With Rigo gone, Dawes occupies the barstool next to Cooper. He uncaps a beer and hands it to her without asking, knowing it’s the only way she’ll accept it, given she’s still on duty and it’s still the middle of the day. And she does accept the beer, showing only the slight hesitation of someone faced with the conundrum of having to either disobey a written regulation or disobey a direct request from a superior. But Cooper’s always considered this a useful rule of thumb: Always obey the request in front of you over the one written in a book somewhere. If he can teach Dawes that, he thinks, then maybe one day they can move on to the more valuable lesson of when to disobey both.
He holds up his own bottle, his second, and offers the longneck for a toast. “Here’s to following proper procedure.”
She hesitates. “I’m not a cop, you know. I was an EMT before this.”
“And I was a corrections officer. So maybe neither of us should be expected to play Sherlock Holmes on this one.”
They toast. Cooper swigs. He tips his beer back slowly, careful not to race too far ahead. It’s not like he’s an alcoholic. It’s just that he can’t usually think of a good reason, when the opportunity presents itself, not to fuzz the edges of the world just a little bit. “You like that work? An EMT?”
“I trained for it because I thought I’d be saving people’s lives. Turns out you spend most of your days helping really fat people get out of bed.” She pretends to take a sip of beer. She hates beer.
“I’m sorry I was hard on you earlier.”
“You weren’t hard. You were right.”
“It’s possible to be both.” Cooper looks her over. “Why the hell did you choose the name Sidney Dawes, anyway?”
“Do I look like a Barbara Quayle to you?” She picks at the label of her beer, unscrolling it from the sweating bottle. “To be honest, I thought you could choose any name you liked when you got here, and I wanted to be called Darwin.”
“Why Darwin?”
“Because Darwin means change.” She fakes another sip. “I don’t know shit about Charles Dawes, but ‘Dawes’ seemed close enough.”
“And why Sidney?”
“For Sidney Poitier. He’s the only black person on either of those lists.”
Cooper finishes off his bottle, slightly ahead of schedule. He starts to think about number three. He gets up and walks around the bar, rummaging in the fridge, then surfaces with another cold one and pops the beer open.
“What about you, sir?” she asks. “Why Calvin Cooper?”
“Cooper for Gary Cooper, the greatest movie sheriff of all time. I guess I figured if someone had to take that name, it might as well be me.”
“And Calvin?”
“I just liked the comic strip, the one with the kid and the tiger. Besides, I always had a boring first name so I wanted something a little fancier. It was John, if you’re curious. Unlike the residents living here, I know who I used to be.”
“Really? And what was your last name?”
“Now you know I can’t tell you that.” Cooper swigs. “Okay, your turn, Sid—what’s your real first name?”
“My first name is just a bunch of syllables my mother thought up five minutes before I was born, then slapped on my birth certificate, then stuck me with. I never liked it.”
“Let me guess. LaToya?”
“Don’t. That’s not even funny,” she says sharply.
Cooper considers this onset of defensiveness. For the first time, he starts to think he might grow to tolerate her. From what he’s seen so far—well, for starters, the notebook’s got to go. But she’s smart, and persistent, and not afraid to be a stickler. “Your secret dies with you,” he says.
To Cooper’s disappointment, Dawes pushes her beer away and pulls out her notebook. “Tell me about Ellis Gonzalez.”
“We’ve got to get back to work.”
She nods to the notebook. “This is work, sir. Why’d he leave?”
“To be honest, he wasn’t cut out for this place.”
“I’d like to try and contact him.”
“Why?”
“Ask him about that gun. What if he never sent it in? That would answer a lot of questions. I bet I could track him down.”
“Off-grounds? Absolutely not. We’re only cleared to leave the facility under extraordinary circumstances.”
“And this doesn’t strike you as an extraordinary circumstance, sir?”
Cooper stands behind the bar, glaring at her. Here he is, trying to reach out, sharing a slightly illicit midday drink, making connections, and now this: a blatant flirtation with insubordination. “You seem to be under the impression that you can say anything to me just so long as you follow it with ‘sir.’”
“That’s not true. Sir.”
“My theory is, someone got drunk, staggered home to retrieve a rusty old firearm he’d kept stashed under the floorboards or who the fuck knows where, came back here and settled their argument for good. People do smuggle things in here, Deputy, despite our best efforts. In any case, whoever did this will likely come crying to us and confess before week’s end. It’s not like they have anywhere to go.”
Dawes sits up a little straighter, like a student in a seminar, poised to deliver the argument she’s been formulating for weeks. “To the contrary, I would argue that, given this is a facility dedicated to sheltering sensitive government witnesses, even the possibility that someone’s found a way to target these witnesses represents the most serious kind of breach—”
Cooper cuts her off. “Let me share a secret with you, Sidney Dawes. These people”—and here he gestures toward the door, the bungalows, the town—“they agreed to be part of an experiment. That’s what this really is. You ever hear that expression: ‘If you want to truly keep a secret, you have to keep it from yourself’? That’s the notion this whole place is founded on. You flip. You talk. You get your past sins wiped away. In most cases, so thoroughly that even you don’t even remember who you used to be. For these people, that’s a blessing, believe me.”
“But they’re not all criminals, right?” Dawes asks. “Some of them are innocents. Just victims, hiding out from some bad person they agreed to testify against.”
“Sure. But here’s the magic of this place. We don’t know which is which. And neither do they.” Cooper leans in toward her and speaks low—he doesn’t want Greta, wherever she got off to, or anyone else, to hear this next part. “Look, if you are worried that this incident will somehow imperil your potential for professional advancement—”
“That’s not my worry—”
“Let me assure you that, to anyone in the outside world, this town basically doesn’t exist. As far as they’re concerned, these people have served their purpose. This place is just a landfill to store them all until they die.”
“But Agent Rigo—”