Текст книги "Collecting Cooper"
Автор книги: Paul Cleave
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
chapter forty-eight
The cell door is open and the air coming in is slightly cooler than that already in the room. In the doorway is Adrian, he’s holding a gun and a Taser, and standing next to Cooper is Cooper’s mother. Cooper can see the corridor behind Adrian and this isn’t Sunnyview or Eastlake, he doesn’t know where in the hell this is.
“What is he talking about?” his mother asks him.
He turns toward her. There is enough artificial light coming from the corridor behind Adrian to see her clearly. Wherever they are, they have power. This could be a house. In town somewhere? No way of knowing.
“I don’t know,” Cooper answers, and his mother, aside from looking scared, is suddenly looking every one of her seventy-nine years, plus some. For the last few years she has had a look on her face as if she’s been sucking on a lemon, now she looks like that entire lemon has been jammed into her mouth. Her gray hair is a tangled mess, and even if Adrian Tasered her he’s still surprised he got her out of the house without her clawing her way back in for a comb and lipstick. She’s wearing a nightgown that has all the shape of a rectangle that he gave her two years ago for Christmas because he found it on sale for ten bucks. “You can’t listen to anything he says. He’s completely crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” Adrian says. “Look, look at the blood on him. He’s a killer.”
“I’m not a killer,” Cooper says. Two minutes ago his mother was led into his cell at gunpoint and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except stand at the back and watch unless he wanted to get shot. She came running toward him and almost rolled both of her ankles on the padded floor and he caught her before she fell. He hugged her hard, he didn’t want her being here but he was grateful to see her in a way, which made him feel immediately guilty, and she was grateful to see him too, to see he was still alive. Somehow Adrian has upgraded from a Taser to a gun. A Taser wasn’t great against two people, but a gun was. A gun could be good up against ten people if none of them had guns either. So Cooper stood back as the cell door was opened and in came his mother. He loves his mother but having her here has complicated things. A lot.
“Why continue to lie? You don’t need to anymore,” Adrian says. “This is your chance to unburden yourself of all that hate, that hate that made you go and kill other people. Seven now.”
Two, Cooper thinks, and even then it was really only one. But it will certainly be two once he gets out of this cell. Damn it, the sick fuck is even wearing some of his dad’s clothes, clothes that his mum should have thrown out nearly forty years ago when he walked out on them, but for some reason she kept. “I’m not a killer.”
“Nice people don’t raise serial killers,” Adrian says, looking at Cooper’s mother. “So why care about trying to keep her happy by lying? She isn’t a nice person.”
“Young man, you really need some serious help,” his mother says, and it’s the same tone she used to use on Cooper when he was a young boy and he wouldn’t finish his dinner or mow the lawn or was mean to his sister. The same tone she used on him when he stole the car. He’s half expecting her to make Adrian write a letter to his future self. “I don’t know what game you’re playing at here, but somebody is going to get seriously hurt.”
“I can prove your son’s a killer,” Adrian says.
“That’s bullshit,” Cooper says. “Don’t listen to him.”
“He was driving girls out to Sunnyview. It’s a closed down mental hospital and it’s abandoned, and he’d keep them there for . . .”
“You’re crazy,” Cooper says to him, cutting him off. “Don’t listen to him, Mum. He’s an escaped mental patient. I used to interview him a few years ago for my book. He killed his family with an ax. He bit off their fingers and used them to draw pictures on the walls.”
“Oh my God, that’s awful!” his mother says.
“Wh . . . what? I did no such thing,” Adrian shouts. “Tell her, tell her the truth!”
“The police found him wearing a dress.”
“You’re lying!”
“It was his sister’s dress and it was too small for him but he wore it anyway.”
“You poor boy,” his mother says to Adrian, “what kind of mother did you have to have raised you so wrong?”
“It wasn’t their fault,” Adrian says. He moves the gun from Cooper’s mother back to Cooper, and Cooper doesn’t like the look of his shaking hand.
“You had more than one?” she asks.
“I only killed one of them,” Adrian says, yelling now, and Cooper puts his arm in front of his mother and steps slightly in front of her. “The other one . . . the other one died naturally,” he says, “and I never ate any fingers or wore a dress! I would never do that!”
“I want you to let her go,” Cooper says.
“Are you sure? Is that really what you want? For your mother to be free to tell the world what kind of man you really are?”
It’s a good point, and one that he’s been thinking about since Adrian first threatened to bring her back here.
“I helped you,” his mother says. “I bandaged up your leg and this is how you repay us? You’re so rude and so ill-mannered. If I were your mother I’d be ashamed right now.”
“Mum,” Cooper says, and gives her a look that suggests it’s time she shuts up.
“Don’t you look at me like that, Cooper. I’ll speak my mind.”
She’s going to get them both killed.
“I knew she was a nasty lady,” Adrian says. “It’s just like the books said. Think of what she’ll tell everybody if I let her go. She may not believe me, but the police will listen to her, they’ll figure things out, they’ll know I’m not lying.”
“Let her go,” Cooper says, only he doesn’t sound convincing and he’s sure his mother will hear it in his voice, and she does.
“Cooper? Is any of what he’s saying true?” she asks, stepping back in front of him and turning to look him in the eyes.
“Of course not,” he says.
“All of it,” Adrian says.
“Shut up, young man,” his mother says, throwing Adrian a glare before turning back to Cooper. “Tell me you haven’t hurt anybody,” she says.
“He’s mad,” Cooper says. “I swear to you he’s mad and he’s making it all up.”
“Promise me. Promise me you haven’t hurt anybody,” she says, and it sounds like she’s telling him off.
“Look at all the blood on his clothes,” Adrian says, and he sounds desperate to convince her. “Ask him how it got there!”
“I was trying to help somebody,” Cooper says. “There was a girl. Adrian stabbed her. I tried to save her, but I couldn’t,” he says, and suddenly he feels like a kid lying to his mother, wanting nothing more than for her to believe him, and if she does, what then? How can he convince her not to tell the police that Adrian kept calling him a serial killer?
He doesn’t think he can. His mother is nearly eighty—and eighty-year-old women say a lot of random shit all the time, and some of that is going to stick somewhere. There must be a way he can walk out of here with her, he can play the part of the victim and the hero assuming the photos haven’t been found.
“She bled out all over me and it was awful,” he says, “really awful. I tried so hard to save her but . . . but I couldn’t,” he says.
His mother takes his hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she tells him.
“He told me where the dead girl was,” Adrian says. “How did he know? That’s what the police are going to ask!”
“What dead girl is he talking about?” his mother asks. “The one you tried to save?”
“A different one,” Cooper says. “He’s killed many.”
“What about the thumb? He cuts people’s thumbs off and collects them in jars! I’ve seen it!”
“You’re the one who cuts them off,” Cooper says.
Adrian raises the gun, and Cooper steps further around in front of his mother. It could all end right now. Then Adrian smiles. “I understand why you’re saying these things,” Adrian says. “It’s because you’re scared.”
“It’s going to be okay,” his mother whispers, her hand tight in his.
“Don’t cry,” she tells him, and he wasn’t aware that he was. He reaches up and wipes at his eyes. “You’ll get us out of here,” she tells him.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her.
“It’s not your fault we’re here,” she says. “You can’t be responsible for others, especially for a young man badly deranged.”
“I’m not deranged,” Adrian says. “Tell her, Cooper, tell her about the girl I found that you kidnapped. Tell her!”
“What girl?” Cooper asks, knowing that Adrian must have found Emma.
“The girl you left at Sunnyview. You were going to kill her.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Cooper asks.
“I’ll show her to you,” Adrian says, “to both of you. I have her tied up.”
“You have a girl here you kidnapped?” Cooper’s mother asks, and she’s asking Adrian.
“I saved her.”
“You saved a girl who you have tied up. Are you planning on hurting her?” she asks.
“You don’t understand,” Adrian says.
“Because you never make sense,” Cooper says to him.
“You’re scared of her,” Adrian says. “You’ve always been scared of her because she’s dominated you your entire life. It’s what you wrote about in your book. It’s what they all write, all the people who know stuff about serial killers. It’s why she’s here. And you’re lying. I never killed my family. Never had a sister whose dress I never wore.”
“Let us go, please, please, I’m begging you,” Mrs. Riley says.
“I can’t. He’s too valuable.” He looks back up at Cooper. “Wait here,” he says, and he closes the door and disappears.
“Thank God you’re okay,” his mother says, and embraces him.
“I’m going to get us out of here,” he tells her. “I promise,” he says, and all he has to do is ask her not to go to the police until he’s found out whether or not they know he’s a killer.
“He’s back,” Cooper says, hearing the footsteps outside the door. The door opens outward and Adrian is back, the gun still in his hand, no chance of grabbing it.
“I’m doing this to help you,” Adrian says.
“Doing what?” Cooper asks.
“This,” he says, and he lifts the bottom of the shirt and clipped to his belt is a small Walkman. Adrian presses play, and Cooper can hear his voice coming back at him, Adrian’s voice too, and in that moment his mother’s fate is set. At seventy-nine years old, she has had her life. He has to cling to that, and he likes to think she would sacrifice herself to save him. That’s the kind of woman she is. He loves her. He just loves his freedom more.
chapter forty-nine
I’ve gotten a little more used to the roads now and only make two wrong turns leaving Grover Hills. I pull over at one point and fiddle with the unmarked patrol car’s laptop computer, dirt from the road slowly drifting by as I look up the address I want, and when I have it I turn up the volume on the police band and listen in to the reports coming from different parts of the city. Neighbors of Cooper Riley’s mother have described Adrian Loaner and Emma Green’s car as being seen in the driveway. It was one of the neighbors who called the police when he saw her being put into the trunk of the car. Bloody clothes have been left at the scene, and bandaging and medical tape and bloody rags were left on the dining room table. Adrian went there and forced Mrs. Riley to help him. More information comes in as I drive. An empty grave has been found out at Sunnyview, most likely the location where Jane Tyrone was buried. Fingerprints found inside one of the padded cells has matched those taken from the hairbrush from Emma Green’s flat. The background images in the photos Cooper took match those of one of Sunnyview’s padded rooms. Corpse dogs are running the grounds while they wait for ground-penetrating radar to arrive.
When I get into town I get caught up in a traffic jam. It’s almost eleven o’clock and hundreds of teenage drag racers with nothing better to do are out in their cars, cruising the four avenues surrounding the central city, proving to their friends and other drivers that they have a volcano of testosterone just waiting to be released, proving a point to the council and government that even though cruising in packs in their modified cars is now illegal they just don’t care, and proving to me that teenagers with this dickhead mentality are nothing more than sheep in their desperation to feel accepted. I listen to the police channel in the detective’s car, learning that there’s an estimated fifteen hundred drag racers circling the streets. Neon lights line the bottom of some cars, bright paint works, lots of chrome, and big mufflers, intersections are blocked and the police are just too busy with other things to care. Passengers in the car in front of me turn to give me the finger. I stare at them thinking about the man who killed my daughter, and how there’s a lot of room out in that forest for more graves. The line of traffic passes a parked car that’s been set on fire. I can see the lights from fire engines about four blocks away unable to get any closer. I manage to turn left onto a side street about a minute later and get clear of it all.
I drive out toward Brighton where the houses are a little more run-down and where there are fewer people to care. This part of the suburb on the edge of the beach is in need of one half-decent tidal wave to clean it up. I come to a stop outside the address I looked up, it’s a small worn-down house that can’t have many more than a couple of rooms, the kind of place where you’re being screwed if the landlord is charging you anything more than two figures a week. The lights are on inside, which means I won’t be waking anybody, but when I knock nobody answers. I knock a few more times and give it another minute before walking around the house, looking in the windows.
Jesse Cartman is sitting in the living room staring at a TV set that is switched off. He’s completely naked except for a photo album lying on his lap, and two cocktail umbrellas lying on his stomach. His eyes are wide open and unblinking. I tap on the window and he looks over at me. He stands up slowly and the album slides off and hits the floor and he comes to the window close enough for parts of his body to press against it. The cocktail umbrellas have stuck to the sweat and gotten tangled in the hairs on his belly.
“Detective,” he says, the word coming out so slowly it’s like he’s speaking underwater.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
“Detective,” he repeats, just as slowly.
I make my way to the back door. It’s locked but doesn’t hold up to much of a kick. I figure the landlord won’t notice the busted doorjamb the same way he hasn’t noticed the building getting ready to fall over. The house smells of cat piss but I don’t see any cats. Cartman is still standing in the living room facing the window staring out at the overgrown garden.
“Hey, Jesse,” I say, and he doesn’t turn around. “You forget to take your meds?”
“My meds,” he says, still staring outside.
“Where are they?”
He doesn’t answer. The house is small enough to find the bathroom in about four seconds. The floor is tiled with mold growing in the grouting. The bathroom mirror is cracked and the glass is pitted. I open the cabinet and find a couple of containers of pills. I read the labels and have no idea what they are.
Back in the living room he’s still facing the window. He’s so close to it there’s no room to see his reflection around him. “You need to take some of these,” I say.
“I’m hungry.”
“Come on, Jesse, it’ll help.”
“I don’t want help. I just want to forget.”
“I need your help, Jesse.”
He doesn’t answer. I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder and he slams his head forward into the window. It doesn’t break and he bounces back. This is not the same man I spoke to earlier today. That man wanted to take his medication to get better. That man was reminded about things and this is the man who can’t remember them. I lead him back to his chair expecting him to resist but he doesn’t.
“Listen, Jesse, it’s very important you listen to me.”
“I’m still hungry,” he says. There is a bump forming on his forehead that he doesn’t seem concerned with. I shake out a couple of pills and try handing them to him but he won’t take them. He doesn’t even look at them or seem to know they’re there. I’m not even sure that he knows I’m here. There’s a large bite impression on the inside of his arm that no doubt lines up perfectly with this teeth. He’s hungrier than I thought.
“I need you to tell me about the Twins.”
“She was so beautiful,” he says. “So innocent. I just had to taste her. Had to. It wasn’t up to me, but it kept saying to do it, over and over at night when I was lying in bed he’d tell me and so I did, it was the only way to shut him up. He lived inside of me, this monster with no name.”
I look at the photo album. He’s talking about his sister. The picture of them staring up at me is nothing like the last time I saw him and his sister together.
“So much blood,” he says, “and I hate . . .” He stops talking. Just in midsentence he stops and he closes his eyes and starts slowly rocking back and forth, just little movements at first, increasing into bigger ones until he tips out of the chair and sprawls on the floor facedown. I jump onto his back and pull his head up and open his mouth and jam a couple of pills in there and hold his mouth closed and pinch his nose shut and he doesn’t resist. He swallows the pills.
I sit him back in his chair and he stares ahead like nothing happened.
“The Twins,” I say. “Were they actual twins?”
“She tasted sweet,” he says. “Like candy.”
Somehow I don’t think she did. “Jesse, listen to me, think about Grover Hills.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No Grover Hills.”
“There were two orderlies there.”
“The Twins,” he says.
“Were they brothers?”
“They were twins.”
“Do you know their names?”
“Buttons knows.”
“What?”
“Buttons,” he says, and he stabs his finger into his forearm. “Buttons was there too.”
“Buttons is a cat?”
“Not a cat,” he says. “Buttons,” he adds, then holds his fingers up to his mouth and pretends he’s smoking a cigarette before stabbing it into his arm. A moment later he tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and falls asleep.
chapter fifty
Adrian can’t sleep.
One reason is his leg. The bandage has gotten bloody because the wound beneath it keeps itching and he can’t stop scratching at it. He keeps digging his fingernails into the itch trying to find relief only it doesn’t work. Cooper’s mother told him he’d need to get stitches, but he had stitches all those years ago when he was badly beaten and pissed on and he didn’t like them then and can’t see any reason why that will have changed.
Another reason he can’t sleep is he can’t switch off his mind. He never did find the glue, even though he is absolutely sure he took it from the pocket of his last pants and put it into the pocket of the ones he took from Cooper’s mum’s place, but the problem is the more he thinks about it, the less certain he becomes, the more his memory of the event starts to change. He can remember setting it on the bed with his old clothes when he emptied the pockets, but nothing after that.
He thinks about Theodore Tate and how he could easily have lost his life tonight if Tate didn’t have a bandage around his gun hand. That’s what slowed Tate down, he’s sure of it. He thinks about the Twins, he thinks about the people he met at the halfway house, he thinks about his mother and he thinks about his other mother. He can’t stop thinking of people and it’s keeping him awake. He thinks about the look on Cooper’s mother’s face as he played the tape. He only had to play a few seconds of it before closing the door, knowing what would happen next, but she deserved it. She was a bad mother. Bad mothers deserved what they got.
The bed isn’t comfortable. One of the Twins—he isn’t sure which one—slept on this bed, and that’s another picture he can’t get out of his head, a man who treated him so badly would come here at night and roll in these sheets, his skin flaking into the creases of the bed, into the folds of the pillowcase, and now it’s sticking to his own body, making him itch.
In the end it all becomes too much for him. The window is open and the curtains are moving slightly on the breeze, brushing against the windowsills. He turns on the light. His pajama bottoms are soaked in sweat and there is blood on the right-hand side. He tugs them off. The bandage has gotten loose and saggy. It’s across his thigh, about equal distance between his knee and hip. He holds on to it as he walks outside so it doesn’t slip down his leg. He doesn’t know what the temperature is, but it’s still warm. He knows it’s after midnight but not by much. Much warmer than usual for this time of night he suspects—not that he’s normally outside at this time of night. Back at the Grove he was locked in his room, which was always hard if you needed to use the bathroom, because you had to wait. At the halfway house the only reason you’d step out the doors after dark was if you wanted to commit a crime or be a victim of one.
He lowers the bandage. He scratches at his leg. More blood and more pain and something yellow oozes out, but relief from the itch for those few seconds as his fingers scrape over it. He could try to get Cooper’s mother to help him again, but he’s pretty sure she isn’t going to want to do that no matter how hard he tries. Anyway, he’s angry at her for not believing him. Her son was the one covered in blood, he was the one who put the knife into that girl, and yet he looks like the good guy. It annoys him. He didn’t think Cooper would do that to him. They were meant to be friends, weren’t they?
He wishes he could work on the wound himself. It needs to be cleaned, he knows that. It may get infected. Sometimes infected limbs have to be cut off. He knows that too.
He can’t help himself. He begins crying at the thought. He turns and sobs into the pillow, for the moment not caring about the last person who laid on it, only thinking of a future with one leg, pacing the room and struggling to end on an even number when you have an odd amount of limbs to begin with. When the sobbing dies down, he limps to the bathroom and goes through the medicine cabinet. There’s a lot in here, but on closer look he sees dates with exp in front of them. They must be explanation dates; the dates explaining when the medication is no longer any good. Many of the things in here went bad a few years ago. He doesn’t know if bad medicine just means it won’t work, or won’t work as well, or make him even worse. There is an antiseptic cream that was good up until two months ago, surely that’s okay. The painkillers all went bad a few years ago. The bandages must stay good forever. And there’s some kind of medical padding that looks like it’ll help. Some sharp scissors for cutting things to fit. A safety pin for securing the bandage. He closes the cabinet and stares at the mirror. His face is flushed and there’s a slight rash starting around the edge of his hairline, which he hopes is from the heat and not from some infection climbing through his body. He doesn’t want to die. Not now when life is so good.
He holds the back of his hand up to his forehead like he’s seen people do and his forehead feels warm. A fever? Or just the result of stress and a very, very hot day? He cups his hands under the tap and fills them with water and splashes his face. He immediately feels better, but without his fingers pinching the bandage on his leg tight it slides down to around his foot. His tears become lost in the water on his face. He wishes his mother was here. Either one.
He turns on the shower. He steps inside and lets the water run over his leg. He can feel the infection being washed away from the surface, but at the same time he can feel it inching its way through his body. He doesn’t have to see it to know it’s there. He scrubs at the wound with a facecloth. The gash is about the length of his finger and about as deep and as wide, a long furrow that an inch to the left would have had the bullet missing completely and an inch to the right have had it buried deep into his leg, severing one of those thick veins in there that would cause him to bleed out. It’s not bleeding as much as earlier, even with all the scrubbing, but it is still bleeding. The shower feels good. He has the water temperature set so it’s cool but not too cold. He spends enough time in there for the pads of his fingers to wrinkle, then he climbs out and dries himself down. The itch has faded, but he still needs to do something with the wound.
He doesn’t want to lose the leg.
Doesn’t want to die.
Can’t go to hospital.
Doesn’t want to lie down in the same bed as one of the Twins because the infection would only become more infected.
He goes outside and holds a clean medical pad over the wound, carrying Cooper’s manuscript with him. He sits on the porch. There’s a wooden swing chair that would fit two people, he rocks it slowly back and forth and it relaxes him. It’s too dark to read yet, and he can’t be bothered going back inside to turn on the porch light. The fields around him look pale blue from the moon. In four or five hours the sky will start to lighten. He’s never seen that happen before, and suddenly he is desperate to watch his first sunrise, liking the idea that one day he and Cooper may sit out here on the porch enjoying it together.
