The Dead Room (25 page)

55

Darby sat on the leather sofa less than a foot away from Coop’s armchair. She turned the Glock around in her hand.

‘Nice job filing away the serial number,’ she said. ‘Did you do it yourself? Or did someone give you this throw-down piece?’

Coop didn’t answer.

Her phone rang. She ignored the call and said, ‘Michelle Baxter is missing.’

‘She left town.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because this morning, after you and I talked, I hit an ATM and went back to her place. I gave her the cash and helped her pack.’

‘Because you know the man she was talking to, don’t you?’

He didn’t answer.

‘This afternoon, when I went back to the lab, I went to your office to find you,’ she said. ‘I also checked the fingerprint database. The print from the nicotine gum pack came back with an ID. His name is Jack King.’

‘I know. All this time, I thought he was dead.’

‘When did you figure out he wasn’t?’

‘When I saw him talking to Baxter across the street,’ he said. ‘He’s… That guy is as evil as they come.’

‘Is that why you didn’t call me? Because you didn’t want me to run into him?’

‘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 still time to close Pandora’s box. You can walk out of here with your conscience free and clear.’

‘Maybe you should talk to a lawyer.’

‘I’m not talking to a lawyer, Darby, I’m talking to you. You want to know the rest of it or not?’

‘Tell me.’

‘This girl, her hands, arms and clothes are caked in dirt because Mr Sullivan made her dig her grave in the basement with her bare hands. She’s got duct tape over her mouth. She’s shaking and crying, I’m crying because now the Fed’s pressing a gun against the side of my head – I can feel the muzzle digging into my skin as Mr Sullivan tells me about how I’ve got this
real
important decision to make. Life changing, he says. One of us, he tells us, is going into that hole.’

Darby’s skin grew cold. Coop stared up at the ceiling, at the fast-moving shadows made by the rainwater running down the living-room windows.

‘Mr Sullivan turns to me and says, “Who do you think should be put in there, Coops? This young lady right here, who decided to go to the Feds and tell them about my hotel parties, or you? Word on the street is you’re thinking about going to the cops when you promised me
and
your old man you were going to keep your mouth shut, keep our business right here in the neighbourhood? ”

‘That’s when I realized my parish priest must’ve told Mr Sullivan about my confession. I didn’t tell anyone. Not my friends, not my parents or my sisters. I was afraid of it getting back to Mr Sullivan and here I was stupid enough to believe I could trust Father Humphrey with the whole seal of confession thing.’

Darby gripped the edge of the cushion. ‘This girl in the basement, did she know Kendra Sheppard or Michelle Baxter?’

‘I’m sure she did, but I never got a chance to talk to her. I’m bawling, telling Mr Sullivan I didn’t tell anyone, and he just stares at me cracking peanut shells like he’s at a ball game. He keeps asking me the same question. Who do I think should go into that hole? Either I make a decision, he says, or he’s going to make the decision for me. Guess what decision I made, Darby?’

Her stomach hitched. Bile rose in her throat. She had to swallow several times before she could speak.

‘What was her name?’

‘Don’t know,’ Coop said, his eyes growing wet. ‘I’m ashamed to say I didn’t bother to ask. It was probably better that way, since Mr Sullivan made me put a plastic bag over her head.’

Darby felt her midsection disappear.

‘Of course, being the wonderful Robin Hood figure he was, Mr Sullivan yanked off the tape from her mouth so I could talk to her. You know, in case I wanted to say sorry before I suffocated her to death.’

Coop’s dry, hoarse voice cracked over the words.

‘She tried talking to me, I know she did, but I don’t remember a word because the entire time I was holding that plastic shopping bag over her head I was thinking about my mother, how it would destroy her and my sisters if I was the one who ended up in that hole. If I was the one who disappeared. That was Mr Sullivan’s specialty. I had heard stories, but now I was seeing it up close and in person.’

Tears spilled down his cheeks and his face crumbled. ‘She didn’t even put up a fight, Darby. It was like… like she had
resigned
herself to it.’

Darby couldn’t move and all the while a voice inside her kept wishing that she could hit some magic rewind button on time, go back to her office and forget about coming here.

Coop wiped his eyes. ‘After it was over, he made me put her body in the grave. I was burying her and not really feeling anything, I was in shock. But I was thinking about how I was going to hell. Mr Sullivan, he was all happy, kept telling me how proud he was. After she was buried he stuffed a wad of cash in my pocket. Two hundred bucks. That’s how much her life was worth. He told me I was working for him now, and my new job was to keep an eye out on the streets, report back to him if I heard or saw anything in the neighbourhood.

‘First, though, he said, I had to pay the piper. And if I didn’t, he was going to pick up the phone and call one of his boys on the force, tell him about what had just happened here and give ’em this plastic bag with my prints all over it. And this Fed was going to back him up, say how I’d been working for Mr Sullivan and he’d seen me going into the house with this girl and heard screaming. And once I was in jail, Mr Sullivan said he was going to pay my mother a special visit.’

His name isn’t Frank Sullivan, Coop. His real name is Ben Masters and he was a Federal agent who’d been planted inside the mob and I don’t think he died and I don’t know how he, King, Alan and the other two Federal agents placed on that boat managed to fake his death. All I know is that as every minute passes, this thing just keeps getting deeper and deeper, and I keep wondering when – or if – I’m going to reach the bottom
.

Ezekiel kept whispering to her:

I didn’t call you to help me; I called to warn you about these so-called Federal agents. I have no idea if they’re still working for the FBI… You know what they did to your father; you saw what happened to Kendra… Don’t think you can expose these people. You can’t trust anyone.

Coop moved his niece so her tiny head rested underneath his chin. ‘Mr Sullivan took me upstairs to what I guessed was Kevin’s mother’s or sister’s room – the sun is shining through these real lacy curtains, and there were all these religious pictures of Jesus and Mary and the pope hanging on the walls. And there was Father Humphrey sitting on the edge of the bed with his collar off and a glass of whiskey in his hand. The door locked behind me – they conveniently locked on the
outside
so I couldn’t get out – and Father Humphrey kept smiling at me as he patted the spot next to him on the bed. Want to know what he did?’

‘No,’ she said, strangling on the word.

‘Good, ’cause I don’t want to rehash the gory details. And I’d hate to see you blush.’

‘Coop –’

‘I found the plastic bag, by the way. That’s why I was in such a rush to get inside the house. I found the bag inside that box full of bones.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘I threw it away.’

Darby stared at the carpet. She felt numb all over.

‘I’d appreciate it if you left out that little detail when speaking to the commissioner,’ he said. ‘I don’t want her to come looking for me. I already have them watching me.’

‘Who? Who’s watching you?’

‘Why, the League of Extraordinary Dead Federal Agents. They’re roaming around Charlestown.’

‘Do you know their names?’

‘No, but I know their faces. They’re probably watching the house right now.’

‘That woman you… met in the basement.’

‘I don’t know her name. And I’m proud to say that, being the stand-up guy I am, I never bothered to find out. Feel free to use your psych degree to draw your own conclusions. Just don’t share them with me.’

‘Ezekiel told me Kendra Sheppard was working with my father to help bring down Sullivan.’

‘And look how well that turned out.’

‘Did you know?’

‘I knew Sullivan had a thing for her, kept her close. I found out about it after the prostitution bust.’

‘And the other remains in the basement?’

‘No idea. I’ve got a favour to ask.’

‘What?’

‘Take a long vacation until this blows over. Fake a heart attack. Buy a plane ticket and go somewhere, just do
something
. You need to get as far away from this as you can.’

‘It’s a little too late for that.’

Coop stood up and placed his sleeping niece on the sofa.

‘You remember how my old man died?’

‘Hit-and-run,’ she said. Someone had run him over after he stumbled out of a bar in Lynn.

‘What I didn’t tell you was the phone call I got after we buried him. That Federal agent who’d brought me to Reynolds’s house,
Special
Agent King? He called me at home and told me to keep my mouth shut or I’d be burying my mother next to my old man. That’s why Jackie and I decided to stick around in Charlestown. We wanted to keep an eye on my mother. Thank God she moved to Florida at the beginning of the year.’

‘Kendra Sheppard taped conversations with these –’

‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. I don’t need anything else floating around my head, and whatever it is, it’s not going to make a shit’s worth of difference now anyway. You can’t take these guys down. They’re like vampires. They came here, what, twenty something years ago, and turned Charlestown into
Salem’s Lot
. Now they’re back, and if you think you can kill them, you’re wrong. You put one down and there’ll be another one to take his place. They’re –’

Darby heard the screech of car tyres.

Coop scooped up the Glock and ran for the front door.