Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“Define all the time,” I tell him.

He shrugs again and water drips off the hose. “Every few months or so.”

I do the math. Every few months. Six people a year. Ten years would be sixty people. No way sixty people are going to pay their money and head downstairs and beat the hell out of somebody with a baseball bat or hammer. I don’t see it.

What I can believe is it happening once or twice. There could be some truth in what he’s saying. If it did, it must have felt good for the person getting revenge. I wonder how good it felt when their hour was up. How many went home and threw up, how many wanted to come back for more. “And you told nobody.”

“Who’d believe me? Even you don’t.”

“I’ve seen the room,” I tell him, but it’s still not enough. I believe people suffered down there with the bed and dirty blanket and dirty pillow, but not for money, and not by family members out looking for revenge.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t tell anybody. None of us did. Rumors don’t amount to much when they’re being told by crazy people, and half the people who came out of that place are dead now and the other half still fucking crazy. After that first guy got killed down there, the Twins would start taking others down there. Sometimes we’d be beaten. Sometimes just humiliated. And made to scream. And our screams couldn’t be heard.”

“What about. .”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Jesse. .”

“I mean it,” he says, looking right at me and holding up his hand, and his eyes flare with the darkness I saw in them years ago. “I hate that I remember it all. You want me to stop taking the drugs so I can forget?”

“Okay, Jesse,” I say, still holding the hose. “No more questions about the room.”

“I want you to leave now.”

“I have to find Emma Green.”

“She was pretty,” he says. “She reminded me of. .” he trails off and looks down at the puddle forming around his feet.

“Of your sister?”

“I said I want you to leave,” he says quickly. “You ever see Pamela Deans once you were released?”

“Never.”

“What happened to you? Where’d you go?”

He drops the hose. “What do you want from me?”

“Your help,” I say. “If Emma reminds you of your sister, then you owe it to her to help her. This is your chance at some redemption, Jesse. Don’t let it pass you by.”

He looks up at the ceiling and keeps his gaze up there as he comes to a decision. When he looks back at me, his face is tight with anger. “A bunch of us were sent to a halfway house,” he says. “I was allowed to move out about six months ago. I have my own place now and I always show up to work and I never miss my doctor’s appointments and always take my meds. I’m fine now. I’m no longer a danger to society,” he says, and he says it as though he’s rehearsed the lines over and over, as if he were forced to memorize them on the day Grover Hills was shut down and he was sent forth into the world to fend for himself.

“The guy from the picture, it also looks like another guy who might have been there too.”

“Where? The halfway house?”

“Both. The Grove,” he says, “that’s what we called it. He was there and at the halfway house. I really can’t remember his name.”

“Did he have a habit of killing and digging up pets?”

He pulls back a little in disgust. “What? No, no, not that I know of. Jesus, that’s wrong,” he says, and I picture the day we found him after he’d had his hands deep inside his sister. I wonder what would have gotten the same wrong reaction from the predrug Jesse Cartman.

“The Twins have names?”

He bends down and picks the hose back up. “Just the Twins. Twin One and Twin Two.”

“Where is this halfway house?” I ask him.

“Town. Worcester Street,” he says, and gives me the address.

I thank him for his time, not real sure how I feel about Jesse Cart-man. Back when I first saw what he had done, all I wanted to do was put a bullet between his eyes. Now he’s a different person. It’s as though the man who killed his sister has disappeared, and this new version of him has to live with that guilt. For the first time it really sinks in that he was a victim back then too, a victim of a sickness he couldn’t control, a victim who slipped through the cracks along with others who, with the right medication in the first place, never needed to have hurt anybody.

If he were a criminal, he’d have been locked away. He’d have been released from jail within the last couple of years, and he’d have come out a far more violent man. At least this way there’s a chance he can function in society.

“I truly am better now,” he says, as if reading my thoughts. “I truly hope you are,” I tell him, aware the only thing stopping him from trying to eat somebody else are a few small pills that he pops every morning along with his cornflakes when he wakes up to carry on with his normal life.

The walls are blurry and sway a little when Cooper starts coming around. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth and he probes it with his finger. He’s bitten down on the side of his tongue, the flesh torn and swollen.

There is no light coming into the room. He can tell by feel that he’s in a padded cell. He’s either in Sunnyview or Eastlake. Most likely it’s Sunnyview. Adrian must have followed him out here the other night since he knows about Emma Green, and he certainly would want to hide somewhere he was somewhat familiar with. Cooper doesn’t remember any of the trip here. In the end he had to accept Adrian was going to shoot him with the Taser, but it was the only way if he wanted to change location. The police are probably already at Grover Hills and he couldn’t afford to be found there covered in a dead girl’s blood. They’d arrest Adrian and he’d tell them everything he knew about Cooper, including what he knew about Emma Green, which was turning out to be quite a lot. Adrian would have led the police straight here. The police would be saving Cooper only to crucify him.

He’s done with the baby steps. Now he has to go full throttle. It’s a three-part plan. Escape. Kill Adrian. And make up a story to put him in the clear. It’s all going to work out. In fact, there’s no reason he can’t come out of all this looking like a hero and write his book. And, if he can get hold of the file Adrian was holding up earlier, he might be able to track down Natalie Flowers.

God, that would make all of this worth it.

Unless the cops have found the photographs.

That’s what he needs to determine once he gets out of here. He’ll have to return to his office and see if the pictures are still there. If they are then the three-part plan will work out. If they’re gone, then the three-part plan has to change. Escape. Kill Adrian. And get the hell out of New Zealand. He doesn’t know exactly how somebody goes about doing something like that, but if people dumber than him can flee the country, then there shouldn’t be any reason he can’t too.

He walks the room. It’s completely padded. Not just the walls, but the floor too. He jumps up but can’t reach the ceiling. It might be padded too. There might also be a light up there. He walks a grid formation and finds nothing else in the room with him. One of these walls has a door in it, and he finds the join in the padded wall and can pull it back barely enough to reveal the door frame. Light comes in around it. He tugs at the wall hoping to tear it away, but it’s no use. He finds a mail-sized slot in the door at head height. He can’t open it from this side. It’s hot in here and stuffy. There will be no power to the building, and even if there was there’d be no air-conditioning in this room. These were never designed to be comfortable-only designed to stop the crazy from banging themselves into oblivion.