Chris Mooney - The Dead Room

'That's when he showed me the pictures, these Polaroids of some girl missing her hands and teeth.'

Darby had to clear her throat before she could speak. 'Was Jack King involved in this?'

'The pictures, what I saw on the steps, what Mr Sullivan said to me – I told my mother. All of it.' Coop swallowed. 'I'm scared shitless, crying, and she's on the phone with my old man and the next thing I know it's five in the morning and we're down at McKinney's Diner and my father is telling me about how Mr Sullivan is keeping Charlestown clean and safe – he's keeping out the riffraff, is what he says. "Guys like Tommy C.," my dad says, "a guy who's trying to peddle drugs in our town, a guy like that had it coming." Mr Sullivan – that's what my father calls him – Mr Sullivan, he says, is a good man and sometimes good men have to make hard decisions. Decisions the police won't understand. My father tells me to forget what I saw and to keep my mouth shut – my father makes it a point, in fact, to drill it into my head for the next week. Guess what I did?'

'You kept your mouth shut.'

'That's right. I gave my parents my word. They were good people. Hard workers. They had a lot of love in their hearts, but they weren't exactly the two brightest people. Like everyone else who lived here back then, they looked at Mr Sullivan as this… this Robin Hood kind of guy, I guess you could say. At the time crime here was at an all-time low. No drugs, no girls on the streets looking for crack cocaine in exchange for blow jobs. Back then we walked the streets at night 'cause you knew you were safe.'

Coop took another sip of his drink and then held the glass near his face, staring at it. 'Thing is, what I saw? It's eating me up inside. I mean it's really tearing it up because, after all, I'm a God-fearing Irish Catholic and we're talking about my soul here. So I go to confession and tell the priest what I saw, everything that happened, the pictures, you name it. I'm telling him I want to go to the police 'cause it's the right thing to do. I ask him if he knows of a cop I can trust. You know what the son of a bitch said to me?'

'I'm guessing he told you not to go to the police.'

'That's right. Say three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers and all will be forgiven. And that's what I did, Darby. Thing is, though, the Big Guy in the sky had other plans for me. Next day I'm walking home from school trying to, you know, reconcile everything that's happened, and a car pulls up next to me and there's this huge dude who looks like Frankenstein minus the neck bolts flashing me his badge.'

'Jack King.'

Coop nodded. 'He told me to get my ass in the back seat. Being the good boy I am, guess what I did?'

'I think you got your ass in the back seat.'

'You're pretty good at this.'

'I've known you a long time,' she said, keeping her voice low, hoping it would bring Coop's down a notch and remove that jittery hitch in it. 'I know you're -'

'You don't know me, Darby.' He drained the rest of his glass and placed it back on the steam trunk. 'You think you know me because we've spent so much time together. But unless you've got an ability to read minds, see thoughts from moment to moment any time you want, you can never really know another person. That's why I don't see the point in getting married. You could go to bed every night with your wife, give her the ole high-hard one and your heart is swelling with love for her – I'm talking about that once-ina-lifetime love you see in movies, the kind people rarely experience in their lives. The type where it hurts to breathe, right? And for all you know your significant other is fantasizing you're George Clooney or the pool boy or whoever while you're on top of her. And the thing is, no matter how much you love the hell out of someone, you can never really know that person. Not in the way you know and trust yourself.'

'I think I've earned your trust over the years.'

'You have,' Coop said. 'You definitely have. That's why I'm going to tell you the best part of the story, the part where Special Agent King takes me into Kevin Reynolds's basement.'

Darby shifted in her seat. The jumpy, nervous hitch she had heard in Coop's voice had disappeared. Now his tone was stripped of emotion, like Michelle Baxter's, and for some reason it triggered the memory of looking through the tiny window built into the ICU hospital door and seeing the flat-line on her father's heart monitor after her mother decided to pull him off life support.

'Special Agent King pulls up in front of Reynolds's house and tells me to get out of the car,' Coop said. 'I'm panicking, thinking, oh shit, this guy knows about what I saw and he's here to bust Reynolds and Sullivan. King doesn't ring the doorbell or knock, just opens the door, grabs me by the arm and drags me across the kitchen and into the basement. That was the first sign I had that something was seriously wrong.'

Coop stared at his hand as he rubbed the back of Olivia's head. 'I'm standing in the basement with King behind me and there's Mr Sullivan sitting in a kitchen chair cracking peanut shells in his hands and shooting me this look that says I'm in serious trouble. 'Course I already know that since he's got this young girl tied to a chair with duct tape and there's a big hole in the dirt floor right behind her.'

Darby looked at the front door, wanting to run for it and get as far away as she could from whatever Coop was about to tell her.

'You want to hear the rest of it, Darby?'

No, I don't.

'I don't have to tell you,' he said in a low voice. His eyes were too big and his mouth was quivering. 'There's still time to close Pandora's box. You can walk out of here with your conscience free and clear.'

'Maybe you should talk to a lawyer.'

'I'm not talking to a lawyer, Darby, I'm talking to you. You want to know the rest of it or not?'

'Tell me.'

'This girl, her hands, arms and clothes are caked in dirt because Mr Sullivan made her dig her grave in the basement with her bare hands. She's got duct tape over her mouth. She's shaking and crying, I'm crying because now the Fed's pressing a gun against the side of my head – I can feel the muzzle digging into my skin as Mr Sullivan tells me about how I've got this real important decision to make. Life changing, he says. One of us, he tells us, is going into that hole.'

Darby's skin grew cold. Coop stared up at the ceiling, at the fast-moving shadows made by the rainwater running down the living-room windows.

'Mr Sullivan turns to me and says, "Who do you think should be put in there, Coops? This young lady right here, who decided to go to the Feds and tell them about my hotel parties, or you? Word on the street is you're thinking about going to the cops when you promised me and your old man you were going to keep your mouth shut, keep our business right here in the neighbourhood? "

'That's when I realized my parish priest must've told Mr Sullivan about my confession. I didn't tell anyone. Not my friends, not my parents or my sisters. I was afraid of it getting back to Mr Sullivan and here I was stupid enough to believe I could trust Father Humphrey with the whole seal of confession thing.'

Darby gripped the edge of the cushion. 'This girl in the basement, did she know Kendra Sheppard or Michelle Baxter?'

'I'm sure she did, but I never got a chance to talk to her. I'm bawling, telling Mr Sullivan I didn't tell anyone, and he just stares at me cracking peanut shells like he's at a ball game. He keeps asking me the same question. Who do I think should go into that hole? Either I make a decision, he says, or he's going to make the decision for me. Guess what decision I made, Darby?'

Her stomach hitched. Bile rose in her throat. She had to swallow several times before she could speak.