I’m surprised too.
She carries on. “I told you no tricks, Joe.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Well you should have assumed it. I still want my money.”
After that the footage gets even worse. There is a coldness with this woman that I’ve never seen before, a cold beauty that remains even when she withdraws the knife and drags it across the dead detective’s throat. Not long after she walks away the footage ends. Melissa said no tricks, but filming her was a trick. I wonder what the money is she’s talking about. According to the file the question has been posed to Joe, but he hasn’t given an answer.
I switch off the TV and walk slowly down the hallway to the study with a stronger determination to help Schroder. This is why he included the DVD. The connection between Melissa and the Carver is hard to understand. She tortured him, they became lovers, and he won’t give up any information on her. It doesn’t make sense. If the Carver hadn’t been arrested, would they have stayed together until one of them killed the other?
By the end of the first hour there aren’t any spare surfaces on the desk and I’ve had to lock down the fan to keep it from blowing the papers away. By the end of the second hour parts of the floor are covered and some of the images are taped to a whiteboard I have in my study and the fan is back in the wardrobe. All the windows in the house are open. I can hear a stereo thumping from one of the neighboring houses and somebody singing along to it. I wanted to think in silence, but I turn my own stereo on preferring to listen to my own music rather than somebody else’s. I listen to a Beatles album and think things were easier back then before figuring things are never easy. In the two hours I’ve created piles of chaos with no real clear insight to who this woman is.
The security guard on the golf course was the last body found, and that was three weeks ago. I wonder what Melissa wants their uniforms for. All that wondering, though, tires me out, and by the end of the third hour I start moving through the house, putting some distance between me and the collection of evidence. I pause in the kitchen and make a sandwich. I’d planned on arriving home and somehow making my way out to see my wife, but somehow three hours have gone by and I haven’t even thought of her. I feel like getting a drink. Start with a beer and see what follows, but there’s no alcohol in the house. I end up sitting at the dining table with my lunch and a glass of milk the same way I did when I was a kid.
There is a world waiting for me back in the study, a world that I thought I had escaped. I finish my lunch and I’m halfway down the hall back toward that world when somebody knocks on my front door. My parents said they’d call first, so it isn’t them. Anyway, through the blurred glass I can see only one figure. I feel like not answering it. I just want to tell whoever is there to go away, but the knocking continues so I head toward it. I open up the door. It’s my lawyer. A year ago my lawyer wanted to kill me. He tied me up and dragged me into the woods. He threw me into the dirt and made me stare down the barrel of a gun while he considered pulling the trigger. My only thought now is that he’s come to finish off what he couldn’t finish then.
chapter six
Cooper can taste carpet and dust and something metallic, along with something he can’t place, something that makes him think of decaying coffins being opened in ancient black-and-white movies, where the inside lids have claw marks and the dead men have torn and broken fingernails. His eyes are too heavy and sore to open. The darkness is connected optically to a mind that feels raw. His head is pounding and he wonders what sort of hangover this is, and quickly decides it must be the worst kind, the kind where you wake up and wish you were dead instead of drunk. There is a ringing in his ears and his chest is burning.
The first memory to return is the heat wave. A city under siege by the sun. That could be why he started drinking. Hell, it’s a good reason for anybody to start. Drink what you can then pass out someplace cool, because wherever he is at the moment, it is certainly that. He bets his wife is equally as drunk somewhere before remembering he doesn’t have a wife anymore, that they separated three years ago though he can’t quite remember why, not off the top of his head, and since his wife there haven’t been any other women, not serious ones, and there’s nobody at the moment, so probably he started drinking alone. Only he’s given up drinking, or so he’d thought. In the past the drink has gotten him into trouble. He rolls onto his side, the bed squeaking and grinding beneath him, not his bed, though, because he doesn’t recognize any of the sounds. Then he thinks hospital. He’s been in an accident, that whatever has happened has nothing to do with an indulgence of too much scotch. He listens for but can’t hear the chatter of patients, the scuffle of feet, the bing bong of the intercom shouting code blue or code red in room one-oh-something. Last time he stepped into a hospital was two years ago when his uncle was sick, his uncle being eaten alive from the inside out by cancer. He remembers another old man in the same room having to shit into a plastic container suspended beneath the seat of a chair next to the bed, the stench of it wafting through the room enough to make him leave. None of that is with him here, none of the sounds or the smells. This isn’t a hospital.
He massages his closed eyes with his fingertips and winces when he finds a bump on his forehead sticking out like a golf ball. He gets his eyes open and everything is blurry and gray-looking. He blinks heavily until things start to clear a little, but it doesn’t help. Wherever he is, there isn’t much light. His face is grazed and stings to the touch. He remembers walking to his car after closing the garage door. He was carrying his briefcase and he can’t remember why, there’d be no purpose for that, and then there was . . . was . . . what?
“Oh Jesus,” he says, and he tries to stand up, but his body won’t work, he manages to get up onto his elbows before collapsing back down, his arm banging off the edge of the bed, his knuckles hitting the concrete floor and scraping away the skin. He sticks them in his mouth and the blood tastes sweet. He needs to get up. Needs to get away from wherever this is. The man. The man asked him for the time and then . . . and then he lost control over his body. He lay on the ground with the sun in his eyes until the man shadowed it. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t even speak. There was confetti on the ground next to his face and he couldn’t figure out why it was there. The man crouched down and held a cloth over his face and there was nothing he could do to fight it. Then . . . then this.
He pushes his hands into the bed. Forces himself upward, slower this time, trying to maintain control, desperate to get onto his feet, pausing to sit on the edge of the bed while the world spins. His eyes begin to adjust. The room comes into focus, but there’s not much to see. It’s some kind of bomb shelter. The only light coming into the room is through a small glass window in a door. Everything is concrete and steel. With small cramps and electrical-like charges, feeling begins to arrive to the rest of his body. First pins and needles through his feet and hands, then it spreads up his limbs into his core. He stands up. There’s a heavy ache behind his eyes. He’s tired and scared and has no idea how long he’s been unconscious.
He realizes he was shot by a Taser. That’s what the confetti was. Tasers spit out twenty or thirty bits of paper with serial numbers on them every time they’re fired. It identifies the user. Then he was drugged. He remembers the rag on his face, the smell, the darkness.