Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“Because it’s illegal, that’s why.”

“And if I hadn’t had it, who knows where the hell I’d be waking up right now?”

“Okay, Tate, I’ll let the gun slide for now, but I’m not forgetting about it. By the way, you shot him.”

“What?”

“We found the bullet in the fence. There’s cloth and blood on it, so it went through something. And we got drops of blood on the lawn surrounded by the Taser ID disks, and we’ve got blood leading up the street. Not enough to be something major, but you got him pretty good.”

Schroder helps me out of the ambulance, taking some of my weight so I can step down. My first few steps are like those a baby foal will take and Schroder has to help me for a few seconds. The headache stays, though. I remember pulling out the gun. I was holding the phone in my good hand and reached for the gun with my bandaged one. It made me a split second slower. It made the grip more difficult. If I’d had a fraction longer I could have taken aim. This would be all over now. Problem is Adrian would be lying in my backyard with a bullet in his head, his brain pulped, along with Emma Green’s location.

The ambulance is parked in front of my house. On the footpath are plastic markers sitting next to what must be blood drops. We head to the backyard where six people are looking around, all of them slightly out of focus. All the lights in my house have been switched on, and a couple of large lamps have been set up outside. My neighbors keep peering over the fences.

Jane Tyrone is hanging where I last saw her. There’s rope wrapped around her chest and under her arms, and she’s been strung up, the rope thrown around the chimney on the roof and pulled back down to lift her weight, then tied off against the leg of the picnic bench. I can imagine Adrian heaving her into the air, the actions like climbing a rope. Nobody would have seen a thing over the fence. Ever so slowly, her body is rotating a hundred degrees or so, the rope spinning, she comes to a stop going one way then slowly starts to spin back the other. Her body is bloated and there isn’t much left in the way of skin, just a few patches, but mostly it’s just raw-looking flesh and even bigger areas of no flesh at all. There’s a large slice across her chest that must have been made by the shovel that unearthed her. She’s naked, but covered in dirt. Parts of her are moving slowly, and I realize she has bugs squirming inside her. What face she has left is dark and sagging, the remaining skin is loose and her fingers and hands look like she’s wearing gloves that’re two sizes too big for her.

“Anybody see anything?” I ask.

“Lots of people heard the gunshot,” Schroder says, “and most of them looked out their windows. We got a bunch of matching descriptions that line up with Adrian Loaner, along with a description of the car.”

“That it?”

“That’s about as good as we can get. At least this time he didn’t take all your files.”

“Remind me to thank him,” I say. “So we don’t know anything more than we already knew, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not true. We know he’s obsessed with you.”

“Can’t somebody cut her down?” I ask, nodding toward the dead girl.

“Not yet.”

“Jesus, Carl, she’s been up there long enough.”

“Not yet, Tate. You know how it goes.”

“Goddamn it,” I say, and I’m hit by another wave of nausea and have to crouch down before I lose balance.

“You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” I say, sounding pissed off and wanting to sound that way. “I was ringing you earlier because there was something I had to tell you. Goddamn it, it was important.”

“It’ll come to you.”

I close my eyes. I hate it when people say that, but I hate even more forgetting something I’m about to say before I can say it. This feels just like that. I squeeze my eyes shut even tighter in the hope it will help. I’m in the backyard, I’m on the phone to Schroder, I’m thinking about Emma Green, about Grover Hills, about places where Adrian can keep his collection. Grover Hills. . for a while Christchurch did what it could to hide the mental people away until one day they realized they were going to need a hundred institutions, so instead they closed down the three they had and let everybody go.

The three they had. .

All within driving distance!

My eyes snap open. Every muscle in my body is humming with energy. “I know where she is,” I tell him, almost but not quite grabbing hold of Schroder and shaking him.

“What?”

“Emma Green. It’s what I wanted to tell you. I know where she is.”

“Where?”

“I’m going with you,” I say and head to Schroder’s car. In the last few minutes a couple of vans have shown up, TV network slogans stenciled across the sides. I feel nauseous again. “And we’re going to need to lose these vultures,” I say, nodding toward the vans.

“You’re staying here, Tate. Tell me, what’s your theory?”

I open up the passenger door and climb in. “Let’s go,” I say, ignoring him, “and get some backup. We’re going to need it.”

His mother used to tell him only girls cried, and when he went down to the basement and came back with tears on his face that’s what made him a girl. He never thought so. He always thought it was what those two orderlies did to him sometimes when they stripped him naked that made him a girl, or they thought of him as a girl, he isn’t sure exactly which. But right now he is crying. He’s pulled the car off the road well away from Tate’s neighborhood and he’s holding his hands tightly on his leg and there are tears streaming from his face. He cries not only from the pain but from the frustration. Nothing is working out. He always has to fight for everything in his stupid life and this is going to be no different. Why can’t things just come easily to him like they do to everybody else?

Why can’t people just like him?

His hands are covered in blood. There isn’t anything in the car he can wrap around the wound, and if he takes his pants off to use he would be almost naked. His leg is itchy and too tender to scratch. He lowers his head and stares at the hole, tears dripping into his blood, and he imagines he’s back in his room at the Grove and he’s pacing the room, counting the footsteps, preferring the even footsteps over the odds, starting with his left and finishing with his right. Then he thinks about the cats, the boys who pissed on him and beat him, then he imagines putting them in the ground and digging them back up, ending their lives the same way they ruined his.

His tears start to slow, and the pressure in his chest from sobbing begins to ease. Strings of snot dangle from his nose and he wipes them with his hands, forgetting about the blood for a second until it streaks across his face. He begins to cry again. Life isn’t fair. It never has been. It never will be.

His leg hurts but it’s not bleeding as much now. His pants are completely soaked in blood. He can’t stay on the side of the road all night. He wipes his hands dry on the passenger seat, starts the engine and drives slowly, but not too slow, not wanting to attract the kind of attention that will get him pulled over. Blood has pooled into his shoe and makes a sucking sound when he presses on the accelerator. The wound is bad, but he knows if it were that bad he’d have passed out or died from loss of blood. He has no idea how to treat the wound or take care of it. In the past, cuts that were bad were bandaged for him by one of the nurses or his mother, and since leaving the Grove he’s never needed a doctor or a nurse to take a look at anything. What he needs is his mother, either one of them, but one’s dead and so is the other and he has never felt their loss as much as he feels it now. He truly is alone with nobody to care for him, he’s out of mothers, out of old people, his best friend left him for a girl that isn’t even real, and those at the halfway house never warmed to him the same way ninety-nine percent of everybody else never warms to him.