Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  Why can’t people just like him?

  His hands are covered in blood. There isn’t anything in the car he can wrap around the wound, and if he takes his pants off to use he would be almost naked. His leg is itchy and too tender to scratch. He lowers his head and stares at the hole, tears dripping into his blood, and he imagines he’s back in his room at the Grove and he’s pacing the room, counting the footsteps, preferring the even footsteps over the odds, starting with his left and finishing with his right. Then he thinks about the cats, the boys who pissed on him and beat him, then he imagines putting them in the ground and digging them back up, ending their lives the same way they ruined his.

  His tears start to slow, and the pressure in his chest from sobbing begins to ease. Strings of snot dangle from his nose and he wipes them with his hands, forgetting about the blood for a second until it streaks across his face. He begins to cry again. Life isn’t fair. It never has been. It never will be.

  His leg hurts but it’s not bleeding as much now. His pants are completely soaked in blood. He can’t stay on the side of the road all night. He wipes his hands dry on the passenger seat, starts the engine and drives slowly, but not too slow, not wanting to attract the kind of attention that will get him pulled over. Blood has pooled into his shoe and makes a sucking sound when he presses on the accelerator. The wound is bad, but he knows if it were that bad he’d have passed out or died from loss of blood. He has no idea how to treat the wound or take care of it. In the past, cuts that were bad were bandaged for him by one of the nurses or his mother, and since leaving the Grove he’s never needed a doctor or a nurse to take a look at anything. What he needs is his mother, either one of them, but one’s dead and so is the other and he has never felt their loss as much as he feels it now. He truly is alone with nobody to care for him, he’s out of mothers, out of old people, his best friend left him for a girl that isn’t even real, and those at the halfway house never warmed to him the same way ninety-nine percent of everybody else never warms to him.

  Including Cooper.

  Friendship is such a simple thing for others, but not for him. And he’s being naïve if he thinks Cooper really wants to be his friend. Although Cooper was right about the police.

  He begins driving, heading back home, unsure if Cooper will help him, trying desperately to think of another option. Each turn is painful as he switches from accelerator to brake. There aren’t many people on the streets, not in the suburbs. People don’t go out much at night. He learned not to. At night the last place he ever wanted to be was outside the walls of the halfway house.

  He could go to the hospital. He couldn’t go in, but he could get one of the nurses coming out to help him. She wouldn’t want to at first, but he would make her do it. He could hold a gun to her head and she wouldn’t say no. The problem is somebody might see him. The hospital is a public place.

  What then?

  “Why couldn’t you have helped me?” he says, talking to his second mother. If she had helped him in the beginning, none of this would have happened.

  He pulls over and stops the car, thinking, thinking, the only person who would help him is somebody who doesn’t know him already, somebody who hasn’t formed an opinion.

  chapter forty-five

  We split into two teams. Schroder lets me come along this time. We head to Eastlake House full of enthusiasm and determination, and the other team heads to Sunnyview Shelter. We know that Adrian Loaner has a gun and therefore armed-offenders units are coming along for the ride. The drive takes us out of town and back past the prison and the fields full of crops and animals but none of it is visible in the dark. There aren’t any streetlights on the motorway, just faded white lines down the center of the road keeping traffic on one side from smacking head-on into traffic on the other. Red and blue swirling lights belt out from the top of the cars, a string of vehicles consistent in their urgency, the lights warning anybody ahead of us to get the hell out of the way.

  Schroder is armed and so is everybody else and I’m the only one who isn’t. I’ve never seen him drive so fast and it doesn’t mix well with the headache and nausea I still have. We hit another section of unpaved roads and Schroder barely slows down, not until the roads become a maze. The dirt streets all look the same and the GPS unit on Schroder’s dashboard doesn’t seem to have any better idea where Eastlake is than we do. In the end all the patrol cars slow down and a bunch of us get out and stand on the side of the road, the flashing lights coloring our skin first red and then blue and then merging to purple. The urgency and frustration is evident in the way everybody starts swearing about how hard it is to find anything out here. One call to the media and we could have followed them. The air is warm and sticky but fresher out here than in town. An entire community of moths, maybe a thousand or more of them, are hanging around in the headlights, the occasional one straying into our faces. We get out maps and bounce out some ideas and finally decide on a direction. Schroder takes the lead again and we sit in silence as he drives, a few minutes later bringing us to a stop a hundred meters from a driveway lined with oak trees. He kills the lights and the other cars line up in single file behind us and do the same. The night goes dark. There is no light pollution out here from the city, and the stars are as clear as you’ll ever get without flying up to greet them. Pale light is thrown out over the fields from a moon that in a few days will be full, there are shapes out in those fields, fence posts and trees and black objects the size of cars that could be just about anything.

  “Wait here,” Schroder says.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I mean it. You step out of that car and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  “Don’t make me beg. Damn it, Carl, you’re only here because of me.”

  “Maybe you’re right. You should put yourself in the line of fire. It’d be worth the paperwork just to get rid of you.”

  I watch through the windshield as the armed-offenders unit slowly moves forward, six people dressed in armor as dark as the night, and they fade out of view about ten meters ahead of me. Schroder goes around to the trunk of the car and puts on a bulletproof vest. I get out of the car and he hands one to me. I put my arms through the holes and strap it on tight. Out of the car I can feel the tension in the air, and I’m certainly contributing to what’s feeling like a trigger-happy mood. If there are any scarecrows out in the fields they’re in danger of being shot. Emma Green is in this building somewhere, she has to be, and if not then she’s in Sunnyview.

  I follow the team with Schroder who has his hands tightly on a pistol, but I fall back with each step because of my knee. By the time they reach the driveway, I’m already twenty meters behind and frustrated. The road is hard-packed dirt and the heat of it is coming up through my shoes. The unit ahead splits up, two go left, two go right, and the other two go straight ahead. Schroder waits for me, then we follow the two straight forward at my pace, and come to a stop twenty-five meters back from the door. The building looms up out of the ground, the front of it lit up by the moon, it looks pale white and run-down, the ivy climbing the front of it so black that it looks like strings of holes in the walls. It looks like the sort of place we should have come armed with crucifixes and holy water. There are no cars out front. One of the teams makes it around the back and I can hear a voice coming through Schroder’s earpiece but can’t make it out. He puts his finger against it and listens carefully, cocking his head slightly to the side.

  “No cars around the back,” he tells me.

  “Doesn’t mean they’re not here,” I say. “Might just mean that Adrian is out and not back yet.”

  “Well, if he’s on his way back we’ll get him. We’ve got two units hidden a few blocks back. No way anybody is getting past without getting pulled over.”

  The team in the middle reaches the door. One of them stands off to the side, half crouching while pointing his gun ahead as the other person swings a metal battering ram that opens the door quicker than a key and
echoes across the fields. Flashlights are switched on and the team disappears. There are loud footsteps as they make their way quickly through the building. I want to join them but Schroder puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “Give them time,” he says.

  We give them five minutes. The moon reflects off some of the windows but the light seems to be absorbed by others. There are constant updates coming through Schroder’s earpiece. None of the shapes out in the field move. Flashlights appear in all the windows. We can hear the officers moving around inside. There’s the occasional stuck door being shouldered open, the odd floorboard creaking. Then the scene is clear and we move into the building.

  The building seems much bigger than it ought to be up close, and even bigger inside. We step in through the main door. The framework has been splintered from where the team knocked it in. The air is dry and has the texture of dust. We start on the ground floor and make our way upstairs. We take a good look around, there are padded cells that are empty and no basements with thick iron doors and scream rooms. There is leftover furniture abandoned, a few broken windows, but no vandalism, just like Grover Hills. The living arrangements are crowded, small rooms that would take two people and I can’t imagine there was much hope for anybody living out here, and I think about my wife, about her care home, about the room she has all to herself even though she’s not aware of it, and I can’t help but think the people sent here could have done better if they had rooms and care like that. How hard was it for the nurses and doctors to care about people who’d done really bad things? Surely many came here with good hopes but ended up being burned too many times until they just treated everybody like shit.

  No scream room. No basements with thick iron doors. No Emma Green, no Cooper Riley, no Adrian Loaner, and no indication they were ever here.

  “Shit,” I say, voicing my anger. “We chose the wrong one. She must be at Sunnyview,” I say, but nobody is listening. The armed team is going back through the rooms, and one man is covering the room I’m in with Schroder, while Schroder is on his cell phone, so I’m talking to myself.

  Schroder is slowly shaking his head and I have a real good idea of what he’s about to tell me and a real bad feeling about it. He slips his cell phone back into his pocket.

  “Don’t tell me,” I tell him.

  “It was a good idea, Tate, and nobody here rejected it, but that was the team at Sunnyview and it’s empty.”

  “No way,” I say, punching the padded wall of one of the cells. “It can’t be. They have to be there or here. Have to be.”

  “There are signs somebody was there,” Schroder says. “Apparently there’s a new chain and lock hanging from the door that’s just been smashed, there’s dirt on the front steps, and there are some empty water bottles in one of the padded rooms. Forensics are going to take a look around; it’s possible she was being kept there, and just as possible some homeless guy was using it for shelter.”

  “Emma’s still somewhere.”

  “I know. She’s just not here.”

  “Then where?” I ask, hitting the padded wall again, this time not as hard.

  “I don’t know. But it has to be somewhere big enough for four people.”

  “Why four?”

  “I got another call while I was on the phone to the other team. Adrian’s collected another person.”

  I almost can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Jesus,” I say, “are you joking? Who?”

  “He’s taken Cooper Riley’s mother.”

  chapter forty-six

  The bandaging is tight but it makes the wound feel much better and Adrian is thankful for her help. He did to Mrs. Riley what he did to her son, and she rode in the trunk of the car in the same style too. Cooper would want him to have treated her worse than that, but of course he’ll never admit to it. He didn’t need to use the Taser though. He only needed to point the gun at her and hold the rag over her face, and it was enough. Cooper’s mum had to be a hundred years old and was never going to put up much of a struggle, and she didn’t, not when he told her he was taking her to see her son.

  He should have thought of her immediately, especially after his conversation with Cooper that morning. But instead he sat parked on the side of the road for twenty minutes before her name tumbled into his head. This time, as he had predicted, there were no cars outside her house when he got there. He parked in the driveway and he planned what he would say, but at the door those same words tangled in his mouth and he said nothing that made any sense. So instead he cried and he pointed the gun at her and told her he would kill her if she didn’t help. When they were done, he found some clothes in the back of a wardrobe before putting her into the trunk of the car alongside the other girl.

  By now the police will have unearthed some of the bodies at the Grove. He doesn’t know how many are there. Grover Hills ran for over fifty years before he got there, and he imagines records of patients back then would have become as lost or as buried as some of the patients. Could be there were other orderlies, other “Twins” who tormented other patients and put them in the dirt. There might be a hundred graves out there. He never saw any ghosts but he’s never believed in them, and he suspects the two things are related, that you can only see what you believe. He must remember to ask Cooper about that. If there are ghosts, is it possible the ghosts of the Twins are haunting the ghosts of those they killed out there, their souls tormenting other souls? Ever since that first visit down to the Scream Room, the Twins have been haunting him; in fact, it’s only been since he killed them that they’ve finally left him in peace. They took him down to that basement eighty-seven times over the twenty years he was there. He doesn’t know how many times a year that is. Sometimes it was once a month. Other times twice a year. One year they only took him down there on his birthday. Eighty-seven times. He doesn’t like that it ended on an odd number. It was the irregularity of it all that frightened him the most. You just never knew. Any minute they could come and take you.

  And then he took them.

  First one, then the other. He knocked on the door and swung the hammer the moment it was opened. He forced his way inside, but it didn’t take much forcing at that point. He finished off one of the Twins then sat quietly in the living room while waiting for the other to come home. A hammer to cave in the backs of their skulls. No need for any discussion. He didn’t care what they had to say, and for years they’d told him to shut up. The Twins lived together, neither of them married, a modern three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood with a garage door that automatically opened with the touch of a button—something he’d never seen before. There was nothing there to suggest they were so mean and cruel. Nothing to suggest they had missed the Grove so much that they had built their own Scream Room. No, those suggestions were all kept for the farmhouse they kept an hour out of the city. He knows that because even before he thought about returning to the Grove, he had been following them. He had seen the farmhouse from a distance.

  The farmhouse is more open than the Grove. Lots more ground with low wooden-beam gates between paddocks fenced off with wire. Lots of different types of grass and weed are devouring the landscape, no animals anywhere, just a million bugs making sounds in the night. He wonders what used to be farmed here, if there were ever any cows and sheep and chicken. He imagines growing up in a place like this, going to one of the small schools in one of the small towns nearby, where kids who live on farms are shipped to by bus five days a week. Winters sitting around the fireplace, summers riding horses and lying under trees and eating fresh fruit. When the hunt for Cooper has died down, he should look at getting a horse and planting some apple trees. He’ll plant orange trees too, and whatever else he can plant.

  In hindsight, it might have been better to have brought Cooper out here in the first place. Nobody has any reason to visit, only the Twins, and they won’t be visiting anymore. There must be graves out there among that tall grass, other victims of the Scream Room built inside, a room with padded walls and
little acoustics and you could scream and scream in there for a thousand years and never be heard. Since he’s heading down the path of hindsight, he should have locked the Twins in the Scream Room at the Grove and just left them there. Starvation would have taken care of them. Let them stay down there and let them scream their throats raw and never be heard, one of them eventually eating the other to live longer. He wishes now he had thought to do that. They were lucky to have only been hammered. With what they did to him, to the others, to what they’ve done in the Scream Room they built out here, they deserved much worse.

  The key for the farmhouse is now hanging on the same set of keys for the stolen car. He checks on the mother and lays her down on the driveway, then pulls out the girl. He has to drag her because his leg is too sore to carry her weight. She’s still asleep, and in her sleep she doesn’t look happy and he guesses she didn’t enjoy the earlier ride, jammed up against the girl he dug up. He gets her up onto the porch and inside and lays her down in the hall. He grabs a glass of water and comes back to her and tips it toward her mouth, but it runs over her face and soaks into the carpet. She is no good to Cooper like this, and what kind of host would he be offering her to him like this anyway? She groans a little, and he isn’t sure whether she’s asleep or partly awake. He drags her into one of the bathrooms where it’s much cooler, his leg too sore for him to carry her. He fills one of the tubs with cool water and slides her inside. She blinks and focuses on him but still doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m going to make you better,” he says, and he puts water onto his fingers and rolls it into her mouth. This time she swallows. He smiles. Then his smile disappears. He can’t find the glue. He took it out of his ruined pants back at Cooper’s mum’s house and put it into his new pair—didn’t he? Ever since the beating Adrian took as a kid, he’s been fully aware anything he puts down he may never see again. He can take his watch off and sit it on a table only to find it two days later under the bed or outside in the garden. He can put down a key and turn his back on it and it’ll disappear. Screwdrivers, coins, books, even shoes—it doesn’t matter. And it’s frustrating. It makes him crazy. He should have been a magician.