Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“Any thoughts to what you’re gonna do now?” Schroder asks.

“Why? You want to offer me my old job back?”

“Yeah, that’d go down well.”

“Then I’ll become a farmer. Looks like a pretty nice lifestyle.”

“I don’t know any farmers, Tate, but I’m pretty sure you’d make the worst kind.”

“Yeah? What kind is that?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s thinking I’d make the kind of farmer who’d shoot any cattle being mean to the other cattle. I try to imagine myself driving one of those tractors seven days a week and moving cows from one field to another, but no matter how hard I try I can’t get any of those images to stick. Traffic gets thicker the closer we get to town.

“Look, Tate, I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’m starting to see things a little different now.”

“What kind of different?”

“This city. Society, I don’t know. What is it you say about Christ-church?”

“It’s broken,” I answer, and it’s true.

“Yeah. It’s seems like it’s been breaking down for a while. But things. . things are, I don’t know. It’s like things just aren’t getting better. You’re out of the loop since leaving the force three years ago, but we’re outnumbered. People are disappearing. Men and women leave for work or home and just never show up.”

“My guess is they’ve had enough and are escaping,” I suggest.

“It’s not that.”

“This is your idea of small talk?”

“You’d rather tell me about your last four months?”

We pass a field where two farmers are burning off rubbish, most of it bush that’s been cut back, thick black smoke spiraling straight up into the sky where it hangs like a rain cloud without any breeze to help it on its way. The farmers are standing next to tractors, their hands on their hips as they watch, the air around them hazy with the heat. The smell comes through the air vents and Schroder shuts them down and the car gets warmer. Then we’re heading past a gray brick wall about two meters high with Christchurch written across it, no welcome to in front of the name. In fact, somebody has spray-painted a line through church and written help us. Cars are speeding in each direction, everybody in a hurry to be somewhere. Schroder switches the air-conditioning back on. We reach the first big intersection since leaving jail and sit at a red light opposite a service station where a four-wheel drive has backed into one of the pumps and forced all the staff to stand around in a circle with no idea what to do next. The board out front tells me petrol has gone up by ten percent since I’ve been gone. I figure the temperature is up about forty percent and the crime rate up by fifty. Christchurch is all about statistics; ninety percent of them bad. One entire side of the petrol station has been covered in graffiti.

The light turns green and nobody moves for about ten seconds because the guy up front is arguing on his cell phone. I keep waiting for the car tires to melt. We both get lost in our own thoughts until Schroder breaks the silence. “Point is, Tate, this city is changing. We catch one bad guy and two more take his place. It’s escalating, Tate, spiraling out of control.”

“It’s been spiraling for a while, Carl. Way before I ever left the force.”

“Well, these days it seems worse.”

“Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?” I ask.

“About what?”

“About why you came to pick me up. You want something, Carl, so just spit it out.”

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and gazes straight ahead, his eyes locked on the traffic. White light bounces off every smooth surface and it’s becoming harder to see a damn thing. I’m worried by the time I make it home my eyeballs will have liquefied. “In the backseat,” he says. “There’s a file you need to take a look at.”

“I don’t need to do anything except put on some sunglasses. Got some spares?”

“No. Just take a look.”

“Whatever it is you want, Carl, it’s something that I don’t want.”

“I want to get another killer off the streets. You’re telling me you don’t want that?”

“That’s a shitty comment.”

“See, the man I knew a year ago would have wanted that. He would have asked me how he could have helped. That man a year ago, he would have been giving me his help even if I didn’t want it. You remember that, Tate? You remember that man? Or did those four months in the slammer fog up your memory?”

“I remember it perfectly. I remember you shutting me down when I knew more than you did.”

“Jesus, Tate, you have a strange perception of reality. You got in the way of an investigation, you stole, you lied to me, and you were a real pain in the ass. Reality saw you kill somebody, it saw you crash your car into a teenage girl and put her in the hospital.”

Last year I tracked down a serial killer, and people died in the process. Bad people. At the time I didn’t know one of them was bad, and killing him was an accident. That guilt, it changed me. It got me drinking. And drinking led to the car accident which led to me getting sober again.

“You don’t need to lecture me on reality,” I say, thinking about my daughter, cold in the ground for three years and never coming back, then thinking about my wife in her care home, her body nothing more than a shell inside of which used to live the most perfect woman in the world.

“You’re right,” he says. “You’re the last person who needs a lecture on reality.”

“Anyway, I’m a different man now.”

“Why, did you find God while you were locked away?”

“God doesn’t even know that place exits,” I tell him.

“Look, Tate, we’re losing a battle and I need your help. That man a year ago, he didn’t care about boundaries. He did what needed to be done. He didn’t care about consequences. He didn’t care about the law. I’m not asking any of that from you now. I’m only asking for your help. For your insight. How can a man who did all of that last year not want to offer that?”

“Because that man ended up in jail with nobody to give a damn about him,” I say, the words more bitter than I intend them to be.

“No, Tate, that man ended up in jail because he got drunk and almost killed somebody with his car. Come on, all I’m asking is for you to take a look at the file. Read it over and tell me what you think. I’m not asking you to track anybody down or get your hands dirty. Truth is we’re all losing perspective, we’re too close-and hell, no matter what you’ve done or the actions you’ve taken, this is what you’re good at. This is why you were put on this earth.”

“You’re stretching,” I tell him. “And trying to appeal to your ego.” He takes his eyes off the road for a second to flash me a smile. “But what isn’t a stretch is the fact that you can do with the money.”

“Money? What, the police department is going to put me back on the payroll? I seriously doubt that.”

“That’s not what I said. Look, there’s a reward. Three months ago it was fifty thousand dollars. Now it’s two hundred thousand. It goes to whoever can offer information that leads to an arrest. What else you going to do, Tate? At least take a look at the file. Give yourself a chance to-”

His cell phone rings. He doesn’t finish his sentence. He reaches for it and doesn’t say much, just listens, and I don’t need to hear any of the conversation to know it’s bad news. When I was a cop nobody ever rang to give me good news. Nobody ever rang to thank me for catching a criminal, to buy me some pizza and beer and say good job . Schroder slows a little as he drives, his hand tight on the wheel. He has to swerve out wide to avoid a large puddle of safety glass from a recent accident, each piece reflecting the sunlight like a diamond. I think about the money, and what I could do with it. I stare out the window and watch a pair of surveyors in yellow reflective vests measuring the street, planning on cutting it up in the near future to widen it or narrow it or just to keep the city’s roadworking budget ticking over. Schroder indicates and pulls over and somebody honks at us and gives the finger. Schroder keeps talking as he does a U-turn. I think about the man I was a year ago, but I don’t want to be him anymore. Schroder hangs up.