The night passed. Paine thought desperately of lively things, baseball games, boxing matches, raucous parties. His head drooped; he fought himself out of sleep, found he had dropped the cable. It had snaked away from him on the floor. He spent an anxious ten minutes crawling in careful arcs, until his fingers brushed across it, mere inches from the live wire ends.
He went back to his spot, measured two paces out from the wall, found the water bowl, sat, waited.
The walking above stopped.
With indirect hearing, Paine registered the clutching down of the returning jeep outside the house.
It was the coolest time in the cellar. Paine estimated that it must be an hour before dawn, the coldest time of desert night, a clean chill in the air. The sky above would be wide and pure, Saturn high overhead, bringing a preview of autumn stars up behind it in the east-Cassiopeia, the Andromeda galaxy, the Pleiades, peeking above the mountain horizon. An hour-long respite from the heat, the temporary banishment of summer.
Paine tensed, waited.
He heard no sound from above.
Then, he did. A door, not the front door, at the back of the house, thrown open, a tattoo of gunfire, a fumbled pause, more gunfire. Running. Something knocked over, a curse in the dark. Muffled shouts. More gunfire. A curse, followed by a single shot.
Silence.
Not silence. With his strained ears, Paine heard something, the stalking of a hunter, which grew to a resulting whisper. At the back of the house, four quick steps, followed by quiet.
So suddenly that it startled Paine, the trapdoor directly above him was yanked up.
Paine forced his voice to sound calm and faint. "What the hell's going on up there? The light bulb went out."
A quickly muttered curse, the metal ladder lowered into the hole.
A figure as small as a monkey scampered down the ladder.
Paine lifted the water bowl, pooled it around the bottom of the ladder, jammed the live wires against the nearest rung.
Tiny Man stepped into the water and screamed, a spark of light bursting around his small body. He was flung from the ladder, and Paine heard him hit the floor as darkness returned.
Paine threw himself at the spot where Tiny Man had hit. He missed by a foot, heard Kwan panting beside him, on his back Paine covered him with his body, began to pummel him in the face and body, raining blows as fast as he could. Kwan's body was trembling slightly, as if electricity was still running through him, but Paine felt him stiffen, regain his strength.
As Paine reached for Kwan's neck, Tiny Man clamped his hands around Paine's wrists. His grip was steel. One hand left Paine's wrist and Paine felt it move down to a hardness at Kwan's midsection. The hardness moved. Paine took a hand from Tiny Man's throat, moving desperately around to Tiny Man's wrist. His fingers brushed the flat of hard steel. Tiny Man slashed upward, moving against Paine easily, and suddenly Paine lost his grip on the arm with the blade and he felt Tiny Man's arm move free of him, drawing back for a blow.
"Good-bye, Mr. Paine. I will cut you so that you will die slowly and no one can save you-"
Paine and Kwan were outlined in the circle of a flashlight beam as a shot split the air. Tiny Man grunted and bucked once under Paine, his eyes opening wide and then closing. Another shot and Tiny Man bucked and grunted again, less audibly. His knife clattered to the floor. It sounded as if he had taken a couple of punches, but Paine saw two red and growing stains in the side of his shirt.
Tiny Man's eyes unfocused and he went limp under Paine as Paine turned.
Bob Petty was standing at the bottom of the ladder, his police revolver still held in one straight, aiming arm. As Paine watched, Petty pumped a third shot into Kwan's dead body beneath him.
Petty's eyes met Paine's and locked there.
A long moment passed as the world reestablished itself. Then Bobby smiled, a sad thing, and said, "Sorry I had to beat the shit out of you, Jack."
30
In the dessert, in the hour before dawn when the autumn constellations had not yet given way to the sun, Bobby Petty told Jack Paine what it was like.
"It's like nothing I've ever felt before, Jack. One moment my life was on a flat road, and I was traveling on a straight course. Then, with one bit of information, the road disappeared and there was nothing but hole in front of me. I remember looking into the TV room where Terry and the kids were watching something together, and when I saw her I felt dirty. I went into the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror, and it wasn't me anymore. It was someone else. A monster. I didn't even look at the girls. I was afraid they would be unclean if I even looked at them. So I went into the bedroom, and packed some things in a duffle, and said I'd go out for ice cream and took the duffle and left. I went to a bar up in Scarsdale, a non-cop place, and I stayed in a motel room, and by the next morning I knew what to do.
"I went to the bank when it opened and took all the money out, and got on a plane for Texas. If I'd left the money Terry wouldn't have believed I was gone. I only had one thing in my head, Jack. To kill Kwan, and keep him from killing my men. The rest of it didn't seem important. My life was over anyway; the further I got from my life the better it would be. The only thing I wanted to do before the whole thing came out, before they lumped me in there with Calley and the rest of them, was to kill Tiny Man."
Paine had one question, but didn't want to interrupt. In the purpling dawn light, he felt Bob Petty bursting next to him, wanting to spit all the poison out of him.
"So I followed him from Texas, back to New York." Petty laughed grimly. "I called that stupid bastard Coleman and told him Kwan was coming, and he panicked. I couldn't save any of them."
Petty stared at the horizon, looking for the sun that refused yet to rise. "In a way I think they were lucky, getting it over with."
This time, the silence was longer; the sun would not burst forth from the horizon, but Petty was looking beyond it, anyway.
"It was horrible in Cambodia, Jack," he said, his voice barely audible. "It was war, and I lived with it because of that, but face to face like that. ." The whisper trailed off, returned, stronger. "It was something we thought we had to do, and we did it. For years I wished I had been in the air force because they got to do it from up in the clouds by pushing a button. It's no different, but they didn't have to look into the faces. There was one face I dreamed about for years. He couldn't have been more than nineteen. He looked into my eyes when I shot him. His eyes were the same as mine. Whatever happened, he thought he was doing the right thing. He was willing to die for it. That was my face. I knew that if that conviction wasn't in me, that if I wasn't absolutely sure that what I was doing was right, was saving the lives of my own people, then what I had done that day when that face had looked into mine and refused to look aside, was look in a mirror and that I had killed myself. .
He was weeping, trembling beside Paine in the cool predawn desert. All of it came out of him, and suddenly Paine felt as if he were holding not a friend, not even a brother, but his own son. The bond was that close.
Petty wailed, "Oh, God!" and tried to bury himself, his memory, his very self, into Paine's chest, and Paine held him for a long time, and rocked him, and let the hurt flood out of him into the desert ground.
"Jesus, Jack," Bobby said, sitting up, pulling away from Paine. "Jesus."
And they watched, and still the sun would not rise. "I have one question, Bobby," Paine said.
They looked for the unrising sun, and Petty said, "What is it?"