Collecting Cooper

chapter twenty-eight

The payoff is in the expression. It’s been more than twenty years since he last saw that look. It brings a flood of memories that makes his insides warm and gives him a sense of longing for those days. There will be more cats, he tells himself, because there are more people who have hurt him. Through the gap in the fence he watches Tate drop the pages. They hit the deck and slide apart like a deck of cards, the top few peeling away and drifting onto the brown lawn. Tate reaches up to the cat and Adrian doesn’t stay to see what happens next, instead he runs down the street to where his car is parked, mission almost accomplished, drives to the end of the street, turns left, then turns left again and comes up the parallel street into the cul-de-sac and stops outside Tate’s house.

The front door to the house is open, which makes this easier. He was going to knock on the door and shoot Tate when he answered it, which is always risky, but now he steps inside. He can’t hear anything except a mechanical sound being repeated over and over from the first room on the left, a whirr-clunk, whirr-clunk. He takes the Taser out of his pocket. His hands are sweating and he almost loses his grip on the handle. He keeps it pointed ahead of him, but close to his body where he can protect it. The rag is in his back pocket, along with the small plastic bottle of the fluid that makes people sleep.

Ideally he’d like to shoot Tate in the back. The whole thing would go that much easier, but it’s not necessary. Either way, once Tate is down and unconscious, Adrian can back the car into the driveway and pick him up. He’s not the best at reversing a car but he’s done it enough times that he’s confident he can do it again. He’ll park next to Tate’s car because the driveway is wide enough. Then he’ll pop the trunk and load Tate in and drive back to the Grove. He’ll put him in one of the rooms with the padded walls. Not as comfortable as a bed, but much safer when dealing with somebody like Tate.

Theodore Tate-both killer and hunter of killers-the perfect collector’s piece. He will have stories too-good ones.

The room making the sound is a study. There are pages coming out of a printer, being ejected through a slot like an envelope being mailed. The pages fall into a tray. There’s a bunch of them already, and there are lots of other papers and photographs scattered across the floor and desk. He takes hold of the next page rolling out of the printer. He scans it then picks up other pages from the tray and scans those too.

Oh my God, is this the book Cooper was working on? He recognizes some of the names. It is! It really is! He can’t believe it, and he’s so excited that his hands start shaking even more. More pages come out of the printer. He snatches them up. How did Tate get hold of a copy? And why? He glances around the room as if the answer is going to be there for him, but it isn’t, but what is here are lots of other papers and photographs to do with another case, one that he’s been reading about lately. Tate is not only looking for Cooper, but also for the woman who’s been killing men in uniform.

He can’t believe his luck in coming here.

He doesn’t think the smile will leave his face for hours!

He steps into the hallway. He can hear Tate talking to somebody and his heart slams harder in his chest and his smile disappears. There are two people here! He steps back into the study and scoops up the manuscript and all the papers scattered around the room, and the papers he jams into an empty file. He doesn’t get them all and he can’t wait for the rest to come out of the printer. Cooper will love getting his hands on this Melissa X information. What a way to make him happy! He feels like he’s raiding a treasure chest. He feels like, at any second, Tate and his friend are going to burst into the study and capture him. It makes him both excited and anxious.

He gets back outside and runs down to the car. His racing heart slows down, but he’s still dripping with sweat. He starts the car and is about to pull away when he realizes that Tate may not have had somebody with him, but may have been on the phone. He feels stupid. He bets that’s what it was, that Tate was calling somebody. Probably the police. He still has time to go back inside and try to collect him.

Only he’s too nervous, way too nervous now, and he’s ridden his luck for the morning, getting in and out of the house without being seen, getting all that information, and digging up the cat. He can come back any time. He can come back tonight, or tomorrow, or next week. So he puts the car into gear and drives out of the street. His nerves turn to excitement. In fact he’s so excited on the way home he pulls over for five minutes to look through the book. Seeing the names of people he used to know, it’s like pulling the scab off an old memory, a happy scab because the memories make him smile. He drives to a convenience store and buys a newspaper, and when he finally gets home he bursts through the front door and puts Cooper’s book on the floor by the basement door, then heads straight down into the basement.