Collecting Cooper

chapter seven

My lawyer’s name is Donovan Green. He’s my height and built about the same and I met him late winter last year-the afternoon after I got drunk and ran my car into Emma Green, his daughter. I didn’t know who he was when he bailed me out and offered to represent me. I took his help because there was no real alternative. Thirty minutes after meeting him his help turned out to be the kind that had him dragging me unconscious through the woods. He held a gun to my head and in the end didn’t have the stomach to finish the job. He left me with the promise that if anything ever happened to his daughter he’d be back. I keep my hand on the door and my stomach sinks. If he’s here to kill me, then his daughter must have died from her injuries. Which means I won’t get to see my wife one last time. Which means I have to go along with whatever it is he wants to do. That’s the way things work in my world. Last year I wanted him to pull the trigger. Now I don’t.

“Remember me?” he asks.

He looks about as run-down and tired as he looked last time I saw him, as if the heat has gotten to him the same way it’s gotten to the trees outside my house. His hair is messed up and his clothes are wrinkled and he hasn’t shaved in a few days and he smells like he hasn’t showered either. My mouth goes dry and I struggle to answer him. It must be obvious that I remember him. The kind of time we shared together is impossible to forget. I let my hand fall from the door and I take a step back.

“You might as well come in.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, and he sounds tired. “I remember what I promised you. But I’m not here for that. I’m here for your help.”

For him to want my help it must be bad. Bad enough he’d come to the one man he hates more than any other. I move aside and he comes in. I lead him through the house. He doesn’t comment on any of the furniture or décor. The stereo is on repeat, and the Beatles album has started back up. I take him outside onto the deck where the outdoor furniture has gathered some rust and a whole lot of cobwebs over the last four months. I don’t offer him a drink. The sun beats down on us and I figure he won’t want to stay long, and imagine he’d want to stay even less if I showed him the DVD I watched earlier. We sit on opposite sides of the table, balancing it out and giving the yard good feng shui.

“I want to hire you,” he says.

He’s beginning to sweat and he has to keep squinting to look at me because the sun is in his face but on my back. He’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts and not a suit, so he’s not here in any lawyering capacity, which means I won’t have to take out a second mortgage to talk to him. He looks like he’s slept in that shirt for the last few days.

“I don’t need the work,” I tell him.

“Yes you do.”

“It’s a moot point. I lost my PI license so I can’t help you.”

“That works out okay because I won’t be paying you. You’ll be doing this for free so it won’t be professional. You’re not going to need a license because you’re going to want to do this for free anyway. You owe me.”

“Thanks for sweetening the deal. You want to tell me what’s bad enough for you to have come to me? You do realize I only just got out of jail today.”

“I know. If that had been up to me you’d have been put away for much longer. You could have killed my daughter.”

I don’t answer him. I’ve already apologized and I could apologize a thousand more times and he wouldn’t accept it. I know that because I’ve been in his shoes. I dragged the man who killed my daughter and hurt my wife into the woods and handed him a shovel. There was a lot he tried saying. He tried telling me how sorry he was that he’d been drinking so much, how sorry he was at all the other driving convictions in his past. He apologized for running down my wife and daughter by accident and doing nothing about it. He cried as he dug the hole, he got dirt all over his face and shirt. He was a mess. His face was covered in snot and tears and he kept blubbering that he was sorry, and in the end I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t see it as an accident. I saw it as murder. A man with that many convictions behind him, that many warnings, a man like that who keeps on drinking and driving, that makes it only a matter of time before he kills. It was no different from a man firing a loaded gun into a crowd of people.

I put a bullet in his head and filled in the grave he had dug.

My lawyer knows I did it. I told him. When he pointed the gun at me wanting to do the same thing, I told him how it was going to feel.

“She’s gone missing,” he says. “Emma.”

“What?”

“Nobody has heard from her in two days. She was at work Monday night and left to go home and never showed up.”

“You’ve gone to the police?”

“What?” he asks, almost flinching as though my question is the most stupid one he’s ever heard. “Jesus, of course we have. But the police, the police only care once somebody has been missing twenty-four hours, so they’ve only cared since last night, and they haven’t cared much because they’re not out there looking for her, and even when they do start looking there are things I know you can do that they can’t.”

“The police, you have to trust them. They know what they’re doing.”

He starts drumming his fingers across the tabletop then stops and stares at his fingernails as if disappointed by the tune they made. He looks back at me and there is genuine pain in his eyes and I know the feeling and I know I’m going to help this man.

“When girls like Emma go missing,” he says, and the words are slow and considered and must hurt to say because I know where he’s going with this, “there’s only one way they’re ever found.”

I don’t answer him. He looks up toward the sun and I know he’s fighting back tears.

“When was the last time somebody her age went missing and there was a happy ending?” he asks.

I still don’t answer him. I can’t tell him the truth, and I don’t want to lie to him. Girls like Emma who go missing normally show up a few days later floating naked in a river.

“I already know she’s probably dead,” he says, and the words come from him in small stops and starts, like he really has to force them.

He looks back at me. “Statistically, I know the deal,” he adds. “My wife, she knows it too. Right now she’s sedated because she’s borderline hysterical. The police tell me in cases like this, they never really know whether the girl just ran away from home or got herself a new boyfriend and is holed up in a bedroom somewhere. It’s bullshit. They know it’s bullshit when they’re spinning that possibility to me and my wife. If there’s a chance she’s still alive, she won’t be by the time they find her, and if she was alive in the time they were looking and not finding her and I didn’t do everything I could. . then. . I don’t know. I think you know, right?” he says. “I think you can figure out how it would feel. So I’m doing everything that I can, and that means coming to you. It means you’re going to do everything you can because you owe me and you owe her. Then. . and, if she is, you know, dead, then the police will find who hurt her and then what? Send him to jail for fifteen years and parole him in ten?”

“I know it’s wrong, trust me, I really do, but that’s just the way it is,” I say.

“I know. Jesus, don’t you think I know that? But it shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to be. I remember what you said to me in the woods. I know you killed the man who killed your daughter. What gives you the right to have that justice and stop others from having it?”

“You don’t need to remind me of my own daughter.”

“Do I need to remind you that you almost took mine away?” He slowly shakes his head. “When you ran into her it changed her life. It sent her down a different path. You jumped into her timeline, and instead of her turning A,” he says, tapping his right forefinger with his left to make his point, “she turned B. It brought different people into her life. Doctors and rehab, new friends. She lost three months studying and had to take private tutoring. She almost didn’t graduate high school last year. She almost didn’t qualify for university this year. Her circumstances changed. If you hadn’t hurt her, she’d be in a different place now, with different people in her life. If one of those different people are responsible for taking her. .”

“I get your point,” I say, holding up my hand. If one of those new people in her life took her, then it’s my fault. It’s like he said-I sent her down path B, and path B might have had a bad man waiting in the shadows.

“Do you? Because if you did you’d be asking me how you can help. I know about you,” he says. “You’re about doing the right thing. Looking for Emma, that’s the right thing. That’s why you’re going to help me.”

I look at him but all I can see is his daughter, slumped against the steering wheel with blood running down the side of her face, broken glass surrounding the car, my own car a wreck with the front of it folded around a lamppost, a billboard with Jesus turning wine into bottled water staring down at me, my clothes and skin reeking of alcohol. My ears were ringing and I could taste blood and the night was so cold there was fog in the air, and God how I wish it was all just a dream. I had become the man who had run over my wife and daughter. That was the worst part. I picked up the half-empty bottle of booze from the floor of the car and tossed it into the night and I’ve not had a drop since. Donovan Green’s eyes are pleading with me, he knows his daughter is dead and yet is still holding out hope that she isn’t.

“I’ll need expenses,” I say, and I hate asking for them, but I don’t have any money. “I don’t even have a car. Or a cell phone.”

“You’ll get what you need.”

“And I can’t give you any promises.”

“Yes you can. You can promise me you’ll do what it takes to find the man that has her, and that when you find him. . when you find him, you’ll come to me before you go to the police. You’re working for me, not them. You come to me, not to them.”

I slowly nod, images of Donovan Green walking through the woods with his daughter’s killer and I’m walking with him, helping him get the revenge he needs. This time I imagine he’ll have the balls to go through with it. “We don’t know anybody took her,” I say. “Not for sure.”

“Somebody has her. I know it. I just know it.”

“Tell me about her,” I say, and as he does I realize there was never any chance of staying away from this world.