Текст книги "Collecting Cooper"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Do you have any antiseptic, Adrian?” she asks.

“Huh?”

“Antiseptic.”

“Oh, yes, sure.”

“Can I have some?”

He moves around the bed and unties the ropes. She sits up, carefully so the sheet doesn’t drape from her body. She rubs at her wrists while he unties her feet. Her wrists are red and the skin is broken and it must be hard being tied up for nearly a week the way she was, and he’s annoyed at Cooper for doing that to her. Cooper could have just locked her in a room. When her feet are free she slowly leans forward and rubs at her ankles.

“Can I have the antiseptic?” she asks.

He passes it to her. She takes off the lid and starts to rub cream into her ankles and wrists. He watches her work, going from limb to limb, and he wants to offer to help but he doesn’t. He likes the idea of rubbing cream into her and helping her, but he doesn’t think she’ll like the idea as much.

“It really hurts,” she tells him.

“I’m sorry. Next time it’ll . . .” he stops talking, realizing his mistake. He looks down, unable to look her in the eye, waiting for her to pick up on it, waiting for her to say Next time what? You said you were letting me go. He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence, and thankfully he doesn’t have to because she lets him off the hook.

“Let’s take a look then, shall we?” she says, missing his comment, and he is pleased. “What happened?”

“Somebody shot me.”

“Oh, you poor man,” she says, and her voice is soothing and already his leg doesn’t seem to hurt as much. The image that comes next is immediate—he sees himself sitting with this woman on the porch watching a sunrise and not with Cooper. His chest is warm and he feels a little light-headed and he isn’t sure what’s going on. Her wrists are shiny from the cream. He can’t stop looking at them.

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” he says, but it really does. He doesn’t want her to know how much pain he’s in. “You know, I’ve had worse,” he adds and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

She tucks the sheet beneath her armpits and clamps her arms down on the outside of it. “Is that everything in the plastic bag?”

“Yes.”

“We should start by washing the wound,” she says. “Is that okay? Do you want me to do that for you?”

“Okay.”

“You have nice legs, by the way,” she says.

“Oh. Oh, really?”

“Surely, Adrian, you’ve heard that before?”

“Umm . . . no. Never.”

“Never? I find that hard to believe,” she says, and her smile makes him smile. “Now, do you have any cotton balls?”

“In the bag.”

“Then let’s get started.”

He hands her the bag and she goes through it, placing the items on the bed next to her. Along with the antiseptic, there are other ointments, bandages, gauze pads, tape, a safety pin, pills, creams, a pair of scissors. He keeps his eyes on the scissors. He wants to take them away from her, but at the same time he doesn’t want to say anything mean to her. He needs to take them away without sounding like he doesn’t trust her. He’s really starting to think it would be a waste if he gave her to Cooper.

“Is that pad stuck on the wound?” she asks, leaning forward to get a better look. Her hair is draped down her back, the sheet open like a curtain through which he can see her spine, it looks like a row of knuckles down her back, her skin is smooth and pale. The skin on her neck is tight and there are beads of sweat sitting on the surface. He has the urge to run his finger over them and send them dripping down her body.

“Yes,” he hears himself saying.

“We’re going to need to remove it.”

“The leg?” he asks, the image of him pacing uneven laps in his room comes back to him, and he can feel the blood drain from his face. He wants to be sick.

“No, the pad,” she says. “That would be awful if we had to remove the leg,” she says, and she says it in a way to not make him feel stupid about his mistake. He doesn’t know why he thought she meant the leg—it makes no sense. He feels silly. In the past others would have laughed at him for getting something so simple so wrong.

“It’s going to hurt,” she warns him, “but I sense you’re not going to have a problem. Here, let’s soak it first. It should come away easier.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

She soaks one of the cloths in water and he watches her fingers, her arms, the way her hair sticks to her face. His heart is racing. She squeezes the cloth and he loves the way the water sounds sprinkling back into the bucket. It makes him want to go for a swim, something he hasn’t done since he was a boy. She places the cloth and holds it against the pad on his thigh and she looks up at him and smiles and his legs are starting to turn into jelly. He wishes he were sitting down. She peels the corner of the pad away. It’s still stuck but not as bad.

“Just a little longer,” she says. “Or I can just rip it straight off. Would you prefer that?”

“Yes,” he says, and the word hasn’t been out of his mouth for more than half a second when rip, it’s torn from his thigh. “Ah,” he says, “ah that . . .”

“Was really brave of you,” she says, and smiles at him.

He smiles back, hiding the pain. She reminds him of Katie, Katie the girl he fell in love with, only Emma is much nicer than Katie. Far more beautiful, and friendly, and even though she’s much younger than Adrian he can feel himself falling. It’s as if he’s thirteen again. Of course his mother would say he’s becoming obsessed, but his mother would be wrong.

“Now, let’s take a look,” Katie says—no, not Katie, Emma. When they’re sitting on the porch watching future sunsets, he’s going to have to be careful not to make that mistake. “Hmm, it looks nasty. Let me wash it down,” she says, and she soaks some cotton balls in antiseptic.

“It’s old,” he says, nodding toward the same antiseptic she put on her own wrists and ankles.

“This stuff lasts forever,” she says. “Trust me, they only put expiration dates on it to make sure you keep buying more. It’s perfectly safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I used it, didn’t I?”

She did, but she didn’t know it was old, and he feels bad about not having told her before she used it on herself. He has a decision to make—does he believe her or not? Does he trust her? He decides that he does. She’s a nice person, that is obvious, and nice people can be trusted.

He nods. “Okay,” he says, “use it on me.”

She smiles. He never wants to see her not smiling. She pads two cotton balls against his thigh, then slowly wipes them downward. “You’re doing really well,” she says. “Not much longer to go.”

“Okay.”

“You really should get stitches, Adrian.”

“I can’t.”

“Then we’ll do the best we can. Now, I need to cut some gauze into the right size.”

“I’ll do it.” He leans over to the bed and picks up the gauze and the scissors. “What size?”

“Just a little bigger than the wound.”

“Oh, of course.” He uses the scissors then hands her the gauze. He puts the scissors into his back pocket. She holds the gauze in place and puts another medical pad on top of it.

“Now I need you to cut some tape to the right lengths.”

“How long?”

“Just a little longer than the pad.”

She passes him up the tape. It’s difficult because he’s still holding the gun, but he manages okay. He cuts a piece at a time and hands it to her and she sticks it across the edge of the pad and across his thigh. When all four are in place she lets go and leans back.

“Looks good,” she says. “How does it feel?”

“Much better,” he says, and he smiles and she smiles back and this is perfect, just perfect.

“Okay, now, where’s the bandage?” she says, turning back to look at the contents on the bed. “Ah, there we go,” she says, picking it up. “Now I’m going to put this on tight, but not too tight, okay, Adrian? Let me know if it hurts.”

“It won’t hurt,” he says, his heart fluttering, liking how his name sounds coming from her mouth. He can see what Cooper saw in this girl, but what Cooper was going to do to her was wrong. Very wrong. He will never let Cooper hurt her. Never.

“Just let me know if it does,” she says. “I don’t want to hurt you, Adrian.”

“And I don’t want anybody to hurt you.”

She puts one hand on the inside of his thigh and he can feel himself stirring and is embarrassed about it. She reaches the bandage behind his leg and takes it in her other hand then starts pulling it around. She repeats the movement over and over, crisscrossing the bandage until it’s nice and secure and covering about half of his thigh.

“Now you’ll need to do this again tonight, so if you like I don’t mind staying for the day, and tonight after I re-dress the wound you can take me home? Is that okay, Adrian? I need to see my parents. I love them so much and miss them.”

“Sure! Sure,” he says, excited.

“How does it feel?”

“Good.”

“Now you’ll need to use both hands to hold the bandage,” she says, “one here on this side and one on this side, just until I can pin it into place. Be careful with that gun and don’t shoot yourself in the foot. I’d hate for you to hurt yourself, Adrian.”

“Okay.” He lowers his free hand and holds the bandage, and he lowers his gun hand and does the same, extending his grip along the side of the gun to the bandage, the barrel pointing to his foot.

“You got it?”

“Yes,” he says, wishing things had gone this easy with Cooper.

“Now don’t let go. Keep lots of pressure.”

“Okay.”

“Now, what else do we have here,” she says, turning toward the bed, then she comes back with the safety pin. “Let me secure it with this,” she says.

He’s thinking about the sunrise, about how, if he’s allowed, he’d like to hold her hand as they sit on the porch, a nice warm wind, both of them drinking orange juices. He’s thinking about a future with her, about the sun coming over the tops of the trees and shining in her hair and he’s thinking about how beautiful she’ll look. He’s picturing himself on the porch at the opposite end of the day, watching the sun set behind the mountains in the distance, Emma cuddled up next to him for warmth. He’s thinking about holding the bandage nice and tight, and he can’t think of too many things at the same time because he’ll end up forgetting things.

Her hands brush against his, and he watches her fiddling with the safety pin, poking the point just so it will slide beneath the material. Her hand touches more of his hand and she tries to get a better angle, and then her hand is on his hand and then . . .

The gun goes off. Her finger is jammed against his finger, which is resting against the trigger. The barrel is still pointing down at his foot. Two toes have completely disappeared, replaced by a pulpy mess that looks like a crushed tomato. He doesn’t even feel any pain, it doesn’t have time to register before Emma’s arm swings upward, the safety pin is in her hand and it’s bent open, he gets a real good look at it because it comes racing toward his face. His hands are still on the bandage, still on the gun, and he’s still not letting go just as she told him, at least until the pin hits, enters, and sinks down deep into his eyeball, right up to the small O-shaped hinge. Then he lets go with both hands and screams.

His hands race up to his face and the gun hits him in the side of the head hard enough to give him an immediate headache, but he hangs on to it. He squeezes his eyes closed and his left one closes across the pin but won’t seal shut, letting in light, allowing him to see the shaft of the pin as it trails out of his blurry perspective. There’s an immediate flow of tears. The pain comes from his eye and from his foot at the same time, both far worse than anything he ever felt in the Scream Room. The pain has a weight to it, it’s heavy inside his head pulling his gaze to the floor, a sharp intense pain that starts at his eye and detours through his brain before spreading to his shoulders, and from his foot a dull ache races up his leg into his belly. He touches the pin with his free hand wanting to pull it out and the pain widens, and immediately he vomits, no warning of it, stomach bile spilling over his chin and down the front of his shirt. There’s a sudden ache in his groin and his entire body burns with pain and he doesn’t know what’s happening.

The girl is screaming at him but he can’t absorb the words, they’re all insults, even if he can’t focus on them he can recognize the tone, and the pain explodes in his groin again and he realizes she’s kicking him. He puts his arm ahead and pulls the trigger and the gun goes off and he can’t see if he hits the woman or the wall, and he fires again and then again, the sound deafening, hurting his ears. He staggers to the side leaving one of his toes behind, another barely hanging on, and he can’t maintain his weight on his foot, he buckles and trips over the bucket and hits the floor, his bare feet soaked in the process, his body banging against the drawers and the Taser landing in his lap. He pinches his fingers on the safety pin, takes a deep breath and pulls. He can feel his entire eyeball being brought forward and the pain is too intense and he has to let go, it’s as though the pin is much longer now that it’s inside of him, so long it’s gone directly into the center of his brain. He opens his good eye and has to hold it open with his fingers to stop it from closing. Something oozes down the pin and drips onto his cheek. He looks around the room and he’s alone now. He takes another grip on the safety pin, puts down the gun, pushes his other fingers against his eye to stop it moving, grits his teeth, and pulls as hard as he can.

chapter fifty-three

The alarm clock goes off and I wake up feeling even more tired than before I went to sleep. It reminds me of how I used to feel last year when I’d wake up every morning with a hangover. I spent months on end trying to drink away the memories of the bad things I thought I’d done before crashing into Emma Green sobered me up for good. A couple of cups of coffee go a long way to bringing me around. I take a cold shower and drink another coffee before settling up with the hotel clerk, this one a different guy from two hours ago.

The roads are full of early-morning weekend traffic. Most people have the windows down with their arms hanging out the window, some of them with cigarettes between their fingers with smoke trailing into the air. There are no early indications that today is going to be any cooler than yesterday. I think of Buttons and what he said about rumors in a mental institution, and wonder how much of what he said last night was true. I hope Jesse Cartman is doing better this morning, that he’ll take his medication today and not be found with his hands buried in somebody else looking for the soft meat. There’s a delay up ahead, a couple of the teenage drag racers from last night have crashed, shutting down one of the lanes, so we’re all bottlenecked up to and through an intersection, the heat cooking us all.

I make it through the city. I drive out past the airport taking a road with a view to the runways, an incoming plane low enough to shake the car. There are a few dozen people parked off the road, caught between reading newspapers and watching the planes come and go. Out past more paddocks and more farmers and I should just buy a house out here because it’d mean less commuting.

I don’t get all warm inside at the thought of returning to the prison. I have to go past a guard station and show some ID before I pull into the parking lot where there’s a small scattering of other visitor vehicles. It all looks exactly the same as it did a few days ago when I was stepping out of it. Same shimmering blacktop. Same dust floating up from the exercise yard. Same machines and same scaffolding and same work crews extending the prison walls, making more room for the new arrivals being bused in on a daily basis, not having to work too fast because the prison just keeps on busing them back out. The entrance betrays what it’s really like inside. A nicely landscaped garden around the parking lot that’s turning brown in the sun, a large double set of automatic glass doors, all modern styling with furniture inside only a year old at the most. There’s a reception counter with about four people behind it, all of them look like they should be on the other side of the bars, especially the woman who speaks to me. She has dark black hair along with a small reserve of it lining her upper lip. She looks at me as if trying to figure how many pieces she can break me into, and I imagine it would be a lot. She has to be at least twice my weight, and she’s carrying most of that in her shoulders and chest.

“I’d like to see a prisoner,” I tell her.

“You have an appointment?”

“No.”

“You just say no?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t just come down here without making an appointment.”

“Then I’d like to make an appointment,” I say.

“For who and for when?”

“For Edward Hunter, and for now.”

“I just said you can’t come here without making an appointment.”

“I just made one.”

“No you didn’t,” she says. “You just asked to make one. It’s a big difference.”

“Please, it’s important.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

I think about calling Donovan Green. Asking him for some more money to grease the transition between not seeing Edward Hunter and seeing Edward Hunter, then figuring it’s too risky. The woman looks like she’d be happy because most of her income is being blown on steroids, but sad because she’d have to split it with the others behind her. “Please, it really is important,” I say. “I think he knows something that can help me find Emma Green, the girl that’s missing. Please. Her father sent me. He’s desperate. And what can it hurt letting me see him?”

She takes a good ten seconds to think about it. Weighs up whatever options there are for and against, and comes to the conclusion that helping me out may end up being her good deed for the day.

“Don’t make this a habit,” she says.

“I won’t. I promise.”

“It’ll take ten minutes. Sit down and wait, and if it takes longer, don’t complain.”

I sit down and wait and I don’t complain, even though I can feel each of the minutes ticking away.

chapter fifty-four

The screams are loud, muffled somewhat by the padded walls of the cell, but high pitched enough to come through and for Cooper to know they’re being made by a woman. Probably from Emma Green. There’s a second gunshot, then three more, and Cooper is desperate to know what’s going on. Have the police arrived? He hopes not.

His mother is in the opposite corner of the cell. He can’t see her—he still can’t see a damn thing in here and has no idea whether it’s even morning yet, and his bladder is so full that fluids must be starting to back up into his stomach and his groin feels like it’s going to pop. His mother isn’t talking to him, or even looking at him now, and for that he truly hates himself. He starts banging on the cell door. He has to bang hard to produce sound loud enough to be heard, and he uses his shoe like he did back in Grover Hills.

“Hey, hey, what’s going on out there? Adrian? Hey, let me out of here. Let me out, let me out, let me out!”

The screaming stops. There is no more gunfire, only silence. He keeps banging at the padded door.

Then the slot at face height opens up.

“Who are you?” Emma Green asks.

He almost jumps at seeing her face. In a weird way it’s like seeing a ghost. “Who . . . who are you?” he asks, trying to sound like he doesn’t know. “Please, please, you have to let me out of here,” he adds, trying to hide his shock at seeing her. “He’s crazy. He’s going to kill us.”

“You look . . . kind of familiar.”

“Please, we have to hurry.”

“Oh my God, you’re one of my university professors! What the hell is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and right now he really doesn’t. Somehow Emma Green has escaped. The screams must have come from Adrian. The gunshots must have been Emma Green shooting him! It’s perfect. All absolutely perfect. “Listen, what’s your name?” he asks.

“Emma.”

“Listen, Emma, I’ve been captive for . . . I don’t know, I’ve lost track of time. Please, please, you have to let me out of here. You killed him, right? The man who took me?”

“No. He’s still alive. I only hurt him,” she says, glancing over her right shoulder to look down the corridor.

“You shot him, right? Please tell me you shot him.”

“He was shooting at me.”

“Oh, fuck, so he’s still out there? You have to hurry. You have to let me out, you have to let me out now!”

“Are you in there alone?” she asks.

He steps aside so she can see into the room. “My mother is in here with me,” he tells her.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“It’s what I’m trying to tell you. He killed her. Last night he killed her right in front of me and there wasn’t a thing I could do,” he says. “It was the worst . . . the worst thing in the world.” And it was the worst thing. He wrapped his hands around his mother’s throat and he told her he was sorry over and over as her eyes bulged forward and he took her life from her. He loves her, but he loves his freedom even more. There was no other way. The police would question her. She would tell them a crazy man thought her son was a serial killer. The police would wonder if there was something to that, on account of one of his students going missing. Two students, if you counted the one from three years ago.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“Please, you have to let me out.”

“Hang on a second.”

She takes a step back and the door opens outward into the hall. The relief washes over him. He can feel the excitement of killing Adrian. He can taste the excitement of being alone with Emma Green. For the first time he notices she’s completely naked. He steps out of the cell. This isn’t Sunnyview or Eastlake. “Where in the hell are we?”

“I have no idea,” she says. “But I think there are two of them.”

“What?”

“Somebody took me on Monday night,” she says, “and left me in a building somewhere. Then somebody else took me from that building and brought me here. It wasn’t the same guy.”

“Where is he now? The one you hurt?”

“That way,” she says, and points down the hallway.

The hallway is part of a house. Just a normal house with a padded cell and not a mental institution that’s been abandoned. The hallway is carpeted and wider than what he’s used to. There are old-fashioned side tables against the wall with ceramic knickknacks on them, some watercolor paintings that don’t look very good and were probably done by the owners of the house. He takes two steps toward the room Emma said she came out of and the door flies open and Adrian appears, blood and fluid streaming down one side of his face, the palm of his hand hiding some kind of mess, his foot is bleeding and looks like it’s been clubbed with a hammer. He levels the gun.

“Jesus,” Cooper says, and he grabs Emma and shields her from what’s coming, covering her with his body, an instinct he guesses coming from the Cooper Riley that predated his divorce and Natalie Flowers. The bullet hits the wall well wide of them and he figures two things right then: Adrian has probably never used a gun before today, and his accuracy is off because he’s only using one eye.

“You’re my friend,” Adrian yells, and there’s another gunshot, this one closer.

“Let’s go,” Cooper says, and he rolls off the girl and grabs her arm and pulls her upright. The room they just came out of would provide immediate safety, but he’ll only be back at square one, locked away at Adrian’s mercy.

Unfortunately it’s their only option. The door is opened across the hallway, and to get past it they’d have to close it, it’d take an extra second or two and he just doesn’t think they have that long.

“I thought you liked me,” Adrian says, and Cooper isn’t so sure he’s the one being spoken to.

He pushes Emma into the room and dives after her. The impact of hitting the ground is all the convincing his bladder needs to let go, and a quarter of it is emptied before he can get it back under control. He guesses he has five seconds to make a decision before Adrian either locks the door or shoots them.

“Do you have a weapon?” he asks.

“What? No, no, of course I don’t.”

He looks around the room. His pants are soaking wet, and his bladder is desperately trying to let go again. In fact, it’s more painful than before. There was nothing in here earlier that could help, and nothing now.

Except his mother.

His mother doesn’t have to have died in vain.