Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

in waking, none of the images came together and made sense. He stared a long time, in the heat, with his hands cradling the back of his head, and still Bobby Petty's soul stayed in front of him, inviolable, rock hard, refusing to break, and so none of the questions were answered.
    Sometime late in the hot night, Paine's eyes closed, and the waking dreams stopped, and the subconscious took over with its own jumbled version of life. Paine dreamed sleeping dreams, bad dreams, too, and in them he searched for Rebecca between the stars, wanting desperately for her to reach out to hold him from a place he could not see, as he looked up into the starry void from a place he would not leave, but still did not want to be.

6
     
    H e called Terry early, giving her enough time, and when he got there, the house was straightened and the children were out to school and she wore a face that was presentable to the world. She looked as though she had stopped crying, even when alone. She looked halfway back, which might be as far as she got for a while, but it was enough.
    Paine sat at the kitchen table, and she had coffee ready. She wore shorts and a gray gym T-shirt that said Police Academy on it. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and the temperature was already eighty-five degrees. The weatherman had said high nineties, maybe the century mark.
    "I want to look through the house, Terry," he said. She was studying his face, and he was sure she already knew what he meant, and understood, but he said it anyway. "Top to bottom. It'll look like it's been burgled when I'm finished. I want to go through his clothes drawers, the junk drawer he kept stuff in, his toolbox, the glove compartment in the car I want to go through the last week's trash, his uniforms. If you want to leave while I'm doing it—"
    "I'll help you."
    "All right," he said. "But I just wanted to tell you it might be painful—"
    She shook her head, cutting off his argument against her helping.
    Paine drank his coffee, trying to think of something to say to her. She sat holding her untouched coffee mug, letting the steam take the warmth out of it. He knew she was waiting for him to say something to her, one way or the other, to tilt her life toward 100 percent.
    "I take it no one's heard from him again," he said.
    She shook her head no.
    "I talked to Coleman yesterday afternoon, and then Hermano, the guy he was working on the drug bust case with. Coleman acted like an egg on a griddle. I think they're coming down on him from up top. He tried to get me to rejoin the force."
    "Christ."
    "Coleman always was an asshole. But now I think he realizes it for the first time. Hermano was just scared. I don't think this had anything to do with what Bobby was working on."
    Her fingers working on the handle of her coffee mug, she waited.
    "Terry" he said, "I'm as blank as you. I don't have any idea what this is all about. That's why I want to go through the house—"
    "Then let's do it," she said angrily, getting up.
    They started in the basement. Bobby had a workshop down there, one half of the cellar behind a sheetrock barrier that was all his own. There were two workbenches, one covered messily with tools, fuses, rolls of duct tape, tubes of glue ; the other immaculate, a fisherman's shrine, neat racks of lures above neatly labeled drawers of miniature tools and fly-tying equipment.
    Paine went through everything, the drawers, the boxes, the discarded shopping bags with abandoned receipts inside. When he finished in the tool room he went through the other half of the cellar, the playroom, which contained only toys except, on one side under a low Tiffany-style fluorescent, a pool table, now piled high with boxes of military novels and sealed Christmas ornaments. Paine checked down the slipcovers of the two old chairs in the corners, moved the canned food shelves under the stairs.
    "What's next?" Terry asked.
    "Where does he keep the rest of his stuff?"
    "Mostly in the bedroom. The garage,