Collecting Cooper Read Online Free PDF

and shattered vertebrae and people tell me she was lucky to live. My daughter wasn’t so lucky. Nobody ever tells me my daughter was unlucky enough to have died. People hardly mention her anymore.
    Schroder’s money will only get me about halfway there. Instead I have to wait for my parents. I don’t have a car—it was damaged in the accident last year that led to my conviction. My parents wanted to pick me up today but couldn’t. They visited me twice a week every week while I was locked away, but the day I’m due out they’re busy, Dad with an appointment with a specialist at the hospital to fix the kind of prostate problems men get when they get to Dad’s age, problems I’m hoping they’ll cure with a pill by the time I get to sixty.
    It’s too hot to head back outside, and ironically, after four months of wanting nothing more than to come home, I’m hit with an incredible sense of boredom. I stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window. Though tidy, the backyard looks tired, the heat having drained much of the life from every living thing planted out there. My cat, Daxter, comes in and gives me a sad look, then comes back in a minute later with a bird in his mouth. Daxter is an overweight ginger cat who, for a piece of food, will be your best friend. He puts the bird on the floor next to my feet and steps back and meows at me. I don’t know whether to tell him off or cuddle him. I do the latter, then toss the bird into the garden recycling bin outside.
    Like I knew I would, and like Schroder knew I would, I turn my thoughts to the folder with the green cover and rubber bands—a folder full of death. It couldn’t hurt to look. Schroder’s hoping there is something I can see that nobody else can. It’s unlikely, but possibly I can offer a different perspective. Plus I have a mortgage to pay and nothing in the way of job prospects. I pick the file up from the dining table and carry it to the study.

chapter four
     
    The heat is bad—not as bad as earlier this morning when Adrian set fire to his mother, but still hotter than he’d like. People complain about the heat. His mum did. She complained and screamed until the pretty-colored flames melted her tongue to the roof of her mouth and then she couldn’t scream anymore. People like to walk around complaining that it’s too hot and six months ago those same people walked around complaining it was too cold, and people, he knows, just can’t be pleased. Adrian doesn’t like the heat, but he isn’t making a fuss about it. He knows you just have to be careful enough to stay in the shade and drink enough water. If you don’t you can get skin cancer or your skin gets old quickly and gets blotchy and he doesn’t like the idea of that. When he gets too hot he sweats, which makes his clothes stick to him and makes him itch, and he hates itching, because his are the kind of itches that he can never quite get to, they travel as he scratches at them, forcing him to chase them with chewed-up fingernails, which roughs his skin and makes him bleed.
    He doesn’t know how to work the radio in the car so he can’thear the temperature on the news. He wishes he could. He loves to listen to music, any kind of music as long as it’s not that heavy metal stuff you rip your throat up trying to sing along to, or worse, hip-hop. For twenty years he never heard a single song, a life without music, only sad, lonely humming from some of the others he lived with. When music came back into his life, he just didn’t get it. It was like all the rules had changed. Even records and cassette tapes had been replaced with songs you listened to on a computer, and he barely even knew what a computer was let alone how to use one. He listened and adapted to the new styles and now he hates to be without it. His favorite is classical. As a kid he never liked classical music. He used to have a paper route, and he’d save his money, and he was always spending it on cassette tapes. He