Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“How often did this happen?”

He takes a long swallow of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Just that time. There were rumors. You think rumors are bad out here? Son, rumors are nothing compared to what goes around in a mental institution. You listen to the patients in there and you’d be believing Elvis was living out there along with Jesus. But that was the start of it. After that, the Twins, they changed. They got off on it somehow. The Scream Room became not just a room for punishment, but a room for pain. They’d take us down there and hell, most of us, we deserved every second of it. It was as though two demons were unleashed, two mean demons who just loved to beat the shit out of everybody and humiliate the hell out of them. With the boy they killed, I accepted that. An eye for an eye and all that. Was biblical. But what they became. . they deserve to rot in Hell for that.”

“They’re already there,” I tell him. “They got themselves killed.” His eyebrows raise up. “They did now, did they? Well, I can’t say that’s a real shame, now. Who got them?”

“Adrian Loaner.”

“No. Adrian? Well I’ll be damned. Never knew that boy had it in him.”

“You sound proud of him.”

“Proud? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I do know if anybody deserved to hurt those fellas, it was Adrian.”

“Who were they? The Twins?”

“What do you mean, son?”

“I mean who are they? You know their real names?”

“Sure I do. Murray and Ellis Hunter.”

“Hunter?”

“That’s what I said.”

The name is familiar. A few months ago when I was in jail, a man there named Jack Hunter was stabbed. Schroder came into the prison to see me and ask if I’d look into it, see if I could figure out who’d done it.

“You know where they live?”

“Now why’d I know a thing like that?”

“Because I’m thinking Adrian is hiding out there.”

He shrugs. “That’s a pretty big theory,” he says, “but it’s not impossible.”

“Not impossible at all,” I tell him. After all, if Murray and Ellis Hunter are dead in the ground at Grover Hills, then that means they have a home somewhere that they’re not looking after. That means an empty building, and Adrian has to be somewhere and the Hunter house is looking like a good bet. “How long they work at Grover Hills for?”

He pulls a handkerchief out from his pocket. His clothes are immaculate, his shirt is still buttoned up, and his tie nice and tight, but the handkerchief is the dirtiest one I’ve ever seen. He wipes it around the back of his neck and it comes away wet. “They started a few years after I was there. And they left five or six years ago. Was a hell of a surprise to see them go. Never knew where they went. Adrian kill them back then, did he?”

“No. He killed them at some point in the last week or two. Along with Nurse Deans.”

He whistles, like he’s just inspected and appreciated a car that can travel much faster than he’d previously imagined. “She was a real piece of work, that one. Listen, son, I don’t know what happened between when they left and when they died. If I were to have at a guess, I’d say they did nothing good. Those boys were evil. The patients were bad but most of them were just wired up wrong is all. Nobody liked it, but you couldn’t blame them for it. Those boys, I’d bet my bottom dollar they carried on hurting people well after they left the Grove.”

“And you? What’s your story?”

“My story is my story,” he says, and he tries to offer a kind smile that doesn’t quite fit right on his face. “Don’t forget we made a deal,” he tells me.

“I’ll be back,” I promise him.

I try to use the police computer to look up the Hunters but at some point in the last hour I’ve been locked out, it asks for a password that I don’t know. So I drive deeper into town. Cell phone technology has made phone booths pretty much redundant in most parts of the world, but not here in Christchurch where many people are still living in the stone age. I find a phone booth a block away from the police station next to the Avon River, where four teenagers in their boxer shorts are currently going for a drunken swim. Back in the nineties, to combat underage drinking, the government lowered the legal drinking age, so suddenly thousands and thousands of youths across each city were no longer breaking the law, hence making it no longer an issue. Only the government couldn’t see what a bad idea that was. They opened the floodgates, and now, years later, the country has one of the biggest underage drinking problems in the world.

I flick through the phone book. Half of it is missing but thankfully it’s the half starting from M . There’s almost a hundred Hunters in there. Two of them belong to the brothers. I check the initials and find an M and E Hunter on the same line. Maybe they lived together. They did everything else together, so why not? I figure it’s worth a shot. I figure since Buttons didn’t know their address, then Adrian wouldn’t have known it either. Yet Adrian found them, which means it can’t be hard to do. He probably looked them up in the phone book. Probably saw the same initials and started with that one. I decide on the same thing.

I pick up the phone. It’s sticky. I miss my cell phone. I drop some coins into the slot. I have to press the receiver tight against my ear to block out the loud music being pumped from every open doorway of every open bar and every passing car. I dial the number and nobody answers immediately, which I figure to be a good sign, then an even better sign comes along: an answering machine picks up.

“You’ve reached Ellis and Murray and we’re out and you know the deal, so go ahead and leave a message if you want.”

I don’t bother leaving a message.

The adrenaline is starting to pump. It’s closing in on two-thirty and the drag racers have either moved on or all broken down on another stretch of the four avenues because I don’t get caught up in traffic again. I race through the streets doing about 20 kph over the limit, passing a couple of speed cameras, which flash at me, but I’m in a detective’s car so the tickets will be waived. The Hunters live in a part of the city where there aren’t any junked-up cars resting on front lawns. In fact it’s a nice neighborhood where most houses look no more than ten years old and you can drive for five straight minutes without passing any crime scene tape. I find the address and there aren’t any cars parked out front. I pull over a block away and grab a flashlight and make my way back. My heart is racing. Adrian has my gun and a Taser and who the hell knows what else. First thing I check is the garage window. There’s one car in there that doesn’t belong to Emma Green, and a space for another car. There aren’t any lights on inside the house. I shine my flashlight on the back door and crouch in front of the handle. I use a lock-pick gun. It only takes a few pulls of the trigger and some good placement and thirty seconds to make my way inside. Not as quick as kicking down the door, but the door here looks far more sturdy than Jesse Cartman’s house, and back there I wasn’t trying to be quiet. I step into the hallway. I can hear the beep beep of an answering machine. It sounds frantic. It sounds like it’s desperate to unload its secrets. I use the flashlight to light my way, stepping carefully. In the living room there are photos of Murray and Ellis Hunter and there’s no doubt they’re the two men I saw in the ground. There’s a large patch of blood in the center of the living room with hair and what could be bone fragments stuck in it. There is more blood leading from the front door and drag marks in the carpet.