Free Collecting Cooper by Paul Cleave Page A

just great,” he screams, “now look at what you’ve done? That’s it—that’s it—no more lunch for you today. Now you go hungry,” he says, and he kicks at the coffee table one more time, picks up the lantern, and heads upstairs. He wanted nothing more than to make a good impression, a lasting first impression, and he’s failed, all because of Cooper.
    “You can’t keep me here,” Cooper shouts out from the basement.
    Adrian stops at the door and looks back down at the cell. Cooper is staring up at him through the window. “We’ll make it work,” he says. “Soon we’ll be friends. I forgive you for making me make a mess.”
    “You’re delusional.”
    “I’m. Not. Delusional,” he says, biting down on each word. Why do people always think he’s crazy? He’s had to deal with that his whole life and he’s sick of it. He looks down at his feet, at his polished shoes. He cleaned his shoes as part of his attempt to make a good impression, and now he isn’t even sure why he bothered. Did he not clean them enough? Is that the problem? The right one is scuffed up from kicking the coffee table. The fifteen dollars he paid last week for his shirt and tie from the thrift store is looking like a waste of money. He flicks the hair out of his eyes. He can feel the tears starting to come. This has gone nothing like he expected.
    He slams the basement door on Cooper’s shouts, angry, embarrassed, wondering if it wouldn’t just be easier to set fire to his collection the same way he set fire to his mother.
    He races down the hallway and up the stairs to the first landing, his hip hitting the wall and the radio bouncing off his belt onto the floor. He wouldn’t really set fire to Cooper, that’s just his frustration talking and trying to convince him to do something stupid. He bends down to pick up the radio and is relieved it hasn’t broken. He rewinds the tape a little and can hear Cooper’s voice, then rewinds it the rest of the way so he can record over it. He doesn’t want to hear any of the conversation.
    If he wanted to, he could give Cooper the gift he got for him to smooth things over, but he wanted that to be a surprise for tomorrow. He quietly opens one of the bedroom doors in case Cooper’s gift is sleeping, and she is. There are other, perhaps more appropriate rooms for her, but he liked the idea of keeping her more comfortable, of giving her a bed. Her hands are bound to the rails of the bed in the same place he tied them two nights ago. Her skin is flushed and the skin around her lips is dry and has chipped and there’s a plastic drinking straw hanging from her mouth. There’s a pitcher of water on the floor next to her that he helps her drink from, but unfortunately there’s no bathroom in here and he didn’t want to risk untying her all the time for her to urinate, so the room smells from where she’s soiled herself, and the smell reminds him of his days at school, which makes him smile, but then reminds him of the day he got beaten into a coma and the smile disappears. The girl is no more than twenty, he thinks; he isn’t sure of her name and the time for asking was before he glued her lips together around the straw, but he had to do the gluing before she could say mean things to him. She looked the type that could be pretty nasty if she wanted to be. Right now she just looks unhealthy, and he doesn’t think Cooper will be happy with his gift covered in sweat and urine, and he’s going to have to do something about it. Probably he’ll just hose her down and leave her naked. Cooper will like her that way.

chapter nine
     
    Donovan Green leaves me the car he arrived in—a rental—and catches a taxi. The rental is a white four-door sedan about a year old. It tells me Green knew I would take on the case, that he knew I had no car, and from the moment he realized his daughter was missing he knew he would be contacting me if she didn’t show up. If there had even been any doubt, he