the room. Paine threw his jacket on the couch, sat behind the desk, went quickly through the mail.
'I was going to call you yesterday, right after you left,' Terry said. She was standing on the other side of the desk, looking down at him. 'Last night I almost did. I had a few drinks and went to bed, but I couldn't sleep. I almost called you at two in the morning.'
'You should have,' Paine said.
Terry paused, and then said, 'I'm sorry, Jack.'
Paine put on a smile. 'For what?'
She didn't smile. 'I was serious about what I said yesterday. But I shouldn't have done that to you.'
'Did the garbage men come?'
A flush of anger or embarrassment came and faded. 'Yes. And they'll come next week for the rest.'
'My point was, don't you think you're being a bit hasty?'
'In getting on with my life? When people die, you put their things away and go on.'
'Bobby's not dead.'
Now her eyes were focused straight on him. 'To me he is.'
Paine looked at her, and she sat down and put her hands in her lap. 'I'm sorry, Jack, but that's the way it is. He's gone now. I know he's not coming back I have a life to get on with.'
'Terry, I'm going to find him, whether you want me to or not.'
She stood, still clutching her hands, and turned away from the desk. 'I know you will. But I don't want to know anything about it.'
He saw her beginning to sob, and he rose and walked around the desk.
She turned, crying, and fell into his arms. Her hands moved up to her face, trying to stop the tears, but then she let them come and put her arms around Paine and held him close to her.
'Oh, Jack, I don't know what the hell to do. .'
He held her tight, and suddenly she stopped crying and he looked down and her face was there, and she was looking at him with a hard straight look. She looked almost fierce. Tears had flushed her face, and she reached up and held Paine's neck and pulled his mouth down to hers.
Paine tried to stop her, but she held his neck and 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
Paine 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 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
