Cooper By The Gross (All 144 Cooper Stories In One Volume)

by Bill Bernico

  The customer at the end of the bar finished his beer and stood up, grabbing his hat. He made it to the front door without falling over but just barely.

  “Good night, Gus” Gloria said, as the customer left. “Stay off the sidewalk.”

  Gus didn’t answer. He let the door close behind him and walked out to his car. I heard the engine kick over and the sound of the car as it sped away in the night.

  “Looks like it’s you and me, kids,” Frank said to Ellie, who was cleaning up after the last patron. “What do you say we clean up and close a little early tonight?” Then he remembered that Gloria and I were still sitting there sipping our beers. “Sorry, Elliott,” Frank said. “Take your time. I’m in no hurry.”

  Gloria stood staring at the illuminated beer sign, lost in thought. I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her, nuzzling her neck. “You still worried about Joey?”

  “Him and that kid at the mini mart,” Gloria said, “And every other kid who’s left alone at that hour of the night.”

  “Two more months and Joey will be off at college,” I said. “He’s probably had his fill of dealing with the public anyway.”

  Frank walked over to the picture window and pulled the string that turned off the neon beer sign. He was about to lock the front door when it opened and two men entered wearing ski masks and flashing handguns in front of them.

  One of the men jabbed the barrel of his revolver in Frank’s stomach and pushed him back into the room while the other pulled the shade down over the front door and locked it behind him. Gloria stood motionless, waiting for an opening. She backed up away from the men, feeling behind her as she retreated.

  The first man kept pushing Frank until his back was up against the bar. “Okay, pop, open the till,” he said in a voice that was almost squeaky. “Do it, now.”

  Ellie was still in the kitchen so Frank hurried behind the bar and punched two buttons on the cash register. The cash drawer slid open with a ring. He scooped out the currency and laid it on the bar. Two of the twenties fell over onto the floor. In the instant it took the man to instinctively bend over to retrieve the fallen money, I had the .38 that hung under my arm in a holster, in my hand.

  The man at the door yelled to his partner, “He’s got a gun, Jason.” He fired his pistol at me, missing me by several feet. I returned fire, hitting him in the abdomen. He fell back against the front door, groaning and holding his mid-section. Blood oozed out between his fingers.

  In the split second following the first shot, Jason rose from the barroom floor clutching the two twenties that had fallen. His revolver fired up and wide, tearing a hole in the ceiling above my head. I squeezed off another round, hitting Jason in the side of his neck. Jason’s gun dropped to the floor with a thud. He grasped his neck with his right hand, his left hand still holding tight to the forty dollars. In a matter of seconds he fell backwards, flat on has back. His head hit the barroom floor with a cracking sound. With a final gasp, Jason’s hand fell away from his neck and out at his side. Blood spurted out of the wound and onto the floor. A crimson pool formed around the gunman’s head.

  The second man was still groaning and holding his left hand over his wound. His right held tight to the pistol. I walked toward him and he threw his gun away from him and held his hand up in front of his face. “No,” he screamed. “Don’t shoot me again.” His face got tight and he winced in pain. Suddenly his eyes widened and rolled back into his head and he slumped over sideways across the front door.

  Gloria rushed over to where I stood and threw her arms around my neck, sobbing uncontrollably. I returned my .38 to its holster and hugged her.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, looking her over.

  Gloria nodded. “Oh, Elliott, that was a foolish thing to do. You could have been killed. The money wouldn’t have been worth it. I’m sure Frank’s insured against robbery.” She hugged me again, grateful that I wasn’t hurt.

  I pried Gloria’s arms from around my neck and sat her down on a stool. Frank came around from behind the bar and knelt down next to the man sprawled across the door. He pressed two fingers into the man’s neck looking for a pulse, but didn’t find one. Ellie came out of the kitchen just then and rushed to her husband’s side. When she saw the two dead bodies on the floor she gasped audibly. Frank grabbed her shoulders and turned her away from the carnage. “Call the police,” he said to his wife. Frank lifted the ski mask from the man’s face and stepped back for a better look.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Frank said, shaking, “He’s just a kid. Just a god damned stupid kid.”

  “Oh, my god,” Gloria said.

  I turned around to find Gloria standing over Jason’s body. She’d pulled his ski mask off his head and stood holding it. Her eyes went wide when she recognized the dead boy. I looked down at the body on the floor. He, too, was just a kid—just a fresh-faced, foolish kid who’d never get to take that final algebra test.

  60 - You Ought To Be In Pictures

  Elliott looked at me out of the corners of his eyes before actually turning his head toward me. “Dad, what are you doing?” he said. “Why didn’t you just stay on ninety-five and pick up ten at Blythe?”

  I sighed heavily. “Because then we’d be backtracking,” I said. “Blythe is forty miles further south than we want to be. I figured if we cut over to Palm Springs on sixty-two we could save almost an hour.”

  “At least we’d be on a real road,” Elliott reminded me. “This way’s desert all the way. If we broke down our bones would be bleached before anyone found us.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said. “The tank’s full, we’ve got plenty of water and there are no cops for almost a hundred miles. This old crate will still do eighty-five like a breeze. We can really make up time.”

  Elliott thought about it for a moment. “I suppose,” he said. “I just hope we don’t break down in the middle of nowhere. I don’t want any more trouble with any more bikers like the last time when you took that short cut around San Francisco. The vultures won’t like the taste of my flesh.”

  “You worry too much, you know that?” I said. “I’ve been working on a new routine. Trust me. We’ll be in Palm Springs in a couple of hours and then it’s just a hop, skip and a jump back to Hollywood.”

  “We’d better be,” he said. “If we don’t get this camera equipment back to the studio, we won’t get paid. And don’t forget the bonus he promised us if we’re back early. Shooting on that movie was over yesterday and they need this stuff back today. Elliott lay back on the seat and closed his eyes. “Wake me up when you get to Palm Springs,” he said. “There’s nothing in this desert I want to look at anyway.”

  Elliott and I had been hired to provide extra security on a motion picture location in Arizona. It was just three days work, but Kevin Meyer, the line boss who’d hired us, told us there’d be a two hundred dollar bonus in it for us if we took one of the cameras back with us ahead of the rest of the trucks. We agreed and once again Cooper Investigations was on the job.

  I drove on, playing the same song over and over in my head. It beat listening to the radio and it helped keep me busy as I drove. The afternoon heat was sweltering. Heat waves rose from the desert floor, casting mirages of vast water pools in the distance. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead and ran down into my eyes. There was a moist smell of fresh road kill sifting in through the open windows.

  Elliott had napped for almost an hour before we reached the outskirts of Twentynine Palms. The sun was just settling above the horizon and glowing like somebody’s idea of what a UFO looked like close-up. I could see the town in the distance when Elliott sat upright and rubbed his eyes.

  “Where are we?” he said, looking around.

  “Just outside Twentynine Palms,” I said. “It’s just another mile or so. See, I told you we could save some time this way.”

  From off in the distance behind us I felt the subtle rumble moments before I heard it. A few seconds later, the sound became louder unti
l I recognized it. I checked my rearview mirror and jabbed Elliott with my elbow. “Oh oh,” I said. “We almost made it. Here they come.”

  Elliott swiveled around and looked through the back window of my Oldsmobile sedan. He turned back around and looked at me with his I-told-you-so look.

  “Just grab the camera and follow my lead,” I said.

  “Does this have anything to do with some new routine you mentioned earlier?” Elliott said.

  “You’re the cameraman,” I said. “Just be the cameraman and do what I tell you and we may just get out of this.”

  Elliott nodded as I reached onto the seat next to me and pulled a small lapel microphone from a leather bag and clipped it onto my shirt. I tucked the cord down my shirt. It went nowhere and just hung there against my wet skin. I put a small earpiece into my right ear and tucked the cord down the same place in my shirt as the lapel microphone cord. Elliott reached into the back seat and opened the camera case, pulling the film camera onto his lap. He familiarized himself with where to hold it and where the controls were. If he was going to play the part, he might as well try to be convincing.

  The rumbling increased until it became deafening. Suddenly forty or fifty motorcycles caught up with my car. Some stayed behind us while others passed us and still others rode alongside our car. We were surrounded by The Hell’s Angels. The longhaired, greasy, tattooed animals who rode the bikes yelled, waved their middle fingers and swung heavy chains over their heads. On the backs of several of the bikes were women. Well, technically they were women. In their black leathers and colorful bandannas, they looked as tough as some of the guys. What came out of their mouths was nobody’s idea of Sunday school recitations.

  The bikes in front of us gradually slowed down, forcing our car to slow with them, and in just a few seconds we’d all come to a complete stop. I picked up my clipboard with the previous day’s shooting schedule attached, tucked a long yellow pencil behind my ear and looked at Elliott. “Show time,” I said. “All right, everybody out.”

  Elliott opened the door on his side of the car and stepped out onto the road. He immediately hoisted the huge camera onto his shoulder and began looking through the viewfinder. I stepped out of my own side of the car and walked toward a tall, fat biker with a tattoo of a tear running down his face. He had another tattoo plainly visible on his right forearm. It was a large snake wrapped around a battle-ax. He seemed to be the leader of this clan of Neanderthals. He wore black leather pants and heavy boots and he was coming toward me. His hairy chest peeked through the top of dirty blue denim vest that we wore. From beneath the bottom of his vest, fat oozed out like bread dough rising on the oven door. He looked as though he hadn’t quite finished evolving.

  I stood face to face with the huge monster and shook my head. “This is all wrong,” I said, retrieving the pencil and flipping through the pages on my clipboard. “You were supposed to wait until we actually got into town and you were supposed to approach from the other end. Didn’t Carson fill you in on the plot?”

  The primitive man in black looked as though his fifth-grade teacher had just called on him with a question and he wasn’t prepared with the answer. “Huh?” he grunted.

  I looked back at Elliott, who was beginning to lower the camera from his shoulder. “Keep rolling,” I said, swirling the pencil in the air in small circles. “Maybe we can use some of this.” Elliott nodded and raised the camera again, squinting into the viewfinder and positioning his finger on the trigger.

  I put a hand on the biker’s shoulder and stood next to him. Look, uh…what’s your name again?”

  The leader of the bikers looked around as if I might be talking to someone else, then he looked the hand I’d rested on his shoulder. I took my hand off it. “Sonny,” the man said in a voice that came from down in a deep well.

  “Look, Sonny,” I said, walking with him away from the others, “Here’s the plot. You and your gang are supposed to come riding up this road until…”

  Elliott followed us with the camera. Sonny stopped walking and turned toward me. “What the hell are you talking about?” He grabbed me by the arm and lifted. I was up on tiptoes and my arm hurt from the vice-like grip he had on me. I jerked away from him and straightened up, dropping my pencil.

  I slowly moved my head back and forth, scanning the roadway from both directions. “You mean you’re not from the studio?” I looked down at the gravel and shook my head. “Jesus. They promised us an authentic motorcycle gang and gave me the authority to give the leader a starring role with a few lines.” I bent down and grabbed the pencil, erasing some of my own handwritten notes and making a quick change on my page.

  “I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Sonny said.

  Over his shoulder I could see some of the other bikers beginning to surround Elliott. One of the women brushed the palm of her gloved hand across Elliott’s behind. “Nice ass,” she said, smiling at Elliott. Elliott quickly stepped back. Two other bikers stood next to the crude looking woman. The biker on her left had so many piercings on his face with silver rings and stubs sticking out all over, that he looked as though he’d fallen face first into a fisherman’s tackle box. The biker on her right looked out of place among the rest of these apes. Maybe he was Sonny’s cousin, I don’t know. He was thin and wiry and looked like a biker about as much as I looked like a ballet dancer. All he was missing was a pocket protector with six pens and a little white tape holding his Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses together. He could have passed for someone named St. Poindexter, the patron saint of geeks.

  I gave Elliott the signal and he lowered the camera off his shoulder. I grabbed my lapel mic and lifted it closer to my mouth. “Camera two, do you read me?” I pressed the earpiece into my ear and pretended to listen. “Camera two,” I repeated, “cut. Cameras three and four, cut.” I pointed off into the distance toward the edge of town. I raised my arms above my head and waved them, crossing them several times.

  I looked back at Sonny, who by now was totally confused. “Look, Sonny,” I said. “Do you and your gang want to be in this move or not? It doesn’t pay all that much, but, hey, think of how it will look on the big screen when the other gangs see it. Man, you’ll have the whole territory to yourselves the day after this epic hits the theaters. They even had a cool screen name picked out for you. In this movie you were going to be Samuel Q. Striker. He’s the baddest, the toughest, the most righteous biker in the whole southwest. That’s you, isn’t it? I’ll bet you could play that part quite naturally.”

  “What’s the Q stand for?” Sonny asked, his interest beginning to come to a boil.

  I rifled through the papers on the clipboard, playing for time and then it came to me. “Quentin,” I said. “Samuel Quentin Striker. But all through this movie the others actors will call you Sam Quentin.” I waited for a reaction from Sonny. Apparently the joke was lost on him because he showed no reaction at all.

  I held my palms out toward Sonny and touched my thumbs together, making a frame with my hands. I framed Sonny’s face and nodded approval. “Yeah,” I said approvingly. “That’s the face I want. It has a rugged, primitive look.”

  “What’s the name of this movie?” Sonny asked.

  I had to think fast and killed a little more time thumbing through the sheets on my clipboard. “It’s going to be called Sometimes The Postman Only Rings Once.”

  Sonny went into a mini trance, trying to take in this new information. All he said was, “Oh, yeah. Cool title.”

  “Don’t you remember that John Garfield and Lana Turner movie called, The Postman Always Rings Twice? Well, this one is a take-off on that title. Pretty clever, huh? I thought that one up myself as I was writing the script for this movie.” Elliott gave me his silent ‘Oh brother’ look but kept pretending to film.

  I could see Sonny trying to absorb what I’d told him. He pursed his lips—what I could see of his lips through the thick salt-and-pepper beard—and thought. “What do I gotta do?” h
e said, slipping his palms into his back pockets.

  “That’s the spirit, Sonny,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder again. “First, you have to turn your whole caravan around and ride east. You ride east exactly eight miles to the place with the big boulder alongside the road. You know the spot I’m talking about? There’s a bunch of tall cactus plants on the other side of the road.”

  He nodded like a kid eager to please his dad. “Yeah,” he said. “We passed it on our way in.”

  “Good,” I said. “You just give me ten minutes from the time you stop at the boulder until you turn your whole gang around and come riding back this way again. That’ll give me enough time to reposition my camera crew and get the full effect of the thunderous sound of forty hogs coming at the camera.”

  “Forty-three,” Sonny said, proudly.

  “Forty-three,” I repeated. “When the bikes get to this point, I’ll get a close-up of your face. You got a comb? Just comb out your beard a little. You have crumbs all over it.”

  Sonny wiped his beard with his hand. I pressed the earpiece with my index finger and pretended to listen again. I held a hand up as I listened. “Uh huh,” I said into the lapel microphone. “Sure. His name’s Sonny and he’s willing to co-operate with us. How’s that? Wait a minute, I’ll ask him.”

  I turned toward the burly biker again. “The director wants to know your real name so he can give you a full credit at the end of the movie. You know, where the names scroll past and it says Sam Quentin was played by…and then your name will be up on the screen. See?”

  “It’s Sonny,” he said. “Just plain Sonny.”

  I repeated the name into my lapel microphone and waited. I looked back at Sonny. “Okay, if you want just Sonny, we’ll list you on the screen as just Sonny. But we’ll need your real name for the royalty checks. You can’t cash them with just a single name.”