He refills his glass. Holds it aloft.
Here’s to the person you might have been, and to the person you have become. May they never meet in a dark alley.
He downs it.
Then Cooper sets the glass aside and begins to count his scars.
It’s an annual ritual, every year on his birthday, like revisiting a topographical map of his past misadventures and mistakes. He starts with the crescent-shaped scar on his elbow, earned at age eight, during a brief experimentation with skateboards. Eventually, he decided that it was hard enough to keep your feet under yourself in this world without adding the complication of wheels.
Scar number two: A faint straight line on his left hand, over his thumb, from a slipped chisel in tenth-grade woodshop. Seven stitches. He got better with the chisel, eventually.
Number three: The blanched-white lightning-bolt zigzag on his left shoulder, acquired while bow-hunting in the woods of Vermont. Age sixteen. An errant shot, loosed by a friend who either had terrible aim or who was finally acting on long-simmering suspicions that Cooper was fucking his girlfriend. Those suspicions were never proved, Cooper thinks, which isn’t the same as saying they were unfounded. Had the arrow sailed six inches to the left, it would have soared right past him, an effective warning shot; six inches to the right and it would have put him in the ground. He knew the friend well enough to know his aim wasn’t that good either way. The friend never out and out copped to it—he always insisted it was an accident. But he couldn’t muster any tears at the ER. And Cooper didn’t talk much to either of them after that, the onetime friend or his girlfriend. Eventually, they got married, and Cooper moved away. The shoulder still aches from time to time, but only if he thinks too hard about it. Sometimes he can forget it’s even there.
Number four: Hairline scar threaded across his right knuckles. Age seventeen. Courtesy of a concrete dugout wall punched in frustration after allowing a game-tying home run. Missed six weeks of pitching. Probably cost him a scholarship.
Number five: The arcing surgical scar on his right shoulder, age twenty, where a doctor went in and tried to save his bum rotator cuff and his slim hopes of a baseball career. The doctor saved one but not the other. Cooper was in community college at the time, a local star of sorts, and still nursing the eroding dream that his pitching arm might carry him to some better life. Truth is, he was good but not that good, even before the surgery. He could blame the injury for halting his career, and has, out loud to many people in his life, but secretly, he knows. To this day, he can’t raise his right arm to shoulder height without a little bit of wincing, and the famous Cooper curveball died on that operating table, along with a few other things.
Number six: The showstopper. Age thirty-two. A faint but unmistakable fissure arcing downward across the left side of his forehead, cutting his eyebrow in half. The consequence of his head being slammed in a door, intentionally and repeatedly. It happened at Highsbury Federal Correctional Institute, where Cooper worked as a guard. A surly inmate caught him looking the other way, wrong-footed, and jumped him. Goddamned low-security facility, too, full of frauds and cheats and embezzlers, not grizzled murderers, so where’s the good story in that? The inmate was not exactly some cutthroat lifer, just a finance dude with rage issues and an aggravated assault prior doing a stretch for insider trading, who filled his time in the weight room and got his girlfriend to smuggle him steroids. Definitely not a scar to be proud of, thinks Cooper, feeling it now with his whiskey-numbed fingertips. But it’s the one most people ask about. It probably even got him laid a couple times. That’s never changed the fact that he often wishes, in the later hours of the evening, that the inmate had finished the job.
Number seven: He threads his fingers back through his hair and feels the long ugly scar along his scalp. This is his most recent acquisition, obtained right before he started working at the Blinds, the barroom mystery. A souvenir of the dark years, the Austin years, when he’d regularly go out to new bars looking for drinks and fights and usually find both. This was all before he landed his plum job as sheriff in Caesura. This was back when he was working as private security for an old baseball teammate from community college who’d made good, and who basically gave him the job out of charity. That job mostly entailed watching nothing happen on multiple security cameras for ten hours a day, or patrolling the grounds and throwing rocks at rats. As for his off-hours, he spent those becoming well acquainted with the local constabulary, particularly the inside of their drunk tank, even if he was not always clear on the specifics of why he’d ended up there. He fingers the jagged ridge. This scar is a remnant of a particularly nasty barfight, one that got away from him, or so it was explained to him later. Honestly, he doesn’t even remember that fight. All he’d asked afterward was which bar it happened in, so he’d know which one not to go back to, because they likely had a Do Not Serve photo of him hung over the cash register.
Lucky for him, not long after, he stumbled into this job at Caesura. Friend of a friend of his old boss, who was happy to pass along the tip. Lucky for him, and lucky for all the fine residents who’ve since been placed under his protection.
Well, lucky for all but two of them, he thinks.
He’s eight years in, with two to go—that was the deal from the start. Put in ten years as de facto sheriff of the Blinds, babysitting memory-wiped felons, then retire on half-salary and full benefits, with no further obligations. It’s a hell of a pension plan, frankly, if he can just stick it out for two more years. Which, until recently, he was more than happy to do.
Then another even more compelling offer came along.
He raises the near-empty bottle. He proposes a toast to all his scars. The whole collection, another birthday tradition. They are, all seven of them, a year older, as is he.
Here’s to you, my lifelong companions. Happy birthday.
This time he skips the glass.
Not drunk. Not really.
Just fuzzing the edges of the world.
Cooper puts down the bottle, wipes his mouth, and then refills his glass. He pulls the misshapen slug, the one he retrieved from Colfax’s bungalow, from his pocket and holds it up and looks at it under the kitchen light. This wayward bullet, with so many secrets to spill, should it ever be allowed to share them. He turns the slug in his fingertips, slowly, examining it. Then he drops the slug in the shot glass. It sinks with a plop into the amber bourbon and hits the glass’s bottom with an audible plink.
Tiny bubbles flock to the bullet and stick to it.
Cooper picks up the glass, toasts the world one last time, then downs it all in a single gulp, the whiskey, the bullet, everything.
A crackle of static shakes him awake.
He’s still in his kitchen. Apparently he’d nodded off. It’s well past midnight now. Cooper rises and fumbles around for his gun belt. On the belt, his walkie-talkie. He retrieves it. Clicks the button. “Yes?”
Only Robinson and Dawes have walkie-talkies. It’s how the local police force keeps in touch. They don’t usually need them to keep in touch at five in the morning, though.
“Sheriff, it’s Deputy Dawes.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“I do.”
“Well, what is it?” says Cooper, irritated in this moment for about twelve different and equally pertinent reasons, not least by the whiskey headache pounding full-fisted at the door of his addled brain.
“I think I’ve found something,” Dawes says, through the static.
“Found what?”
“For the murders,” she says. “I think I’ve found the missing link.”
TUESDAY
8.
ORSON CALHOUN DOESN’T KNOW WHY, but he’s always been good with tools. He can’t remember where he learned to use them, or to what purpose, but they just feel right in his hands. The heft of the pliers. The surety of the wrench. The momentous arc of a ballpeen hammer, perfectly weighted and well suited to its job. It all just feels so natural, like
he was born to wear overalls. He remembers something vaguely, as a kid, with his dad, in a dusty basement with small windows, and the sound of tools clattering, but that’s where his memory gets ragged. Orson’s case, the doctors told him before he entered the town, was a deep dive; the relevant memories required something like a root canal for his brain. Plus, he was one of the early ones, the original eight, back before they’d perfected the precision of the technique. Some of the newer people, they remember almost everything—childhoods, first crushes, wives, kids—except for the part of their lives they chose to forget. With Orson, they scoured most of his memories, just to be sure. So there’s a lot of empty space in Orson’s mind. It’s left him a little slow, he understands. Common objects can sometimes puzzle him, and every emotional reaction feels unexpected and brand new. But not tools—tools feel familiar. They feel good. They sound good. They even taste good, he thinks: that metallic tang you get on your tongue when you spend all day in the workshop. Which is where Orson spends almost all his time, out at the repair yard at the far edge of the main drag, in the shadow of the westward fence.
The scrubby patch of grass out front of his shop usually looks, to the unaccustomed eye, like a junkyard, with various machines in states of disassembly, their inner workings strewn across the dirt. There’s a rider mower that Sheriff Cooper located for Orson as a reclamation project, which he’s been tinkering with for weeks. There’s a rusting and broken-down washing machine salvaged from the town’s Laundromat. There’s the dormant Chevy Aveo hatchback, the town’s emergency vehicle, half-covered under a blue plastic tarp with its hood propped open, waiting for Orson to spark it back to life. It all looks terribly disordered, to anyone but Orson. Yet even from a distance, in the morning’s first shadows as Orson approaches, he can tell that something’s wrong today. What would look like the usual sprawl of the yard to anyone else looks to Orson like chaos. Parts kicked and scrambled. Tools broken and destroyed. Machines upended. And that’s just outside.
Inside, the workshop’s much worse.
Orson feels a terrible clenching as he flips on the light switch to reveal the damage.
His workshop’s wrecked. Tables overturned. Tools and parts scattered everywhere. Whoever did this even found his cache of spray paint and emptied every can, leaving vandal’s scribblings. Graffiti. Something scrawled that’s not even English. And underfoot, he notices, in among the overturned boxes of nails and screws and bolts and scattered drill bits, is a bunch of playing cards. They definitely don’t belong to Orson; he doesn’t have the attention span to play cards. His scrambled brain can barely remember which suit is which, let alone actual rules.
He stoops to pick up a card. Turns it over. It’s not a playing card.
It’s a trading card. Fresh from the pack. Bubblegum powder still on it. He picks up a few of the others. They’re cards for some movie for kids, with robots in them, scattered all over the floor of his shop.
Orson drops the card. No sense to any of it, he thinks, despairing, as he surveys the damage again. Assessing what he’s lost, he feels an ugly stirring. The kind that usually only tugs at him in the night’s last moments before he falls asleep. Something dark. A rustling in the bottomless chasm of his mind where all his memories used to be.
He fends it off. And does the only sensible thing he can think to do.
He sets out to track down Sheriff Cooper.
Sheriff Cooper will know what to do. Sheriff Cooper will help him. Orson believes in Sheriff Cooper, who’s always been very good to him.
As he’s leaving, Orson notices that a gas can has gone missing from the workshop. What the hell? Given that no one in this town has a car, except for Sheriff Cooper, what in the world would anyone in town want with a can of gas?
Dawes is waiting for Cooper at the police trailer when he arrives just before six, which is an unpleasant surprise for Cooper, since he purposefully showed up fifteen minutes earlier than their meeting time to get a few minutes to collect himself. No dice. She’s already seated in a hardback chair, hands resting on her knees, like someone in a banana republic stationed patiently outside the office of an elusive bureaucrat. She smiles at him pleasantly when he enters, and he smiles back, less pleasantly. Cooper looks around the trailer, groggy, a little hungover, a lot suspicious, and still recalling foggily how that half-drunk bottle on his kitchen table last night got whole-drunk in a hurry.
“You call a meeting for the ass-crack of dawn, Dawes, you’re at least obliged to provide coffee,” he says.
“Commissary’s not open till seven.”
“So what the fuck are we doing awake at this hour?” Cooper halts by his desk to fiddle with a cheap plastic coffee machine, then realizes there are no filters. Or, for that matter, coffee. He takes off his gun belt, coils it on his desk, and slumps into his swivel chair, which wobbles uneasily beneath him.
“A fax message arrived for you,” Dawes says, nodding toward the machine.
Cooper turns in his chair. Sure enough, a long white tongue of shiny fax paper lolls out of the machine. “What time did this arrive?”
“It was here when I got here.”
“Did you read it?” he asks, trying his best to sound casual.
“Of course not. Fax machine is sheriff’s eyes only.”
He nods thoughtfully, as though to acknowledge that she’s spoken some wise old gospel truth that they’d all be well served to remember. Then he rips the scrolled paper clear of the fax machine, turning in the chair to make sure she won’t see it, even though she’s risen from her seat, carrying a thin file folder, and come to hover by his desk. He hunches over the fax. It says, simply, 2 P.M., in handwritten scrawled block letters. He reads it again, then folds it, stands, and feeds it into Abel, the shredder, which gobbles it with a mechanical roar.
“Anything important?” Dawes asks with, to Cooper’s ear, a little too much interest.
“Just a routine ping from Amarillo, checking in on the investigation. I’ll call them this afternoon.” Cooper slumps back into his chair, the springs whining beneath him. “Now tell me about this grand theory of yours. The one that couldn’t wait until a reasonable hour.”
“It’s not really a theory. Not yet, anyway,” she says. “It’s just a name. Gerald Dean.”
“Okay. Gerald Dean. What about him?”
“He drank with Gable, regularly. Real barstool buddies. According to Greta.”
“For this you woke me up at five in the morning?”
“It also turns out he and Gable arrived in Caesura together, in the same batch, in the first year, about six months after the facility opened.”
Cooper has no idea where this is going, but he’s sure of one thing: It’s not leading in any way back to him. He does his best to subsume his relief in a wave of exaggerated irritation. “Sure. Lots of people arrive together, Dawes. They usually come in groups of three or four. That’s how this works.”
“Then there’s this—” Dawes drops the thin file folder on Cooper’s desk.
Cooper opens it, while saying, “Feel free to spoil the surprise.”
“I looked back through the old records. Housing requests, medical records, that sort of thing. Right after he arrived, Dean put in a request to be moved across town. To the north quarter. So he’d be next-door neighbors with Errol Colfax.”
Cooper scans the papers in the folder and thinks, Is this it? Is this really all that Dawes has? “I remember that,” he says. “Dean wanted someplace quieter. The north quarter is where all the shut-ins are: Colfax, William Wayne—you know, the mummies. We had a free bungalow at the time, so I approved the move. So what?” He hands the folder back to Dawes. “I’m still not sure what this has to do with Hubert Gable.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd,” says Dawes, “that Dean requested to move so close to Colfax? Who ends up dead? And now he turns out to be our second victim’s closest drinking buddy?”
“Maybe. But he moved seven years ago. What do you think he was doing all these years
—biding his time?”
Before she can answer, the door to the trailer swings open—it’s Robinson, arriving for his shift. He looks mildly surprised to see Dawes and Cooper already at the office, insofar as his face can register extreme emotions like surprise. “I’m presuming my invitation got lost in the mail,” he says.
“Dawes has a theory,” says Cooper.
“Worth waking with the roosters for?” says Robinson.
“Jury’s still out on that,” Cooper says.
“Well, when you two are done with this little powwow, we’ve got a noise complaint to deal with,” Robinson says. “One of the new arrivals, Vivien King. Lives over by Ginger Van Buren. Says she was up all night.”
“Let me guess,” says Cooper. “Our beloved coydogs.”
“In fine form and full voice last night, apparently.” Robinson shrugs. Then he eyes an open box of pastries on the table. “Remind me when the last delivery from Amarillo was?”
“Last Wednesday,” says Cooper. “New truck’s due tomorrow.”
“So those are a week old?”
“What is it they say about beggars and choosers, Walt?” says Cooper.
Robinson frowns. He’s amassed an impressive collection of frowns over the years, to go with his extensive arsenal of shrugs. These frowns and shrugs, deployed in various combinations, serve him perfectly well for roughly 99 percent of whatever each day might present. He ponders the pastries a moment longer, frowns again, shrugs again, then passes. “So what’s this grand theory?”
“That Hubert Gable and Gerald Dean like to drink together. And Gerald Dean and Errol Colfax used to be neighbors,” says Cooper.
“Sounds open and shut to me,” Robinson says.
Dawes pipes up. “I think it’s at least enough of a connection to justify putting in a formal information request to unseal the files on Colfax, Gable, and Dean.”
The Blinds Page 7