Collecting Cooper

chapter fifty-four

The screams are loud, muffled somewhat by the padded walls of the cell, but high pitched enough to come through and for Cooper to know they’re being made by a woman. Probably from Emma Green. There’s a second gunshot, then three more, and Cooper is desperate to know what’s going on. Have the police arrived? He hopes not.

His mother is in the opposite corner of the cell. He can’t see her-he still can’t see a damn thing in here and has no idea whether it’s even morning yet, and his bladder is so full that fluids must be starting to back up into his stomach and his groin feels like it’s going to pop. His mother isn’t talking to him, or even looking at him now, and for that he truly hates himself. He starts banging on the cell door. He has to bang hard to produce sound loud enough to be heard, and he uses his shoe like he did back in Grover Hills.

“Hey, hey, what’s going on out there? Adrian? Hey, let me out of here. Let me out, let me out, let me out!”

The screaming stops. There is no more gunfire, only silence. He keeps banging at the padded door.

Then the slot at face height opens up.

“Who are you?” Emma Green asks.

He almost jumps at seeing her face. In a weird way it’s like seeing a ghost. “Who. . who are you?” he asks, trying to sound like he doesn’t know. “Please, please, you have to let me out of here,” he adds, trying to hide his shock at seeing her. “He’s crazy. He’s going to kill us.”

“You look. . kind of familiar.”

“Please, we have to hurry.”

“Oh my God, you’re one of my university professors! What the hell is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and right now he really doesn’t. Somehow Emma Green has escaped. The screams must have come from Adrian. The gunshots must have been Emma Green shooting him! It’s perfect. All absolutely perfect. “Listen, what’s your name?” he asks.

“Emma.”

“Listen, Emma, I’ve been captive for. . I don’t know, I’ve lost track of time. Please, please, you have to let me out of here. You killed him, right? The man who took me?”

“No. He’s still alive. I only hurt him,” she says, glancing over her right shoulder to look down the corridor.

“You shot him, right? Please tell me you shot him.”

“He was shooting at me.”

“Oh, fuck, so he’s still out there? You have to hurry. You have to let me out, you have to let me out now!”

“Are you in there alone?” she asks.

He steps aside so she can see into the room. “My mother is in here with me,” he tells her.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“It’s what I’m trying to tell you. He killed her. Last night he killed her right in front of me and there wasn’t a thing I could do,” he says. “It was the worst. . the worst thing in the world.” And it was the worst thing. He wrapped his hands around his mother’s throat and he told her he was sorry over and over as her eyes bulged forward and he took her life from her. He loves her, but he loves his freedom even more. There was no other way. The police would question her. She would tell them a crazy man thought her son was a serial killer. The police would wonder if there was something to that, on account of one of his students going missing. Two students, if you counted the one from three years ago.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“Please, you have to let me out.”

“Hang on a second.”

She takes a step back and the door opens outward into the hall. The relief washes over him. He can feel the excitement of killing Adrian. He can taste the excitement of being alone with Emma Green. For the first time he notices she’s completely naked. He steps out of the cell. This isn’t Sunnyview or Eastlake. “Where in the hell are we?”

“I have no idea,” she says. “But I think there are two of them.”

“What?”

“Somebody took me on Monday night,” she says, “and left me in a building somewhere. Then somebody else took me from that building and brought me here. It wasn’t the same guy.”

“Where is he now? The one you hurt?”

“That way,” she says, and points down the hallway.

The hallway is part of a house. Just a normal house with a padded cell and not a mental institution that’s been abandoned. The hallway is carpeted and wider than what he’s used to. There are old-fashioned side tables against the wall with ceramic knickknacks on them, some watercolor paintings that don’t look very good and were probably done by the owners of the house. He takes two steps toward the room Emma said she came out of and the door flies open and Adrian appears, blood and fluid streaming down one side of his face, the palm of his hand hiding some kind of mess, his foot is bleeding and looks like it’s been clubbed with a hammer. He levels the gun.

“Jesus,” Cooper says, and he grabs Emma and shields her from what’s coming, covering her with his body, an instinct he guesses coming from the Cooper Riley that predated his divorce and Natalie Flowers. The bullet hits the wall well wide of them and he figures two things right then: Adrian has probably never used a gun before today, and his accuracy is off because he’s only using one eye.

“You’re my friend,” Adrian yells, and there’s another gunshot, this one closer.

“Let’s go,” Cooper says, and he rolls off the girl and grabs her arm and pulls her upright. The room they just came out of would provide immediate safety, but he’ll only be back at square one, locked away at Adrian’s mercy.

Unfortunately it’s their only option. The door is opened across the hallway, and to get past it they’d have to close it, it’d take an extra second or two and he just doesn’t think they have that long.

“I thought you liked me,” Adrian says, and Cooper isn’t so sure he’s the one being spoken to.

He pushes Emma into the room and dives after her. The impact of hitting the ground is all the convincing his bladder needs to let go, and a quarter of it is emptied before he can get it back under control. He guesses he has five seconds to make a decision before Adrian either locks the door or shoots them.

“Do you have a weapon?” he asks.

“What? No, no, of course I don’t.”

He looks around the room. His pants are soaking wet, and his bladder is desperately trying to let go again. In fact, it’s more painful than before. There was nothing in here earlier that could help, and nothing now.

Except his mother.

His mother doesn’t have to have died in vain.