Collecting Cooper

by Paul Cleave

  His hands race up to his face and the gun hits him in the side of the head hard enough to give him an immediate headache, but he hangs on to it. He squeezes his eyes closed and his left one closes across the pin but won’t seal shut, letting in light, allowing him to see the shaft of the pin as it trails out of his blurry perspective. There’s an immediate flow of tears. The pain comes from his eye and from his foot at the same time, both far worse than anything he ever felt in the Scream Room. The pain has a weight to it, it’s heavy inside his head pulling his gaze to the floor, a sharp intense pain that starts at his eye and detours through his brain before spreading to his shoulders, and from his foot a dull ache races up his leg into his belly. He touches the pin with his free hand wanting to pull it out and the pain widens, and immediately he vomits, no warning of it, stomach bile spilling over his chin and down the front of his shirt. There’s a sudden ache in his groin and his entire body burns with pain and he doesn’t know what’s happening.

  The girl is screaming at him but he can’t absorb the words, they’re all insults, even if he can’t focus on them he can recognize the tone, and the pain explodes in his groin again and he realizes she’s kicking him. He puts his arm ahead and pulls the trigger and the gun goes off and he can’t see if he hits the woman or the wall, and he fires again and then again, the sound deafening, hurting his ears. He staggers to the side leaving one of his toes behind, another barely hanging on, and he can’t maintain his weight on his foot, he buckles and trips over the bucket and hits the floor, his bare feet soaked in the process, his body banging against the drawers and the Taser landing in his lap. He pinches his fingers on the safety pin, takes a deep breath and pulls. He can feel his entire eyeball being brought forward and the pain is too intense and he has to let go, it’s as though the pin is much longer now that it’s inside of him, so long it’s gone directly into the center of his brain. He opens his good eye and has to hold it open with his fingers to stop it from closing. Something oozes down the pin and drips onto his cheek. He looks around the room and he’s alone now. He takes another grip on the safety pin, puts down the gun, pushes his other fingers against his eye to stop it moving, grits his teeth, and pulls as hard as he can.

  chapter fifty-three

  The alarm clock goes off and I wake up feeling even more tired than before I went to sleep. It reminds me of how I used to feel last year when I’d wake up every morning with a hangover. I spent months on end trying to drink away the memories of the bad things I thought I’d done before crashing into Emma Green sobered me up for good. A couple of cups of coffee go a long way to bringing me around. I take a cold shower and drink another coffee before settling up with the hotel clerk, this one a different guy from two hours ago.

  The roads are full of early-morning weekend traffic. Most people have the windows down with their arms hanging out the window, some of them with cigarettes between their fingers with smoke trailing into the air. There are no early indications that today is going to be any cooler than yesterday. I think of Buttons and what he said about rumors in a mental institution, and wonder how much of what he said last night was true. I hope Jesse Cartman is doing better this morning, that he’ll take his medication today and not be found with his hands buried in somebody else looking for the soft meat. There’s a delay up ahead, a couple of the teenage drag racers from last night have crashed, shutting down one of the lanes, so we’re all bottlenecked up to and through an intersection, the heat cooking us all.

  I make it through the city. I drive out past the airport taking a road with a view to the runways, an incoming plane low enough to shake the car. There are a few dozen people parked off the road, caught between reading newspapers and watching the planes come and go. Out past more paddocks and more farmers and I should just buy a house out here because it’d mean less commuting.

  I don’t get all warm inside at the thought of returning to the prison. I have to go past a guard station and show some ID before I pull into the parking lot where there’s a small scattering of other visitor vehicles. It all looks exactly the same as it did a few days ago when I was stepping out of it. Same shimmering blacktop. Same dust floating up from the exercise yard. Same machines and same scaffolding and same work crews extending the prison walls, making more room for the new arrivals being bused in on a daily basis, not having to work too fast because the prison just keeps on busing them back out. The entrance betrays what it’s really like inside. A nicely landscaped garden around the parking lot that’s turning brown in the sun, a large double set of automatic glass doors, all modern styling with furniture inside only a year old at the most. There’s a reception counter with about four people behind it, all of them look like they should be on the other side of the bars, especially the woman who speaks to me. She has dark black hair along with a small reserve of it lining her upper lip. She looks at me as if trying to figure how many pieces she can break me into, and I imagine it would be a lot. She has to be at least twice my weight, and she’s carrying most of that in her shoulders and chest.

  “I’d like to see a prisoner,” I tell her.

  “You have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “You just say no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t just come down here without making an appointment.”

  “Then I’d like to make an appointment,” I say.

  “For who and for when?”

  “For Edward Hunter, and for now.”

  “I just said you can’t come here without making an appointment.”

  “I just made one.”

  “No you didn’t,” she says. “You just asked to make one. It’s a big difference.”

  “Please, it’s important.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  I think about calling Donovan Green. Asking him for some more money to grease the transition between not seeing Edward Hunter and seeing Edward Hunter, then figuring it’s too risky. The woman looks like she’d be happy because most of her income is being blown on steroids, but sad because she’d have to split it with the others behind her. “Please, it really is important,” I say. “I think he knows something that can help me find Emma Green, the girl that’s missing. Please. Her father sent me. He’s desperate. And what can it hurt letting me see him?”

  She takes a good ten seconds to think about it. Weighs up whatever options there are for and against, and comes to the conclusion that helping me out may end up being her good deed for the day.

  “Don’t make this a habit,” she says.

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “It’ll take ten minutes. Sit down and wait, and if it takes longer, don’t complain.”

  I sit down and wait and I don’t complain, even though I can feel each of the minutes ticking away.

  chapter fifty-four

  The screams are loud, muffled somewhat by the padded walls of the cell, but high pitched enough to come through and for Cooper to know they’re being made by a woman. Probably from Emma Green. There’s a second gunshot, then three more, and Cooper is desperate to know what’s going on. Have the police arrived? He hopes not.

  His mother is in the opposite corner of the cell. He can’t see her-he still can’t see a damn thing in here and has no idea whether it’s even morning yet, and his bladder is so full that fluids must be starting to back up into his stomach and his groin feels like it’s going to pop. His mother isn’t talking to him, or even looking at him now, and for that he truly hates himself. He starts banging on the cell door. He has to bang hard to produce sound loud enough to be heard, and he uses his shoe like he did back in Grover Hills.

  “Hey, hey, what’s going on out there? Adrian? Hey, let me out of here. Let me out, let me out, let me out!”

  The screaming stops. There is no more gunfire, only silence. He keeps banging at the padded door.

  Then the slot at face height opens up.

  “Who are you?” Emma Green asks.

  He almost jumps at seeing her
face. In a weird way it’s like seeing a ghost. “Who. . who are you?” he asks, trying to sound like he doesn’t know. “Please, please, you have to let me out of here,” he adds, trying to hide his shock at seeing her. “He’s crazy. He’s going to kill us.”

  “You look. . kind of familiar.”

  “Please, we have to hurry.”

  “Oh my God, you’re one of my university professors! What the hell is going on here?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, and right now he really doesn’t. Somehow Emma Green has escaped. The screams must have come from Adrian. The gunshots must have been Emma Green shooting him! It’s perfect. All absolutely perfect. “Listen, what’s your name?” he asks.

  “Emma.”

  “Listen, Emma, I’ve been captive for. . I don’t know, I’ve lost track of time. Please, please, you have to let me out of here. You killed him, right? The man who took me?”

  “No. He’s still alive. I only hurt him,” she says, glancing over her right shoulder to look down the corridor.

  “You shot him, right? Please tell me you shot him.”

  “He was shooting at me.”

  “Oh, fuck, so he’s still out there? You have to hurry. You have to let me out, you have to let me out now!”

  “Are you in there alone?” she asks.

  He steps aside so she can see into the room. “My mother is in here with me,” he tells her.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “It’s what I’m trying to tell you. He killed her. Last night he killed her right in front of me and there wasn’t a thing I could do,” he says. “It was the worst. . the worst thing in the world.” And it was the worst thing. He wrapped his hands around his mother’s throat and he told her he was sorry over and over as her eyes bulged forward and he took her life from her. He loves her, but he loves his freedom even more. There was no other way. The police would question her. She would tell them a crazy man thought her son was a serial killer. The police would wonder if there was something to that, on account of one of his students going missing. Two students, if you counted the one from three years ago.

  “Oh my God,” she says.

  “Please, you have to let me out.”

  “Hang on a second.”

  She takes a step back and the door opens outward into the hall. The relief washes over him. He can feel the excitement of killing Adrian. He can taste the excitement of being alone with Emma Green. For the first time he notices she’s completely naked. He steps out of the cell. This isn’t Sunnyview or Eastlake. “Where in the hell are we?”

  “I have no idea,” she says. “But I think there are two of them.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody took me on Monday night,” she says, “and left me in a building somewhere. Then somebody else took me from that building and brought me here. It wasn’t the same guy.”

  “Where is he now? The one you hurt?”

  “That way,” she says, and points down the hallway.

  The hallway is part of a house. Just a normal house with a padded cell and not a mental institution that’s been abandoned. The hallway is carpeted and wider than what he’s used to. There are old-fashioned side tables against the wall with ceramic knickknacks on them, some watercolor paintings that don’t look very good and were probably done by the owners of the house. He takes two steps toward the room Emma said she came out of and the door flies open and Adrian appears, blood and fluid streaming down one side of his face, the palm of his hand hiding some kind of mess, his foot is bleeding and looks like it’s been clubbed with a hammer. He levels the gun.

  “Jesus,” Cooper says, and he grabs Emma and shields her from what’s coming, covering her with his body, an instinct he guesses coming from the Cooper Riley that predated his divorce and Natalie Flowers. The bullet hits the wall well wide of them and he figures two things right then: Adrian has probably never used a gun before today, and his accuracy is off because he’s only using one eye.

  “You’re my friend,” Adrian yells, and there’s another gunshot, this one closer.

  “Let’s go,” Cooper says, and he rolls off the girl and grabs her arm and pulls her upright. The room they just came out of would provide immediate safety, but he’ll only be back at square one, locked away at Adrian’s mercy.

  Unfortunately it’s their only option. The door is opened across the hallway, and to get past it they’d have to close it, it’d take an extra second or two and he just doesn’t think they have that long.

  “I thought you liked me,” Adrian says, and Cooper isn’t so sure he’s the one being spoken to.

  He pushes Emma into the room and dives after her. The impact of hitting the ground is all the convincing his bladder needs to let go, and a quarter of it is emptied before he can get it back under control. He guesses he has five seconds to make a decision before Adrian either locks the door or shoots them.

  “Do you have a weapon?” he asks.

  “What? No, no, of course I don’t.”

  He looks around the room. His pants are soaking wet, and his bladder is desperately trying to let go again. In fact, it’s more painful than before. There was nothing in here earlier that could help, and nothing now.

  Except his mother.

  His mother doesn’t have to have died in vain.

  chapter fifty-five

  A guard comes and tells me to follow him. He has a large forehead creased with stress, and a lower lip that sticks out half an inch past his upper one, the kind of lip you wouldn’t want to have when you’ve got a bad cold. He escorts me past a metal detector where I’m frisked for any concealed weapons or drugs. It’s all caught on security camera from about four different angles, which must be switched off most of the time going by the amount of drugs and weapons that make it in here. I’m led into the visitors’ room, which is on the other side of a set of bars that slide open as we approach. The visitors’ room has a dozen or so square tables in it, all of them marked in some way, chips in the edges, lines and creases where things have been dragged across them, small words etched into the wood. A few of them are occupied with people in jumpsuits sitting opposite loved ones in summer outfits. The room is air-conditioned and doesn’t give the visitor any indication of how hot it gets in the cells this time of the year, or how cold it gets in the winter. The last four months I always approached this room from the other side. This time I’m given a small speech by the guard on things I can’t do. Edward Hunter is sitting behind a table with his hands in his lap looking at me and trying to place how he knows me. I sit down opposite him and neither of us offers to shake hands.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” I tell him.

  “I don’t remember speaking a single word to you when you were in here,” he says, “what could be so important that you had to come back?”

  “There’s a missing girl.”

  “There are lots of missing girls,” he says. “My daughter went missing once and she died, why should I care about anybody else?” His voice sounds neutral, like he’s being chemically balanced. He speaks with no emotion when he talks about his daughter. He sounds drained, empty. His wife was gunned down in the same bank robbery Schroder was talking about, the bank where Jane Tyrone worked. Edward’s daughter was kidnapped and held ransom for money, and Edward went after the men who had her. What he did to those men for killing his family is the reason he’s here.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your family,” I tell him.

  “I know you are. Your daughter was killed too,” he says. “Did you kill the person who hurt her?”

  “Please, I’m here for your help.”

  “You did. I can tell,” he says. “Do you have a monster living inside of you? Mine likes the taste of blood.”

  If Edward Hunter isn’t on any kind of medication, I sure as hell hope he starts getting it. If he’s already on some, then they need to up the dose. His words make me think of Jesse Cartman. Without a doubt there was a monster inside Jesse Cartman that was desperate to be fed.


  “Her name is Emma Green,” I say, moving forward. “She was kidnapped Monday night and I think she’s still alive. She was taken by a man named Cooper Riley. Then they were both abducted by an ex-mental patient named Adrian Loaner.”

  “Sounds like you know everything there is to know.”

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  “Well, nor do I. I haven’t even heard of those people. I don’t get out much, you know. And I don’t like the news. What’s there to like? Same stories every day with different names. Nothing to like about that at all.”

  “What’s your relationship to Murray and Ellis Hunter?”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Murray and. .”

  “I know. I heard you. They’re uncles, on my dad’s side,” he says, and for the first time he’s engaged with the conversation. “I hardly know them. I didn’t see them for years after my dad was, you know, arrested. I saw them at my grandparents’ funerals, and that was it. I hardly even spoke to them, and if I saw them on the street tomorrow I wouldn’t even recognize them.”

  “They used to work at Grover Hills.”

  “What’s that, some kind of retirement village?”

  “Not quite,” I say, then explain it to him.

  “So what do you want to know about them?”

  “Any idea where they live?”

  “None. Why? You can’t find them?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “What. . you mean. . what? How?”

  “Murdered.”

  “Jesus,” he says. “By who?”

  “Adrian Loaner.”

  “The man who has Emma Green.”

  “He used to be a patient there. Everything suggests your uncles used to abuse him, along with others.”

  “Oh, I see,” he says, reaching up and gripping the edge of the table. “Now I see why you came here. You think they have the Hunter gene, right? The one that makes us blood men. My dad had it, I have it, and now they have it too.”