Welcome to Cooper

by Tariq Ashkanani

  “Can’t say I blame you.”

  “Coming here, it is dangerous. I feel exposed.” He smiled. “How many Ukrainians do you think are here beside me, hmm? Not many, I think.”

  “Smart move keeping your product this far west. How many of these farms do you own?”

  “Own? I don’t own. I am no farmer. But I do help some farmers remain farmers.”

  “Must be difficult, running things from Omaha.”

  “It becomes easier. Once you have the police, everything becomes easier.”

  “Oh yeah? How much does it cost to make a cop look the other way?”

  “Less than you think.” He tapped at his cigarette. Orange embers drifted between us. “Not everything is measured in money, Detective.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you point a gun at a man’s wife, and maybe that man now works for you.”

  His voice was cold. The smiles and laughs gone.

  “So why are you here?” I asked him. “I heard you had a money problem.”

  “I heard you helped me solve it.”

  I glared at him. He sniffed and wiped at his nose. He almost looked bored.

  “These farms,” he said, “they are very important to me. Any problem with them, any disruption, that is bad for business.” He took a long inhale on his cigarette, blew it out slow. “You being here, Detective. I think you are bad for business too.”

  I scanned the brush where I’d tossed my gun, but it was too dark to see anything. Behind me, I could hear the farmer shifting his weight uncomfortably. I looked over at Joe. “You going to let this guy do all the talking?”

  “You’re in serious trouble, son,” Joe said.

  “Stop calling me son,” I said. “You sound like an idiot.”

  Marchenko let out a dry laugh and took a step closer.

  “This quipping you are doing,” he said. “I do not think you do it because you are brave.”

  “No?”

  “No. I think you do it because you are scared. You do it to hide your fear from me.” He leaned toward me. “You think anyone would find you out here, Detective? Hmm? Buried in an unmarked grave?”

  I swallowed. “You think you can kill a police officer and get away with it? You’re crazy.”

  “You spy on your partner and you call me crazy,” Marchenko said, standing up straight and shrugging. “That is an interesting viewpoint.”

  He was just about finished with his cigarette, and something told me we weren’t going to stand around chatting long enough for him to light up another.

  “People will come for me,” I said. I could feel my legs beginning to wobble, the adrenaline buzz starting to fade. “They will, Marchenko, and you know it.”

  “Why would they come for you,” he said, “when they have never come for those before you? You think you would be the first police officer I have killed? My friend, this is not some big deal. This is just good business.”

  He took one last, final draw and then flicked his cigarette away. It soared through the air and faded into nothing. I never saw it hit the ground. Marchenko reached into his jacket and pulled out a large silver semiautomatic. Thing looked like a goddamn hand cannon.

  “Now Thomas, please. Into the field.”

  I turned to run, but the farmer drove his shotgun into my spine so hard I pitched forward over my Impala. Marchenko’s men grabbed my arms, dragged me away. I caught a glimpse of Joe’s face as I was led deeper into the ravaged cornfield. He looked resigned.

  It was dark in the field. Away from the cars, moments of moonlight where the scudding clouds allowed. The earlier snow shaking free as we pushed across the rattling rows of broken cornstalks. When they forced me to my knees I felt it darken my trousers. Felt it trickle into my shoes.

  It was going to end here. In the snow and the corn and the low grass. I heard a hammer being pulled back and Marchenko was there. He pressed the barrel against the side of my head. I closed my eyes and was surprised by who I saw. Her eyes open and the bathwater warm.

  “Wait,” Joe said.

  The pressure against my skull faded slightly. I looked up to see Marchenko staring at Joe, irritation scrawled on his face.

  “Wait,” Joe repeated quietly.

  Marchenko let the gun fall away completely. “Why should I wait? This is your mess I am cleaning up.” He turned and spat into the darkness. “Always your mess I am cleaning up.”

  “Then let me take care of him.”

  “You want to kill him? Here, take it.”

  “I said I’ll take care of him.”

  “That is not the same.”

  “He’s more valuable to us alive, Demyan.”

  The Ukrainian thought it over for a while. He tapped the barrel of the gun against his thigh as he did so. Then he motioned to his men, jerking his head toward the cars.

  “You want to clean up your mess? Fine. But if he is not with us, then you kill him. You do it proper.”

  He started to leave and then stopped, turned, and gave me a blank look before stepping right up inside Joe’s space.

  “You do it proper, understand?” he repeated, and sniffed noisily. “You do it proper or you don’t come back to Cooper.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  They left us by the side of the road.

  We stood in silence and watched them drive away. Stood in silence until their taillights had danced off into the dark, and then stood in silence for a little bit longer after that. Eventually Joe sat down heavily against the side of my Impala.

  “I guess we need to talk,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  He nodded, patting himself down for his smokes. I waited for him to light up. Used the time to steady my nerves. Although I’d never admit it to him, I was shaken up pretty bad. I was suddenly grateful for the shroud of inky black.

  “Morricone got you spying on me?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “A wire?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much do they know?”

  “They know you work for Marchenko. Drugs, whatever. They seem pretty sure you were involved in the van heist, too. Maybe more, but that’s all they told me.”

  Joe grunted as he inhaled. Glittering lights in the distance. Cooper was watching.

  “This has to stop,” I said.

  “Tommy, look—”

  “You shot a man. Shot him in cold blood. You murdered him. And for what? Money?”

  “And who was he? This man that I shot, hmm? Who was he?”

  “Joe—”

  “No, son, let’s not pretend he was some saint, alright? Or some down-on-his-luck poor son of a bitch. Or even some piece-of-shit petty criminal—twenty years ago he killed three women, Tommy. Three. Last week he killed a fourth. Scooped out their eyes with a goddamn teaspoon.”

  “Wrong!” I barked at him. So ferociously that he actually jerked backward a little. I advanced on him. “Foster didn’t kill Kelly Scott. Simon Jacobs did.”

  “Who’s Simon Jacobs?”

  “And Christ, I nearly helped him get away with it.”

  “Tommy, who’s Simon Jacobs?”

  I blinked. Joe was staring at me, eyes wide and on his feet now. I wanted to drive my fist into his stomach. Grind his face into the dirt until he begged me to stop. I felt my fingers curl into my palms. Felt that old familiar anger boiling inside, filling me from the ground up. Overspill from the town beyond, seeping through the dirt and the muck and floating in the air between us.

  I dug in my pocket. “Simon Jacobs is the guy who took these,” I said, and threw the crumpled photograph at him. It bounced off his chest and landed by his feet. He picked it up and examined it wordlessly.

  “And there’s a hell of a lot more where that came from, too,” I said. “You know what I’ve spent the last week doing? I’ve been saving your ass.” I pulled out the negatives. “Jacobs followed us the entire time we were robbing that transport. Took a whole bunch of nice pictures to remember it by.�
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  Joe’s face was drawn. With fury or fear I couldn’t tell.

  “He wanted me to frame Foster for her murder,” I said. “Wanted me to help him get away with it. Know why I didn’t? Because I didn’t want to end up like you.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “He took her watch, Joe. Took it from her wrist after he was done. He killed her.”

  A horrible silence after I said that. Joe gazed at the photograph for nearly a minute. I wondered what was running through his mind. Images of Kevin Foster ran through mine. The red wall, his eyes rolling away.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this earlier?” Joe said finally.

  “I was just trying to keep my head above water.”

  “That’s why you tell me these things!”

  “No more lies,” I said. “You planted Foster’s print, didn’t you? You and Bob. Or were you just going to doctor the records afterwards?”

  “Tommy—”

  “I pulled Foster’s file from storage, Joe. You’ve had his prints in a box this whole time.” I stared at him. “I spoke with Brian Ackerman.”

  “You what?”

  “He’s pretty far gone, but he just about shit himself when I mentioned your name.”

  “He’s an old man, Tommy!”

  “And twenty years ago he helped you frame Foster. Don’t deny it. Was it his idea? That where you got all your tricks from? Tell me I’m wrong. You figured you had your man and so you set him up for an easy arrest. Only what if it wasn’t him, Joe? What if it was never him?”

  “You want the truth? Fine. Let’s start with your personnel record.”

  My heart dropped, and my voice along with it. Joe pushed forward.

  “Turns out you were quite the dealer back in DC.”

  “Those files were sealed.”

  “And worth every penny extra, believe me. Remind me, did they rule it an accidental drowning in the end? Or was it a suicide? Which one do you tell yourself to help you sleep at night?”

  For a moment I saw her again. Floating just beneath the surface, her eyes open and staring endlessly upward.

  Joe was close now. I could smell tobacco and sweat. “You’re a hypocrite,” he sneered. “You want to know how I could work with someone like Marchenko? Because people like him keep this town safe.”

  He took another step toward me.

  “I don’t expect you to get it, you little shit, but I’ve sacrificed everything for this town. I’ve bled for it. You sneer at dirty money but you take it, same as we all do. Because deep down you know you need it. People out here have been left behind for a long time, Tommy. You think that farmer back there wouldn’t love to tell us all to go to hell? He swallows it down, takes his share so he can keep his family going. What I do, I do for the greater good. But you? You beat up junkies and sell out your friends. And for what, a bag of pills? A line of coke? Or maybe just so you can feel like a man. Just for those few seconds.”

  I stayed quiet. Scared to look too hard at what he was saying. Scared in case I found some truth. I could hear him panting. A long sigh and then he was next to me, the two of us looking out across the silent fields and the shimmering lights in the distance.

  “So what happens next?” I said. “What’s your great plan for all this?”

  “You drive me home,” Joe said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his cigarettes.

  I pushed off the car and leaned close. Flicked the photograph he was still holding. “What about Jacobs?”

  “Screw Jacobs,” Joe growled. “We’ll deal with him personally. You and me. Far as anyone is concerned, Foster killed Kelly Scott. We get rid of Jacobs, that’s the only story that matters.”

  “You forgetting someone shot Foster in the head?”

  Joe lit up, nodded. Breathed it in deep. Blew it out the side of his mouth. “I think our real-estate friend makes a good suspect, don’t you?”

  I stared at him. “Well, you’ve got this all figured out.”

  “Don’t worry, Tommy, I’ll take care of you.”

  I pushed off the car and walked around to the driver’s side. “You want to deal with Simon Jacobs? You want to arrest Gary Hadley? You do it yourself.”

  “You fight me on this, I might not be able to protect you next time.”

  I turned the key. A meaty roar in the still air. Snow scattered as I bounced onto the road, and by the time I looked back Joe was nothing but the fading glow of a cigarette against the dark of the night.

  Most of my life up in Duluth was pretty uneventful. School was school, which meant it was shitty and less shitty in equal measure. I never really fitted in. Always felt like I was the odd one out. Didn’t have that many friends, didn’t want any. I wasn’t unhappy or anything. I just . . . was.

  I’ve told Rookie about little Jesse Kane already. The kid in my class who hung himself because his parents got divorced. That kind of defined my time at high school. Kind of defined everyone’s. Jesse had never been popular, but his name was on all our lips after he strung himself up. People said he shit himself after he died. Imagine being found swinging from a light fixture with shit in your pants. I always figured if you’re going out, go out with some goddamn dignity.

  See, on some level I respected Jesse. He ended it on his own terms. He messed up the execution—no pun intended—but at least the guy tried. He didn’t waste away in some hospital bed or get clipped by a pizza delivery boy on his way to the library or whatever. He looked death straight in the eye and said, Fuck you. Then he shit his pants and kind of ruined the moment, but he was nearly there. He was like, ninety percent there. Take-home message from this story? Take a dump before you step off the chair. Take a goddamn laxative if you have to.

  When I was in my final year of high school, my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer. Docs said she had it bad. Both barrels, if you get my drift. She was given six months at best, maybe a bit more if she had chemo. We’d never really had any sort of meaningful relationship, me and my mom. I reckon too much time had passed. I was too messed up and she was completely insane so the whole thing was probably doomed from the start.

  She worked two and a half days a week for a hardware store that paid lousy to begin with, and when she was diagnosed the chemo wasn’t even an option. I mean, the store wasn’t exactly handing out free healthcare along with their ten percent staff discount. But I don’t think she would have taken it anyway. What was the point in living those extra few months so you could sit on a bathroom floor puking your guts up? Screw that. We might not have been as close as I’d hoped, but I always respected her for that decision.

  By the time I left school it had gotten pretty bad. She didn’t have much of an appetite and spent most of each day feeling tired. Sometimes I could hear her struggling for breath. Her eyes took on this hollow look, like they were sinking farther and farther into her sockets. It made her seem like she was sad all the time, which maybe she was. Then after a while it wasn’t just her eyes, it was everything. Her whole body just dropping away, like a skin-suit deflating right back to her bones.

  I started working part-time at a chicken factory. Stacking boxes onto the back of loaders for eight hours a day, three days a week, then going home and helping my mom go to the toilet.

  I think it happened about four months after she was diagnosed. She’d started taking these vitamin pills because that’s all she could keep down. I was buying boxes of the stuff for her, she couldn’t take them fast enough. Popping them like candy as she wasted away. I came back from work one night and she had fallen out of bed trying to get her pills from the dresser. God knows how long she’d been lying there for.

  I told you already about how she was when she was younger. Before prison broke her. She was strong back then. Stood up for what she believed in, for what she thought was right. I wish I’d known her when she was like that.

  Most of my mom’s life was dictated by others. By her mother. By Robert. By the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. By cancer.r />
  I wondered at the time if I’d look back on it differently later. But now it is later and I look back on it the same. Some things in this life are timeless, and mercy is one of them. When it comes down to it, I guess there’s not much we can control in this life, but how we go out is one of them. And I know—I just know—if my kid had walked in on me lying there like Skeletor with a busted hip, I’d have begged him to stick a pillow over my face and hold it there until I could escape this shitty world.

  Rookie looks a little pale at this point. I don’t think he was expecting the story to go where it did. Way I see it, I was doing her a favor. She didn’t struggle, I tell him. Didn’t try and fight me off or tell me to stop. You ask me, she was smiling under that pillow.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  What little was left of that night, I didn’t sleep it.

  Outside there was more rain. Standing at my bedroom window I could see the last of the snow was melting. If the weather didn’t let up, everything would soon be rinsed clear. I padded through to the kitchen and there was a bottle in the back of the cabinet and a glass on the counter. Sleep wasn’t going to come tonight. I didn’t think I wanted it to.

  I sat at my kitchen table and watched the rain trickle down the window. Placed the bottle in front of me and for a while I watched that, too. It was cold in there. When I checked my cell it was nearly 4 a.m., and when I called her she didn’t answer. I put the phone to one side and rubbed at my face.

  I waited as long as I could before pouring, which to be honest probably wasn’t that long at all. The heady scent hit me the second I twisted the top off the bottle. Warm and heavy, like a thick blanket. My mouth was already wet, my lips parted. I turned the glass around and around and when I called her again she still didn’t answer.

  Maybe I’d just have the one. Settle my stomach, get me going. There were eggs in the fridge and I was pretty sure they were still good. One to get me on my feet and I could make myself an omelet for breakfast. I could have coffee too, strong and black, that would help me power through till sunrise. Then I could go for a run; I hadn’t done that in months.

  I always felt good after a run. Clearheaded. That’s what I needed to be right now: clearheaded. I’d know what to do then, I’d have an answer to all this. I turned the glass around and around. Just one to get me going.