Collecting Cooper (18 page)

“Hey, Dax,” I say, and Daxter doesn’t respond. “Dax?”

He doesn’t move, and the closer I get to him the more my heart starts to sink, and the slower I walk.

“You okay, Big Fella?” I ask, knowing that he isn’t.

Daxter is laying on his side stretched out in a position that he never adopts. It’s a struggle to crouch down next to him but I manage it, sliding my unbending leg out to the side. I put my hand on Daxter and he’s not as warm as he should be. I shake him a little and there’s nothing. His head lolls around. I hold his face and turn it toward me and his eyes are half closed and there is blood down the side of his face. I pick him up and he’s heavier than normal and he sags, gravity pulling every limb straight down, some of his ribs have broken and changed the shape of his body. I lean against the side of my house and I cradle Daxter against my chest and I start stroking him, rubbing him beneath his chin and scratching the top of his head. Tears well up in my eyes and I can’t contain them. It takes a minute or so to realize my lap is wet, and when I lift Daxter up urine and water is leaking out of him. I hug him against my chest and push my face against him, fully aware I’m cuddling a dead cat and I must look insane doing it, but unable to do anything different. We bought Daxter for Emily five years ago, and he was more her kitten than mine or Bridget’s. After Emily died Daxter was never the same. He would always sleep in her room and only ventured to the rest of the house when he was hungry or desperately in need of attention. Daxter is with my daughter now, and I truly am alone.

I carry him through the house to the backyard. I change into some fresh pants and throw the urine-soaked ones into the trash since they’re burned anyway. I find the shovel in the garage. I struggle to dig a hole, and it hurts, but I need to feel the pain, it should never be easy burying something you love. It’s the first grave I’ve dug in over a year, and it’s certainly by far the smallest. I pick a spot against the back fence opposite the deck, beneath a small tree whose roots aren’t big enough to interfere with the digging. The ground gets harder the deeper I go. The dirt piles up on the lawn, it gets darker the deeper I go. When the hole is deep enough I head inside and find a shirt I’ll never wear again. I wrap Daxter inside it, careful to make him look like he’s still sleeping, careful to lay him on his side with his back curved slightly and his front paws up over
his face covering his eyes the way he used to do it. I scrunch up a handful of shirt so I can lift him, and again he feels heavier than he ought to. I lower him into the ground and I can’t contain the tears anymore. I shovel the dirt back into the grave. I pat it down and I sit on the deck and I figure if Daxter could choose a place to be buried, this would be it.

I stare at the grave and my emotions take hold. The tears come quicker. Daxter has been family from the day we got him, and now he’s another family member I’ve lost.

Adrian is exhausted. Stopping at Theodore Tate’s house added over an hour to his journey. The house was in the base of a cul-de-sac, with the back fence looking out over a different street. He was able to see through a gap into the backyard. He watched Tate break ground with a shovel, but didn’t hang around after that. He was pushing his luck as it was. He had parked down a side street a few blocks away, where he seriously doubted Tate would be driving, and had killed time walking up and down the street trying as hard as he could not to be noticed while he waited. He figured everybody was too busy being hot to pay him any attention. They were certainly too busy to pay him any attention when he convinced the cat to come to him. Adrian was good with cats. He always has been. He thought cats and dogs would have a sense about what he was capable of doing to them, but they didn’t seem to. It was weird. He didn’t know for sure the cat belonged to Tate. It was laying in Tate’s yard, but cats tended to get around. He took the gamble, and it’s obvious from Tate’s reaction that the gamble paid off.

He’s returning home much later in the day than he wanted. Cooper
will be angry at having been kept waiting so long, but Adrian knows the present will make up for that. The sun is peaking in the sky and there is dust in the air and a hot wind is steadily picking up speed from the northwest. In warm winds like that he finds his itches become worse. He pours a glass of water and sets about making some sandwiches. The house doesn’t have any power, and the best he can do to keep the slices of sandwich meat fresh is to store them in a cooler. As long as he replaces the meat every couple of days it doesn’t go off too much. He’ll try to remember to pick some up later on today on the drive back to Tate’s house.

The more he thinks about Tate, the more he starts to think about what he would be like if added to the collection. Both cop and killer. It’s certainly worth considering.

The girl in the bedroom wakes up when he opens the door. The look of fear that was in her eyes for the first two days is no longer there, instead there is seething hatred. He imagines part of her wishes he had killed her already, but of course he’s not going to kill her. He moves his gaze from her eyes to the curves of her body, and sometimes he wants to touch those curves, to feel them beneath his fingertips, and sometimes, and thank God his mother never found out, he’d lay awake at night and imagine what kind of curves Katie, the girl from school, would have. She actually reminds him of Katie, similar hair, similar eyes, and he wonders if she remembers him from months ago when he first approached her. He’s aware he smells of petrol, but she smells far worse. He was stupid, he realizes, to have stood among that crowd of people smelling the way he did, stupid for that and lucky nobody noticed.

“I have these for you to wear,” he says, and he rests the clothes on the end of the bed. Her own clothes weren’t appropriate for what he wanted, so he had cut them from her and discarded them in the bin. “I’m going to clean you down a little,” he says, and rests a wet towel over her leg.

She flinches but doesn’t answer him because she can’t, just the same murmurs that can’t take shape around the straw to become words.

“Do you remember me?” he asks.

She shakes her head. The hate has gone from her eyes and now it’s back to fear.

“I tried talking to you,” he says. “It was the last Monday night before Christmas. You were working. I told you that you looked like a girl I used to know. It was hard for me to talk to you,” he says, “hard for me to talk to anybody. It went against all of my instincts, but I found the courage to come up to you and you rejected me. You shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “You shouldn’t have been mean to me.”

All the hardness falls from her eyes and she starts to cry.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, “but don’t try anything, he adds, holding up a knife. “You’ve been here for nearly three days and you don’t have the strength to fight me. Trust me, I’ve been in your situation,” he says, which isn’t exactly true but close enough. He leans over and cuts through the rope. She doesn’t move. She’s lost weight since being here and doesn’t look good. Her face is more . . . hollow, he would say, for lack of a better word. And pale too, white and damp with sweat.

“I’m not going to hurt you, I promise,” he says, and it’s true. He isn’t going to hurt her. But she shouldn’t have made him feel bad. “You can’t go around being mean to people,” he tells her, wiping the towel over her, her skin wet and breaking out in goose bumps. “You made me feel bad about myself.”

She tries to slap him and he pulls back, she mostly misses but one of her nails stings his face. He grabs her by her ankles and drags her off the bed. She flails at him with her arms but can’t reach. She hits the floor, her head bangs heavily against it and her eyes roll upward. She goes limp.

He is disappointed in her. He drags her away from her own mess, leaving a greasy trail. He picks her up and carries her into the bathroom and rests her in the bath and rinses her down then dries her. When he undressed her a couple of days ago it was new to him. He’d never undressed a woman before and it felt kind of, well, kind of nice. Kind of like how he always imagined it would be with Katie. When
all this is over, he might look for more women to undress. Of course, dressing her is much harder. He can’t use a knife for that. He struggles with her, rolling her over the floor while tugging on her clothes, thinking this is pointless since Cooper will strip her down anyway, but doing it because stripping her down will be important to Cooper. It will be part of the ritual. As much as he enjoys the idea of undressing future women, he certainly doesn’t want to go through this process again. The dress is a little big for her, which makes it somewhat easier. His face is sore, and when he reaches up his finger comes away with a spot of blood from where she scratched him. He looks at the scratch in the mirror, then wipes away the blood. It’s not very long, only a few centimeters, but now that he knows it’s there it hurts.

“You hurt me,” he says, but she doesn’t respond. He’s tempted to try and remove the glue from her lips. He could wipe nail polish remover across them, but he’ll wait because Cooper will like her more this way. Her chest raises and falls steadily, a soft, raspy wheeze comes from her throat, the sound identical to the one the old fridge at the halfway house used to make.

He lifts her up and carries her to the basement door. She is much lighter than Cooper and he thinks even lighter than when he first brought her here so he doesn’t need the dolly. He knocks first on the basement door before opening it, thinking Cooper would like that more than just barging in. It’s a small simple sign of respect, one that was never afforded to him whenever the Twins locked him down here. The Twins were a pair of orderlies who used to work here, and for fun they would lock patients down here and make them hurt. The sun has moved to other parts of the house and not much light is getting downstairs, so he hooks the lamp under his fingers before heading down.

“She’s for you,” he says. He lays her on the floor, careful to keep her limbs from tangling beneath her, before turning on the lamp. Cooper is standing at the cell door looking at him, an expression on his face that Adrian has seen on other people before this, notably his own mother when he started soaking her in petrol yesterday morning.

“What . . .” Cooper says, but doesn’t finish.

Adrian hopes Cooper isn’t turned off by the dress. He’d have liked to have put her in something sexier, but all he had was a dress he took from his mother’s house. He took other things too that morning. Food, mostly. And money. “I found her in town,” he says. “Isn’t she perfect?”

Cooper’s face is pressed up against the glass. “Jesus, Adrian, Jesus, this is insane. Totally insane.”

“I found her on Monday night,” he says. “Isn’t she perfect?”

“I . . .” Cooper says, then nothing else.

“You’re lost for words,” Adrian says. “I know what that’s like. See, I told you I can take care of you. I took care of your house. I burned it down.”

“Oh Jesus, my house,” Cooper says. “And this girl. Adrian, Adrian . . .”

“I wanted to do something nice for you,” he says. “And I know you like women and I thought you’d like this woman and I used my own initiative. I want to help you, Cooper. I like helping my friends,” he adds, hoping Cooper believes he has other friends.

Cooper says nothing. Adrian finds the silence unsettling. He’s spent many days and nights down here in silence, and back then he got used to it. Now it hurts. “You said the very thing I liked about you the most is the one thing you can’t do locked up down here. But you were wrong, Cooper. See? I can bring them to you. As many as you need,” he says, hoping Cooper won’t want many, hoping that if Cooper does, taking girls like this one will only get easier.

“I . . . I don’t know what to say,” Cooper says. “Is she mine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, okay. Good, that’s good,” Cooper says. “So . . . so I can do with her anything I want?”

“Of course,” Adrian says, smiling. He’s happy Cooper is getting the point. “Are you going to have sex with her?”

“Is that what I did with the others?”

“I think so.”

“Then yes, of course, I’d love to have sex with her. It’s just that, well . . . ah, it doesn’t matter.”

Adrian is confused. “What doesn’t matter?”

Cooper sighs. “I’m going to have to say no, Adrian. You’re going to have to take her back, or kill her yourself. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” he asks, his voice gaining in pitch.

“No reason. But I appreciate the gesture, I really do. If only . . . ah, nothing.”

“If only what? Please, just tell me,” he asks, desperate to know.

“This is stupid,” Cooper says. “It’s just that if I’m going to have sex with her, I can’t do it in front of anybody. I can’t have an audience. I’m going to need privacy.”

“Privacy?”

“See, I told you it was stupid, and now you probably hate me and think I’m being ungrateful and a bad friend.” Cooper turns away.

Adrian steps up to the door. “I don’t hate you,” he says, desperate for Cooper to believe him. I think I understand,” he says. “You don’t think you can . . .” he searches for the right word, and settles on
perform.
“You don’t think you can perform if I’m watching.”

“Exactly.”

“So if I don’t watch, you can sex her?”

“And kill her, if that’s what you want, Adrian.”

“Is it what you want?”

“Of course.”

“Then it’s what I want too,” Adrian says, smiling.

“There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“Ah, now I feel really silly, and you’re going to say no.”

“Go ahead and ask,” Adrian says. His eyes are wide open and unblinking as he stares at Cooper, hanging on his every word. This is why he wanted Cooper here. For the stories. For the excitement. For his collection.

“I was thinking it would be cool if I had sex with her, and you were to help me kill her when I was done.”

“You want me to kill her?”

“Just help me. You’ve never killed before, right?”

“Right,” he says, but that’s not true.