Collecting Cooper (2 page)

She sits on the ground crying and angry, her handbag next to her, the contents in a puddle across the tarmac. Her first thought is to go inside and tell her boss what happened, but he’d tell her it was her own fault. Another thing about her boss is that everything is always somebody else’s fault, and in this case he would think she was somehow trying to blame him. She gets onto her feet and looks at her palms. The skin has torn on her right palm, the skin stretched up like a balloon. At least there’s no blood.

She wipes at the tears on her face. “Asshole,” she whispers. The warm wind pushes against her and tugs against the torn skin on her
palms, puffing it out like small parachutes. She gets her handbag packed and then has to rummage back through it for her keys, but her keys aren’t there. She crouches back down. She was holding her keys when she was walking out to the parking lot, wasn’t she? She isn’t sure, but she starts to turn, then spots them behind the back wheel of a dirty and beaten-up Toyota. She moves over and bends down and reaches for them. At the same time footsteps race toward her. She looks up and can see a man silhouetted against one of the lights, thank God somebody is here to help.

“Thank . . .” is all she can say, then just utter panic as he jumps on top of her.

She has no idea what’s happening. She tries to fight him and he rewards her by pounding her head into the ground so hard the parking lot lights go dark. She can feel the world slipping away. She thinks she is fighting against it, but she isn’t sure because it feels like she’s falling into a dream. Her grandfather smiling at her, the old man in the car, dropping one of the coffees earlier in the day and getting told off from her boss, her boyfriend wanting to spend the night, then she thinks about Satan living in Christchurch, setting up residence and inflicting His friends upon the city before deciding this isn’t even happening, but for all her good hopes the world drifts away.

When the world comes back, it arrives without any reference to time. It’s just like last year when she had the accident. Back then she was hit by a car, but she has no memory of it. Can’t remember the hour before the accident, or the day following it. This time she can remember. She’s lying down on a mattress, but when she rolls to the side the mattress doesn’t end. Her wrists are painfully sore and are tied behind her, and her legs are tied too, they’re connected to whatever is keeping her wrists together. The headache is the worst, the pressure so strong behind her eyes that whatever is covering them is probably holding them in. She’s thirsty and hungry and the air is hot and stale. It must be ninety degrees. Everything is dark. She starts to cry. This isn’t a hospital. She’s tied up to bake in this oven of a room.

Footsteps. A floorboard creaking. A lock disengaging and then a door opens. Somebody approaches her. She can hear breathing. She tries to talk but can’t. She thinks of her parents, her friends, her boyfriend. She thinks of the old man at the café and she makes a promise to herself that if she gets out of this alive she’ll never help anybody again.

“Drink.”

It’s a man’s voice. The pressure is removed from her mouth. There has to be something she can say to get out of this. Something she can say to make him let her go.

“Please, please,” she cries, “please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to be hurt, please, I’m begging you,” she says, the tears soaking her face. She doesn’t think she’s ever cried so much. She knows she’s never been this frightened. This man is going to do bad things to her, and she’s going to have to live with what he’s done to her, it will haunt her and make her insane. The person she was is about to die.

But she will get through this. She will survive. She knows that because, because . . . this was never meant to happen to her. It’s not possible her life is about to end. It doesn’t add up. Doesn’t make sense. She cries harder.

“Please,” she says.

The plastic neck of a bottle is pushed against her lips.

“It’s water,” he says, and he tips it up. It pours into her mouth. She hates him, but the thirst is overpowering and she accepts the drink. He pulls it away before she can swallow more than a few mouthfuls.

“There’ll be more soon,” he says.

“Who, who are you? What are you going to do with me?”

“No questions,” he says, and the pressure is back on her mouth, some form of tape. “You’re going to need to keep your strength,” he tells her. “I have something very special planned for you over the following week,” he tells her, “and you won’t be needing these,” he adds, and she feels a blade slip beneath her clothes and he starts cutting them away.

The dust from the exercise yard clings to the hot air. Flies and mosquitoes are trying to use my neck as a landing strip. Giant concrete walls separate me from the sounds coming from the other side where men are ticking through life, kicking a football or playing cards or getting stomped on. Cranes and scaffolding are off to the right, workmen creating additions to a prison that can’t keep up, dirt and cement dust hugging the air like an early winter’s fog, so thick the details are hard to make out, could be a stampede of cows just came through, could be a stampede of prisoners are trying to escape. My clothes smell stale and feel stiff; they’ve been folded and jammed inside a paper bag for the last four months, but they’re sure as hell more comfortable than the prison jumpsuit I worked, slept, and ate in. Sweat and confinement is still on my skin. Heat is radiating up from the blacktop pavement into my feet. When I close my hands, I can feel the metal and concrete walls that would isolate me from the world the same way an amputee can feel a phantom leg. My last four months have been all about isolation. Not just from the world, but from other prisoners too. I’ve spent day after day surrounded
by cells full of pedophiles and other pieces of human trash that couldn’t be thrown into the general population for fear of having their throats ripped open. Four months that felt like four years, but it could have been worse. I could have had my teeth smashed out and made to play fetch-the-soap every night. I was an ex-cop in a concrete-and-steel world surrounded by men who hated cops more than they hated each other. I felt nauseous being surrounded by child molesters, but it was the better alternative. Mostly they kept to themselves, spending their days fantasizing about what it was that got them arrested. Fantasizing about getting back to that life.

The prison guards watch me from the entrance. They seem worried I’m going to try and break back in. I feel like a character in a movie; that lost guy who wakes up in a different time and has to grab somebody by the shoulders to ask them for the date, including the year, only to be looked at like they’re a fool. Of course I know the date. I’ve been waiting for this day ever since I got thrown inside. My clothes are a little bigger because I’m a little smaller. Prison nutrition is malnutrition.

The nine o’clock sun is beating down and forming a long shadow behind me. In most directions it looks like there is water resting on the surface of the ground, a thin pool shimmering in the heat. The blacktop grabs at the soles of my shoes as I walk across it. I have to hold my hand up to my face to shield my eyes. I’ve been out of jail for twenty-five seconds and I don’t remember a day as hot as this before going in. I haven’t seen much sun over the last four months and already my pale skin is starting to burn. The longer I was trapped behind those walls behind me, the further away this particular Wednesday seemed. Prison has a way of fooling with time. There are a few cars around belonging to visitors, and one has a guy leaning against it staring at me. He’s wearing tan pants and there are dark rings in the armpits of his white shirt and he’s lost a bit of weight since the last time I saw him, but the buzz-cut hair is still the same, and so is his expression, of which, lately, he seems to have only the one. I can smell smoke from something big burning far off in the distance. I close my eyes against the sun and
let it warm my skin, and then burn, and when I open them again, Schroder is no longer leaning against the car. He’s covered half the distance between us.

“Good to see you, Tate,” Schroder says, and I take his hand when he reaches me. It’s hot and sweaty and it’s the first hand I’ve shaken in a long time, but I can remember how it goes. The prison food didn’t rot all of my brain away. “How was it?”

“How do you think it was?” I ask, letting go.

“Yeah. Well. I guess,” Schroder says, summing things up. He’s just looking for words and not finding them, and Schroder won’t be the last. A couple of exhausted-looking birds fly low past us, looking for somewhere cooler. “I thought you could do with a lift home.”

There’s a white minivan waiting near the entrance, the bottom half of it covered in dirt, the top half only marginally better. There’re a couple of other guys released today sitting onboard, both have shaved heads and tattoo raindrops streaming from their eyes, they’re on opposite sides of the van staring out opposite windows wanting nothing to do with each other. Another guy, a short, powerfully built man with all the fingers on his right hand missing, turning his fist into a club, is swaggering out from the prison, his arms puffed out to the side to encompass his large chest and even larger ego. He stares at me before climbing into the back of the van. I give it a week tops before they’re all back in here.

Four of us are getting released today and I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of spending twenty minutes in a vehicle with any of them. I’m not exactly thrilled about spending time with Schroder either.

“I appreciate it,” I tell him.

We head over to his dark gray unmarked police car that’s covered in dust from the drive out here, making all the letters on the side of the tires stand out. I climb in and it’s hotter inside. I play around with the air-conditioning and get some of the vents pointing in my direction. I watch Christchurch Prison get smaller in the side mirror before disappearing behind a large belt of trees. We
hit the highway and turn right, toward the city. We drive past long paddocks with dry grass and barbed-wire fences. There are guys in those fields driving tractors and whipping up clouds of dirt and wiping the early-morning sweat from their faces. Away from all the construction and the air is clear.

“Any thoughts to what you’re gonna do now?” Schroder asks.

“Why? You want to offer me my old job back?”

“Yeah, that’d go down well.”

“Then I’ll become a farmer. Looks like a pretty nice lifestyle.”

“I don’t know any farmers, Tate, but I’m pretty sure you’d make the worst kind.”

“Yeah? What kind is that?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s thinking I’d make the kind of farmer who’d shoot any cattle being mean to the other cattle. I try to imagine myself driving one of those tractors seven days a week and moving cows from one field to another, but no matter how hard I try I can’t get any of those images to stick. Traffic gets thicker the closer we get to town.

“Look, Tate, I’ve been doing some thinking, and I’m starting to see things a little different now.”

“What kind of different?”

“This city. Society, I don’t know. What is it you say about Christ-church?”

“It’s broken,” I answer, and it’s true.

“Yeah. It’s seems like it’s been breaking down for a while. But things . . . things are, I don’t know. It’s like things just aren’t getting better. You’re out of the loop since leaving the force three years ago, but we’re outnumbered. People are disappearing. Men and women leave for work or home and just never show up.”

“My guess is they’ve had enough and are escaping,” I suggest.

“It’s not that.”

“This is your idea of small talk?”

“You’d rather tell me about your last four months?”

We pass a field where two farmers are burning off rubbish, most of it bush that’s been cut back, thick black smoke spiraling straight
up into the sky where it hangs like a rain cloud without any breeze to help it on its way. The farmers are standing next to tractors, their hands on their hips as they watch, the air around them hazy with the heat. The smell comes through the air vents and Schroder shuts them down and the car gets warmer. Then we’re heading past a gray brick wall about two meters high with
Christchurch
written across it, no
welcome to
in front of the name. In fact, somebody has spray-painted a line through
church
and written
help us.
Cars are speeding in each direction, everybody in a hurry to be somewhere. Schroder switches the air-conditioning back on. We reach the first big intersection since leaving jail and sit at a red light opposite a service station where a four-wheel drive has backed into one of the pumps and forced all the staff to stand around in a circle with no idea what to do next. The board out front tells me petrol has gone up by ten percent since I’ve been gone. I figure the temperature is up about forty percent and the crime rate up by fifty. Christchurch is all about statistics; ninety percent of them bad. One entire side of the petrol station has been covered in graffiti.

The light turns green and nobody moves for about ten seconds because the guy up front is arguing on his cell phone. I keep waiting for the car tires to melt. We both get lost in our own thoughts until Schroder breaks the silence. “Point is, Tate, this city is changing. We catch one bad guy and two more take his place. It’s escalating, Tate, spiraling out of control.”

“It’s been spiraling for a while, Carl. Way before I ever left the force.”

“Well, these days it seems worse.”

“Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?” I ask.

“About what?”

“About why you came to pick me up. You want something, Carl, so just spit it out.”

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and gazes straight ahead, his eyes locked on the traffic. White light bounces off every smooth surface and it’s becoming harder to see a damn thing. I’m worried by the time I make it home my eyeballs will have liquefied.
“In the backseat,” he says. “There’s a file you need to take a look at.”