall and pulling the remains of the canvas bag away from him.

"Mr. Paine," Tiny Man said, "I want you to remember this, because this man did a wrong to you, but mainly because it will make an impression of what you have become involved in."

Tiny Man whirled toward Philly, at the same time lifting something from the inside of his baggy trousers.

Philly looked up at him and suddenly knew what was happening. He began to scream. Tiny Man's blade, which looked something like a long, not very wide, meat cleaver, came down and across, halfway cutting Philly's head from his neck. Philly's scream turned into a gurgle of blood, and the second swift fall of Tiny Man's blade finished the guillotining. He then proceeded, with fast, tautly muscled strokes, to detach Philly's limbs from his torso.

Paine tried to turn his head, but Poppa put his hands to either side of Paine's face and made him watch. One of the AK-47s pointed close by Paine's face, making him keep his eyes open. The dull, meaty sounds of Tiny Man's blade hacking at flesh were like nothing Paine had ever heard before.

It was over in a matter of minutes. Poppa released Paine's head and he turned to vomit, missing the dog bowl with urine in it, soiling the mattress. The fruit he had just eaten came up readily, followed by watery yellow bile.

When Paine straightened himself and opened his eyes, Philly's lifeless face was staring into his. Tiny Man held Philly's hair tightly in one hand, and he put this hand on Paine's head, gripping the hair, and brought the two heads close together.

"Would you like to say good-bye, Mr. Paine?" Tiny Man asked. "He will be fucking no more men, or killing any of my loyal workers."

Tiny Man yanked Philly's head away, threw it disdainfully into a far corner of the room, and went to the ladder.

He was about to climb up it when Paine said, "You killed Coleman, Johnson, and Quinones."

Tiny Man looked back at him in wonderment. "Of course. Did you think Bob Petty did those things? Petty has even
more foolishness than honor. He has been following me for the past week, trying to do the same thing to me that I've been doing to his men. Johnson, he tried to hide, unsuccess
fully. Coleman, he tried to warn, again unsuccessfully. I was even able to lure him away from Quinones for the half hour I needed."

Kwan had his foot on the ladder when Paine asked, "Why did you act now?"

"Because I knew Petty was coming for me."

"How did you know that?"

Kwan smiled and shook his head. "You are as foolish as your friend, Mr. Paine. I was told, of course."

"By who?"

"By someone in your government." Tiny Man smiled again. "We will see your friend Bob Petty soon, Mr. Paine. Bearing all of his foolishness and honor, he will come to save you." He began to scamper up the ladder, the three black men just behind him, one of them bearing the remaining fruit in its bowl.

"Perhaps," Tiny Man said, "I will let you say good-bye to him, too."

A
gain, Paine waited. The heat lessened, and sometime during what must have been the night, he slept, and dreamed. And, for all that he had seen and been through, it was a peaceful dream.

Paine was on his hill, with his telescope, and he saw Bob Petty whole again. Though it might have been possible for him to do so, Petty had not gone mad. He had lost only his respect for himself, and had acted only out of love and honor.

And on his hilltop, with his telescope, Paine searched once more for Rebecca, who refused to appear to him.
"Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on,"
she had said. Paine wanted her to hold him now. But she was not there in the empty vacuum of space, and he cried out futilely to the scattered atoms of her dead body.

And then suddenly he was looking not into the eyepiece of the telescope but into its open end, and he saw his face huge in the mirror below. For now the instrument was pointed not at the stars but at himself, and he saw his own essential self, saw into his heart, and saw that Rebecca was there with him, had been with him all along. For the vast cosmos cannot compare to the human heart, which in the atoms of its memory breaks death and transcends time.

And he felt the memory of her arms around him, cradling his heart and protecting him from the cold night, and death was something he neither feared nor craved.

Maybe you'll think of me as holding you.

And she held him till morning came, and he awoke into the air of another hot day.

Poppa and the others had taken the limbs and torso and head of Philly Ramos away. Paine was thankful for that. There were still bloodstains on the blue padding of the walls. Paine's water bowl had been refilled, and Paine drank half the water, and sat on the edge of his mattress, away from his dried vomitus, and tried to think.

His body was weak, and his mind. The oven-like heat of the cellar told him to lie down and sleep, but he would not do that.

He looked, instead, at the half-full water bowl, and at the single light bulb in the center of the ceiling.

He picked up his water bowl, carried it to the corner of the room under the trapdoor in the ceiling, and put it down. Then he went back to his mattress, pulling it over beneath the light, folded it over, and stood on it. He was not high enough. He got off the mattress and folded it in thirds, making it three thicknesses high, and stood on it again.

It was just high enough for him to work at the fixture.

He pulled the insulation from around the metal box, finding the wires that led into the fixture box and tracing them away from it. He followed the line of the wire, which was stapled to the overhead beam, removing insulation along the way.

When he had a sufficient length, he found a spot where the thick electrical cable was bowed out slightly from the support beam and slipped his hand between beam and wire. He grasped the wire and yanked on it, working the staples from side to side until one of the tines pulled out of the wood and he was able to free the cable from it.

He worked his way back to the fixture box this way, yanking the cable and freeing it as he went.

When the cable had been freed from the last staple near the fixture box, Paine straightened out his mattress and moved it back to its original spot. He picked up his water bowl and placed it on the floor two paces from the wall under
the trapdoor. Then he walked back to the cable, took a strong two-handed grip on it, and yanked it sharply out of the fixture box.

The basement went dark.

He felt up gently along the cable until he reached a spot near the end, where the cable insulation had been cut away to allow the individual wires to be separated, stripped, and attached to the light fixture.

Holding the cable at this point, keeping it well away from his body, Paine moved to the corner of the basement where the trapdoor in the ceiling was, trailing the cable behind him. He measured out two paces from the wall, found his water bowl, sat down on the floor near it, and waited.

Again, time was heat. Paine measured the day by the amount of heat in the cellar. In the dark, the game was even easier, and, for a while, it occupied Paine's mind. It was a better thing to think about than the way Tiny Man had hacked up Philly Ramos
_;
better than thinking about what Tiny Man would do to him alter there was no more need to have him around. Though he did not crave death, or fear it, he knew that it might arrive very soon. There was as little doubt in Paine's mind as in Kwan's that Bob Petty would come. The question, which was a question that covered most of the secrets of life, Paine thought, was when and how?

In the dark, as the day went along, when the heat had peaked, which put it somewhere around 3:00
P.M.,
Paine began a new game. Continuing to hold the cable carefully, switching it from one hand to the other when he got tired, he began to strain his ears for sounds from the rooms above.

At first he heard nothing. But he persisted. He thought of the way an astronomer uses averted vision, will look slightly to the side of an observed object because that part of the eye, away from the center of the pupil, is more sensitive to light and will see more detail. He began to use averted hearing, cocking his head slightly away from a barely perceived sound to sharpen his sense of it.

It was a bogus analogy, a mind game, but it worked. His hearing sharpened, and he began to hear sounds. A series of footfalls, a muffled exchange of conversation, a snatch of television from the far side of the house. He heard a door open and close
;
the volume of the television rose. Reruns of
Bonanza
. He heard a commercial come on, someone laugh.

It took him hours, but he began to figure out their setup. There were two of them in the house. Two of them had left. He imagined that Poppa, with one of his cohorts, had driven in the jeep to the house on the Indian reservation. That was where they would meet Bob Petty. They knew Petty wouldn't agree to come where all four of them waited for him. They would hammer out a deal, and Petty would follow them back here. That was when they would try to take him. Tiny Man had enough confidence in his own abilities to be able to handle Petty alone
;
the others were mere insurance. Tiny Man also knew Bob Petty's mind as well as Paine did, and knew that he would do almost anything to get Paine freed.

Paine wondered if Poppa and his two friends were aware of the fact that they were nothing but bait. Again he heard a grunt of laughter from the TV room above. Apparently not.

The heat in the cellar diminished. Paine could almost hear night falling outside, rushing to meet his own imposed night.

The time when they had fed him the night before was already past
;
his body had tensed, and now weariness assaulted him with the realization that they were not going to bother to feed him. The television droned on—reruns of "The Patty Duke Show," "Laugh-In," "Dennis the Menace." He heard an occasional short blurt of laughter. The opening and closing of the refrigerator, a chair scraped across the floor. The front door opening and closing.

Finally, the television was turned off
;
the sound of night came to the house.

Then there was only the sound of one figure walking, from one end of the house to the other.