Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  He massages his closed eyes with his fingertips and winces when he finds a bump on his forehead sticking out like a golf ball. He gets his eyes open and everything is blurry and gray-looking. He blinks heavily until things start to clear a little, but it doesn’t help. Wherever he is, there isn’t much light. His face is grazed and stings to the touch. He remembers walking to his car after closing the garage door. He was carrying his briefcase and he can’t remember why, there’d be no purpose for that, and then there was . . . was . . . what?

  “Oh Jesus,” he says, and he tries to stand up, but his body won’t work, he manages to get up onto his elbows before collapsing back down, his arm banging off the edge of the bed, his knuckles hitting the concrete floor and scraping away the skin. He sticks them in his mouth and the blood tastes sweet. He needs to get up. Needs to get away from wherever this is. The man. The man asked him for the time and then . . . and then he lost control over his body. He lay on the ground with the sun in his eyes until the man shadowed it. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t even speak. There was confetti on the ground next to his face and he couldn’t figure out why it was there. The man crouched down and held a cloth over his face and there was nothing he could do to fight it. Then . . . then this.

  He pushes his hands into the bed. Forces himself upward, slower this time, trying to maintain control, desperate to get onto his feet, pausing to sit on the edge of the bed while the world spins. His eyes begin to adjust. The room comes into focus, but there’s not much to see. It’s some kind of bomb shelter. The only light coming into the room is through a small glass window in a door. Everything is concrete and steel. With small cramps and electrical-like charges, feeling begins to arrive to the rest of his body. First pins and needles through his feet and hands, then it spreads up his limbs into his core. He stands up. There’s a heavy ache behind his eyes. He’s tired and scared and has no idea how long he’s been unconscious.

  He realizes he was shot by a Taser. That’s what the confetti was. Tasers spit out twenty or thirty bits of paper with serial numbers on them every time they’re fired. It identifies the user. Then he was drugged. He remembers the rag on his face, the smell, the darkness.

  He supports his weight against the wall and makes his way to the door. It’s a short walk. The room is twice the size of a prison cell, with a view out to what looks like another prison cell, this one not as dark, with light coming through an open door that he can just see the bottom of on an upper landing. The window in the door is clean, but has some scratches on this side of it and, if broken, wouldn’t leave a hole big enough to climb through. The window fogs up from his breath, he wipes his hand over it, his thumb following some of the scratches. He doesn’t want to think about the people trapped on this side of the door who made them, not yet anyway. There’s a bookcase out there but he can’t make out any of the titles. There’s a couch with holes big enough for him to see, through which springs are sticking out. He looks back at the bookcase. He keeps staring at it, the shapes becoming clearer . . . if only there was a little more light. On the top shelf he thinks he can see the thumb he bought in the auction, and suddenly it all makes sense to him—the auction was a trap. Whoever sold him the thumb never intended to part with it—in fact, all along the seller wanted more thumbs to add to his collection. Next to the bookcase, the leather scuffed up and one of the catches twisted, is his briefcase.

  The nausea hits him like a punch to the stomach. He turns around and everything is dark until he moves from the window. There’s no sink or toilet, only two buckets. There’s a cup for drinking and a toothbrush, which indicates the seller’s intent isn’t murder, at least not immediately. He picks up the empty bucket and sits on the edge of the bed and throws up into it, wiping the bottom of his shirt across his mouth when he’s done. His head is pounding, and having to squint to see a goddamn thing isn’t helping. He rubs his hand over his chest and finds the two small holes where he was shot by the Taser, the barbs pulled out by his attacker.

  He closes his eyes and takes himself back to the moment he first saw the man, he holds on to the image, and no, he’s sure it’s not somebody he’s ever seen before. How many other people did this man post that thumb to and then abduct? It’s a hell of a signature. A hell of an MO. One he’ll teach about if he ever gets out of here.

  He moves around the cell, slowly exploring the walls with his hands, the back of the cell almost in complete darkness. The stench of his vomit hangs in the room with nowhere to go, making him feel sick all over again. There are bolts jutting out of the floor and the walls that he finds when he trips on one and lands against the other. Once something large used to be in this room. There are pipes leading up into the ceiling that have been capped off, and a thick piece of steel that’s been bolted into the roof, probably covering a hole. If the hole is close to the size of the piece of steel, then it would be big enough to squeeze through. He steps onto the bed but can’t reach it. He tips the bed up onto its side and scales it and when he’s within reach he sees that the nuts on this side of the metal have been filed into a smooth surface. Even if he was strong enough to loosen them with his fingers, there’s no way he can grip them. He tries digging his fingers under one of the edges of the plate but it’s no use. He climbs down and resets the bed to how he found it. On another wall an iron eyelet has been welded onto another of the bolts, this one half a meter from the ceiling. There are a couple of holes in the walls that have been filled in with cement. Whatever was taken out of this room was taken for the purpose of turning this place into a cell, and that’s exactly what this place is. Christ, it’s like something out of a textbook. Something he would teach.

  Is that the point of this? Is that why he’s here?

  He checks his pockets. There’s a piece of tinfoil that he didn’t put in there and a couple of coins which he did. He unwraps the foil. There are two painkillers. He wraps them back up. He studies the ceiling looking for signs of surveillance and sees none. He has two options: keep waiting, or start banging and yelling.

  He pounds against the door. “Hey? Hey? Who’s out there? Hey? Where the hell am I?”

  No answer. He pushes at the glass, not expecting to see it flex, and flexing is exactly what it doesn’t do, nor break, nor shatter. He bangs against it with the heel of his fist and each bang vibrates through his head, making the headache worse. He takes off his shoe and bangs with the heel of it and gets the same result. He looks out at the bookcase. The harder he stares at it the more his head hurts, and he finds peripherally he can make out some of the items, but when he looks straight on they merge with the darkness. Before disappearing, he’s sure what he was looking at were weapons and ropes and pieces of clothing; things he himself has collected.

  He starts banging again. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to ignore the throbbing deep in his brain. His arm is getting sore from swinging his shoe into the door. He switches from hand to hand and is getting ready to give up after five minutes of it when the light coming through the door upstairs dims, and he knows somebody is standing up there. He stops banging and his headache thanks him for it. When the man comes down, he comes down surrounded by a cold blue glow. Cooper sees him in stages, the feet are first, brown leather shoes scuffed from use. Pants frayed around the hems with a couple of coin-sized holes—not the kind of fraying with holes that are in fashion, but the kind that comes from years of wear. Then the hips, the top of the pants coming into view, a leather belt, then he sees the lantern, a battery-powered lantern for camping, not bright enough to hurt his eyes. The man carrying it is wearing a short-sleeve white shirt with a thin leather tie, and the same corduroy pants from earlier. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and turns toward him. The lantern gives his skin a pale sheen. His hair is slicked to the sides with wide comb teeth marks through it, with a clump of it falling over his forehead. He has brown, droopy eyes and chapped lips and dozens of acne scars. He reaches the cell door, the lantern to the side of a tray carrying food that Cooper can’t smell.

/>   Then the man smiles. “Welcome to my collection,” he says.

  chapter seven

  My lawyer’s name is Donovan Green. He’s my height and built about the same and I met him late winter last year—the afternoon after I got drunk and ran my car into Emma Green, his daughter. I didn’t know who he was when he bailed me out and offered to represent me. I took his help because there was no real alternative. Thirty minutes after meeting him his help turned out to be the kind that had him dragging me unconscious through the woods. He held a gun to my head and in the end didn’t have the stomach to finish the job. He left me with the promise that if anything ever happened to his daughter he’d be back. I keep my hand on the door and my stomach sinks. If he’s here to kill me, then his daughter must have died from her injuries. Which means I won’t get to see my wife one last time. Which means I have to go along with whatever it is he wants to do. That’s the way things work in my world. Last year I wanted him to pull the trigger. Now I don’t.

  “Remember me?” he asks.

  He looks about as run-down and tired as he looked last time I saw him, as if the heat has gotten to him the same way it’s gotten to the trees outside my house. His hair is messed up and his clothes are wrinkled and he hasn’t shaved in a few days and he smells like he hasn’t showered either. My mouth goes dry and I struggle to answer him. It must be obvious that I remember him. The kind of time we shared together is impossible to forget. I let my hand fall from the door and I take a step back.

  “You might as well come in.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, and he sounds tired. “I remember what I promised you. But I’m not here for that. I’m here for your help.”

  For him to want my help it must be bad. Bad enough he’d come to the one man he hates more than any other. I move aside and he comes in. I lead him through the house. He doesn’t comment on any of the furniture or décor. The stereo is on repeat, and the Beatles album has started back up. I take him outside onto the deck where the outdoor furniture has gathered some rust and a whole lot of cobwebs over the last four months. I don’t offer him a drink. The sun beats down on us and I figure he won’t want to stay long, and imagine he’d want to stay even less if I showed him the DVD I watched earlier. We sit on opposite sides of the table, balancing it out and giving the yard good feng shui.

  “I want to hire you,” he says.

  He’s beginning to sweat and he has to keep squinting to look at me because the sun is in his face but on my back. He’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts and not a suit, so he’s not here in any lawyering capacity, which means I won’t have to take out a second mortgage to talk to him. He looks like he’s slept in that shirt for the last few days.

  “I don’t need the work,” I tell him.

  “Yes you do.”

  “It’s a moot point. I lost my PI license so I can’t help you.”

  “That works out okay because I won’t be paying you. You’ll be doing this for free so it won’t be professional. You’re not going to need a license because you’re going to want to do this for free anyway. You owe me.”

  “Thanks for sweetening the deal. You want to tell me what’s bad enough for you to have come to me? You do realize I only just got out of jail today.”

  “I know. If that had been up to me you’d have been put away for much longer. You could have killed my daughter.”

  I don’t answer him. I’ve already apologized and I could apologize a thousand more times and he wouldn’t accept it. I know that because I’ve been in his shoes. I dragged the man who killed my daughter and hurt my wife into the woods and handed him a shovel. There was a lot he tried saying. He tried telling me how sorry he was that he’d been drinking so much, how sorry he was at all the other driving convictions in his past. He apologized for running down my wife and daughter by accident and doing nothing about it. He cried as he dug the hole, he got dirt all over his face and shirt. He was a mess. His face was covered in snot and tears and he kept blubbering that he was sorry, and in the end I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t see it as an accident. I saw it as murder. A man with that many convictions behind him, that many warnings, a man like that who keeps on drinking and driving, that makes it only a matter of time before he kills. It was no different from a man firing a loaded gun into a crowd of people.

  I put a bullet in his head and filled in the grave he had dug.

  My lawyer knows I did it. I told him. When he pointed the gun at me wanting to do the same thing, I told him how it was going to feel.

  “She’s gone missing,” he says. “Emma.”

  “What?”

  “Nobody has heard from her in two days. She was at work Monday night and left to go home and never showed up.”

  “You’ve gone to the police?”

  “What?” he asks, almost flinching as though my question is the most stupid one he’s ever heard. “Jesus, of course we have. But the police, the police only care once somebody has been missing twenty-four hours, so they’ve only cared since last night, and they haven’t cared much because they’re not out there looking for her, and even when they do start looking there are things I know you can do that they can’t.”

  “The police, you have to trust them. They know what they’re doing.”

  He starts drumming his fingers across the tabletop then stops and stares at his fingernails as if disappointed by the tune they made. He looks back at me and there is genuine pain in his eyes and I know the feeling and I know I’m going to help this man.

  “When girls like Emma go missing,” he says, and the words are slow and considered and must hurt to say because I know where he’s going with this, “there’s only one way they’re ever found.”

  I don’t answer him. He looks up toward the sun and I know he’s fighting back tears.

  “When was the last time somebody her age went missing and there was a happy ending?” he asks.

  I still don’t answer him. I can’t tell him the truth, and I don’t want to lie to him. Girls like Emma who go missing normally show up a few days later floating naked in a river.

  “I already know she’s probably dead,” he says, and the words come from him in small stops and starts, like he really has to force them.

  He looks back at me. “Statistically, I know the deal,” he adds. “My wife, she knows it too. Right now she’s sedated because she’s borderline hysterical. The police tell me in cases like this, they never really know whether the girl just ran away from home or got herself a new boyfriend and is holed up in a bedroom somewhere. It’s bullshit. They know it’s bullshit when they’re spinning that possibility to me and my wife. If there’s a chance she’s still alive, she won’t be by the time they find her, and if she was alive in the time they were looking and not finding her and I didn’t do everything I could . . . then . . . I don’t know. I think you know, right?” he says. “I think you can figure out how it would feel. So I’m doing everything that I can, and that means coming to you. It means you’re going to do everything you can because you owe me and you owe her. Then . . . and, if she is, you know, dead, then the police will find who hurt her and then what? Send him to jail for fifteen years and parole him in ten?”

  “I know it’s wrong, trust me, I really do, but that’s just the way it is,” I say.

  “I know. Jesus, don’t you think I know that? But it shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to be. I remember what you said to me in the woods. I know you killed the man who killed your daughter. What gives you the right to have that justice and stop others from having it?”

  “You don’t need to remind me of my own daughter.”

  “Do I need to remind you that you almost took mine away?” He slowly shakes his head. “When you ran into her it changed her life. It sent her down a different path. You jumped into her timeline, and instead of her turning A,” he says, tapping his right forefinger with his left to make his point, “she turned B. It brought different people into her life. Doctors and rehab, new friends. Sh
e lost three months studying and had to take private tutoring. She almost didn’t graduate high school last year. She almost didn’t qualify for university this year. Her circumstances changed. If you hadn’t hurt her, she’d be in a different place now, with different people in her life. If one of those different people are responsible for taking her . . .”

  “I get your point,” I say, holding up my hand. If one of those new people in her life took her, then it’s my fault. It’s like he said—I sent her down path B, and path B might have had a bad man waiting in the shadows.

  “Do you? Because if you did you’d be asking me how you can help. I know about you,” he says. “You’re about doing the right thing. Looking for Emma, that’s the right thing. That’s why you’re going to help me.”

  I look at him but all I can see is his daughter, slumped against the steering wheel with blood running down the side of her face, broken glass surrounding the car, my own car a wreck with the front of it folded around a lamppost, a billboard with Jesus turning wine into bottled water staring down at me, my clothes and skin reeking of alcohol. My ears were ringing and I could taste blood and the night was so cold there was fog in the air, and God how I wish it was all just a dream. I had become the man who had run over my wife and daughter. That was the worst part. I picked up the half-empty bottle of booze from the floor of the car and tossed it into the night and I’ve not had a drop since. Donovan Green’s eyes are pleading with me, he knows his daughter is dead and yet is still holding out hope that she isn’t.