A Cold Copper Moon (The Cooper Series Book 3)

by Richard Conrath

  Chapter One Hundred Five

  Port Columbus

  Saturday Night, 9:05 p.m.

  I tried calling Jillie again as the plane touched down at Port Columbus. No answer.

  “Still not answering?” said Louise.

  “Nope,” I said, my concern rising. “I don’t get it.”

  Louise started to rise to get our bags when the pilot said, “Please stay seated and keep your seat belt on until we come to a full stop.” She did.

  “And when you deplane, please go easy down those steps,” he cautioned.

  The pilot turned and smiled as we began to disembark. “Take care.”

  I nodded and thanked him. He smiled. “Thank Secretary Wong. I hope all goes well.” Then, “Your car is here,” he continued, pointing at a black SUV that had just pulled up at the bottom of the airstair.

  The driver was out of the car as Richie and Louise stepped onto the tarmac, taking their bags and loading them into the cargo space.

  “I’ll need to drive you off the airfield,” he said, taking my bag and loading it with the others. “After that, it’s yours,” he continued as I opened the door to the passenger side.

  We ducked around several large commercial planes taxiing to take off as we headed for the exit.

  “You do this often?” I said.

  “More than I would like,” he replied, shaking his head. “Those boys are bigger than me.”

  In fewer minutes than you can count to fifty we are off the airfield and I was behind the wheel of the black Accord SUV. Louise was in the front seat.

  “I’ll call the cops,” she said.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I want to see Jillie and Maxie first. I know Henry. He’s not going any-fucking-where,” I added, wanting to handle this one myself.

  I checked my cell. It was 9:20 and no messages from Jillie.

  It was cold. No snow falling now. No clouds. A sky full of stars. Crisp and clear. And the moon: I looked for signs of copper along its edges, but there were none. It was full and huge, and it lit up the fields, now long past harvest time, that surround Columbus, Ohio.

  A sign outside the airport advertising a hotel sported a gauge that read 29 degrees—unusual for this time of year, even in Ohio. I took the exit toward I-270 South, dug the phone out of my jacket, and hit favorites for Jillie’s phone number.

  “You oughta let me drive if you’re gonna use your cell,” Louise cautioned. She was watching me fool with the phone and drive with my knees. She reached for the cell. I handed it to her. She put it on speaker and held it up so I could hear: “The party you have called is not available. Please leave a message at the beep.”

  “Want me to call the cops?” Louise said again. I shook my head.

  Richie grunted in the back. “Fuckin’ cops. What are they gonna do?”

  It’s seventy miles from Port Columbus to Concord College, a little over an hour’s drive. I took the I-70 exit off I-270 toward Zanesville and hit darkness almost immediately: no lights, anywhere. It’s all farmland stretching from central Ohio through a vast belt that encompasses most of Indiana, Illinois, southern Iowa, northern Missouri, and Kansas, where the farms turn into mountains in Colorado and California. It’s over a thousand miles of corn and wheat and potatoes. And if you would drive it, you would see irrigation machines stretching for miles and throwing water like cannons over potato crops, and you would see barns sitting far back in the fields and farm houses barely visible from the road, and you would see silos, the high rises of rural America, and long lines of telephone poles that link the people living in those vast farmlands of the Midwest to civilization.

  Snow began to fall again. A light snow. Disappearing on the road as quickly as it hit. I worried about the silence from Jillie, and it was accentuated by the silence of the night, by the silence of Richie, fooling with his gun in the back seat, by the silence of Louise who was staring out the passenger window, out at the Great Midwest. I reached for the phone again. But Louise picked it up for me and hit the speed button.

  Nothing, her eyes said, and I saw sadness leaking there, like she was worried also. I knew she wanted to call the cops, but they would be the same guys who screwed up Maxie’s case eight years ago when someone said they thought they saw Maxie get into a car—a black one—and the detective that caught the case said there was not enough detail to follow up, no more witnesses, no tag number, and besides, the witness, a local guy, whom everyone saw as the town clown, I mean look at him—who would really believe him? And I thought, I would now. Angry. Now after eight years, it looks like the clown knew what he was talking about.

  In twenty more minutes we were passing through Zanesville, the only town in America to boast a Y Bridge.

  About twenty miles past Zanesville, we exited the freeway at US Route 40, otherwise known as the West Pike (west of Muskingum, that is) and we were only a few miles from the city limits of Muskingum, Ohio, and from my old house which would be on our left, just before the college, just before Anthony’s Antique Shop, just before the Post Office, and just before the cemetery. Just a few miles away from seeing my son who had been missing for eight years. So I hurried the car, through the snow that was now swirling on the road like in a dust storm, and through the darkness of Route 40, little used now that the interstate highway had been built. Now I was only minutes from the center of town. Streetlights began to appear through the snow, through the darkness, and I was praying...

  And then I saw it. My old house. Just ahead. On the left. I slowed down and reached for the phone.

  Chapter One Hundred Six

  The House on US 40

  Some windows were lit up. I looked for shadows of someone passing through. No sign of life. Where was she?

  I was going to call again when Louise stopped me.

  “She’s not there,” she said, “or...”

  “She’s in trouble.”

  The street was deserted except for two cars parked east of the house, near Anthony’s Antique Shop. Two cars. One parked in front of the other. Otherwise the street was deserted. And I drove very slowly.

  “I don’t like it,” I said, and slowed down as I passed an old, two-story that had been moved by the owner from a farm a few miles outside of town to the lot next to my house—I should say what used to be my house. It cost him as much to move it as it did to purchase it. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

  I paused at my drive. It was a steep climb from the road to the house, made even more difficult now by ice and a thin cover of snow. The ice was black and threw off a reflection from a streetlamp that rose above the road about twenty feet away. Trees played with the light, casting shadows that floated over the street as the wind caught their branches.

  “You sure?” said Louise, studying the icy drive.

  I took the hill quickly, sliding only at the very top and coming to a halt in front of the porch, next to the garage, an unattached building about ten feet from the house. I sat idling for a few moments, staring at the porch, trying to be calm, trying to decide what to do, and you might ask why not jump out, bang on the door, and grab Maxie, who should be waiting there—for me—inside the house, after eight years, eight long years, the boy whose disappearance had turned our lives inside out and upside down, the boy whom I had nightmares about almost every night since he disappeared, who I thought was dead, about whom I had the most horrendous thoughts—like how did he die? Was he abused? Was he was sold to some pedophile? And don’t think it doesn’t happen every day—my heart beating hard as I thought about it.

  And so I sit in the car, idling, and you wonder why and I tell you, it’s a father’s instinct—an inner sense a parent has of danger. I’ve had it before—and that’s the feeling I have now—that there is danger here—inside the house. And the 100 billion neurons in my brain that control my thoughts, and my consciousness, and my planning, and my decisions about what to do, and my blood pressure—now at an all-time high—all of those neurons are pouring messages into my unconscious about how to process t
he unanswered phone calls, the nervousness in Maxie’s voice, the fact that Henry had just been there, the oddness of the two cars on the street, the quiet of the house now, sitting in my lights like a giant sleeping thing that feels dangerous—and that’s why I don’t go rushing up to the door, pound on it, and look for Maxie, the son whom I ache so much to take into my arms...

  Then, suddenly, the lights inside the house went out.

  Chapter One Hundred Seven

  Henry vs. Jillie

  Late Saturday Night, December 10

  Charlie had lost a lot of blood. It was a shoulder wound. The impact had knocked him flat on his back and he had dropped the shotgun immediately. The Asp, who had come in through the back door, picked up the Mossberg, ignoring Charley—like he wasn’t there—or like he didn’t matter, which was worse. The room smelled of gunpowder. The odor of fresh blood already in the air, like the smell of iron. Jillie was kneeling down next to Charlie, checking the wound. She peeled away his jacket, its front filling up with blood. Charley moaned as she worked.

  “Easy now,” she urged, smoothing his forehead as a mother would. There was blood on her hands, and it followed her touch to his brow, and then to his face.

  Jillie looked back at Henry. “We need to get him to a hospital.”

  Henry ignored her. And the man who was with him, the one Maxie called the Asp, walked over to Maxie and to Joey, who was standing as still as an ice carving at a winter show and grabbed them both by the arm, neither resisting, their eyes locked on the Asp, and he said, “What are we going to do with this kid?” referring to Joey, pushing him toward Henry.

  “Lock him in the guest bedroom closet. Key’s in the door.”

  “My husband will be here,” said Jillie, warning him and watching Asp drag Joey up the stairs, the kid kicking, Asp stopping mid-stairs, getting a handhold on Joey’s belt, dragging him easily the rest of the way up the stairs, Joey choking and kicking and trying to scream but...

  “Don’t hurt him,” Jillie pleaded with Henry, and she wondered who this man was who had only hours before dropped her off at her home after a Chagrin Falls holiday.

  Henry smiled. “Your husband?” pausing, “Cooper?” like it was some kind of joke. And he thought for a while. “We won’t be here, Jillian, when he comes,” he replied, almost distractedly, as he looked out the window, through the dark. And out of that dark, two beams of light swung across the front, as a car accelerated up the steep incline of the drive. Its lights swept over the porch as it swung toward the house and parked. And then it was quiet except for the low murmuring of the car’s engine, and the lights stayed on, illuminating the porch. Henry threw an arm in front of his face with a damn it, then turned, and he and the Asp quickly doused the lights in the living room of the house on US 40 and stared through the front window at the car that was sitting there, its exhaust pushing clouds of white into the air and its lights, like two large eyes, staring back at them.

  Chapter One Hundred Eight

  Inside the House on US 40

  Jillie watched Henry as he studied the lights in the drive outside, wondering if it was Cooper but not daring to say anything. Instead she focused on Charley.

  “He’s going to bleed to death if we don’t get a doctor, Henry,” Jillie warned, hoping to call on the person she thought she was with for the last few days.

  Henry ignored her, watching the car pull back into the shadows of the garage, watching the driver kill the lights. And now the entire place was in darkness except for the light from streetlamps that danced with the shadows thrown by the naked trees and played around telephone poles and power lines that crossed the empty field between the house and college, through which Cooper had run when he heard about Maxie’s disappearance. And the macabre scene played itself out over a hill behind the house.

  “Do you want me to circle around behind the car?” whispered the Asp, leaning into the window with Henry.

  Henry nodded and Jillie heard. A whisper travels further than a normal voice. But there was nothing she could think of to do. Maxie was now on the floor beside her, tearing off strips of cloth from his own clothes to help stem the blood from Charley’s wound.

  “We need to get out of here,” she whispered to Maxie.

  Henry turned around, and raised a finger to his mouth, then turned back to the window. “There’s a gun under the bed upstairs,” she said in as hushed tones as she could muster. “We need to get it.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom, sir,” Maxie said. He had never called him by name, never by anything else but ’sir’, for to Maxie he was just the Man. He existed for Maxie without a name, with no history, with no friends—that he knew of—and no girlfriend in his life—except for his mother it seemed. And his patients. He wondered if he really had any patients at all.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said again.

  Henry turned. “So? Go!” and then he was back at the window. “Come right back,” he added, his back to Maxie. “Your mother’s here,” his voice rising in a warning.

  The Asp had already disappeared into the dark. Jillie heard the creak of the floorboards in the dining room and then in the kitchen as he made his way out of the house. She wished she could warn Cooper.

  Chapter One Hundred Nine

  The Plan

  “Fuck is that about?” said Richie, leaning over the front seat and sticking his head between Louise and me. We all stared at the front porch that was now lit only by the Honda’s headlamps.

  “This is not good,” I said, staring into the front window, now completely dark. “Those cars on the street...I wonder...”

  There was not a movement from inside the house. I watched carefully for the slightest stir of a curtain, for a face in the glass, for anything.

  “Someone’s there!” said Louise, excited and pointing to the window. She was trying to keep her voice low. It came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “Maybe two somebodies,” said Richie, echoing Louise’s ragged whisper.

  I saw them also. Faint outlines against the glass. Like spirits playing with us.

  I backed into shadows about twenty-five feet from the porch and out of the way of the light from the highway.

  Two cars in the street, I thought. Someone is in there with Henry.

  “Okay. We need to call the locals,” whispered Louise, placing her hand on my knee, trying to persuade.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I want to talk with Henry myself—first.”

  “That’s a mistake, Coop,” cautioned Louise. We need to…”

  And just then there was movement in the brief space that separated the house from the garage. “Did you see that?” I said.

  “I got this,” Richie replied, and began to open the car door.

  “Wait!” I whispered harshly as the interior lights came on. He quickly eased the door shut, killing the light.

  Louise pulled the covers off the lights and disabled them.

  Chapter One Hundred Ten

  Maxie

  Maxie headed upstairs for the guest bedroom. He was surprised that the Man had allowed him to go. “Better hurry back, boy,” Henry warned from downstairs. And Maxie hurried all right, hurried to the closet where Joey was, and he found the key still in the door, and he unlocked it, and out came Joey. Thanks dude, that man’s crazy! And Maxie told Joey about the gun...

  “Time’s up!” The voice from downstairs again. The two boys, scrambling like crazy for the gun under the bed, found it—a black case, small, with clips on the side, which Maxie quickly snapped open. Inside was the gun, black, the magazine next to it. He had seen the gun before. His dad had shown it to him and told him never to touch it, and here it was the same gun, so he picked it up and Joey said, Cooooool dude, and reached for it, turning it in his hands like he was lucky to be handling it...

  “I’m coming up, Maxie,” called Henry and Maxie ran to the bathroom, flushed the toilet and yelled he was coming. Joey handed him the gun as he came out. Maxie quickly jammed the magazine into t
he gun, tucked it in his pants, under his shirt, and hurried back down the stairs. Joey watched from the bedroom door.

  Chapter One Hundred Eleven

  The Asp

  Richie was out of the car and lost in darkness quickly.

  “I should help,” said Louise. “He’s going to need it.”

  I nodded. “I’m going into the house.”

  “You think that’s smart?” she warned. “You have no idea who’s in there.”

  “Jillie and Maxie are in there.”

  “Right.” We both exited the car quietly.

  “Stay away from Richie. He might shoot you,” I whispered as she slid away into the darkness.

  We went in opposite directions. Louise headed toward the opening between the garage and the house, I headed left toward the street, trying to stay in the shadows. My plan was to circle the house and come in through the coal-cellar that faced US 40. I retreated behind the car toward a field that was completely dark that separated my house from the college. The embankment was snow covered so I decided to slide down on my rear rather than risk falling.

  I crept below the embankment where I would be concealed from anyone watching from the front window. From a side window...well that would be a problem. In a few minutes I was climbing back up the embankment and standing over double doors whose base met at ground level and ran up at a forty-five-degree angle to the side of the house. They were old-fashioned cellar doors installed in homes built in the 20s and 30s (mostly rural) that had coal chutes and dumbwaiters and servants’ quarters. The doors were made of hardwood and rested on a concrete structure that rose gradually from ground level toward the house, striking it about four feet from ground level.