Cold Night

'Thank you, Barbara,' Gloria Fulman said. There was a baby in the bassinet, small as a cat, and she picked it up. Paine studied her face and there was something akin to maternity on it.

Gloria Fulman said to Barbara, 'We've had a little accident. We'll need someone to come and look at the rug. And please tell Jeff to bring the limousine around front. Mr. Paine will be going back to the airport now.'

SIXTEEN

At twenty-five thousand feet in the air, with the sustained muffled scream of jet engines to lull him, Paine closed his eyes and the third bad place found him.

It was a night place. There was only darkness, the snick-snick of windshield wipers, the tarp-bright, slick blackness of wet street reflecting the colors of man-made night: dirt-yellow streetlamps, squares of dim light in rows of dead black buildings. The windows in the patrol car were down; the night smelled wet and close and dirty. Dannon was driving, and he wouldn't stop talking. He had been talking ever since they went on shift, first about his fishing trip, the Pennsylvania walleye pike he had caught in a big reservoir. Then he talked about the Yankees.

Paine felt sick. There was a constant gnaw in his belly that had risen slowly to the back of his head and settled behind the back of his eyes where it throbbed dully. His head felt like a giant squeezed fist.

'Sure you don't want to go in?' Dannon kept asking. He knew Dannon was taunting him. Good cops did their job. Good cops stuck with their partners, didn't go in sick in the middle of a shift.

'Come on, Jack,' Dannon said with mock heartiness, punching him lightly in the ribs. 'Want a nice bowl of chili? Maybe a greasy bucket of Chinese ribs?'

Paine groaned and Dannon laughed.

Dannon was always like this-a sour mix of paternalism and riding, suppressed brutality. Paine had given up long ago trying to figure Dannon out. He seemed to like being a cop, but there was a deep, festering resentment in him, an itch he never scratched in front of Paine. He hovered on the edge of unpredictability. At first it had seemed like camaraderie, the complaining and dissatisfaction, but Paine had learned that Dannon's resentment also held room for Paine himself. After Paine had refused to have anything to do with Dannon's small payoffs, the free hamburgers and coffees, the twenties cheerfully collected here and there, he knew he had found his way onto Dannon's crap list.

'Little high and mighty for a rookie whose old man blew his own brother's head off, don't you think?' Dannon had said one night, his joking manner layering the hostility beneath. In the locker room he subtly rode Paine all the time, doing it in such a way that, without looking cruel, he drew laughter from anyone who was around. When they were alone, he could be just as subtle and vicious, and often was.

'Sure you don't want a taco, kid?' Dannon laughed, pushing Paine with his fist in the ribs again. His voice turned mean. 'Want me to bring you in, Jack? Take you to the nurse?'

'Fuck off,' Paine said.

The dull yellow lights flashing off the black wet tarp were like pins stabbing into his eyes. He wanted to squeeze his head with his hands and scream.

Dannon drove without speaking, blessing Paine with the near silence of windshield wipers slapping water from the glass in front of him.

They were in the center of Yonkers now, a run-down mix of gasping businesses and warehouses bordered by low-rent apartments. Paine fought to keep his eyes from squinting against the stabbing hurt that assaulted them from the sodium vapor lamps overhead. There had been a lot of trouble near here lately.

Dannon slowed the car to a crawl.

Paine thought his partner had seen something. Ignoring the anguish his eyes felt, he searched for a problem. If he missed something, Dannon would get on him. But there was nothing. Dannon began to talk.

'You know, kid,' he said, his voice conversationally hiding the menace that crept into it, 'I don't understand how you can afford to be a fucking saint.'

'Let it drop,' Paine said.

Dannon laughed. 'I can always stop for those tacos.' His tone changed to mock seriousness. 'I just don't understand you.'

'I told you,' Paine said, wanting more than anything to ram his eyes shut, but keeping them open, looking through the sweeping path of the wipers, out through the water-spattered, half-opened window on his right, 'I don't give a shit what you do. Just leave me out of it.'

'You're my partner, Jack,' Dannon went on. 'I can't leave you out of anything.'

'Learn.'

Anger, the thing Paine had fought to control since he had started with this man, rose in him.

'Look,' Dannon began, but the anger spilled over in Paine and he grabbed Dannon's arm, hard. Dannon braked the car in the middle of the street and turned his cold eyes on Paine.

'Leave me the fuck alone,' Paine hissed. 'I don't give a shit if you're screwing your grandmother on the side, just leave me out.'

Time stood still as Dannon stared into his face. Then he broke contact and turned back to the road. 'All right, kid,' he said quietly.

They drove in silence. The night melted away around them. Yellow lights, black streets. Yellow and black. The rain made everything ghostly; a few wisps of misty fog trailed up from the gutters to nuzzle the darkness. They circled the center of town, skirted the outskirts, started from the bottom and drove back up again.

The night stabbed at Paine and he fought to keep his eyes open.

Dannon began to say something, then stopped and said, 'Holy shit.'

He jerked the car to the curb and was halfway out before Paine focused on what was happening. On the sidewalk ahead of them, a man in a stylish raincoat was just collapsing to his knees. As Paine watched, he fell forward. Even in the dreamlike yellow and black light, Paine saw the red tear across the bottom of his face. And up ahead, a small figure in a leather jacket was running away.

Paine pushed his door open. Pulling his.38, Dannon ran past the fallen figure in the trench coat in pursuit of the boy in the leather jacket. He gave a quick glance back at Paine, indicating with a nod that Paine should check the fallen man.

The man in the trench coat lay unmoving, next to a bench. His leather briefcase had fallen open on the ground, leaving a scatter of papers soaking in the light rain. The man was black, maybe thirty years old. He looked like he had decided to curl up and go to sleep, but he was dead.

Paine pulled him over. The left side of his neck looked like a cherry bomb had gone off in it, taking out a ragged wedge half the size of Paine's fist.

Paine settled the man back down in the rain and let him sleep forever. He looked up. Dannon was well up the street, gaining inevitably on the figure in the leather jacket. The boy took a sudden right corner and Dannon disappeared after him.

Paine ran back to the cruiser and radioed for backup. Then he followed Dannon. He reached the corner Dannon had turned, and stopped. His eyes were burning. He closed them tight and then opened them. He was surrounded by night and drizzling rain and yellow and black. He shook his head, bringing his eyes back to focus. He listened. Ahead of him footsteps slapped against wet pavement. He caught movement between two apartment buildings.

He ran. The pavement hit his feet, hard. He felt detached from himself. He felt like someone else was running, watching the pounding of feet against sidewalk. The black and yellow night blurred, cleared. He drew his hand across his eyes, pulled in burning lungfuls of air.

Dannon was twenty yards from him, motioning for Paine to follow him into an alley.

Paine stood before the opening of the alley and swayed. It looked like a cave mouth, the mouth of a dark giant beast. He stumbled forward and it swallowed him.

He fell to one knee, drew a rasping breath, then stood. His eyes focused and unfocused. He felt perhaps he should lie down in the alley, go to sleep, let the other detached self who watched him continue.

'Paine!” he heard from a great distance. It was a giant’s bellow muffled by darkness, the enclosing alley, his