Collecting Cooper

As much as Cooper would love to never see Adrian again, being locked in here would be an awful, awful way to die.

“I’ll tell you where she is,” Cooper says, “and then we start working as a team, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But first, Adrian, you still haven’t told me where the girl from last night is.”

“In the ground, of course.”

“How far away from the building?”

“I think the police have already found her,” Adrian says.

“Shit,” Cooper says, banging his fist against the door. The body will give them a whole lot of evidence to work with. “And the knife?”

“The knife is here,” Adrian says. “I would never throw it away.”

Good. That’s at least something. “Listen to me, it’s time you let me out. I can’t afford to get caught. Neither of us can. We have to get away from Christchurch. We have to try and leave the country. If we work together we’ll be okay, but you have to start by letting me out and we have to trust each other.”

“You said you were going to tell me where the girl is,” Adrian says, almost whining.

Yeah, he knows what he said, but his mind is all over the place, probing at every possibility. “There’s a path that goes around the back,” Cooper says, giving him directions to the girl who gave up on him last year and died. “Keep following it, it follows a low brick wall. You come to the end of that brick wall and you turn right. Walk fifteen meters parallel to the building and you’ll find a ditch. Follow the ditch further from the building another twenty or thirty meters and you’ll find a tree that’s fallen over. Cross over that tree, walk another ten meters, and that’s where she is.”

Adrian closes the slot.

“Hey, hey, Adrian,” Cooper says, banging against the wall, but Adrian is gone, and all Cooper can do is lie back down and wait.

chapter forty

Adrian feels agitated. He needs to do something to release the anger and there are only a couple of things he’s good at. His face is hot and he digs at the itches and flicks the hair off his forehead as he runs back out to the car. He’d left it ru

He snaps off a branch from the tree the car is parked under and uses it to get at the itch centered in his back. It tears at his skin but it’s immediately soothing. The backs of his arms are starting to get blotchy, his skin raised up and raw-looking. This only ever happens when the stress arrives quickly. He snaps the stick in half and throws it onto the driveway. He wants to scream, to release some energy. He would get like this on occasion during his Grover Hills years. Things would upset him, and he wouldn’t be able to calm down. Things like eating nothing but mashed potatoes for a hundred days in a row or not being allowed to go outside for an entire summer. He would panic and scream and he’d be put into the Scream Room and left there for a couple of days, sometimes he’d be beaten. Other times he’d be left alone until his frustration faded and he’d forget why he was so mad. More than once he’d be left down there and he’d beat his hands bloody on the door, begging to be let out.

He gets into the car and drives fast down the driveway. It’s getting dark out now, with shapes in the distance only shadows within shadows now. It feels good to be on the move again. It releases the pressure in his chest a little, but it’s nowhere near enough.

His home is no longer his home! Even at the halfway house the Grove remained out here safe and untouched and waiting for him, and now . . . and now these people have ruined it! Why are they being so mean to him?

He knows the roads out here, and stays well away from the main ones in case there are cop cars about. After all, he’s still driving a dead girl’s car. He reaches the highway without seeing anybody, then it’s a trip further west until another set of back roads. There isn’t much in the way of traffic. The sun gone now, but the sky not yet black. There are no other cars around and he goes beyond the speed limit, something he’s never done before, the headlights swaying across the roads as his shaking hands move the wheel. He keeps his grip tight. He’s doing nearly 100 kph and his heart is racing. He has never driven this fast before.

He knows Cooper thinks their temporary home is Su

This time he pulls up the driveway, there is nobody to dare him, nobody to laugh with. Su

It takes him a minute to get back up. His shirt is ruined. He finds the shovel and carries on. He has a headache. He counts out what he thinks are ten meters. The dirt looks different, it’s raised up a little at the ten-meter mark, and he stabs the shovel into the ground. His itches fade as he digs, but he doesn’t have to dig long before he finds her.

For a girl who has been dead only a couple of days, she is a real mess. In fact she is so much of a mess that he wonders if this is the girl at all and not another of Cooper’s victims. After all, he did say he’d killed six people.

He is frightened that if he picks her up she is going to fall apart. And anyway, he doesn’t want to touch her with his fingers. There are bugs and worms squirming around in her body. He looks around, sees nothing useful, then decides to use his shirt. After all, it’s already damaged. He takes it off, wraps it around the dead girl’s foot, and pulls.

The foot remains attached to the body, and the body slides up and out of the grave, lots of dirt stuck to it, some ugly-looking bits of flesh being left behind. He scoops her up. He keeps her held away from his body. He thinks if he tried dragging her all the way back to the car, there wouldn’t be much of her left by the time he got there. He carries her around the silver birch tree instead of over it. He gets her back to the car and into the trunk. He leaves his shirt with her.