The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Twirling the whiskey.

  Twenty-five thousand dollars, already waiting.

  Sixty restless ghosts, waiting as well.

  Cooper was a good man, or so he liked to believe. There was not much in his previous life to fortify that opinion and, forced to defend it, he’d have scant evidence to present, but he clung to the notion nonetheless. Not a great man—that much he understood; he’d long since given up hope for that and had made his heavy peace with it—but a good man, or good enough. He’d done selfish things, certainly, hurtful things, awful things, made terrible choices, abandoned people who’d offered him love, lied straight to the faces of people who’d offered him trust. There were things buried in his history that he’d do anything to go back and change, but who doesn’t have a few of those? The kind of cold decisions and thoughtless betrayals that had sent his life careening in regrettable directions, before he finally crashed and found himself marooned here, in this town, at this table, with this choice.

  But he’d never done anything like this, he thought. Not kill a man.

  Not even a man like Colfax.

  You can’t stay good after that. If good was a thing you’d ever been.

  Whatever his decision, Cooper wondered how he could possibly continue to live with Colfax in the town, now that he knew the full accounting of who Colfax was and what he’d done and what he was capable of. Cooper wondered how exactly he could let Colfax remain, living side by side with the other residents, as just another happy neighbor. Colfax, it’s true, was a homebody now. Almost meek. Rarely smiled. Kept to his darkened bungalow. Maybe he’s haunted, Cooper thought, and he just doesn’t know by what. That twisted brain, now unburdened of all its worst memories. All its guilt. All its remorse. If ever there was any.

  Yet still haunted by those sixty restless ghosts.

  Cousins. Nieces. By definition, innocents.

  Cooper swirled the whiskey.

  As for the outside world, as far as they were concerned, Kostya Slivko no longer existed. He’d given his testimony. He’d flipped his bosses. Those cases are closed, those files sealed, those sentences passed, those promotions granted. And as for the man himself, he just disappeared. His exploits are now legends. Whispered of. He lives nowhere now.

  Except that he lives here, thought Cooper. A couple of blocks away.

  And all those crimes—

  All those names—

  All those ghosts—

  They’re forgotten.

  Most criminally, by Slivko himself.

  Cooper downed the whiskey.

  He remembers it well, the turning point, at his kitchen table in the light of the single fixture under the stir of the fan blades: The moment that the realization hit him.

  It’s not often in this life that someone offers you $50,000 to do something you already believe to be right.

  And if the price in return was his goodness, that seemed a fair sacrifice. There are other good people in the world, or so he’d heard. He even knew a few, right here in this town, and now he knew how he might help them.

  At which point the decision seemed simple. Because it’s not like the money was for him.

  After that, he just needed a plan.

  That first one was easy, thinks Cooper in hindsight, so easy that he was stupid and sloppy. But he also knew that ultimately there’d be no one to investigate the death except for him. A faked suicide seemed the obvious route. Colfax barely looked up when he entered. Cooper faked the break-in of the gun safe, and the story afterward told itself: Old Errol Colfax, the haunted man, finally got his hands on a pistol and ended it. This surprised exactly no one. Truth be told, there weren’t many people living in the Blinds who hadn’t at least contemplated a similar escape. It’s hard enough to live with what you’ve done. It’s immeasurably harder to live with knowing you’ve done something, but not knowing what exactly it is you did.

  But that’s the nature of the experiment.

  Either way, Colfax ended it, took the coward’s way out, that seemed obvious. And afterward, Cooper simply needed to let the fundamental first rule of the Blinds—the essential truth of its existence—prove itself again to be true. Which is: No one gives a shit. Not outside these fences. Was anyone in Amarillo going to sit up straighter at the news that a piece of human garbage, warehoused in some godforsaken facility, had found a way to put a bullet in his head? Cooper recalled dimly the time when the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer had been murdered in prison by a fellow prisoner, brutally, with an iron bar. The public was not outraged. The public practically cheered. They practically threw the guy who did it a parade.

  So, no, Cooper did not expect the weight of the law to come calling. He went through the motions of an investigation, of course: the break-in, the pistol, and so on. A week later, Ellis Gonzalez up and quit and fled, and for a moment Cooper thought that maybe he could pin it on Ellis, but by then the other $25,000 was deposited and everyone had bought the suicide. Case closed.

  Colfax was easy in hindsight.

  Though it was not without consequence for Cooper.

  For starters: another fax.

  It didn’t come for a couple of months—long enough for Cooper to start believing the Colfax deal was a one-off, engineered by some old nemesis. Long enough for Cooper to start calculating just how much freedom $50,000 could buy.

  Some, but not much. Maybe not enough.

  Then he got another fax.

  This time: Hubert Gable.

  And Gable—well, Gable’s history, chronicled in all its lurid detail on that curling sheet of fax paper, made Colfax look like a choirboy who’d stolen a few coins from the rectory’s money box. Gable’s real name was Perry Garrett. A former professional bodyguard with an amateur taste for call girls and a penchant for sexual pain. Not his, of course.

  Call girls, or whoever else was handy. And disposable.

  His sordid hobbies were apparently later discovered by his employers and discreetly covered up. Until such time, Cooper assumed, that Garrett became expendable or, more likely, found a way to leverage the more mundane but politically enticing transgressions of his employers in exchange for a free pass, a new name, a fresh start, a memory wipe, and a one-way passport to Caesura.

  For Cooper, this decision required decidedly less whiskey-swirling.

  Fifty thousand dollars became one hundred thousand.

  That much closer to his personal fund-raising goal.

  A second suicide wasn’t feasible, of course. Cooper knew that would raise too many questions, maybe invite a raft of psychiatrists to descend on Caesura, concerned about the apparently fragile mental health of the community.

  So no suicide.

  However, the fax offered not just a paycheck, but it suggested a narrative. Colfax’s gun is used to kill Gable. Maybe during a drunken argument. After all, Gable was a friendless grouch who spent most of his time drunk and getting drunker. Anyone might find a reason to plug him out of anger.

  Gerald Dean, aka Lester Vogel, for example.

  The faulty valve.

  The best way to frame him, the fax suggested, was a box of bullets sent to him in the mail, which could be arranged and which Cooper would then conveniently intercept. What Cooper hadn’t counted on is Dawes, the new girl, being so persistent—but even that had an unexpected upside. Dawes beat him to the bullets, but that’s all right, Cooper knows they exist. The stories will still line up. And Dawes, with her notebook and all her fanciful dot-connecting, wound up providing the beginnings of a theory. Something about Colfax and Gable and Dean all being linked, having some outside connection, and Dean stealing the gun, staging Colfax’s suicide, then killing Gable and ending, neatly, with Dean pulling that same stolen gun on Cooper and then being killed in self-defense. The last loose end. A satisfying ending.

  The fax offered him $100,000 for Dean. Whoever they were really wanted Dean dead, apparently.

  Which would bring the grand total to $200,000. And that was more than enough for Cooper�
��s purposes. The purchase of freedom. To start a new life.

  Not for him. For someone who actually deserves it.

  Two people, actually.

  So whether Holliday gives him the information he’s looking for on Fran Adams or not, Cooper knows it’s almost finished. He’s already got Fran halfway convinced to leave the Blinds, take Isaac with her, and find a better life. And while $200,000 can’t buy back your memories or your past life, it can go a long way toward getting you safely set up in a new one. New identities. New papers. A new home, somewhere rural. A place to live that’s safe and far and remote from all this madness. Maybe with a view. Maybe with a yard. Near good schools, and other people. Good people. That doesn’t seem too much to ask, all in all. A life far away from this town and its fences and its befuddled denizens and their unspeakable, buried crimes. If Cooper wasn’t convinced that Isaac needed to leave before—and he was, he definitely was convinced—then the arrival of an animal-burning psychopath like Dietrich has proved more than persuasive enough. Something is unraveling in this town; Cooper feels it. The very experiment itself is coming undone. And Fran and Isaac can’t be here when it does.

  And once they take his money and leave, then Cooper’s done. No more faxes. No more proposals. No more killings. And if the Institute shuts down Caesura, so be it. He would be glad to know he had a hand in closing it down. He’s watched over it for eight years, watched what it does to people, living with a giant hole in the middle of your mind and the knowledge that once you did unspeakable things and you don’t even know what they are. It kills you a little bit, day by day, without killing you. That’s why Colfax’s suicide was so easy to sell. The other residents weren’t suspicious. They were envious.

  If the Institute shuts this place down, Cooper can live knowing he’s made one right choice in his life. Set one thing right, as best he could.

  After all, wouldn’t you kill three murderers to save one child’s life?

  But it is not without consequence for Cooper, he knows that.

  For example: Lester Vogel’s eyes.

  Looking up at Cooper from the other side of the desk. Holding that fax paper. Hands vibrating. Fax paper rattling. His eyes drained once and for all of any hope.

  I wish I didn’t know, he’d whispered, which turned out to be his final words. Clutching the revelations of his past. This accounting of who he really is.

  I wish I didn’t know.

  Cooper understands that sentiment completely.

  He feels that way himself nearly every day.

  21.

  ALONE IN THE POLICE STATION, in the stillness of dawn, Cooper sips his morning coffee. He, along with Robinson, already hefted Gerald Dean’s body and lugged it over to Nurse Breckinridge’s infirmary—she’s making the arrangements right now to have the corpse picked up later today and taken to the nearest town to be cremated. By this time tomorrow, Dean will be ashes. And, if all goes well, Fran will be gone. In the meantime, Cooper’s got paperwork to do. Wrap everything up, file an incident report to the Institute, give them a plausible explanation: How, confronted with Cooper’s theories and the irrefutable evidence of the box of bullets in the mail, Dean confessed that he’d killed Colfax and Gable both, then pulled his 9 mm pistol on Cooper, and that’s when Cooper was forced to shoot him dead.

  Cooper puts the mug down and unfolds the fax from his breast pocket, the one he’s been toting around for a day, the one with Gerald Dean’s real name and mug shot, and he stands and feeds the fax into the shredder.

  Almost over, he thinks.

  Two hundred thousand dollars is plenty. More than enough.

  He’s so lost in this comforting thought that he nearly doesn’t notice when the fax phone starts to ring.

  He stares at the phone. It rings again.

  No one ever calls this number, he thinks.

  Then he answers it.

  Just as he’s lifting the receiver to his ear, Robinson and Dawes come through the door together to start their shift. Cooper raises a finger to hush them and says into the phone: “Cooper here.”

  “—”

  “Of course, I remember you. I was just—”

  “—”

  “As a matter of fact, last night we had a break in the case—”

  “—”

  “Well, I’d sure hate for you to waste your time coming all the way out—”

  “—”

  “Okeydokey. Well, we’re here. We’re always here. So I guess we’ll see you then.”

  Cooper hangs up the phone.

  Robinson asks, “So who was that?”

  “Agent Rigo, the liaison from the Institute who came by on Monday. He says he’s coming out with an investigative team today.”

  “A team? How many people?” says Robinson.

  “Six.”

  “Seriously?” says Robinson. “Well, shit, looks like we finally got someone’s attention.”

  “Apparently, there’s a lot of ‘top-level’ concern about the recent ‘incidents’ in the town,” Cooper says. “His words, not mine.”

  “And it only took three dead bodies and some barbecued coyotes,” says Robinson. “You tell him we got a fresh body on our hands this morning? Not to mention a full confession?”

  “I tried, but he didn’t seem too interested in chatting.”

  Dawes, for her part, just watches the proceedings unfold.

  “As long as they’re making the long trip out here,” says Robinson, “can they talk to those top-level types about bringing some better-quality toilet paper out to us? Something softer than that surplus sandpaper they’ve been sending?”

  Cooper gives a distracted smile, but keeps staring at the fax phone. Like it might jump to life again. Offer up another surprise.

  Almost done. Almost over.

  Well, be patient, Cooper thinks. You’ve got a story. Stick to it.

  Then he says abruptly to Robinson and Dawes: “He said they’d be here in an hour, so we better get busy putting out the welcome mat.”

  22.

  THIS TIME, Rigo arrives bright and early, in a black SUV that looks, in the distance, like a hearse. It barrels ahead on the private approach in a convoy with a second SUV, sleek and identical. As they rumble up, Cooper rolls open the gate and then motions them forward, and the trucks enter and curl to a halt. The agents disembark, three from one car, three from the other, all of them dressed in black suits, like pallbearers, waiting for the hearse to unload.

  Rigo steps out from the backseat of the first truck and stretches in the sun, smiling and shaking off the long drive. Beside him, a woman strides out from the shadow of the first SUV: petite, all business, maybe five feet in heels, and dressed in a black pantsuit. Her white blouse crisp and open at the neck, her black hair pulled back harshly in a ponytail. The other four agents are uniformly beefy and inexpressive in a way that identifies them as supplementary muscle. They array in a loose spread pattern and survey the scene like soldiers in an occupying army.

  Cooper raises a hand in greeting to the party.

  “Sheriff Cooper,” says Rigo. “Anything notable happen in my absence?” He steps forward and claps Cooper on the shoulder like they’re old buddies, then gestures back toward the woman behind him. “This is my partner, Agent Iris Santayana.” She nods. Doesn’t move. Says nothing.

  “Pleased to meet you,” says Cooper, stepping forward. “I’m Calvin Cooper. I’m the sheriff of this town. Sort of.” He starts to offer a handshake but aborts at the last minute, thus saving himself the humiliation of holding his hand out in the air while she ignores it. Instead he shoves the hand into his pants pocket, like something he’s ashamed of.

  Rigo doesn’t bother to introduce the other agents individually—he just waves in their direction and calls them “the team.” Rigo and Santayana are the ringleaders, clearly, and, standing together, one of them seems like a vigilant master and the other like an exotic, expensive pet, though it’s impossible for Cooper to tell which one is which. He introduces
them to Robinson and Dawes, who’ve been lingering on the periphery like shy children. “My deputies are at your disposal, as am I, of course,” says Cooper.

  “We’d just like to get settled in,” says Rigo. “And then get started.”

  “And what exactly are you here to do?” says Cooper.

  “We’re here to find some fucking answers,” says Rigo.

  Cooper lets this rebuke linger in the air, then turns to address everyone. “All right then—let’s get you set up in some of our finest lodging. Then I can give you the grand tour.” He even claps his hands together feebly, feeling like a yokel innkeeper under the scrutinizing eye of city slickers who’ve just arrived and can’t believe that this backwater shithole is where they’re going to have to spend the night.

  Cooper arranges for the agents to stay in a single empty bungalow. They’ve brought their own bedding, military cots, and Rigo insists they bunk together.

  “We’ll need an operations center, too,” Rigo says.

  “You can use our intake trailer,” says Cooper. “It’s just off the main drag.”

  As the three of them, Cooper, Rigo, and Santayana, thread their way straight down the main street, they leave the other agents behind to unload their party’s luggage, which seems to consist of an endless supply of identical large black and very heavy suitcases. Leading the party, Cooper gestures toward the strip of buildings ahead of them. “So, this is the town, pretty much,” he says. “We’ve got a commissary, stocks our sundries and whatnot. We’ve got a library for books and such. There’s a small medical center for emergencies, and there’s a gym, though it’s not much to look at. Basically a bunch of free weights, if you need to blow off steam.” As they pass the commissary, townsfolk are already loitering and gawking at the side of the street, regarding this advancing trio in agitated silence. Cooper waves and offers a reassuring “Morning, folks!”—then says to Rigo in a lower voice, “We don’t get many visitors, as you know.”