Summer Cool

9

A cop named Landers talked with Billy Rader while Paine sat outside the office. Paine heard them laughing. After a while Rader came out, squeezed Paine on the shoulder, kept on walking toward the female dispatcher who had smiled and motioned to him from across the room.

"Come on in, Paine," Landers said, and Paine stood and entered the office.

Landers waited for him at the door, and closed it behind him. He walked around to his side of the desk, and they both sat down. Landers was short and thin, with a pinched, leathery face. He wore a light tan cotton suit with an open-necked shirt.

It was hot in the office. The window was halfway open, letting hot air in, and a rotating fan in one corner next to a row of old oak filing cabinets blew the hot air around.

"Well," Landers said, scratching his cheek before looking at Paine, "if you hadn't been with Billy Rader, you'd be in deep shit. Way I see it, you're still in shallow shit. But that's okay, as long as you do what I say."

"Billy's all right," Paine said.

"Billy?" Landers looked as though his train of thought had been interrupted. "Billy's the best fucking reporter in Texas. He's the only reporter I've ever known who spent time on the force, and the only one who knows what kind of crap we have to put up with. He's always been fair. You're lucky he's a buddy of yours."

"I am," Paine said.

"But you're still in shallow shit. You're from New York, and I don't like New York detectives down here, especially when they don't check in with me."

"I'm not from New York City. I'm from Yonkers."

Again, Landers's train of thought had been derailed. "That don't make a shit of difference to me. New York is New York."

"We like to think there's a difference."

Landers held up his hand. "Enough chitchat," he said. "Here's the deal, and the only deal. I want you out of Fort Worth tonight. And out of Fort Worth means out of the state of Texas. Billy told me what you're up to. If your friend shows up I'll call you. Right now your friend is in the deepest shit there is. He rented a hotel room, and then left it with a headless body in it. I don't know about New York, or Yonkers, but we don't like that kind of business in Texas. But you're not going to do anything about it. I am."

Paine sat silent.

"Is this getting through to you?" Landers asked.

"Sure."

"I'm not kidding, Paine. I find your ass in Texas tomorrow morning, and I'll haul you in on suspicion of murder. I can do it, and I'd enjoy it."

Paine stood, drew out one of his cards and dropped it on the desk. "You'll let me know if Bobby Petty shows up?"

Landers reached over, took the card, put it down in front of him. "As long as you're back at this New York number, I will." He stood, held out his hand. "Nothing personal, Paine. Especially as you're a friend of Billy's. We just do things our own way here."

"Everybody does," Paine said, not taking the hand, leaving the office.

Paine extricated Billy Rader from the laughing dispatcher and a group of three uniformed cops he had gathered. They went out into the dusk. The sun was lowering, but the heat wasn't. They stood for a minute, feeling the heat, watching the clear, cloudless sky turning purple toward blue-black.

"He tell you to go home tonight?" Rader said.

"Yes."

"He meant it. Landers can be mean as a rattlesnake."

"He's a cop," Paine said.

Rader laughed. "Ain't we all. You, me, Bobby Petty, Landers. Just a bunch of fucking cops." He studied the sky, seemed intent on one purpling section about thirty-five degrees up from the horizon. He squinted, and then grunted with satisfaction. "North star looks good tonight. Not twinkling. Be a good night for seeing." He cocked his head toward Paine. "Landers said you had to be gone by tonight?"

Paine nodded.

Rader smiled broadly. "Nights go from dusk to dawn in Texas this time of year," he said.

"Okay, Billy," Paine said.

By true nightfall, they had reached Billy Rader's observatory, forty miles north of Arlington. There was a glow to the south, from the big twin cities area, but it was blocked by low hills and cottonwood trees and the sky overhead was black and clear.

Before they entered, Paine helped Billy pull the tin slit back away from the dome. It was big inside, bigger than Paine's own observatory, and the telescope was bigger, a huge cannon-like white Newtonian with a sixteen-inch mirror cradled at the bottom end.

"Gonna try something," Billy said, studying his watch in the near dark, snapping on the red map light near the top of the step ladder used to view through the top end, where the eyepieces went. "Shit, we almost missed it."

Paine helped him move the dome around on its ball bearings. It squeaked and rumbled as the slit circled the sky from east to south. Rader quickly set the stepladder in place, climbed to the top, dropped a powerful eyepiece into place and put his eye against it.

"Thought I could eyeball it, but I'd better set the circles," he said, scrambling down the ladder and consulting the two large setting circles on the telescope's mount, etched with degree marks, by which the scope could find any point in the sky.

"Got it now for sure," Rader said, giving a small grunt of pleasure as he refocused the eyepiece. "Come on up here, Jack."

Billy stood aside, as Paine crowded next to him to look into the eyepiece. He adjusted the focus slightly.

"Jesus."

An explosion of light came into sharp view. A huge, frightening, awesomely packed globe of millions upon millions of pinpoint stars, densely packed to the point of white heat at the center, flowing outward in all directions until tiny, individual stars, each a miniature sun, focused like gems against the black sky.

"Omega Centauri," Billy Rader said. "The biggest fucking globular cluster in the sky. You can't see that sucker in New York, Jack. I can only see it here way low through a couple of trees a little while every night."

As Rader was saying this, the spectacular sight began to fade behind the low hills.

"Let me have a last look," Rader begged, pulling Paine away from the eyepiece.

"You deserve it," Paine said.

Sometime toward dawn, as the distinctive cross of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, sank toward the western horizon, Billy Rader lit a cigarette and asked Paine, "So tell me how you've been."

"I can always tell when you get serious because you light a cigarette," Paine said.

In the red light of the map light, Rader shrugged. "Heard some bad things about you a little back. Sounded like it was tough."

"It was," Paine said.

"She really got to you that bad?" Billy Rader asked.

Paine hesitated, pulling away from the eyepiece, in which the stately Andromeda galaxy, now overhead, floated like a majestic whirlpool of soft light. "Yes, she did," he said quietly.

Bader nodded, pulled at his cigarette. "It was like that with Janet and me for a while, before we busted up. It's bad enough when they get a hook into your crotch, but when they land it in your gut it's much worse. Like they take a piece of your soul away and keep it."

"It was never like that with Ginny and me."

Bader waved his cigarette, making a line of light with the glowing end. "Just because you marry a woman doesn't mean she has the hook in your gut. Sometimes she gets it in there later, sometimes not at all. Most men, I don't think they know what the fuck they're doing when they get married. It's like they go blind for a little while. Then they wake up. Sometimes they're lucky, and when they wake up the hook is in deep and they can be happy. The rest of us. ." He shrugged. "Why do you think the divorce rate is so high, Jack? It's because the hook was somewhere, in the groin, in the pocketbook, but it wasn't in the gut. That only happens rarely, Jack. Sometimes the hook falls out later, like it did with Janet and me. I can't fucking explain it."

"Neither can I."

Billy was hesitant again. "It's just that I heard you and this woman. .^"

"Rebecca."

"Well, I heard you almost killed yourself after she did."

"I thought about it, Billy. But that wasn't the first time. I don't think I'll be thinking about it much again."

That seemed to be what Billy Rader had been digging for, and Paine was happy he had found it. Bader threw down his cigarette, and Paine watched the glow snuff out under Rader's boot.

"I imagine that don't make getting over her any easier."

"In a way, it does."

"Oh," Billy Bader said. Then he said, "Let's have one more look at the Ring Nebula in Lyra, then we'd better close this sucker up and get you to the airport. Landers means what he says. But that don't mean," Rader continued, "that a good ole Texan like me can't keep looking around a little for what you need to know."

"Thanks, Billy," Paine said as dawn began to rise. "I was just about to ask."

Later, as the plane climbed up in the new hot day that would get hotter, as Paine laid his head back and watched Texas fall beneath him from the window, he thought of the Ring Nebula. A gently glowing circle of yellow-orange gas, it very much resembled a ring in the darkness. A ring meant many things. Sometimes it meant emptiness. He had worn a ring on his left hand once, and he had taken it off and the space in the middle of it had been his marriage to Ginny. He had never given Rebecca a ring.

Terry Petty wore a ring, a thin round sliver of yellow-orange gold that encircled her finger. He knew she had a hook in her gut. The ring, therefore, was not just a circle of metal but a symbol of an inviolable, mysterious process. Her finger made the ring whole_; there was no emptiness in its center.

Bobby Petty had been a lucky man with, it had seemed, a very large hook in his gut. Paine thought of the headless man in the motel toilet, the look of astonishment in the eyes. Many things could cause astonishment, including the betrayal of a friend, and the stark, sudden viciousness of a cold enemy.

Paine wondered if Petty still wore his ring, or if it had been taken from his finger, becoming only a hole in space signifying, as hard as it was to believe, the destruction of the essential self, the dropping of the hook, and, finally, mere and utter emptiness.