Welcome to Cooper

by Tariq Ashkanani

  “Bourbon,” I said. “And a dinner menu, if it’s not too much trouble.” I smiled at her but she’d already turned away. She filled a shot glass, slid it across the bar.

  “You’re new in town,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Just between us,” she said, leaning in close, “I wouldn’t recommend the food.”

  I caught her perfume, something with orange. Her eyes were emerald green. She motioned with a tip of her head, her pink streak swaying. I glanced over at the man in the corner and together we watched him awkwardly wrap a piece of undercooked bacon around his fork like spaghetti. She raised her eyebrows.

  “Bourbon will do just fine,” I said.

  She nodded and went back to drying glasses. I liked the way she leaned against the wall as she did. All casual, like she was just counting down the hours. It also gave me a pretty good view of her figure. She was toned, her T-shirt clinging to her flat stomach, her slim upper arms. I remember a sliver of skin where her shirt rode up above her black jeans, but you know what, that might just be my memory playing tricks. It’s hard to get everything straight right now. Lot of stuff rattling around up there. So maybe there wasn’t any skin. Maybe she wasn’t even wearing a T-shirt. Maybe she was a blonde in a blue dress and I was at a cocktail lounge, though I sure as shit hope not, ’cause that would mean I’m in more trouble than I thought. So, we’ll go with the goth look for now, and we’ll have her leaning against the wall on one hip like she’s doing it on purpose, and make her hair dark, make it jet black and splash that pink down one side. Yeah, just like that.

  “What brings you to Cooper?” she said, her eyes flicking onto mine.

  “You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

  “We don’t get that many newcomers.”

  I took a drink and let it settle through me. “I got bored with big-city life.”

  “Omaha?”

  “DC.”

  She paused her drying for a moment. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “Not anymore.” I smiled and finished my drink, nudged the glass forward for another.

  There was movement to my left and the guy from the corner appeared with a bundle of notes in his hand. I clocked a snub-nosed pistol tucked down the front of his pants. A woman’s gun. Dumb prick must have thought it made him look tough. I thought about asking to see his permit. Maybe show him what a real gun looked like. He dropped the notes onto the counter and let his eyes linger on the bartender before dragging them onto me. I nodded a hello but my eyes said fuck off, and he walked away, pulling on a worn coat as he left.

  “What was it about Cooper in particular that attracted you?” she asked, pouring another shot. “Our delightful population?”

  “Your wonderful scenery,” I said, tilting the glass toward her in thanks. “Care to join me?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass.” She smiled, jade eyes shimmering in the dim light. “No one comes to Cooper by choice, Officer.”

  That startled me a little. Hid it by finishing my drink. “I didn’t even need to show you my badge.”

  “Like I said, we don’t get many newcomers.”

  I leaned back and dug out my wallet. Thumbed a couple of notes. Placed them on the counter, sat my empty glass on top.

  “I’m Mary,” the bartender said, picking up my glass but leaving the cash.

  “Thomas,” I said.

  “See you around, Thomas.”

  “See you around.”

  The fresh air was cold and it stung my face like I was just done shaving. My apartment wasn’t much warmer. The heating rattled as it came on. Above me I could hear canned laughter, blaring commercials for used cars and divorce lawyers, and a hacking cough that went on for nearly a minute. I’d seen the old guy upstairs over the weekend. Not for the first time, I considered introducing myself, checking in on him.

  Instead, I forced myself to start unpacking. Spent the rest of the evening going through boxes as fresh snow started to fall.

  I wasn’t sure what time it was when I came across her photo, still in its frame and tucked next to a half-empty bottle of Red Stag. I took the bottle and left the picture and drifted off to sleep soon after, my dreams fueled by images of long roads, rising water, vast plains filled with faceless men, and women with pink hair and no eyes.

  Early the next morning, a hammering on my apartment door. I opened it and Joe pushed his way inside. Just about knocked my coffee out of my hand.

  “Morning,” I said. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No time. Bob pulled a print this morning. From her belt, Tommy. From her goddamn belt. Partial thumb, computer says it’s a seventy-six-point-nine percent match to Foster. Good enough for any judge. Now, we’re moving fast on this, but that’s the way of it. I want to be first on the scene, alright? I want to be the one to kick that pervert’s door down and drag him kicking and screaming all the way to the electric chair. Hell, I want to throw the damn switch.”

  “Who’s Foster?”

  “Get in the car and I’ll tell you. And don’t forget that revolver.”

  “Expecting trouble?”

  “Always, Tommy. Always.”

  “Give me a minute to finish getting dressed.” I checked my watch; just after seven. A shower could wait. I dumped my half-drunk coffee, remembered what Joe had told me yesterday, and pulled on a pair of khakis. Grabbed my coat and fixed my tie on the way out the door.

  “Kevin Foster,” Joe said, pulling out his car keys. “Convicted triple murderer, recently released on appeal. Liked to scoop young girls’ eyes out with a spoon, leave them in their backyards. Sound familiar?”

  “Rings a bell,” I said, climbing in and remembering I’d forgotten to brush my teeth.

  “And they said you weren’t detective material.”

  I tapped my temple. “Steel trap.”

  The Ford started up with a roar and Joe pulled away from the curb. He reached down and stuck a light on the dash. Thing lit up blue and started spinning. Joe smacked the wheel as he ran a red. I chewed on some gum and felt my Smith and Wesson lying hard against my chest, and I tried to ignore the knot that tightened painfully in my stomach.

  Chapter Three

  Foster owned a place on the outskirts of town. The quiet edge, where the buildings shrank away into the cornfields. Where the long, flat line was broken by the distant rise of the Pine Ridge. I wondered if Foster could see it. From his bedroom window, maybe. Standing there staring at those tree-lined canyons like it was an escape route.

  Anyway, you know where he lived. You’ve been all over every inch of that place. And I can guess your questions before they even come, but I’m not about to tell you that this was the start of it all. Truth is, it started long before that house.

  Now, I don’t recall Joe knocking when we got there. I remember his boot though. He kicked in that front door like it was personal. Wood—dark, rotten—caved in without much of a fight, pieces of it flying up and settling on the white snow. I drew my gun then. My Smith and Wesson Model 36 revolver. It’s important you remember that.

  Together we stepped across the threshold and into the house. A front room with the curtains drawn. Slivers of streetlight through the cracks. I paused to let my eyes adjust.

  “Cooper PD!” Joe shouted. “You hear me, Foster?”

  I’d tracked snow into the foyer. Dirty white mush smeared across the dark carpet. I could feel flakes floating in behind me, past my face and neck and making my hairs stand on end. Cooper spreading its feelers into Foster’s home.

  “Come on,” Joe said.

  The room was bare. A couch against one wall, a small television against the other. No sign it had really been lived in; Foster couldn’t have been long out of prison. We moved slowly, our guns raised. Joe clicked on a small flashlight and swept the beam forward.

  “Check the other rooms,” he said. “I’m going upstairs.”

  Back in the foyer there was a side table with a phone; the handset lying on its side, a wo
man’s voice telling us to please hang up and try again. A mirror hung above it, smeared with so much dirt my reflection was a murky blur.

  The kitchen and bathroom were empty. A half-used bar of soap by the sink; a couple of old Chinese takeout containers on the foldout table. I clicked on lights, threw open curtains. Anything to get rid of the gloom. By the time I made my way back to the foyer, a couple of minutes had passed. I paused. The woman on the phone repeated her request. Lifting the receiver, I sat it gently back in its cradle.

  A sudden crash from above. Then silence.

  “Joe?” I called.

  Nothing.

  I took the cramped stairs two at a time, squeezing my revolver tight. Followed the noise into a bedroom and Joe was standing there, his back to me. I moved closer, said his name. Saw the glint of something gold wrapped around the fingers of his right hand. Brass knuckles, and when he turned he drove them hard into my stomach.

  I wasn’t wrong about Joe’s physique. The punch was heavy. I fell back. Landed against the wall, air escaping from my mouth in a long, slow gasp. My revolver clattered to the floor and I sank down after it. I couldn’t breathe, my lungs stalled. Pain began to well up in my guts and for a brief second my vision clouded over.

  When it cleared I finally spotted him. Foster. Guy was curled up against a radiator. Gaunt face, dark circles, scruffy beard. Wide eyes blinking rapidly.

  Joe crouched down next to me. Slid the knuckles off and into a pocket. He reached out and I shrank back, but his hand found my shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly. He looked into my eyes. “Breathe,” he said, inflating his chest to show me how. Like I’d never been sucker-punched before. “Your diaphragm’s contracting. Give it a few moments to relax.”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t do anything else. He watched me for a moment longer and then, apparently satisfied, picked up my gun. I tried to say something but it came out in a wheeze. Joe stood, turned my revolver over in his hands. Then he pointed it at Foster.

  If the guy knew what was coming, he didn’t show it. Didn’t scream or beg for his life. Didn’t try to run. He just kept on staring at me, kept on blinking. Held my gaze right up until the moment Joe pulled the trigger. Then the wall went red, and Foster’s eyes rolled back until they were nothing but white.

  So before we get any further, why don’t we go around the room?

  There’s Tubby over there. Pasty white, with a sweaty forehead and a Kim Jong-un haircut. He’s the notetaker. A completely redundant position given there’s a recorder in the middle of the table. When he’s not double-noting my words, he’s tapping out a beat on his notebook with the end of his pen. Guy goes at it every chance he gets. Like some sort of compulsion. Couldn’t tell you what the song is. I never cared much for music.

  Sitting across from him is a bald black man. I think he introduced himself as Special Agent Comstock. Or Cocksock. Or Cumstain. Something like that. He has a notepad in front of him as well, but he only writes down the occasional word or two. He’s the question-asker. He’s the one who brings me back on point when I threaten to wander off-topic. He’s the one who keeps having to remind me why I’m here. A series of bad choices, he calls it. It’s so rehearsed it hurts. A series of bad choices that put you in this chair, at this table, in this room eating that shitty turkey sandwich telling your shitty story. Sometimes he has to remind me what I’m getting from all this, too. Signed and sealed and on its way, he says. It’s always on its way. It’s an old trick, and I’m sure he thinks I’m dumb enough to fall for it. Only I’m keeping the final card close to my chest for the time being. Until I have it on the table in front of me. Signed and sealed and in my goddamn hands, Cumstain.

  There’s a rookie kid who sits nervously on a chair outside the room. Sometimes I see his shadow moving across the glass in the door. Sometimes I wonder if he’s even there. He’s the one they send when they decide I’ve earned myself a coffee (which is usually when they decide they’ve earned themselves a coffee). I’m guessing he’s just a local boy, drafted in to play with the big boys for a few days. Maybe in the evenings he tells them where’s good to eat around here, or what local bars to avoid. Where to find the strip clubs that offer a little extra if you know where to tuck the right bill. Poor kid. This is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to him all year.

  Chapter Four

  It was nearly nine by the time I got back to my apartment. My stomach was badly bruised. I stood in the bathroom and stared at it in the mirror. As first weeks went, I’d had better.

  At least I had time for that shower. A half-assed shave in lukewarm water and two aspirin from my glove compartment, swallowed dry as I coaxed my Impala to life. She didn’t want to start and neither did I. The temperature had dropped in the night; the snow turned hard underfoot. She gave in on the third try, gurgling unhappily. I checked my cell as I scraped ice from my windshield. A missed call, the number unlisted.

  I knew how she felt; by the time I got to the station I could feel it sitting high in my stomach, cresting and falling. I couldn’t even make it to my desk. Hustled into the john, one arm across my chest to protect my tie as I threw up my guts into a cracked toilet with no seat. Dark eyes and a shaving rash stared back out of a dirty mirror. I rinsed my mouth with cold water, splashed some up on my face, too. The hand dryer was broken, so I dragged my palms down the sides of my coat and patted at my forehead with my tie. Took it off after and scrunched it into a pocket.

  The station was old and looked it. It was the bullpen in the lobby, a chain-linked holding area for newly arrested assholes who littered the floor with crushed soda cans and food wrappers that no one bothered to clean up. It was the peeling walls and the nicotine-stained ceiling. The cracked windows. The cheap black-and-white-squared linoleum floor that made your shoes squeak.

  Through the double doors and into the main office. It wasn’t big; a scattering of desks, all of them covered in papers and files. A handful of cops were stood in a corner talking. I recognized a couple of them from the dead woman’s yard. Greasy-faced Lloyd.

  A coffee machine in the corner caught my eye. It rattled as it spat watery brown into a paper cup. I picked it up and hissed, my fingertips burning.

  “Weak coffee in a cheap cup,” Joe said. “Welcome to Cooper.”

  I turned and stared at him. He held my gaze for a moment, then pressed a button on the machine. Collected his cup with practiced ease.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “We’re going to sit down and have a conversation, you and me.”

  “Later,” he said, taking a slurp. “Right now we need to talk to Bob down in the morgue about our new girl. You can finish your coffee on the way.”

  We met Captain Morricone on the narrow staircase down to the basement. It’s an Italian name, right? Morricone. Like the guy who scored all those Westerns. But the captain didn’t look it. Didn’t have the thick swept-back dark hair or the tanned skin, but maybe I was stereotyping.

  He looked like a science teacher. Tall and slim, wearing rimless glasses and a sweater vest. Each part of his outfit half finished. I wondered if he had a pocket watch. He smiled when he saw me, and his teeth shone in the dim light.

  “Thomas.” He announced my name like I was receiving an award. “At last we meet.”

  I actually can’t remember exactly what we talked about, Joe and me and Morricone. The dead woman and the case most likely.

  But if you’re listening to this now, Captain, and I sure as hell hope you are, I’d just like to say you were decent to me. Back when most folks weren’t. And you didn’t deserve what happened and that’s the truth. All this shit—all this paperwork—just dumped on your doorstep. Christ, I hope you come out of this better than I do.

  Before he left though, and I remember this real clear, he gripped my shoulder and said he knew why I was in Cooper. Said he wasn’t interested in any
of it. Said I’d done the right thing.

  No one had ever said that to me before. But if there’s any decency in ratting out your fellow officers, I never found it.

  Morricone said all he cared about was that I cleared my cases and kept my nose clean. “Don’t think of this as a punishment,” he added as he walked away, and I wanted to say, But how can it be anything else?

  The entrance to the morgue was a doorway draped in strips of frosted plastic. Through the slivers I could see metallic grey and coldness. An abattoir. Chunks of meat hanging from hooks, white aprons splashed with red. Music drifted over from a computer, something classical.

  Turned out Bob was the bald guy from yesterday’s crime scene. He smiled when we entered. It was the warmest thing in the room.

  The girl was waiting for us under a white sheet. Bob pulled a dangling chain and set off fluorescent bulbs that flickered and pinged above our heads. Everything went purple, and when Bob peeled back the sheet Kelly Scott’s naked body was purple too. Her skin tight over skinny bones. Her lids open and her bare sockets exposed. They were larger than I remembered. I could have rolled a pool ball in there; spots or stripes, corner pocket.

  Bob walked us through it. He didn’t have much.

  She’d been strangled. Her windpipe crushed. It happened between midnight and 6 a.m., and it happened outside. Dirt under her fingernails and booze in her blood; she’d been drinking. No drugs though, recreational or otherwise, and no sex either. Least not last night. No foreign DNA, no unexplained hair fibers. Killer had wiped her bedroom clean, right down to the book on her nightstand.

  Joe said Bob was making him sound like a goddamned ghost, and Bob said goddamned ghosts don’t need to climb through unlocked bathroom windows.

  I stared down at that patch of pale skin on her left wrist and asked if anyone had found a watch but they hadn’t.

  Now, I want to pause for a moment and talk about how she died. Bob said she was strangled, and she sure had the bruises to prove it. For those that don’t know much about murder let me say this. It’s a difficult method, strangulation. It takes time, more than most think. It’s not like in the movies, you don’t accidentally strangle someone in a few confused seconds or in a moment of rage or passion. The human brain can survive without oxygen for over four minutes. That’s two hundred and forty seconds of keeping that pressure tight; of holding them still; of not changing your mind. You ask me, killers who strangle are a hell of a lot more evil than some frenzied stabber or shopping-mall shooter. With them, it’s more than simple intent, it’s a state of mind. And it scares the hell out of me.