Collecting Cooper

by Paul Cleave

  I wipe at my eyes but things still remain blurry. I crawl away and get to my knees and when I stand up I walk sideways and crash into the wall then back down to the floor. Emma puts the Taser down and picks up the crowbar. Her hands are still tied together, but now they’re in front of her. She must have hooked her feet up and through.

  “Who are you?” she asks. “Who the fuck are you?”

  I hold my hands over my head, ready to defend myself if she starts swinging, not sure that I’m going to be able to. “Your father, he, he sent me to, to find you,” I say.

  “You look familiar.”

  “That’s, that’s because. .”

  “You ran into me last year. What the hell? Have you come here to hurt me?”

  “No, no, of course not,” I say, trying to get my breathing under control.

  Cooper starts gagging. He’s trying to move his arms but he can’t. His mouth is open and his tongue is swelling up. There’s a bulge growing in his throat. His face is turning purple and he can’t breathe. He’s trying to reach his mouth but he can’t.

  “Your father hired me,” I tell her. Sweat is mixing with the blood from my scalp and whatever fluid was in that jar. I keep wiping it from my eyes. It stings like hell. “He thought that I owed it to you and to him to find you. That’s why, why, I took on the case.”

  “Stay where you are,” she says. “Stay on the floor. If you try to move I’ll start swinging. I’m not kidding.”

  “What about him?” I ask, nodding toward Cooper. His face is dark purple now.

  “Was he going to kill me?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Then let him die,” she says.

  “You don’t want that,” I say. “You do now, but soon you’ll regret it. Trust me.” I push myself up from the floor. I wipe at my eyes and suck in some deeper breaths. I try to move over to Cooper. My knee isn’t bending again and hurts to take any weight.

  “Stay where you are,” she tells me.

  “He’ll die.”

  “If you move one muscle I’ll put this through your skull. You got a phone?”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit,” she says. “Everybody these days has a phone.”

  “Yeah? Where’s yours?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. He took it from me.”

  I wipe the bottom of my shirt over my face. My vision is starting to clear. Cooper is making gagging noises.

  “Why do you want to help him so much?” she asks.

  “The police are on their way, but they’re still five or ten minutes away, and honestly I’m just as happy as you are to stand here and watch him die. But he has information I need. There’s another woman I’m looking for. Another girl that he hurt.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You have to trust me.”

  “I’m never trusting anybody again.”

  I reach into my pocket. I find the photograph Donovan Green gave me the day I got out of jail.

  “Your dad gave me this,” I tell her, and I show it to her. “He said the day this was taken you turned ten. He said all you wanted for your birthday was a puppy and when they didn’t get one for you, you ran away. He told me they found you two blocks away at the park on the merry-go-round trying to talk to the birds in the trees and make friends with them. They were so relieved you were okay and when they were about to tell you off, you talked your way out of it. Your dad said you told them you ran away because you felt bad about having wanted so much from them, and not because you hadn’t gotten it, and that you ran away because you were a bad girl. He knew you were making it up, but the way you said it was believable and made them feel bad and they couldn’t bring themselves to tell you off. He said you’ve always been able to talk your way into getting what you want from him. Put down the crowbar, Emma, and let me help him.”

  “He told you all that?”

  I nod.

  She doesn’t put down the crowbar, but she nods toward Cooper. “Help him,” she says. “Ask him what you need to.”

  I move over to Cooper and crouch down next to him.

  “Calm down,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t. He isn’t moving much, mostly just shudders, but I need him to stay perfectly still.

  “Stop struggling or you’re going to die. Now, this is going to hurt but at least you’ll live. You got that?”

  He stops moving.

  I take the pen off the crossword book and snap it in half, giving me a plastic tube.

  “What are you doing to him?” Emma asks.

  “I’m going to save his life. You know what I’m about to do?” I ask Cooper.

  His eyes tell me that he gets it. I pick up a piece of glass from the broken jar, put my hand on his forehead and push his head against the floor to keep him still, then drag the glass down his throat, between two little ridges. He starts struggling again. His face is covered in sweat. When the cut is big enough, I jam the tube into the wound.

  He starts breathing, air going through the pen.

  Sirens finally start sounding in the distance.

  “The police are here,” I tell her. “Go and find some clothes. I’ll wait with him.”

  Emma leaves the room. Cooper stays where he is. His skin is returning from the purple color back to normal.

  “You remember Natalie Flowers?” I ask him.

  He finds the strength to nod.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Any idea at all?”

  He shakes his head again.

  “If you knew, would you tell me?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “You sent her down a path, you know that, right?”

  He nods.

  “People are dying because of her, because of what you did to her. You’re a piece of garbage, you know that, right? The rest of the world is going to know it too because you were kind enough to take the photos to prove it. They’re going to know that you’re the worst kind of rapist. You know, I’ve been in jail, I know what it’s like, but for you, well, there’s a special place in jail for you. My experience in jail is going to look like a vacation compared to yours. Help me with Natalie, and maybe I’ll see what I can do. Maybe you don’t have to spend every day sitting on a bag of ice to keep down the swelling.”

  He lifts his hand slightly and signals that he wants to write something. Every breath he makes is drawn in and out of the pen, accompanied by a hollow whistling sound. I find the nib and plastic spine that came out of the broken pen and hand it to him, along with the crossword book. He tilts it toward him and writes, then puts down the pen. I take the book back off him.

  He’s written Fuck You in the margin. I look down at him, and he grins. Then he reaches to the plastic tube and pulls it out.

  The smile stays on his face for ten seconds. He’s controlling the situation, controlling his fate, controlling the outcome. He’s avoiding jail, avoiding the responsibility, avoiding the media circus. He prefers death to the humiliation he’ll have to face with his peers. His thoughts are very clear in his eyes. He’s happy with the decision he’s made. Then that smile flickers around the edges. He begins to turn purple again, sweat is running down his forehead. He’s beating the system, but he’s not looking as happy with his decision anymore. Twenty seconds into it and there is no longer any hint of a smile. He begins fumbling with the plastic tube. He lifts it up to his throat. He gets the tip of it against the cut but can’t get it in there, there’s too much blood and he can’t get the angle right. It keeps slipping around the edges of the wound and also in his fingertips. He tries to widen the hole with his finger, but in the process he drops the tube. It rolls over the floor toward me.

  Thirty seconds into it and his eyes are pleading for help. He tries to form the word but can’t make it, but he mouths it over and over.

  Help.

  I underline the message he wrote me and throw the crossword book onto his lap. He looks down at it, then back up at me. Forty se
conds now and I’ve never seen such panic in anybody’s eyes before.

  It’s hard to watch.

  I don’t want to watch it.

  And I don’t have to.

  I reach down and pick up the plastic tube. I drop it into my pocket and step out of the bedroom. I walk down the hall, past Adrian, past the dead women, back past all the old furniture and antique calendar and step out the back door, away from the gagging sounds coming from the bedroom. I circle my way around the house. The gun is outside the bedroom window in the garden. I pick it up and drop it into my pocket. I look through the window. Cooper isn’t moving. I didn’t kill him, I could have saved him, and I’m comfortable with not doing so. I throw the tube back into the window. I don’t want to have to explain to Schroder why it was in my pocket. It rolls under Cooper’s body but he doesn’t make a reach for it.

  Emma Green is standing in the driveway. She’s wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. She’s still holding the crowbar. I stop ten meters away from her because she looks like she’s going to swing that thing at the next person who enters her hitting zone. She keeps holding it even when the police cars pull into the driveway and Schroder, along with the other officers, jump out of the car and come over.

  Donovan Green is following them, a woman in the passenger seat who must be Hillary, his wife. Emma recognizes the car and drops the crowbar and runs toward them. Before he can come to a stop his wife has the door open and her feet out, and she almost falls jumping from the car. Donovan leaves the engine running, none of them looking at me, mother and father having eyes only for their daughter. I smile as I watch them give each other the tightest embraces of their lives, and Schroder comes over. He’s armed, and so are the men who show up with him. They’re approaching the house carefully.

  “Adrian?” he asks.

  “Dead,” I tell him.

  “Cooper?”

  “The same.”

  “Jesus,” he says. “Tell me what happened.”

  So I tell him as we watch Emma and her family continue to hug each other, and as the Christchurch sun continues to try and set fire to fields around us.

  epilogue

  The café owner kept Emma’s job for her. She didn’t want to go back, but she needed the money, and anyway, she has time to kill before she heads away to the police academy. She had never thought before that she would want to be a cop, but it’s all she can think about. She has quit university, has filed her application with the police force, and now she just has to wait. It could take six months. It could take three years. Hopefully she’s accepted. Hopefully she has the strength to get through the months of training, and then hopefully she is posted in Christchurch so she can be near her family where she can make a difference. Despite everything that has happened to her, she loves this city. She wants to protect this city. She wants to make sure other girls like her don’t have to go through what men like Cooper Riley put her through. She doesn’t know whether in a few months’ time she might have changed her mind, that the reality of what happened to her two weeks ago will seem different and instead of wanting to become a cop she’ll be wanting to curl up in her bedroom for the rest of her life. Her parents don’t support her decision. They want her to carry on with her studies. They tell her it’s too dangerous being a policewoman. She pointed out that it’s equally as dangerous being a student or working at a café.

  The old man who she thought was dead the night she was abducted is sitting at the table closest to the counter. He’s working his way through a muffin and a coffee and also the crossword puzzle. He doesn’t recognize her from that night. God, how she wanted to scream at him when he walked in! She wanted to spit in his coffee too, but she just smiled and took his money and brought out his order when it was ready.

  Part of her, and she can’t deny it, wants to follow him out to the parking lot when he’s done and, in the morning, people will find him sitting dead behind the driver’s wheel of his car. It’s what Melissa X would do.

  He senses she is looking at him, and he looks up, a big smile on his face.

  “Best coffee in the city,” he tells her.

  She smiles back. “I appreciate hearing that,” she says.

  He goes back to his crossword. She thinks about Adrian Loaner, and how it felt putting that safety pin into his eye. A month ago if asked, she’d have said that sort of thing would never have been possible for her, not under any circumstances. She also never would have thought about following a customer into the parking lot and strangling him either.

  People change. Some for the better, some for the worse. After helping kill two men, she doesn’t know which of those sums her up.

  She thinks about Cooper Riley, flat on the floor with his throat blocked from the Taser. She wanted him to die. She was desperate for him to die, and even though that’s what happened, she’s glad he didn’t die from her hand. There is some relief there. He killed himself, and that took any guilt away from her-even though she isn’t sure she ever would have felt any. If he had lived, he could have hurt other people. Not today, not next week, but definitely in fifteen years when he was freed from jail.

  Theodore Tate made sure that wouldn’t happen.

  At least she thinks that’s what happened.

  Theodore Tate. She still hates him for what he did to her last year. But that’s changing. She’s heard he’s wanting to be a cop again. She hopes she gets to work with him one day. She knows there are things about the world he can teach her that the police force can’t, things that can make her a better cop. Things she can do to help more people.

  Like pulling plastic tubes out of evil men’s throats.

  Okay-she isn’t sure if she could do that, just as she isn’t sure what really happened in that bedroom after she walked out.

  The following day nine bodies were found at the farmhouse. All of them men who had gone missing over the previous few years, all of them killed by a pair of brothers who were themselves killed by the man she stabbed with the safety pin.

  Yes, she absolutely wants to become a cop. She wants to rid this world of men like that.

  The old man finishes off his crossword and waves at her on his way out the door. She goes over to his table and picks up the newspaper he left behind. She folds it over to the front page. There’s a sketch of Melissa X, the same one they’ve been running since last year, only now she has a name and a photograph of when she was a student. Natalie Flowers.

  Natalie Flowers was Cooper Riley’s first victim.

  It’s an awful thought, but she wishes Cooper had killed Natalie Flowers.

  Last night another body was found. An ambulance driver. He was found naked in a park with his hands tied around a tree. His uniform wasn’t at the scene. She wonders if she’ll make it onto the force before Natalie Flowers is caught, then wonders if Flowers will ever be caught. She carries the coffee cup and plate out to the kitchen, folds the newspaper in half, and tosses it into the bin.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-be4b34-2ca9-8648-d086-5e86-a7ed-6a7fff

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 11.09.2013

  Created using: calibre 1.1.0, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software

  Document authors :

  Paul Cleave

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/

  />
 

  Paul Cleave, Collecting Cooper