Welcome to Cooper

by Tariq Ashkanani

  She ran her gloved fingers over the lock, then, apparently satisfied, stepped away. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

  We both knew what was waiting for us. The officers outside had already filled us in. Dead body, male, late seventies. Clinical. A safety barrier to keep emotions at bay.

  Hey, it worked for me.

  At the top of the stairs, we paused at the doorway to the master bedroom. I could smell it from farther out now. Metal in the air. That strong scent of rust. Even though I knew it was coming, the gruesome sight still caught me off-guard. Pale skin on red sheets. His throat sliced open like a gaping mouth.

  Mansfield shook her head. “Christ,” she said.

  There was the sound of footsteps downstairs. A moment later Bob appeared at the top of the stairs. He was dressed in his white hazmat suit and carried a small, plastic case. The same getup he’d worn the first time I saw him.

  He frowned at us both. His face half hidden by the plastic hood and safety glasses.

  “You two,” he ordered. “Out.”

  Mansfield nodded and gave me a look. We headed down the stairs and back into the frosty morning. I cast one last glance around the house as we passed through it. As though I would suddenly spot a strip of negatives sitting next to a potted plant.

  I didn’t realize how humid it had been in the house until we were outside. I took in a deep lungful of icy air. Felt it rattle its way into my chest. I still had the smell of it in my nose. The blood. An irrational fear that it would stay with me forever.

  The street had been cordoned off. A couple more squad cars were parked at either end, their lights rolling lazily. Bile burned in my chest. A hot, stabbing pain that nearly made my legs buckle.

  They were going to find the photographs. It was only a matter of time now. For a few fleeting moments this morning, I’d entertained the idea of coming clean. Of owning up to everything that had happened since I got here. Would it be liberating? For a short while, maybe. Only now the moment had come and I couldn’t face it.

  How long did I have until they found the photographs? I figured that unless Simon had scrawled Thomas Levine Blackmail on the side of an envelope I probably had some time. Even if they were picked up today, they might not get checked straightaway.

  I needed to intercept the evidence somehow. Maybe I could go back into the evidence room, grab the photos before they were logged. I ran through a hundred scenarios in seconds, each more outlandish than the last. At one point I even considered stealing a white forensics jumpsuit to get back in the house.

  Then Mansfield was on the street beside me.

  “You alright, Thomas?” she asked. “You’re looking a little pale.”

  I stared at her. “I’m fine,” I said. “Dead bodies, you know?”

  She harrumphed. “You really want to be of use, you’re welcome to help me take some statements from the neighbors. They’re still living, so I expect you’ll be able to manage it.”

  Turning, she marched to the next-door property. The same guy I’d spoken to yesterday. I decided it was probably best I wasn’t there when he answered, and I slipped away to my car.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  So, let’s skip through the remainder of that Saturday. Trust me, it’s not very interesting.

  I spent the afternoon at my desk, surrounded by a growing number of empty coffee cups and enough paperwork to put anyone off approaching me.

  I wondered how it would happen. A knock on my door one evening, maybe. Shadows and streetlights. The amber glow just starting to work its magic. If it was anywhere else they’d send a friendly face to soothe the pain, only Cooper didn’t have any. At least not for me. More likely it’d be a uniformed stranger, a little embarrassed at having to do this to a fellow officer. He’d spare the handcuffs. Tell me it’s the least he could do.

  Best guess, however, it would be at the station. I’d look up from my desk and see Captain Morricone standing there. His face crumpled. That hope he’d held for me now gone. In some ways I’d rather it was Mansfield. See, I could get angry at Mansfield. I could let the disappointment and the despair turn sour for her, let it build and spark into something more. Into rage. I could hide behind rage. Draw strength from it. I’ve been doing it my entire life.

  I sat at my desk and I felt sick. A sourness that made me sweat. It’s difficult, keeping this stuff to yourself. I was getting so tired of carrying it around. If Joe had turned up that afternoon I’m honestly not sure I wouldn’t have spilled my guts to him.

  But he didn’t, and that was good. I didn’t want to give him any more ammunition. Mansfield was right. He was playing me. Just as she was.

  The clock hit three and I headed out.

  It was snowing again, but lightly. Like the sky was getting tired. Tufts of white that seemed to hang in the air, near suspended and unmoving, and I imagined them parting as I pushed through.

  It wasn’t cold, I remember that. It wasn’t cold.

  It wasn’t anything.

  Stingray’s was quiet. No sign of Mary but that was alright. Maybe that was best. I sat at the bar and ordered the cheapest Scotch they had and knocked back two of them in a couple of minutes. Asked for a third and a beer to go with it. The guy gave me a funny look but my money cleared that right up.

  I was halfway through my beer and really getting into that buzz when Mary sat down next to me. She ordered a lemonade and unwound a scarf from her neck. She looked over at me and smiled, and that same urge to spill my guts hit me hard.

  “You want to go for a walk?” I asked.

  We walked down the same narrow alley we’d gone down before, only this time we kept going. Past the dead grass and along the rickety fence. Following the path of the river as it curved around the edge of town.

  “Listen, I just want to say something,” I started, but the words caught in my throat. Mary put her hand on my arm.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We can just walk.”

  We came out into an open expanse. A construction site, long abandoned. Cracked concrete and weeds. Bookended by water and a quiet road, the fading red of a drifting taillight. Not quite dark enough for the streetlights, too bright for the wanderers and night stalkers. We’d caught Cooper by surprise, and as we strolled across the empty lot I could feel the town shift around us.

  Anywhere else, this might have been a basketball court. A football field. It might have been kids yelling, calling out to each other as they scrambled over frozen turf, a ball arcing against the night sky. Here it was forlorn and forgotten. Just another piece of the American Dream left behind to rot. A car’s headlights swept ahead of us and across the street something glittered; the sparkling scarf of a whore, drifting low by a driver’s window and trailing in the dirt.

  The streetlights blinked on and I felt Cooper relax. The scene change complete.

  I turned to Mary. “Tell me what it’s like,” I said. “Living in a place like this.”

  “It’s not so bad.” Her head was bowed slightly, her pink streak swaying with each step. “There’s worse out there.”

  “There’s better, too.”

  Mary looked at me and tucked a strand of neon behind one ear. “Not for people like us, Thomas.”

  We rejoined the sidewalk. “You know, everyone I meet tells me what this place is,” I said. “And everyone says something different.”

  “Maybe it’s different for everyone.”

  “How do you stand it?” I asked.

  Mary paused and shook her head. Standing there, in the lull between streetlights, her pink streak near black, I felt a great depression settle itself in my chest.

  “How do you not go crazy?” I said, and Mary smiled at me.

  “I listen to music,” she said.

  She stepped closer, her green eyes on mine. She slid her hands into her pockets and nudged me with her elbow. “Walk me home,” she said, “and I’ll tell you a story.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  And so she did.

  “You a
sked me once why I came to Cooper,” she began. “And I said it didn’t matter.”

  “I remember.”

  We were back on the main street now. Cooper was alive around us. A jumble of half-naked women, of parked cars with their running lights on and their windows down, of doors slamming and voices shouting, of brief blasts of music and fluorescent lights reflecting off frozen brick.

  “When I was nineteen I got pregnant,” Mary said. “By some guy who used to go to my school. He was a few years older than me . . . hell, he was like ten years older than me. He used to hang around with my brother—I have a brother, by the way—and one summer he was around, like all the time. He’d be there when I got home from work. He used to say hi, and his eyes would just roll over every inch of me. It was so intimate, and when I look back, insanely creepy. But I never saw it like that then. I was young and stupid, and I thought having an older guy check me out was hot.”

  She took a breath.

  “So there was this house party one night, and he was there and somehow we ended up in the bedroom of this poor kid’s parents, and of course afterwards he didn’t really want anything to do with me, and a few weeks later I found out I was pregnant. I caught him eventually, you know, cornered him in my folks’ kitchen with the goddamn doctor’s note and I was screaming at him because I was pissed at myself for having been so stupid and he was getting angrier and angrier probably for the same reason and he didn’t hit me, it was nothing like that, he just left and said I would never see him again and I was a slut and the baby wasn’t his. So having already done one stupid thing, I figured two couldn’t make much difference and I drank about a quarter-bottle of vodka, which maybe isn’t much for most people but was more than enough for me, and I got in a car and decided to drive over to his house in the rain and ended up wrapping my parents’ Honda round an oak tree about a hundred yards from my house and . . . and losing the baby, or whatever you want to call it. I mean, it was just cells at that point, you know? But they said I’d broken a bunch of bones and punctured my uterus and so they . . . they had to take it out. They just took it all out while I slept.”

  I’m not sure when it happened, but we’d stopped walking at some point. Mary lifted her eyes to look at me and forced a smile. I could hear laughter coming from somewhere, and the sound of car horns and yelling. A man pushed past us, his head down.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Jesus, I’m—”

  “Don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I haven’t told anyone that story since I got here, precisely because I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me.”

  “No, sure, it’s just—”

  “Something that happened,” Mary said. She started walking again, and I fell into step beside her. “It was a long, long time ago and I’ve come to terms with it. I was the talk of the town back home and I couldn’t stand it and so I left as soon as I was able to. Said my goodbyes to those that really mattered and hit the bus station with a backpack and a roll of twenties my dad had given me.”

  “You didn’t even know where you were going?”

  Mary shrugged. “Didn’t matter. Just had to be somewhere else. Honestly, I don’t even remember choosing the bus. It feels like I just walked onto one at random, and . . . and I was so tired, I fell asleep and woke up as we were pulling in. Figured this was as good a place as any to start again.”

  We fell silent for a few moments. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything. The snow had turned to rain—not much, not then, just little droplets here and there. We turned off the main street and wandered along smaller roads past little apartment buildings. At last I looked over at her and she looked over at me.

  “That’s some story,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me that pink streak in your hair isn’t real.”

  Mary smiled at that, and I guess I did too.

  “I’m actually thinking of getting rid of it,” she said. “It’s killing my ends.”

  “I like it.”

  Mary slowed and I realized we were nearly at her building. I sniffed and stuck my hands in my pockets. I thought about her warm living room. Thought about it in soft focus. All light and smooth edges and filled with music. She’d carved herself out a nice spot here, maybe as nice as it got in Cooper. Maybe nicer than what she’d had before. I didn’t want to ruin that for her. Knew if I stayed around too long, that’s what would happen. It always did.

  I hadn’t ended up in this town by accident. I’d come here by choice. Here, I got to run away from my problems and punish myself for them at the same time. Mary talked like there was some point to it all. Like I could find peace here, if I wanted to.

  She looked up at me. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Every day,” I said, smiling a little. “You have no idea how bad.” I wiped at my nose. At the rain that ran down the side of my cheek. “The stuff I’ve got in me . . . I just don’t know how to let it out.”

  “Sometimes when you keep things locked up inside,” Mary said gently, “you forget how to live without them.”

  I took a breath, nodded.

  “I killed my girlfriend,” I said. “I think that’s why I’m here.”

  Mary was quiet as I told her my story. I told her everything. More than I’d told my old captain. More than I’ve told you. Maybe more than I’ve told myself.

  We rounded a corner. Up ahead I could see Mary’s apartment building.

  “Rachel and I, we were unhappy,” I said. “Not at first, but . . .”

  “At first you were in love,” Mary said.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love.”

  It’s true. I mean, I’ve felt it, sure. Felt it hard, felt it in the pit of my stomach. That chemical rush, that endorphin high. Pulsing through the capillaries of my brain. Oh, I’ve felt love. Crushed into white powder and pressed into yellow pills. A smiling face stamped on the coating. What woman could compete with that?

  “But you were happy,” Mary said.

  “Sure,” I said. “We were happy.”

  We paused to cross the street, the wake of a passing car a shimmering haze. Moonlight glinted on the frozen sidewalk. Mary slipped her hand through the crook of my arm.

  “I told people I was out when it happened. I said I got home and found her.”

  “But you were there,” Mary said.

  “I was there,” I said softly. “I was in the next room. I was three feet away. You think you’d hear it, the sound of a life ending. You’d think it would be louder, but it’s not. It’s barely a whisper.”

  We were nearly at Mary’s apartment. The streets here were restless, a wind that shifted the rain back and forth. Cooper’s heart was racing. I could feel it in my chest.

  “I was high,” I said. “I was three feet and a hundred miles away.” And I told her about the junkie woman, about the yellow spoon she’d used to kill her old man and the bag of pills I’d lifted from the scene. “I brought them home. Into our house, Mary. Carried them around in my pocket. Nestled in a little plastic bag.”

  “Just pills, though,” she said. “You didn’t kill her.”

  I could feel it stirring inside me. Protective, maybe.

  “Rachel was in the bathroom. I thought she’d only taken a couple of them, same as me. She got cold all the time. Her hands, her feet . . .” I let out a liquid laugh. “God I’d forgotten all about that. She used to lie on the sofa at night when we watched TV, and I’d hold her feet. I’d warm them under my shirt, against my skin.”

  I fell silent for a moment.

  “She was running a bath,” I said. “She always liked them hot. Like, scalding hot. Way hotter than I could stand. And she’d been in there a while, but I couldn’t tell you how long. Jesus, I was so high I could barely recognize what a number was, never mind tell the time.”

  I took a breath, felt myself tensing up at the memory. Mary squeezed my arm tight.

  “So she’s in there and it must have been a w
hile because I remember banging on the door. Starting shouting at her to hurry up. I needed a piss from all that cheap shit I was drinking. Budweiser, whatever. I was banging on the door and she didn’t answer and—and listen to this Mary—I get angry at her. Like she’s ignoring me, you know? So I kick the door down and she’s still in the bath and of course she’s dead, she’s been dead for hours. The water is freezing.

  “And the bag of pills? It was empty. She’d taken them all, one after the other without stopping. They ruled it an accidental drowning in the end, but that’s bullshit. Rachel wasn’t some dumb teenager, she knew what she was doing. And it was my fault, you understand me? She saw the real me, she saw who I really was, and she just couldn’t bear it for a minute longer.”

  “Thomas, I—”

  “And I panicked, Mary, okay? I started cleaning the apartment. Flushing pills and God knows what else down the toilet. Down the toilet that’s right next to her. And I even think about putting her in bed and making it look like she died in her sleep. Or, or maybe I take her outside, you know? Outside. And do what? Dump her body in the street? What the hell is wrong with me, Mary?”

  I’m staring at her. I let go of a breath I barely realized I was holding. I was hunched up. My back arched, towering over her. My hands were shaking. Fingers curled into my palms.

  Mary stood there, unmoving. She kept my gaze, didn’t back down. Her arm still looped around mine. Still holding on tight.

  Slowly I let the tension ebb away. Took in a cold breath, a lightness in my chest.

  The rain was coming down hard now. Large droplets collecting in my hair and running down the side of my face.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Thomas.”

  I closed my eyes when she said that. I guess I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet. Inside I could feel it starting to build. The heaviness, oozing from my bones.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said again, and then her hand was on my shoulder, squeezing, and even in the rain I could feel her heat, she was so close.