Collecting Cooper Read Online Free PDF Page B

used to collect them. He liked bands and he liked solo artists, but he didn’t like women singers that much. Every week he would spend his pay on another tape, building his library of music. All those bands and artists are in the past and didn’t date well, but classical music stays the same forever, and now he can’t fall asleep without listening to his tape player.
    The car stereo isn’t the only thing not working. For air-conditioning he has to make do with having the window down. He doesn’t have a driver’s license and isn’t sure he’d pass the test if he tried. The thought of it makes him nervous. He could have every piece of information memorized, he’d know in the little diagrams presented if the blue or red car had to give way, he’d know how much tread your tires needed, how much alcohol you could drive with in your blood, but if he sat in front of an officer who watched him trying to complete that test, it would be like a magician came along and made his answers disappear. It would be worse trying to pass the physical part, the part where he had to drive through town with somebody next to him, judging every move he made. He knows he’d only manage a few hundred meters before throwing up all over himself. No, he doesn’t need a license as long as nobody ever pulls him over, and there’s no reason anybody should. He’s a careful driver, and the body in the trunk isn’t making any noise.He just wishes he could get the air-conditioning to work. He isn’t sure whether it’s his fault or the car’s. The car is at least ten years old—surely not everything can be working right on it. The same goes for the radio.
    There aren’t many people on the streets as he drives through them. All the faces look the same. The houses seem to fall into two categories—nice ones that he’d like to live in, and bad ones he wouldn’t. His last house was in that second category, but he’s moved out now and living in the house where his mother, God bless her soul, raised him. It’s not a nice place, but it’s home, and there’s a certain something to be said for that. He just doesn’t know what that something is.
    The driveway leading to that certain-something house has never been paved. It’s made up from loose tooth-sized pieces of shingle that over the years have compacted into the dirt. Some of that dirt blankets the air behind the car as he drives over it, and when he comes to a stop it settles over the warm metal. He sits in the car and waits for the air to clear, humming to himself, not wanting the dust to stick to his damp body and make the itching worse. Soon the tranquillity returns. He loves it out here—the isolation, the peaceful-ness—out here there are no such things as home invasions and loud cars and people being rude.
    The thumb he took from Cooper’s house is sitting on the passenger seat in a glass jar filled with fluid that, if he holds it up to the light, is full of small gray flecks. He shakes it and the flecks float aimlessly like a snow globe but nowhere near as pretty. The thumb doesn’t move much. The nail is longer than he grows his own, and he remembers hearing somewhere that people’s nails still grow after they died, but he isn’t sure that’s true. It makes sense the nail stays the same and the fingers and toes shrink as the body dries out. Cooper would know. Cooper is a professor and a smart person, and this would be just one of a hundred things that he knows. He can’t tell if Cooper cut the thumb from a man or a woman. The nail doesn’t have any polish on it, but that doesn’t mean anything. The cut that removed it from the hand is clean and the bone doesn’t look splintered,but would be under a microscope. Something pretty sharp must have been used. He knows serial killers like to collect moments and . . . and no, not moments, and not moment-o either—he knows the word, has read it a hundred times, but for the moment it just won’t come to him. Whatever it is, he