Collecting Cooper

chapter fifty-three

The alarm clock goes off and I wake up feeling even more tired than before I went to sleep. It reminds me of how I used to feel last year when I’d wake up every morning with a hangover. I spent months on end trying to drink away the memories of the bad things I thought I’d done before crashing into Emma Green sobered me up for good. A couple of cups of coffee go a long way to bringing me around. I take a cold shower and drink another coffee before settling up with the hotel clerk, this one a different guy from two hours ago.

The roads are full of early-morning weekend traffic. Most people have the windows down with their arms hanging out the window, some of them with cigarettes between their fingers with smoke trailing into the air. There are no early indications that today is going to be any cooler than yesterday. I think of Buttons and what he said about rumors in a mental institution, and wonder how much of what he said last night was true. I hope Jesse Cartman is doing better this morning, that he’ll take his medication today and not be found with his hands buried in somebody else looking for the soft meat. There’s a delay up ahead, a couple of the teenage drag racers from last night have crashed, shutting down one of the lanes, so we’re all bottlenecked up to and through an intersection, the heat cooking us all.

I make it through the city. I drive out past the airport taking a road with a view to the runways, an incoming plane low enough to shake the car. There are a few dozen people parked off the road, caught between reading newspapers and watching the planes come and go. Out past more paddocks and more farmers and I should just buy a house out here because it’d mean less commuting.

I don’t get all warm inside at the thought of returning to the prison. I have to go past a guard station and show some ID before I pull into the parking lot where there’s a small scattering of other visitor vehicles. It all looks exactly the same as it did a few days ago when I was stepping out of it. Same shimmering blacktop. Same dust floating up from the exercise yard. Same machines and same scaffolding and same work crews extending the prison walls, making more room for the new arrivals being bused in on a daily basis, not having to work too fast because the prison just keeps on busing them back out. The entrance betrays what it’s really like inside. A nicely landscaped garden around the parking lot that’s turning brown in the sun, a large double set of automatic glass doors, all modern styling with furniture inside only a year old at the most. There’s a reception counter with about four people behind it, all of them look like they should be on the other side of the bars, especially the woman who speaks to me. She has dark black hair along with a small reserve of it lining her upper lip. She looks at me as if trying to figure how many pieces she can break me into, and I imagine it would be a lot. She has to be at least twice my weight, and she’s carrying most of that in her shoulders and chest.

“I’d like to see a prisoner,” I tell her.

“You have an appointment?”

“No.”

“You just say no?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t just come down here without making an appointment.”

“Then I’d like to make an appointment,” I say.

“For who and for when?”

“For Edward Hunter, and for now.”

“I just said you can’t come here without making an appointment.”

“I just made one.”

“No you didn’t,” she says. “You just asked to make one. It’s a big difference.”

“Please, it’s important.”

“That’s what everybody says.”

I think about calling Donovan Green. Asking him for some more money to grease the transition between not seeing Edward Hunter and seeing Edward Hunter, then figuring it’s too risky. The woman looks like she’d be happy because most of her income is being blown on steroids, but sad because she’d have to split it with the others behind her. “Please, it really is important,” I say. “I think he knows something that can help me find Emma Green, the girl that’s missing. Please. Her father sent me. He’s desperate. And what can it hurt letting me see him?”

She takes a good ten seconds to think about it. Weighs up whatever options there are for and against, and comes to the conclusion that helping me out may end up being her good deed for the day.

“Don’t make this a habit,” she says.

“I won’t. I promise.”

“It’ll take ten minutes. Sit down and wait, and if it takes longer, don’t complain.”

I sit down and wait and I don’t complain, even though I can feel each of the minutes ticking away.