Scar number two: A faint straight line on his left hand, over his thumb, from a slipped chisel in tenth-grade woodshop. Seven stitches. He got better with the chisel, eventually.
Number three: The blanched-white lightning-bolt zigzag on his left shoulder, acquired while bow-hunting in the woods of Vermont. Age sixteen. An errant shot, loosed by a friend who either had terrible aim or who was finally acting on long-simmering suspicions that Cooper was fucking his girlfriend. Those suspicions were never proved, Cooper thinks, which isn’t the same as saying they were unfounded. Had the arrow sailed six inches to the left, it would have soared right past him, an effective warning shot; six inches to the right and it would have put him in the ground. He knew the friend well enough to know his aim wasn’t that good either way. The friend never out and out copped to it—he always insisted it was an accident. But he couldn’t muster any tears at the ER. And Cooper didn’t talk much to either of them after that, the onetime friend or his girlfriend. Eventually, they got married, and Cooper moved away. The shoulder still aches from time to time, but only if he thinks too hard about it. Sometimes he can forget it’s even there.
Number four: Hairline scar threaded across his right knuckles. Age seventeen. Courtesy of a concrete dugout wall punched in frustration after allowing a game-tying home run. Missed six weeks of pitching. Probably cost him a scholarship.
Number five: The arcing surgical scar on his right shoulder, age twenty, where a doctor went in and tried to save his bum rotator cuff and his slim hopes of a baseball career. The doctor saved one but not the other. Cooper was in community college at the time, a local star of sorts, and still nursing the eroding dream that his pitching arm might carry him to some better life. Truth is, he was good but not that good, even before the surgery. He could blame the injury for halting his career, and has, out loud to many people in his life, but secretly, he knows. To this day, he can’t raise his right arm to shoulder height without a little bit of wincing, and the famous Cooper curveball died on that operating table, along with a few other things.
Number six: The showstopper. Age thirty-two. A faint but unmistakable fissure arcing downward across the left side of his forehead, cutting his eyebrow in half. The consequence of his head being slammed in a door, intentionally and repeatedly. It happened at Highsbury Federal Correctional Institute, where Cooper worked as a guard. A surly inmate caught him looking the other way, wrong-footed, and jumped him. Goddamned low-security facility, too, full of frauds and cheats and embezzlers, not grizzled murderers, so where’s the good story in that? The inmate was not exactly some cutthroat lifer, just a finance dude with rage issues and an aggravated assault prior doing a stretch for insider trading, who filled his time in the weight room and got his girlfriend to smuggle him steroids. Definitely not a scar to be proud of, thinks Cooper, feeling it now with his whiskey-numbed fingertips. But it’s the one most people ask about. It probably even got him laid a couple times. That’s never changed the fact that he often wishes, in the later hours of the evening, that the inmate had finished the job.
Number seven: He threads his fingers back through his hair and feels the long ugly scar along his scalp. This is his most recent acquisition, obtained right before he started working at the Blinds, the barroom mystery. A souvenir of the dark years, the Austin years, when he’d regularly go out to new bars looking for drinks and fights and usually find both. This was all before he landed his plum job as sheriff in Caesura. This was back when he was working as private security for an old baseball teammate from community college who’d made good, and who basically gave him the job out of charity. That job mostly entailed watching nothing happen on multiple security cameras for ten hours a day, or patrolling the grounds and throwing rocks at rats. As for his off-hours, he spent those becoming well acquainted with the local constabulary, particularly the inside of their drunk tank, even if he was not always clear on the specifics of why he’d ended up there. He fingers the jagged ridge. This scar is a remnant of a particularly nasty barfight, one that got away from him, or so it was explained to him later. Honestly, he doesn’t even remember that fight. All he’d asked afterward was which bar it happened in, so he’d know which one not to go back to, because they likely had a Do Not Serve photo of him hung over the cash register.
Lucky for him, not long after, he stumbled into this job at Caesura. Friend of a friend of his old boss, who was happy to pass along the tip. Lucky for him, and lucky for all the fine residents who’ve since been placed under his protection.
Well, lucky for all but two of them, he thinks.
He’s eight years in, with two to go—that was the deal from the start. Put in ten years as de facto sheriff of the Blinds, babysitting memory-wiped felons, then retire on half-salary and full benefits, with no further obligations. It’s a hell of a pension plan, frankly, if he can just stick it out for two more years. Which, until recently, he was more than happy to do.
Then another even more compelling offer came along.
He raises the near-empty bottle. He proposes a toast to all his scars. The whole collection, another birthday tradition. They are, all seven of them, a year older, as is he.
Here’s to you, my lifelong companions. Happy birthday.
This time he skips the glass.
Not drunk. Not really.
Just fuzzing the edges of the world.
Cooper puts down the bottle, wipes his mouth, and then refills his glass. He pulls the misshapen slug, the one he retrieved from Colfax’s bungalow, from his pocket and holds it up and looks at it under the kitchen light. This wayward bullet, with so many secrets to spill, should it ever be allowed to share them. He turns the slug in his fingertips, slowly, examining it. Then he drops the slug in the shot glass. It sinks with a plop into the amber bourbon and hits the glass’s bottom with an audible plink.
Tiny bubbles flock to the bullet and stick to it.
Cooper picks up the glass, toasts the world one last time, then downs it all in a single gulp, the whiskey, the bullet, everything.
A crackle of static shakes him awake.
He’s still in his kitchen. Apparently he’d nodded off. It’s well past midnight now. Cooper rises and fumbles around for his gun belt. On the belt, his walkie-talkie. He retrieves it. Clicks the button. “Yes?”
Only Robinson and Dawes have walkie-talkies. It’s how the local police force keeps in touch. They don’t usually need them to keep in touch at five in the morning, though.
“Sheriff, it’s Deputy Dawes.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“I do.”
“Well, what is it?” says Cooper, irritated in this moment for about twelve different and equally pertinent reasons, not least by the whiskey headache pounding full-fisted at the door of his addled brain.
“I think I’ve found something,” Dawes says, through the static.