Summer Cool jp-2

by Al Sarrantonio

  Paine turned on the answering machine on his desk. He was checking through the blank tape when the phone rang.

  When he put the receiver to his ear, Philly Ramos's voice said, "Hello, Paine." The voice sounded faraway, vague, haunted.

  "You want me to help you, Philly?"

  "I don't think I can be helped, Paine."

  "You sure, Philly? I can take you in, make sure the police take care of you."

  "I don't think that's possible. Anyway. ." He laughed, a pained sound. "Remember how Roberto used to say he couldn't stand to go back to jail again?"

  "Yes."

  Again the hurt laugh. "That was me, Paine. Worse than Roberto. I was only in once, for a few months. But it was enough."

  "What are you going to do?"

  The laugh. "Doing it now, Paine. Doesn't hurt as much as I thought. Bathwater's all red. ."

  "Philly, where are you?"

  "Forget it, Paine. Too late." The hurt laugh was softening.

  "Philly, don't do this, let me help you."

  "Sorry, don't need help. Told you I can't go back in. Even for a night. Maybe I know what I like, but I always wanted it nice. I wanted it to be nice for Roberto. But I told you, he played the fence with everybody. Even me. The only time I get mean, Paine, is when somebody doesn't play straight with me."

  "Philly-"

  "Thanks for talking, Paine. I was going to do it anyway. Just wanted someone to be with me. I could have made it good for you, Paine, nice, better than Roberto. I would have loved you forever, man. . "

  Philly's voice trailed off to a sigh, and then the phone was hung up in Paine's ear and he heard the final, harsh tone of disconnection.

  Paine hung up the phone, and then picked it up again to repeat, for a moment, that final sound.

  25

  In this bad dream, Rebecca would not appear, and Bob Petty refused to change.

  Paine was on a high hill, in the dark, with the stars of summer covering him like a bowl. He was alone, and even the distant crickets had ceased their whispering chatter. The world was dark and hot, with the stars unmoving above.

  He had a telescope, and he looked for her, but she was not there. He searched between the stars, went over the glowing gas clouds, the thick blanket of suns in the southern Milky Way, up overhead to the deep reaches of black space where the constellation Cygnus ruled. He saw things he had rarely seen: the thin wisp of lace that was the Veil nebula, shining for him with a beauty that should have made him sing. But he was afraid, and he wanted to find her, and she would not appear.

  He looked deeper, into the dark spaces, and saw things no man had seen with a telescope. Planets whirled around protostars, stars were born in the midst of fiery clouds of heated gas, glowing with color: red and green, the blue-white of beginning life. His telescope brought him deeper still into the void, where quasars, borning galaxies of remarkable heat and power, rumbled with the beginnings of everything itself. And still he did not see her.

  He went farther, his eye glued desperately to the eyepiece. He felt tears on his cheeks in the hot night, mingled with sweat, and he began to call her name. There was an ache in him deeper than the space he explored, a need for solace, and for her to be alive again, that no beautiful sight of God's creation, of nature's beginnings, could put to rest. He sought not the birth of all, but the negation of her extinction. She was gone, and he wanted her back, and the rest of creation was a mere mockery, a beginning that only led to death.

  "Rebecca!" he cried, grasping the telescope with both his hands, and now his eye, with the eye of glass that was the telescope, brought him deeper still. He saw the beginning itself, a tiny flash of pure horrible light in the distance, and it filled his vision and blotted out the darkness, and she was not in the heated light, she was nowhere. She was gone.

  "Rebecca!" he called, his voice an echo in creation, but she was not there.

  And then Bobby Petty was there. His face grew out of the creation, and it filled the lens of his telescope, and creation withdrew behind him, and Paine began to return to his hilltop. He saw everything behind Petty pull back: roaring quasars, the galaxies they made, the protosuns, their planets condensing from hard rock, till the rock became Earth.

  And Bob Petty's face was there.

  And still he would not change. Still, Bob Petty was himself. And Petty opened his mouth in laughter, only it wasn't laughter that came out but sobs, the crying of the essential self that was deep inside his own sell, behind the masks, and Paine suddenly knew that Petty's cold eyes that had looked down at him were false, and that all he had done to his family and his life was false, and that Bobby Petty had not changed after all.

  Paine woke up.

  He was stiff and bathed in night sweat, but he ignored it and sat on the edge of the bed and punched a number into the telephone. He was not yet awake, and in his mind the night of his dream and the night that Billy Rader in Texas would be looking at were the same. And he saw Billy Rader peering into his telescope, and looking between the stars, and seeing incredible things.

  "Billy?" he said.

  "Jack? You all right?"

  Paine took a few breaths and said, "Yes."

  "Shitty night here, Jack. Clouds came in about an hour ago. I was just shutting down. Another five minutes, I would have been on the road back to Fort Worth."

  "Billy," Paine repeated, but he still was not fully awake, and he still saw things through the telescope on the hill, though the dream was fading and he heard Billy's voice clearly now.

  "Jack," Billy said resignedly. "Hold on while I go out to my car."

  "What?"

  "Hold on, Jack."

  Paine waited, the world coming back to him, the hot room coming back to him, the stale breeze from the fan, the night stagnation, the hot summer.

  "I'm back," Billy Rader said. "But you have to promise me something. I'm going to give you something, but I want you to promise me you got this yourself. My friend in the Pentagon almost got his nuts screwed off the other day because of you and me. This time, you have to tell the feds you got it yourself."

  Paine said, "I promise."

  Billy Rader sighed heavily. "Here it is, Jack. They threatened to can my friend, and he got pissed. He knows people in the White House, he called them, they told him nothing. He threatened whistle-blower, and they got back to him in fifteen minutes and said they'd cover his ass. He's still pissed, Jack."

  "About what?"

  "They lied to him. The stuff he got out of the computer was a cover. He went deeper, and found a covert operation. A domestic covert operation. I think you know what I'm talking about. This thing gets out, it'll be worse than Iran-Contra."

  "I'm listening."

  Rader sighed again. "Here goes. I've got faxes of two computer printouts here, and, according to them, your friend Bobby Petty was set up."

  Paine saw Petty's face, the laughter in the mouth, the sobbing that came out.

  Rader went on. "This is what happened. Petty and his friends were an elite operations unit in Vietnam. In 1970, after Nixon became president, they were sent into Cambodia a couple of times. One of those times, on direct orders, so they thought, they wiped out the entire male population of a VC village. What they were told was that the village was a direct ferry route to the Ho Chi Minh trail, supplying Chinese weapons to Ho's men as they came down.

  "When Petty and his boys were led in there, they found a lot of weapons, just like they were told they would. There was a firefight. The women and children they drove out, but they wiped out the male population. All of them. Then they went back to Vietnam, mission completed. Supposedly, a good part of the munitions reaching the Viet Cong on the way down the Ho Chi Minh trail had been eliminated.

  "Only, somebody lied to them. What they were really sent to do was handle a personal vendetta against a Cambodian drug operation that had snuffed someone. That someone was the guy who led Petty's team into Cambodia. His name was Kwan Wac Ho. He was also known as Tiny Man."

 
"Jesus."

  "Yeah," Billy said. "But it gets better. Because Tiny Man has been living in the U.S. since 1973, and has been linked to several drug smuggling operations. Most recently, he's been helping a group of South Americans get set up in a little town you might have heard of in New York, called Yonkers."

  "Fuck."

  "Yeah again." Rader's voice became sad. "Looks like your friend Bobby found out something he can't live too well with, Jack. Imagine living all that time with the thought that you did a great service for your country, that you saved a lot of American lives by handling a dangerous mission wiping out a village of bloodthirsty Viet Cong sympathizers funneling to their brethren weapons used to kill Americans. Then imagine finding out that you didn't do that alter all, that all you did was murder a bunch of poor Cambodians trying to make a buck by shoveling coca weed. Could do some things to your head."

  "Yes," Paine said.

  "Seems a lot more reasonable him going bonkers over this than over a woman or something else, doesn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm sorry, Jack, I truly am. Looks like somebody in D.C. found out this guy Tiny Man has been running amok in the drug trade, and with this new drug war and all was afraid that if he got caught the regular way a whole line of dirty old wash would get hung out. I mean, we're talking about another My Lai here, and in Cambodia, yet. So this somebody tells Petty the real story and figures Petty'll go birddog and take care of the whole mess for them. I mean, look at Coleman. Maybe Petty was the only one who didn't know why they went into Cambodia. It could happen, couldn't it?"

  Paine didn't want to say it. He saw Petty's face before him, the laughing face filled with tears, and he saw the essential Bobby Petty, the blue soul deep inside him that had found that his heroism had turned to shit, that he was a murderer as much as any man he had ever tracked, and that his family and friends would, from this time onward, know only a murderer and would be tainted by his presence just as his own soul was tainted, and that he could never look into their eyes again without seeing his own sin reflected in them, and in their lives. And Paine saw the essential Bob Petty and knew that he would wipe his family and friends free of him, separate them in reality even as they were separated by sin, and he saw Bob Petty coldly doing all these things out of love-the destruction of his family, the alienation of his friends, the renunciation of his livelihood. Paine now saw Petty's face not in a dream but in reality, in that room as Petty stood over him with the cold eyes not of hate but of self-death, of love, as Petty swung his fist up, the tremble in the fingers, and brought it down upon Paine as a loving kiss. .

  "Jack, couldn't it happen?"

  Paine saw Petty's face and wanted to believe that he couldn't go mad, could not execute his fellow murderers as they had executed a village of innocent men in an alien country, but Paine knew that this was something that was part of Bob Petty's essential sell-was, in fact, part of his own and most other men's-for madness is sometimes the handmaiden of justice.

  "Jack?"

  "Yes," Paine whispered, "it could happen."

  The line between them was silent a longtime. Paine heard the hiss in the wires, the distance of a wire in the ground and hung on a pole, the wire connecting his mind, his soul, to Billy Rader's mind and soul, and, finally, Billy Rader said what he had to.

  "I'm going to write about this thing, Jack. You know I have to. When it's all over, when I have everything in place, I'm going to publish it. Too many people will be hurt if I don't. It's too big a story to let go. We're talking about another big government scandal, something that shouldn't be going on. All of us get burned when that happens." His voice became quieter. "I know what will happen to your friend, and I'm sorry."

  "I know," Paine said.

  There was another silence. And then Billy Rader said, "There's one other thing, which I know you would find out anyway. I don't want you ever to think I'm using you, Jack, that it's for a story. It's just that I know you, and you'd find it out anyway."

  "Go ahead, Billy."

  "I just want you to be careful, Jack. I want you to be very careful."

  "I will."

  "I know where Bobby is now, where Tiny Man must be." And then he told Paine where.

  26

  Paine didn't like wearing disguises. When he had used the drinking glass to listen in on Sims and Martin, it had made him feel as if he were playing detective. But there were times when playing detective worked, and was necessary. He had colored his hair blond, and he wore a red baseball cap, and he had a blond mustache called "the Baron" that he had ordered from an outfit in New York that supplied Broadway theaters, and he wore an old denim jacket and a pair of faded jeans with the bottoms frayed, and an old pair of sneakers. All of these things together made him look like someone else, a guy from Yonkers who worked on the crew that mowed your lawn, perhaps. He looked like someone on a budget heading to Tucson to see a friend, or, perhaps, to try to persuade his errant girlfriend to come back to New York. He didn't look like someone who would succeed in getting the girlfriend to come back, but that was all right.

  At La Guardia, he told the ticket seller that his name was Jimmy Plunkett and paid in cash. He smiled a lot. People smiled back, and soon he was on a flight with his headset on, thinking about the fed he had seen hanging around outside his apartment building in Yonkers. He knew the disguise was all right, and the makeup covering the bruises, because he had gone up to the fed and asked him the time, smiling, and the fed had not smiled but had given him the time and then put his dead eyes back on the front of the building.

  "Thanks, man," he had said.

  The fed had answered, "Get lost."

  The flight was long, and he slept a little, but Bobby Petty didn't haunt his dreams any longer. When he didn't sleep he listened to the headset and stared at the flat earth below and enjoyed the stale air-conditioned atmosphere of the plane until it landed in Tucson, where it was still 100 degrees with no help in sight.

  He rented a car, paying cash and showing his Jimmy Plunkett driver's license. He kept smiling, and everyone smiled. When you pay cash, he thought, it didn't matter if you looked like a landscaper's assistant from Yonkers, everyone returned your smile.

  He wondered how long it would be before the fed outside his building, and Bryers, and Sims and Martin, found out he was not in Yonkers.

  He figured he had twenty-four hours.

  He drove past the hotel he had stayed in before, thought of going up to room 419 to see if Martin and Sims were still there and ask them the time. He kept driving.

  He drove a long while.

  He was almost where he wanted to go when he knew for sure that he was being followed. A tan Datsun had made all of his turns, and he didn't know how long it had been back there but he knew it had gotten closer. He tried to make it get closer still, to see the driver, but it hung back, refusing to bite.

  He made a few more turns, getting fancy with the wheel, but the Datsun stayed with him.

  Finally, he picked a wide street with lots of light on it and pulled over to the curb.

  The Datsun, a half block behind, pulled over and stopped.

  Paine got out of his car and began to walk toward the Datsun. The sun was in the windshield, and he still couldn't see the driver. And then, as Paine approached the car, the driver's door opened, and the driver got out.

  "Paine," Philly Ramos said, smiling. "What a lousy disguise."

  As Paine got close, Philly held out his right hand in greeting. In it was a small can, the top of which he depressed. A small cloud came out of the can, up into Paine's face. "Sorry, man," Philly Ramos said, affectionately.

  Paine began to choke; his eyes watered and he could not see. He threw out his arms and backed away from Philly Ramos.

  But then Philly said, "Sorry," again, with gentleness, and something came down hard on the back of Paine's skull and he met blackness.

  27

  Paine awoke in a room somewhere, sitting up on a chair, handcuffed behind. Paine's throat wa
s parched with the taste of chemicals and dry heat.

  Philly came into the room and smiled. He wore a long silk paisley robe. His feet were bare. The toenails shone as if they had been covered with clear lacquer. Philly had loosened his ponytail; his straight, ink black hair hung loosely down, framing his beautiful face.

  "Good morning, Paine." He smiled. He went to a window in the room, threw open the curtains, and opened the blinds. Hot morning sunlight slatted the room.

  "What the hell did you spray me with, Philly?"

  Philly's face brightened. "The Israeli army developed it for dealing with Palestinians. You like the bouquet?"

  "The shit works."

  "Let me get you a cup of coffee to wash that taste out of your mouth." Philly turned and went to another room.

  "Where are we?" Paine called after him.

  Philly laughed. "A place outside of Tucson. I have friends in the Indian community."

  "Are we on a reservation?"

  Philly appeared in the doorway with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand. "Yes, Paine, we're on a reservation."

  "What the hell is going on, Philly?"

  "Don't talk," Philly said, crossing the room to stand before Paine. He leaned down, putting the lip of the coffee cup to Paine's mouth. "Drink."

  Paine sipped; his eyes rose and locked on Philly's, studying his face. Philly's eyes were wise, brown, beautiful pools. Philly's face pulled back slightly, the eyes still studying.

  "I meant what I said about being good to you," he said. "Why did you lie about killing yourself?"

  The eyes stayed solemn above the smile. The mouth matched the eyes. "I knew you had a weakness for suicides."

  "Not anymore."

  Philly abruptly stood up, putting the coffee away. A splash of it spilled on Paine. A sharpness entered Philly's voice. "It would have been too late now, anyway."