"Where do you want me to go?"
"The old beat, Jackie-boy."
Paine drove slowly. He took each turn cautiously, keeping his hands in view on the wheel.
"Did Jane Grumbach own you long?" Paine asked.
The mouth of the.38 bumped his neck as Dannon laughed. "I don't know what you're talking about, fuckhead."
"The way I figure it, you took care of the local police for Kopiak and the Grumbachs. The thing I can't figure out is why you killed Kopiak and the rest-why derail the gravy train?"
"Kopiak is dead?"
"His brains are all over his office."
"I was on the way to his office when I saw you. I didn't kill anybody," Dannon said angrily, jamming the gun into Paine's neck.
"Did-"
"Just drive," Dannon snapped.
"Any special place you want me to go?"
"You know where." Paine's hands tightened on the wheel. In the back seat, Dannon was solemn. After a moment he asked, "Kopiak's really dead?"
"Yes."
"Drive," he repeated.
Paine drove.
When they got to the end of the street by the railroad station, Dannon told him to slow down. "You know where to park," he said. Paine pulled the car over to the curb in front of the bench where he'd found the man with the wedge out of his neck. That had been night, and this was day, but the sky was gunmetal gray and the buildings were high and blocked the sun. It might as well be night.
"Get out of the car."
Paine got out. The day became night for him, and the other, earlier night began to unreel in his head like a spool of shadowy movie film. He saw the man with the wedge out of his neck on the ground, face down; he heard Dannon's running footsteps ahead of him, saw the man in the leather jacket running, saw the two of them turn a corner and disappear.
"Walk."
Paine walked. He followed each invisible step as he had then. Dannon's.38 was in his back but he didn't feel it. In his mind he was running, in his mind he went to the corner, stopped, listened in the night for the sound of running men.
"Keep moving, asshole."
In his head, he heard Dannon shout for him, turned, saw movement in the alley, followed.
"That's the way, asshole, I see you remember."
Paine's mind fogged. The movie film unreeled. There was a groaning, thick ache in his stomach. He couldn't see clearly. He heard movement behind him. Dannon. Ahead, under the sloping high sides of apartment buildings, the spiderworks of rusting fire escapes, the tattered flags of wet wash and, up high, the twisted praying metal hands of television antennae, under all this, in the dim walkway scattered with a maze of cartons, broken furniture, the broken innards of a television separated from its praying hands above, he saw movement-the boy in the leather jacket? — saw a figure step out of the deep dream of the night and point something at him…
"Paaaaaaaaaine!"
He remembered, but it was no better; the night was the same, his mind a foggy mess, his arm raised next to him, feeling like it didn't belong to him, like his finger had that night when Ginny walked in on him with that bullet in the chamber of his.38 staring at him, his finger becoming apart from him, thinking for him, and the night became bright with light and the figure in the leather jacket became one with the ground and the flash from the thing the boy pointed at him did not go out like the blinding flash he saw next to him-
"I have a present for you, Paine."
The film spooled onto the ground, the movie was over and he still didn't understand the ending.
Dannon stepped back away from Paine. "I'm going to give you a present before I blow your fucking head apart."
He brought his gun to eye level, sighting along the barrel at Paine's face. "The way I see it, you killed Kopiak and the rest of them. At least, for my purposes you did. And the way I see it I had to shoot you during apprehension. But before I do that I'm going to tell you what happened that night. You didn't kill that kid. I did. The little fucker was running numbers for me, and he'd started skimming. The guy with the briefcase was another of my problems. So were you. So I decided to get rid of all my problems at once.
"I drugged you that night, asshole. Just enough to make you punchy without putting you out. I set up a meeting between the briefcase man and the little shit, and told the bastard that if he took care of briefcase he'd be even with me. Then I told him to wait for me in this alley with a flashlight. Then I called you in. You would have seen Martians if I'd told you to. I told the kid to turn on the flashlight, slipped your.38 out and did him, then put the.38 into your hand. It was easy."
Dannon took careful aim along the barrel of his gun. He moved it up a fraction of an inch, to the center of Paine's temple.
"Nice clean shot for my old partner." He smiled. "Turns out you weren't a bad cop after all. So long, fuckhead."
Paine heard a shot, but it didn't come from Dannon's.38. Dannon gave a short cry of surprise and fell forward. Two more shots went into his prone body, making it jump lifelessly.
Paine ran to the mouth of the alley but the car had gunned its engine and was gone. He crossed the street. There, a car's width out from the curb, were three.30–06 shells, their caliber neatly stamped in a circlet on the back. He picked them up. Near them was a small white rectangle with the name "Johnson" written on it. When he turned the rectangle over, it became a photograph, a corporate head shot of a man with a wry smile who had committed suicide in 1972.
Paine pulled out the worn envelopes of photos in his pocket, saw the name "Mr. Johnson" written on them in Morris Grumbach's arrogant scrawl and Dolores Grumbach's careful script.
The world upended.
For a moment Paine didn't breathe. He saw her face in front of him, felt the essence of her that had danced out of his reach since his eyes had first found hers and sought the answer to the mystery there.
He knew the answer now, why she had affected him so deeply.
She was his mirror image.
And he knew what she was going to do.
Running for his car, Paine said, "Jesus."
TWENTY-THREE
Venus and Mars. Paine's hands were cold on the steering wheel. His mind was cold in his head. Through the window, as he passed the bridge down to his left and the lights of the city began to fade to memory behind him, he saw the stars and the two planets emerge. Mars and Venus. They were farther apart now, the conjunction passing, and they whirled off into space away from one another, two entities that never had belonged together. They were literally on the opposite sides of the earth, Venus close to the sun, Mars out past our planet in the colder reaches of the solar system, away from the sun's heat, and there was nothing that man could do to change that. Venus was love, Mars was war, and man couldn't change that, either.
He drove. He passed the spot where the motorist had been pulled over that night, when the red and white of the state trooper's flasher had reminded him of Mars and Venus. The spot on the roadside was empty now, empty as space above. He drove on. Too late for after-work drinkers tonight. Too late for everybody.
When he was nearly there he knew that he could not catch her. She would drive as fast as she had to, and even though there was only a matter of minutes between them, it might as well be eternity.
Above, through the windshield, Venus was pushed below the horizon, leaving Mars to stare at him like an evil eye.
He pulled off the highway. There was a gas station and it was closed, and then there was a country store with an outside phone but the receiver was dead. And then there was a bar and the music was loud from the jukebox, and an early drunk was telling his friend about the bass he caught-but there was a phone and he put change into it and there was ringing and ringing and then she picked it up.