The Dead Room

‘Yep.’

‘How do you know him?’

Coop took in a sharp intake of air through his nose and moved Olivia from his shoulder to his chest. The baby stirred, her tiny fingers curling into a fist.

‘You remember this?’ he asked.

‘Remember what?’

‘Being this young,’ he said, rubbing the baby’s soft, downy hair. ‘It’s the best part of life and you can’t remember being this clean. Untarnished and perfect. At our age, all you can remember is the scars. The places where you screwed up.’

Darby wanted to speak – wanted to bring him back to the present and guide him, as gently as she could, with her questions. But she could feel Coop circling around whatever it was that was bothering him and waited.

‘Like when I was twelve,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’m dead asleep on the sofa and I hear a car muffler backfire and I’m thinking it’s my old man. He drove this real shitbox Buick every evening to the GE plant in Lynn to work the third shift as a machinist, and here I am opening the door thinking my old man’s come home and I see this guy from the neighbourhood, Tommy Callahan, running up the steps of the church right across the street. He’s clawing at the door, screaming. That’s when Mr Sullivan starts shooting. Pow-pow-pow, like firecrackers going off. And I’m watching Tommy C. collapsing on the front steps of the church. I’m watching him, you know, die.’

Coop traced a finger over Olivia’s curled fist. ‘Mr Sullivan’s standing above him, and Tommy C.’s got his hand up. He’s crying and begging. Mr Sullivan sees me watching from the front door and he pops three rounds into Tommy’s head. Then Mr Sullivan frowns, wiping blood from his shoe on Tommy C.’s jeans and he says, “Hey, Coops, what are you doing up at this hour? Don’t you got school tomorrow?”

Coop took a sip of his drink. ‘Kevin Reynolds drags Tommy C.’s body to the back of a car as Mr Sullivan comes walking right over to the house smiling like he’s here for a social visit. He’s sitting next to me on the sofa at one in the morning and my mother’s up, wanting to know what’s going on, and Mr Sullivan says “Relax, Martha, I just want to take Coops outside to my car and talk to him man to man. We’ll be right back.” I look at my mother and she doesn’t say a word. Next thing I know, I’m sitting in the back of the car and Mr Sullivan is saying, “You see anything tonight, Coops?” And I tell him, I say, “No, I didn’t see anything, Mr Sullivan.” And he says, “I didn’t think so. ’Cause if you did, we’d have a problem. And even if you did see something and, oh, I don’t know, got it in your head to go to the cops, word is going to get back to me, and I’d hate to see your mother or one of your sisters wind up like this.”

‘That’s when he showed me the pictures, these Polaroids of some girl missing her hands and teeth.’

Darby had to clear her throat before she could speak. ‘Was Jack King involved in this?’

‘The pictures, what I saw on the steps, what Mr Sullivan said to me – I told my mother. All of it.’ Coop swallowed. ‘I’m scared shitless, crying, and she’s on the phone with my old man and the next thing I know it’s five in the morning and we’re down at McKinney’s Diner and my father is telling me about how Mr Sullivan is keeping Charlestown clean and safe – he’s keeping out the riffraff, is what he says. “Guys like Tommy C.,” my dad says, “a guy who’s trying to peddle drugs in our town, a guy like that had it coming.” Mr Sullivan – that’s what my father calls him – Mr Sullivan, he says, is a good man and sometimes good men have to make hard decisions. Decisions the police won’t understand. My father tells me to forget what I saw and to keep my mouth shut – my father makes it a point, in fact, to drill it into my head for the next week. Guess what I did?’

‘You kept your mouth shut.’

‘That’s right. I gave my parents my word. They were good people. Hard workers. They had a lot of love in their hearts, but they weren’t exactly the two brightest people. Like everyone else who lived here back then, they looked at Mr Sullivan as this… this Robin Hood kind of guy, I guess you could say. At the time crime here was at an all-time low. No drugs, no girls on the streets looking for crack cocaine in exchange for blow jobs. Back then we walked the streets at night ’cause you knew you were safe.’

Coop took another sip of his drink and then held the glass near his face, staring at it. ‘Thing is, what I saw? It’s eating me up inside. I mean it’s really tearing it up because, after all, I’m a God-fearing Irish Catholic and we’re talking about my soul here. So I go to confession and tell the priest what I saw, everything that happened, the pictures, you name it. I’m telling him I want to go to the police ’cause it’s the right thing to do. I ask him if he knows of a cop I can trust. You know what the son of a bitch said to me?’

‘I’m guessing he told you not to go to the police.’

‘That’s right. Say three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers and all will be forgiven. And that’s what I did, Darby. Thing is, though, the Big Guy in the sky had other plans for me. Next day I’m walking home from school trying to, you know, reconcile everything that’s happened, and a car pulls up next to me and there’s this huge dude who looks like Frankenstein minus the neck bolts flashing me his badge.’

‘Jack King.’

Coop nodded. ‘He told me to get my ass in the back seat. Being the good boy I am, guess what I did?’

‘I think you got your ass in the back seat.’

‘You’re pretty good at this.’

‘I’ve known you a long time,’ she said, keeping her voice low, hoping it would bring Coop’s down a notch and remove that jittery hitch in it. ‘I know you’re –’

‘You don’t know me, Darby.’ He drained the rest of his glass and placed it back on the steam trunk. ‘You think you know me because we’ve spent so much time together. But unless you’ve got an ability to read minds, see thoughts from moment to moment any time you want, you can never really know another person. That’s why I don’t see the point in getting married. You could go to bed every night with your wife, give her the ole high-hard one and your heart is swelling with love for her – I’m talking about that once-ina-lifetime love you see in movies, the kind people rarely experience in their lives. The type where it hurts to breathe, right? And for all you know your significant other is fantasizing you’re George Clooney or the pool boy or whoever while you’re on top of her. And the thing is, no matter how much you love the hell out of someone, you can never really know that person. Not in the way you know and trust yourself.’

‘I think I’ve earned your trust over the years.’

‘You have,’ Coop said. ‘You definitely have. That’s why I’m going to tell you the best part of the story, the part where Special Agent King takes me into Kevin Reynolds’s basement.’

56

Darby shifted in her seat. The jumpy, nervous hitch she had heard in Coop’s voice had disappeared. Now his tone was stripped of emotion, like Michelle Baxter’s, and for some reason it triggered the memory of looking through the tiny window built into the ICU hospital door and seeing the flat-line on her father’s heart monitor after her mother decided to pull him off life support.

‘Special Agent King pulls up in front of Reynolds’s house and tells me to get out of the car,’ Coop said. ‘I’m panicking, thinking, oh shit, this guy knows about what I saw and he’s here to bust Reynolds and Sullivan. King doesn’t ring the doorbell or knock, just opens the door, grabs me by the arm and drags me across the kitchen and into the basement. That was the first sign I had that something was seriously wrong.’

Coop stared at his hand as he rubbed the back of Olivia’s head. ‘I’m standing in the basement with King behind me and there’s Mr Sullivan sitting in a kitchen chair cracking peanut shells in his hands and shooting me this look that says I’m in serious trouble. ’Course I already know that since he’s got this young girl tied to a chair with duct tape and there’s a big hole in the dirt floor right behind her.’

Darby looked at the front door, wanting to run for it and get as far away as she could from whatever Coop was about to tell her.

‘You want to hear the rest of it, Darby?’

No, I don’t.

‘I don’t have to tell you,’ he said in a low voice. His eyes were too big and his mouth was quivering. ‘There’s