Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

He lifts his hand slightly and signals that he wants to write something. Every breath he makes is drawn in and out of the pen, accompanied by a hollow whistling sound. I find the nib and plastic spine that came out of the broken pen and hand it to him, along with the crossword book. He tilts it toward him and writes, then puts down the pen. I take the book back off him.

He’s written Fuck You in the margin. I look down at him, and he grins. Then he reaches to the plastic tube and pulls it out.

The smile stays on his face for ten seconds. He’s controlling the situation, controlling his fate, controlling the outcome. He’s avoiding jail, avoiding the responsibility, avoiding the media circus. He prefers death to the humiliation he’ll have to face with his peers. His thoughts are very clear in his eyes. He’s happy with the decision he’s made. Then that smile flickers around the edges. He begins to turn purple again, sweat is running down his forehead. He’s beating the system, but he’s not looking as happy with his decision anymore. Twenty seconds into it and there is no longer any hint of a smile. He begins fumbling with the plastic tube. He lifts it up to his throat. He gets the tip of it against the cut but can’t get it in there, there’s too much blood and he can’t get the angle right. It keeps slipping around the edges of the wound and also in his fingertips. He tries to widen the hole with his finger, but in the process he drops the tube. It rolls over the floor toward me.

Thirty seconds into it and his eyes are pleading for help. He tries to form the word but can’t make it, but he mouths it over and over.

Help.

I underline the message he wrote me and throw the crossword book onto his lap. He looks down at it, then back up at me. Forty seconds now and I’ve never seen such panic in anybody’s eyes before.

It’s hard to watch.

I don’t want to watch it.

And I don’t have to.

I reach down and pick up the plastic tube. I drop it into my pocket and step out of the bedroom. I walk down the hall, past Adrian, past the dead women, back past all the old furniture and antique calendar and step out the back door, away from the gagging sounds coming from the bedroom. I circle my way around the house. The gun is outside the bedroom window in the garden. I pick it up and drop it into my pocket. I look through the window. Cooper isn’t moving. I didn’t kill him, I could have saved him, and I’m comfortable with not doing so. I throw the tube back into the window. I don’t want to have to explain to Schroder why it was in my pocket. It rolls under Cooper’s body but he doesn’t make a reach for it.

Emma Green is standing in the driveway. She’s wearing a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. She’s still holding the crowbar. I stop ten meters away from her because she looks like she’s going to swing that thing at the next person who enters her hitting zone. She keeps holding it even when the police cars pull into the driveway and Schroder, along with the other officers, jump out of the car and come over.

Donovan Green is following them, a woman in the passenger seat who must be Hillary, his wife. Emma recognizes the car and drops the crowbar and runs toward them. Before he can come to a stop his wife has the door open and her feet out, and she almost falls jumping from the car. Donovan leaves the engine running, none of them looking at me, mother and father having eyes only for their daughter. I smile as I watch them give each other the tightest embraces of their lives, and Schroder comes over. He’s armed, and so are the men who show up with him. They’re approaching the house carefully.

“Adrian?” he asks.

“Dead,” I tell him.

“Cooper?”

“The same.”

“Jesus,” he says. “Tell me what happened.”

So I tell him as we watch Emma and her family continue to hug each other, and as the Christchurch sun continues to try and set fire to fields around us.

The café owner kept Emma’s job for her. She didn’t want to go back, but she needed the money, and anyway, she has time to kill before she heads away to the police academy. She had never thought before that she would want to be a cop, but it’s all she can think about. She has quit university, has filed her application with the police force, and now she just has to wait. It could take six months. It could take three years. Hopefully she’s accepted. Hopefully she has the strength to get through the months of training, and then hopefully she is posted in Christchurch so she can be near her family where she can make a difference. Despite everything that has happened to her, she loves this city. She wants to protect this city. She wants to make sure other girls like her don’t have to go through what men like Cooper Riley put her through. She doesn’t know whether in a few months’ time she might have changed her mind, that the reality of what happened to her two weeks ago will seem different and instead of wanting to become a cop she’ll be wanting to curl up in her bedroom for the rest of her life. Her parents don’t support her decision. They want her to carry on with her studies. They tell her it’s too dangerous being a policewoman. She pointed out that it’s equally as dangerous being a student or working at a café.

The old man who she thought was dead the night she was abducted is sitting at the table closest to the counter. He’s working his way through a muffin and a coffee and also the crossword puzzle. He doesn’t recognize her from that night. God, how she wanted to scream at him when he walked in! She wanted to spit in his coffee too, but she just smiled and took his money and brought out his order when it was ready.

Part of her, and she can’t deny it, wants to follow him out to the parking lot when he’s done and, in the morning, people will find him sitting dead behind the driver’s wheel of his car. It’s what Melissa X would do.

He senses she is looking at him, and he looks up, a big smile on his face.

“Best coffee in the city,” he tells her.

She smiles back. “I appreciate hearing that,” she says.

He goes back to his crossword. She thinks about Adrian Loaner, and how it felt putting that safety pin into his eye. A month ago if asked, she’d have said that sort of thing would never have been possible for her, not under any circumstances. She also never would have thought about following a customer into the parking lot and strangling him either.

People change. Some for the better, some for the worse. After helping kill two men, she doesn’t know which of those sums her up.

She thinks about Cooper Riley, flat on the floor with his throat blocked from the Taser. She wanted him to die. She was desperate for him to die, and even though that’s what happened, she’s glad he didn’t die from her hand. There is some relief there. He killed himself, and that took any guilt away from her-even though she isn’t sure she ever would have felt any. If he had lived, he could have hurt other people. Not today, not next week, but definitely in fifteen years when he was freed from jail.

Theodore Tate made sure that wouldn’t happen.

At least she thinks that’s what happened.

Theodore Tate. She still hates him for what he did to her last year. But that’s changing. She’s heard he’s wanting to be a cop again. She hopes she gets to work with him one day. She knows there are things about the world he can teach her that the police force can’t, things that can make her a better cop. Things she can do to help more people.

Like pulling plastic tubes out of evil men’s throats.

Okay-she isn’t sure if she could do that, just as she isn’t sure what really happened in that bedroom after she walked out.