Free Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) by Al Sarrantonio Page A

suddenly Paine found himself opening his mouth and responding. Her kiss was hard and long. Paine tried to fight her, tried to fight himself, but he melted to her, feeling a cloud move down around him, pushing the world out. He held her a long time and her second kiss was not tentative and hard and fierce but warm and soft. Her kiss lessened and she pulled her mouth away from him and when he opened his eyes she was staring at him hard again, in surprise.
    "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 The bravado, the nervous swagger, the bluster had been replaced by the same purely frightened voice Paine had heard on the tape in Bryers’ office.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