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

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