It’s not often in this life that someone offers you $50,000 to do something you already believe to be right.
And if the price in return was his goodness, that seemed a fair sacrifice. There are other good people in the world, or so he’d heard. He even knew a few, right here in this town, and now he knew how he might help them.
At which point the decision seemed simple. Because it’s not like the money was for him.
After that, he just needed a plan.
That first one was easy, thinks Cooper in hindsight, so easy that he was stupid and sloppy. But he also knew that ultimately there’d be no one to investigate the death except for him. A faked suicide seemed the obvious route. Colfax barely looked up when he entered. Cooper faked the break-in of the gun safe, and the story afterward told itself: Old Errol Colfax, the haunted man, finally got his hands on a pistol and ended it. This surprised exactly no one. Truth be told, there weren’t many people living in the Blinds who hadn’t at least contemplated a similar escape. It’s hard enough to live with what you’ve done. It’s immeasurably harder to live with knowing you’ve done something, but not knowing what exactly it is you did.
But that’s the nature of the experiment.
Either way, Colfax ended it, took the coward’s way out, that seemed obvious. And afterward, Cooper simply needed to let the fundamental first rule of the Blinds—the essential truth of its existence—prove itself again to be true. Which is: No one gives a shit. Not outside these fences. Was anyone in Amarillo going to sit up straighter at the news that a piece of human garbage, warehoused in some godforsaken facility, had found a way to put a bullet in his head? Cooper recalled dimly the time when the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer had been murdered in prison by a fellow prisoner, brutally, with an iron bar. The public was not outraged. The public practically cheered. They practically threw the guy who did it a parade.
So, no, Cooper did not expect the weight of the law to come calling. He went through the motions of an investigation, of course: the break-in, the pistol, and so on. A week later, Ellis Gonzalez up and quit and fled, and for a moment Cooper thought that maybe he could pin it on Ellis, but by then the other $25,000 was deposited and everyone had bought the suicide. Case closed.
Colfax was easy in hindsight.
Though it was not without consequence for Cooper.
For starters: another fax.
It didn’t come for a couple of months—long enough for Cooper to start believing the Colfax deal was a one-off, engineered by some old nemesis. Long enough for Cooper to start calculating just how much freedom $50,000 could buy.
Some, but not much. Maybe not enough.
Then he got another fax.
This time: Hubert Gable.
And Gable—well, Gable’s history, chronicled in all its lurid detail on that curling sheet of fax paper, made Colfax look like a choirboy who’d stolen a few coins from the rectory’s money box. Gable’s real name was Perry Garrett. A former professional bodyguard with an amateur taste for call girls and a penchant for sexual pain. Not his, of course.
Call girls, or whoever else was handy. And disposable.
His sordid hobbies were apparently later discovered by his employers and discreetly covered up. Until such time, Cooper assumed, that Garrett became expendable or, more likely, found a way to leverage the more mundane but politically enticing transgressions of his employers in exchange for a free pass, a new name, a fresh start, a memory wipe, and a one-way passport to Caesura.
For Cooper, this decision required decidedly less whiskey-swirling.
Fifty thousand dollars became one hundred thousand.
That much closer to his personal fund-raising goal.
A second suicide wasn’t feasible, of course. Cooper knew that would raise too many questions, maybe invite a raft of psychiatrists to descend on Caesura, concerned about the apparently fragile mental health of the community.
So no suicide.
However, the fax offered not just a paycheck, but it suggested a narrative. Colfax’s gun is used to kill Gable. Maybe during a drunken argument. After all, Gable was a friendless grouch who spent most of his time drunk and getting drunker. Anyone might find a reason to plug him out of anger.
Gerald Dean, aka Lester Vogel, for example.
The faulty valve.
The best way to frame him, the fax suggested, was a box of bullets sent to him in the mail, which could be arranged and which Cooper would then conveniently intercept. What Cooper hadn’t counted on is Dawes, the new girl, being so persistent—but even that had an unexpected upside. Dawes beat him to the bullets, but that’s all right, Cooper knows they exist. The stories will still line up. And Dawes, with her notebook and all her fanciful dot-connecting, wound up providing the beginnings of a theory. Something about Colfax and Gable and Dean all being linked, having some outside connection, and Dean stealing the gun, staging Colfax’s suicide, then killing Gable and ending, neatly, with Dean pulling that same stolen gun on Cooper and then being killed in self-defense. The last loose end. A satisfying ending.
The fax offered him $100,000 for Dean. Whoever they were really wanted Dean dead, apparently.
Which would bring the grand total to $200,000. And that was more than enough for Cooper’s purposes. The purchase of freedom. To start a new life.
Not for him. For someone who actually deserves it.
Two people, actually.