Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries)

by Al Sarrantonio

  "Leave it be," he said seriously. "Safety, like I said."

  They drove up into the Poconos, through and beyond the summer communities, into an area as lonely as Eden. Macadam turned to dirt, then to trail. Then without warning the car found a short flat driveway that curved to a dead stop in front of a cabin. It looked like any other vacation home, with a short deck out front.

  Uncle Martin got out of the car and jogged around to Jack's side. He opened the door, deftly unlocked the cuff from the door handle and pulled Jack out of the car by it. Jack yelped a protest, but Uncle Martin ignored him, still humming. Now, suddenly, Jack was afraid, and started to resist the cuffs, but Uncle Martin only turned to him and told him to be quiet. "The fishing tackle is inside," he said.

  Uncle Martin brought him into the house, through a big living room with a huge stone fireplace and attached kitchen, and up the stairs. There were two closed doors off the stairway, and Uncle Martin opened the first one.

  There was balloon wallpaper on the walls. A brand-new Sears bed butted one wall, with a rodeo pattern coverlet turned down. The sheets had Roy Rogers's face on them, with Trigger's profile next to him from the neck up. Roy smiled wryly, like he always did, eyes squinting. There was a new Sears chest of drawers, too, the tag still on it; on top of it was a hand mirror, an ebony-handled hairbrush, an old coin bank in the shape of a baseball made out of printed tin. The closet was open, filled with new jeans, shirts and a blue suit. There were pajamas and white shirts and socks still in their bags, the shirts folded around flat pieces of cardboard to keep them stiff, with pins stuck in the collar to keep them in place.

  "This is your room," Uncle Martin said quietly, pulling Jack gently in by the cuffs. Behind the door was a long package wrapped in brown paper. Uncle Martin picked it up and handed it to Jack.

  "Open it," he said.

  Jack opened it. There was fishing tackle in it, a pole, a freshwater lightweight reel spooled with four-pound test line, a clear-plastic tray of panfish lures and red and white bobbers and split-shot sinkers.

  "I didn't lie," Uncle Martin said.

  Jack stood in the middle of the room, and he began to cry. Tears rolled out of him and he couldn't stop. The fishing pole fell out of his hand to the floor.

  His uncle stood nervously next to him, holding the open end of the handcuffs, and then he said quietly, "I'll leave you now," and he dropped the cuffs and left the room and bolted the door behind him.

  It was then that Jack saw that there were no windows in the room.

  They fished three or four times a week. There were trout streams nearby, and a small lake a quarter mile beyond that. His uncle got him up at six in the morning, made breakfast, sometimes waffles and bacon, and then they dressed and fished. For the first two weeks his uncle told him that this was what his father wanted, but after that he said nothing.

  Jack tried to get away the first day they went fishing, but his uncle tracked him down in under an hour and brought him back. A week later he tried again, but his uncle found him in thirty minutes. He didn't try again for a while. He asked small questions here and there, and discovered that his uncle owned five square miles of land. The nearest neighbor was eight miles away to the west.

  Sometimes his uncle called him Jerry, his father's name.

  Days went by, and weeks, and months. When his uncle went out without him he cuffed Jack to a ring anchored in the stone mantel over the fireplace. His uncle hunted a few times, bringing down a stag deer in late August. His uncle skinned and butchered it. He packed all but two steaks in the freezer, and that night Jack had venison for the first time. Also that night the weather turned cooler.

  He hadn't tried to run away since June. He continued to ask small questions.

  One day in mid-September his uncle went into town for supplies, cuffing Jack to the ring in the mantel. Jack had patiently worked on the ring for three months. As his uncle's truck pulled away he slipped the ring out of the wall.

  Under his bed, he had squirreled a full three days' provisions into a canvas sack. The sack had two strips of heavy cloth sewn to it, making a crude backpack. Jack put it on and went to his uncle's bedroom where he hoped to find one of his uncle's rifles.

  He'd never been in this room. "Now, Jerry," his uncle had told him, "I want you to stay out of my room. It's all I've got." There was a dead-bolt lock on the door. Jack tried the knob. It was locked. He threw himself against it. The first time the wood yielded slightly, but held the lock; the second time, the bolt splintered and the door flew inward.

  The room was dark. No windows in here, either. Jack felt around for a wall switch but couldn't locate one. Then he saw a pull chain hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.

  He groped for it, found it, pulled the chain.

  The light went on in the room.

  A chill shot through him.

  The room was almost antiseptically empty. There was an army cot, crisply made, against one wall, and nothing else. The cot had white top and bottom sheets and a gray wool camp blanket. The floor was bare, unvarnished wood. There was no dust, no cobwebs; the walls and ceiling were painted bright, clean white. The light bulb in the center of the ceiling was uncovered, unadorned.

  Next to the cot, on the floor, was a plainly framed photograph of Uncle Martin and Jack's father. In it, Uncle Martin looked to be twelve or thirteen, which would have made his father seven. A lock of blond-brown hair fell across his father's brow, just like it did on his; his father had the same type of Huckleberry Finn grin. The two of them held fishing poles standing next to them, and both their chests were thrust out at the camera. Uncle Martin held a string of perch out proudly. The two boys had their arms around one another's shoulders.

  Someone had scribbled in blue ink at the bottom of the picture: Jerry and Marty, buddies. The word "buddies" had been underlined.

  As he put the picture down he heard his uncle's truck returning.

  He ran from the room. One of the straps ripped on his backpack. He grasped the burlap sack by the top and ran to the front door. His uncle's truck had not appeared in the circular drive yet, but he could hear it approaching.

  He ran to the edge of the deck, jumped off and ran west into the woods.

  In five minutes he had reached the nearest trout stream. The day was warm and he had sweated through his shirt. He kneeled and washed his face.

  He took off his boots, rolled up his pants.

  He waded downstream, keeping to the middle of the water. After a hundred yards he climbed out and made his presence as conspicuous as possible. He went fifty yards into the woods until he reached another, smaller stream, stepped into the middle of it, then carefully retraced his path to the larger creek.

  He waded back into it and went upstream, passing the point he had started from. He went on like this for a quarter mile, once falling into a deep pool where the water was up to his chest. After another quarter mile he emerged on the other bank and set off west into the trees.

  It was later in the day than he had hoped. Originally, he had planned to reach the nearest house before dark. Now he would have to spend the night in the woods.

  That, he knew, would be when he was most vulnerable. His uncle was a good night hunter, had told him that night hunting was the best kind because the prey either thought you would not be there or was so terrified it tripped itself up.

  He moved always west, gauging by the late afternoon sun. He had made a good mile when a noise caught his attention. He paused. He was breathing heavily; the single strap on his pack was beginning to dig into his shoulder. He took it off. Noise again. The slam of a door. It did not repeat.

  He moved on. He craved sound now, thus to gauge his uncle's pursuit, but the afternoon was so still that fear invaded him for the first time. The knowledge that night was not far off didn't help. He had never spent a night alone in the woods.

  He stopped, hearing a final loud noise in the distance—the angry dull boom of a shotgun?—and, stifling a stab of cold terro
r, he stumbled on.

  Night dropped around him. One moment he could clearly distinguish the outline of trees surrounding him; the next he was effectively blind. The afternoon had darkened by degrees, and his eyes had adapted to it, but now real night had come and darkness was real and complete.

  He halted. He heard his own breathing, heard the crack of dead twigs under his feet, heard little else but crickets and, far off, the questioning hoot of a waking owl.

  He took a half-bag of crackers and a stale doughnut from his pack and ate, crouched at the roots of an old oak. It was getting cold. The thin windbreaker that had been more than adequate when the sun had filtered warmly through the trees now helped little, and he soon began to shiver.

  "Shit," he said, hugging himself, angry at his bad planning and worse luck; "shit!"

  Above his whispered exclamation of self-pity, he heard another sound.

  Instinctively, a line of fear drew down his back. He had learned certain sounds in the woods. This wasn't the scratch of a squirrel, or the jumpier antics of a chipmunk. It wasn't the darting sweep of a fruit bat. It was something else.

  He rose slowly, half-paralyzed by fear, his back pressed tight against the rough bark of the tree.

  In front of him, something hissed and moved across his thin line of vision.

  It stopped, showing itself off. It knew that it had him, and, like all cats, it almost preferred play to killing. Its eyes were like two gleaming pumpkin cutout slits, glowing. Almost by their light, he could see the prominently whiskered outline of the rest of its small face. It bared its teeth once at him, giving a short testy snarl, and then circled back on itself, into the surrounding blackness and then out of it again.

  Cougar.

  His uncle had told him about cougars. They hunted only at night; could drag a 900-pound moose over snow by the neck; could jump up fifteen feet with ease and cover twenty miles in one night. A man against a cougar without at least a shotgun and lots of space to fire it was a dead man. His uncle said he had once seen a man brought out of the woods who'd inadvertently cornered a female. The left side of his body was raked as if a machine had gone through it, razoring through clothes, skin, muscle, even bone. Some of the gashes had been nearly an inch deep.

  This looked like that kind of cougar.

  The thing slid across his line of sight, growling to itself, then turned into the darkness again. Jack heard its faint, leisurely pad, heard it suddenly stop.

  The woods waited.

  Out there, he felt it tense into the projectile that would fire at him out of the night, knifing into his flesh and making it night forever for him.

  It pulled tighter, tighter, ready to discharge—

  "Don't move, Jerry." His uncle's voice sounded calmly to his left.

  The cougar sprang.

  The dark exploded with light and thunder. The cougar's hissing thin face, whiskers spread over its long teeth like twin brushes, disintegrated like a crushed melon at his feet.

  "Jerry—" his uncle began.

  Jack peeled away from the tree trunk and ran off. His hands were his eyes; he patted them out in front of him, warding away the night and the thicket of trees. He ran into a tangle of underbrush, and his foot was grabbed by a root. He twisted to one side and fell. He pulled free, gasping, and one boot came away. He stood and stumbled on.

  The night lit up ghostly in front of him. Looking up, he was dazzled by the risen, gibbous moon sliding out from behind a bank of clouds. He was in a small clearing, with a stretch of woods in front of him.

  He hobbled into it.

  There was enough moonlight strobing the trees ahead for him to see where he was going.

  Behind and to his left, he glimpsed his uncle just descending from the clearing into the wood he inhabited. He hobbled faster.

  He cut to the right, off into a thicket away from his uncle. His feet tangled, tumbling him to the ground. He rose, catching sight of his uncle gliding like a spirit after him.

  "Jerry," his uncle called out patiently.

  Jack's lungs burned with insufficient oxygen. He ignored the fire, stumbling on. The moon brightened; then was lost to a cloud. Jack tripped again, and suddenly before him was the broad trunk of an old maple. He cried out but his hands did not rise fast enough as the moon returned and he saw his uncle's face beside him as the tree punched him—

  He awoke in his bed, in daylight. The light was off, making the room nearly dark, but the door was open and the long windows downstairs filled the doorway with sunlight.

  His uncle sat at the foot of the bed, in the dimness, staring at him. His face was blackened with cork, a camouflage cap was pulled low over his brow. Only the whites of his eyes stood out madly from his face.

  His uncle spoke quietly, in horrible contrast to his appearance. "I want to tell you something, Jerry," he said. "I heard a copter this morning. It won't be long before they find you. Before they do, I have to tell you something."

  Tear tracks intersected the cork markings on his face.

  "I could have gone longer," he said. "I want you to know I could have gone as long as I had to. I have the will, Jerry. I've had it for a long time. I wanted to prove that to you."

  Uncle Martin sat rigid and military as stone, a weeping statue. "That first time was the only time, Jerry. It never happened again. Never. It never happened in the Army, or the Green Berets, not anywhere. I saw what I was, and I beat it, Jerry." He sobbed, a tight gulping sound. "I beat it."

  His uncle rose and stood stiffly beside the bed. His hands were straight at his sides, like dead things. He stared down at them. "I don't know why I touched you that time, Jerry. You meant more to me than anyone in the world. You still do. If I had known that touching you would make you act like that, I would not have done it. But I loved you, Jerry. And I had such feelings . . . such strong feelings, that I thought it was right to do what I did."

  A great sob sought release, but his uncle held it back.

  "I didn't know it was wrong. I learned it, though. That's what I want you to know. I learned, and it never happened again. All the time I was in the Army, and all the men and boys I saw, the feelings that went on inside me, I never let them out."

  His uncle turned and looked at him earnestly. "I had to prove it to you. To make it right between us." Tears rolled down his face. "You were my little brother, Jerry! You were all I had in the world! What you did to me, the way you shut me out, it nearly killed me. God, I was only fifteen, Jerry. If only I could take that one time back . . ."

  His uncle sat stiffly down on the bed, wiping a hand across his face.

  "So I thought I could make it like it was again, show you that what I did meant nothing. I wanted to take it back.

  "And now I have. Oh, God, please, Jerry, tell me it never happened . . ."

  His uncle wept into his hands.

  When the state troopers came through the door a half hour later, he hadn't moved. As they pulled Uncle Martin from the bed he saw his pleading eyes and he said quietly, "It never happened," and his uncle's last look was one of deliverance and peace . . .

  "That's my most painful memory," he whispered to Rebecca Meyer. Somewhere he had begun to cry, and he let her hold him, rocking the poison out of him. "Oh, God," he wept, "he never touched me, Uncle Martin never touched me, oh, Dad . . ."

  The night continued. She rocked him, and, sometime near dawn, she whispered to him, "You're well."

  He laughed and said, "You're right."

  He moved against her, and for a time they didn't talk. Paine fleetingly thought of the sounds of the tape in Barker's office.

  "What about Gerald?" he whispered.

  "Gerald can go to hell."

  When they had finished, the sun was rising and she said, "What are you going to do today?"

  "That depends on whether it means anything to you that I don't work for the Barker Agency anymore, and don't have a contract to find out who killed your father."

  "My sister can go to hell, too," she said. She look
ed deep into his eyes. "Here's a contract of your own," she whispered, kissing him.

  He smiled. "Then I'm going to see someone who knows more than he told me."

  He tried to hold her but she got up. "I have to go. Call me later."

  "I will," he said.

  "Call me," she whispered to him, and suddenly sleep overtook him, and her face stayed with him, and, for a time in his sleep, he knew who she was.

  TWENTY-ONE

  In the morning he felt whole. He awoke alone, but for the first time in two days he felt like a live man. His ribs ached, but it was a dull, inconsequential hurt he could live with.

  He dressed and went out of the bedroom, down the long stairs and out through the front door as Gerald, in his tennis togs, came in.

  "Well, well," Gerald said. "Look who's returned from the dead." His voice was mock sweet. He pointed with his racket to the far end of the driveway. "Rebecca had your car brought up here from . . . wherever it was."

  He turned to go but Paine stopped him.

  "Why do you hang around here?" Paine asked him.

  "Two reasons," Gerald answered. "Money, and money."

  "Cute answer," Paine said. "Does Rebecca know anything about your coke habit? You're pretty stupid to leave the stuff in the bathroom upstairs. I found it next to your cheap aftershave."

  Gerald's face clouded. "She doesn't know about it."

  Paine nodded. "I didn't think so. I've got a friend in the police department who grew up Irish poor and loves to bust rich jerks like you. Should I give him a call or would you like to get lost?"

  He watched Gerald's face as the options dropped away from him.

  "I'll leave," he said finally.

  "Don't look so sad," Paine said. "There are plenty of other tennis courts in Westchester."

  The keys were in the ignition of Paine's car. He pulled out of the driveway, feeling like he'd been away from the world for a year. His ribs were telling him that a year off might not be a bad idea.