Read Online Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) by Al Sarrantonio - Free Book Online Page A

more of those little brass pipes?"
    Kohl seemed to nod, so Paine went into the man's coat pocket and found two more lengths of fist-width tubing.
    "A real Boy Scout, right?" Paine said. "Be prepared."
    Kohl tried to roll into a ball again. "We were just trying to do what we were told."
    "By Anapolos? Didn't I tell you I'd take care of Anapolos?" Kohl just looked at him.
    "Christ, you guys are dumb. You just lost your six months free rent." Paine got up. He looked at Koval ; some of the focus seemed to be coming back into his eyes. "Go back to Easton, and forget about me. If you bother me again, I'll have you arrested. If I don't break open your heads first and let your feeble brains drip out. Understand?"
    Paine looked at each of them until they nodded assent. "Fine," Paine said, leaving the alley.
    Up in his office, Paine turned on his answering machine. Billy Rader's voice said, "Call me."
    Paine called, and Billy answered the phone.
    "What is it, Billy?"
    Rader laughed. "I just wanted to tell you the skies are supposed to be crystal clear down here tonight."
    "Fuck you, Billy."
    Rader laughed again. "I also wanted to tell you I got a name on the fellow we found in Bob Petty's hotel room. Parker Johnson. Local boy. No one saw him go into the hotel room. Hold on, let me get my piece of paper." Rader went away from the phone, came back. "I'm just guessing, but would you say Petty was about six foot or so, maybe one hundred seventy pounds, waist size maybe thirty-four?"
    "About that."
    "Well, Johnson was five foot eight, a hundred forty pounds, waist size thirty" Rader gave a short chuckle. "The clothes we found in the room were Petty's, so he must have still been around. And the desk clerk described him as the man who checked into the room. He never came back to check out."
    "Anything else?"
    "Well, it seems some of Johnson's friends say he got very nervous a couple of days ago, and suddenly moved out of his boardinghouse."
    Paine paused. "This guy Johnson have any record?"
    "Clean. His boarding house buddies say he liked to drink, liked the prostitutes now and then, but otherwise was just an okay type."
    "Thanks, Billy."
    "Jack, any chance your friend Petty killed this guy?"
    "I'd like to think he didn't."
    "Sure, Jack. Anything else you'd like?"
    "Any chance you could get into the airline reservation computers, find out if Bob Petty left Dallas-Fort Worth?"
    "I'm already working on that. Also the buses and trains."
    "I can't thank you enough, Billy."
    "Any chance you'd like to sneak on back here tonight, go out to the scope with me?"
    "I'd love to, Billy, but—"
    "Your loss, Jack."
    "Can I ask how you got all this?" Paine asked.
    Rader laughed again. "Your friend Landers has a few rivals in the Fort Worth Police Department. Let's just say I've got a lot of friends in high and low places. I'll get back to you."
    "Thanks again, Billy."
    "I'll think of you tonight while I look at Omega Centauri."
    "Like I said, fuck you, Billy."

13
     
    T he funeral of Roberto Hermano was not an elaborate affair. All those attending, if they hadn't been scattered throughout the church, might have filled one long pew. The church itself was a model of pre-Vatican II Catholicism—a miniature gothic that must have been, in its polished wood and cleaned stained glass heyday, an inspiration to its congregation. Gloomy, dark, muggily cool, with shadows in the corners, the eye was drawn upward to the vaulted, painted ceiling and its now-faded representations of cherubs floating among the clouds.
    Paine's eye was drawn to Hermano's mother, a short, weeping woman in black who had draped herself over the casket parked on its gurney at front and center, and refused to move. The priest waited patiently while two or three family members—cousins or uncles or brothers—tried to persuade her to sit down. But she would have none of it.
    "My Roberto!" she wailed. "What have they done to my baby?"
    Paine knew what they had done to her baby, and he hoped the