Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries) (20 page)

Dannon took careful aim along the barrel of his gun. He moved it up a fraction of an inch, to the center of Paine's temple.

"Nice clean shot for my old partner." He smiled. "Turns out you weren't a bad cop after all. So long, fuckhead."

Paine heard a shot, but it didn't come from Dannon's .38. Dannon gave a short cry of surprise and fell forward. Two more shots went into his prone body, making it jump lifelessly.

Paine ran to the mouth of the alley but the car had gunned its engine and was gone. He crossed the street. There, a car's width out from the curb, were three .30-06 shells, their caliber neatly stamped in a circlet on the back. He picked them up. Near them was a small white rectangle with the name "Johnson" written on it. When he turned the rectangle over, it became a photograph, a corporate head shot of a man with a wry smile who had committed suicide in 1972.

Paine pulled out the worn envelopes of photos in his pocket, saw the name "Mr. Johnson" written on them in Morris Grumbach's arrogant scrawl and Dolores Grumbach's careful script.

The world upended.

For a moment Paine didn't breathe. He saw her face in front of him, felt the essence of her that had danced out of his reach since his eyes had first found hers and sought the answer to the mystery there.

He knew the answer now, why she had affected him so deeply.

She was his mirror image.

And he knew what she was going to do.

Running for his car, Paine said, "Jesus."

V
enus and Mars. Paine's hands were cold on the steering wheel. His mind was cold in his head. Through the window, as he passed the bridge down to his left and the lights of the city began to fade to memory behind him, he saw the stars and the two planets emerge. Mars and Venus. They were farther apart now, the conjunction passing, and they whirled off into space away from one another, two entities that never had belonged together. They were literally on the opposite sides of the earth, Venus close to the sun, Mars out past our planet in the colder reaches of the solar system, away from the sun's heat, and there was nothing that man could do to change that. Venus was love, Mars was war, and man couldn't change that, either.

He drove. He passed the spot where the motorist had been pulled over that night, when the red and white of the state trooper's flasher had reminded him of Mars and Venus. The spot on the roadside was empty now, empty as space above. He drove on. Too late for after-work drinkers tonight. Too late for everybody.

When he was nearly there he knew that he could not catch her. She would drive as fast as she had to, and even though there was only a matter of minutes between them, it might as well be eternity.

Above, through the windshield, Venus was pushed below the horizon, leaving Mars to stare at him like an evil eye.

He pulled off the highway. There was a gas station and it was closed, and then there was a country store with an outside phone but the receiver was dead. And then there was a bar and the music was loud from the jukebox, and an early drunk was telling his friend about the bass he caught—but there was a phone and he put change into it and there was ringing and ringing and then she picked it up.

"I found the key, Jack," she said tonelessly. "In the hollowed trunk like you said."

He knew her voice; it was his own voice in the times when the numbness had taken him over. It was not calm; it was beyond that in a place where there was a clarity that was pure and absolute.

"Rebecca, listen to me—"

"I'm going to kill myself, Jack. You know that. This is the way it had to be all along and you can't stop me from doing it. Dannon was the last. Will you listen to me, Jack? I love you, please listen to me."

"Oh, God, Rebecca—"
  
-

"Listen to me, Jack."

Her voice was like his finger had been when it was on the trigger of his .38, when it had
become
him, and if he did not listen to her she would hang up and he would lose her then and there.

"Yes," he said.

"In the beginning, when I found out who I really am, I used to think a lot about being a Grumbach. And I knew in my heart that I would have been a different person if my real father had raised me. I know there are some things that would have been the same no matter what, but I was sure that there were a lot of things that were put into me by the Grumbachs, things that made me what I am, that would have been different.

"That was the worst thing. Realizing that they had robbed me of who I was supposed to be. And all because the woman who I had known as my mother had decided that she wanted three little girls and that no one was going to stop her from having them.

"My father felt guilty about what my mother had done, but it didn't seem to matter to him whether we were there or not. But my mother wanted us, and we became what she wanted us to be. Gloria was the worst; when she found out who she really was she agreed with my mother that she was lucky. That made my mother very proud.

"I killed my mother. She was drinking one night and I broke apart two dozen sleeping pills and mixed a good bit of the powder in with each of her scotches. Dolores knew about it but said nothing; she said she would help me kill my father but she couldn't and then when I did she couldn't handle it and she killed herself."

There was silence; the faint whistle of electricity running through wires.

"When I murdered my father I took one of his guns, and I made him go to that hotel with me. I made him stand on a chair and tie the rope to the ceiling, and then make a noose at the other end and put it around his neck. He didn't think I was going to kill him. He thought it was some kind of game; he kept saying, 'Whatever the problem is, I'll give you the money for it.' I made him address the envelope to be left at the Mallard, and then call you. I told him what to say. When he got to the part about hanging himself I kicked the chair out from under him."

Her voice was tired, distant, little above the faint whistle of electricity. "I wanted to make them all hang themselves, but it just didn't work out that way."

She stopped speaking, and for a moment Paine thought she was gone. He put more change into the telephone, and was about to call her name when she spoke again. She sounded very far away from him, on Mars.

"I used you, Jack. I couldn't get beyond Paterna by myself and I needed someone to find out who the rest of them were. I'm sorry I did that. I fell in love with you very quickly.

"I want you to remember that, Jack. I love you. If none of this had happened, I could have loved you for a long time. If there's anywhere after this, I still will."

She was beyond Mars, in the cold reaches of space. "Don't try to follow me. I know you as well as you know yourself, because in many ways we're the same, and I know that you don't have it in you to do what I'm going to do. You're too good for that. You might go to the edge, and peer over, but something will always hold you and keep you from falling. When you find me tonight you might want to follow, and you might think you can, but you can't. Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on."

Her voice became even farther away, dreamy. "There's something for you at the Mallard Hotel, Jack. It's addressed to Mr. Johnson. Please tell me you'll take care of it. It will end all this forever."

From her voice, he knew the moment was coming. "Rebecca—"

"Promise me, Jack."

"Oh, God, I promise. Rebecca—"

"I'm going to hang myself, Jack."

He screamed into the phone but he heard the receiver drop and heard her cry out, a muffled "Oh" that sounded almost like release.

Outside, the night was silent and cold as death. Overhead, Mars was gone now, too, eaten by the horizon, but there were stars like spread gems, blue, yellow and white, and there, just overhead, the thumb-smudge of the Hercules cluster, Ml3, that he had looked at with Tom what seemed like a universe ago.

The constellation Gemini was pushing its autumn stars up overhead. Gemini—the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, only one of whom was immortal. Castor and Pollux, special protectors of warriors.

In the sky, Gemini wheeled north.

Paine followed.

C
old night. The gun, the bottle. For Paine, this time, there was no third choice. No A.A. meetings, no sincere bullshit, no upbeat slogans about "learning to like yourself." No suicide-prevention hot line this time, no cool, calm voices coming out of the phone, trying to climb into the dark crawlspace in his head ("Where are you? What are you doing now? When did you start to feel like this?").

Tonight it was the gun, the bottle.

Hartman's .44 lay on the ground next to him. He sat with his back against the observatory, staring up into a sky that might as well be empty of stars. The telescope was blind, its dome sealed against the intrusion of starlight. Above, the stars of Hercules and Gemini dominated the sky, but Paine was as blind to their inevitable passage as the telescope.

Next to the .44 was the long, square bottle of Jim Beam
he had bought in the bar. The bartender had given him an odd look, but the twenty-dollar bill Paine had given him made the odd look disappear. Paine had almost forgotten what a bar smelled like; the distinctive, hidden-alcohol smell. All those bottles side by side, snugly shelved up to the ceiling, enough to make a man drunk for a month or two—all the
weight of
that potential bender seeping through the bottle glass into the dry close air. The Jim Beam's white plastic twist cap was marred where his fingers had worried it open and closed. He had fought the idea
of
starting immediately, outside the bar, emptying the bourbon into his stomach and mind, not even waiting to get up north.

He stared at the bottle
of
bourbon.
This is why we are called thinking beings,
he thought. An animal would have used the gun or the bourbon by now, and thus made room on the planet for more, better animals. But not man. To the end he was an animal with a plan. He would argue with himself constantly, think about the things that had happened to him, try to feel sorry for himself and the others he had dragged through his life even as he had been dragged through it himself. Man, it seemed, always manufactured choices for himself.

The gun, the bottle.

The gun...

He remembered the first time he had picked up a gun. His father had been cleaning it in his study, and then the phone rang and he had gone to answer it in the hallway. Paine had come running in with his baseball glove to ask if he could go to the ball field with his friends. He saw the door to the study open, heard his father on the phone down the hall. He went into the study, saw the gun lying there, blue chrome steel, a handle like polished mahogany. It looked like a sophisticated toy. The cleaning materials
were still laid out around it, but the gun was whole. He picked it up.

It was heavier than he thought it would be. He hefted it in his palm, then closed his hands around the stock, turning it toward the wall and aiming it like Elliot Ness rubbing out the Chicago mob—"Pow!"—then turning it to look down the barrel, his thumb slipping as he turned to see his father there in the doorway, as the gun slipped and he squeezed his grip to keep it from falling, his thumb tightening on the trigger.

The gun said
click
and his father hit him for the first and only time, his open palm across the back of Jack's head as he shouted, "My
God!"
as much at himself as at his son.

The bottle.

The bottle was harder to remember, because it had come on slowly. Beers in high school, gradually bourbon in the Army and then both after work with Bob Petty, searching harder as time went on for the place that made him numb, the place where all the bad places didn't go away but at least had a hard time making it clearly through his head...

The gun, the bottle.

Both.

Neither .

Rebecca Meyer's face pushed into his mind. He remembered the hours before sunrise, the dark outline of her sleeping profile. He thought of the swimming seas of her eyes that had trapped and pulled him down into their depths. He wanted to swim there now again.

He looked toward the house, saw the bright light in the window, thought of the empty sea of Rebecca that was left in there.

Emptiness settled into him again. He looked down at the bourbon, remembered the dry, oppressive odor of the bar.

The bottle.

The gun.

He picked up the .44, pressed the cold heaviness of the barrel against his temple. He felt his being flowing into his finger. He was drained, an empty thing, and only his finger was alive. He felt his finger on the trigger, felt himself, the trigger, pulling, pulling—

He brought the .44 down hard, smashing it into the bottle of Jim Beam. The bottle broke, sour bourbon splashing out of it and soaking into the thirsty ground. Paine trembled, his arm rigid, the hand holding the .44 jamming it into the broken bottle. He felt the sharp bright sting of a glass cut on his finger, felt the sensation of it blossom from his finger up through his hand and arm and into his head.