A counterfeit life, spent
EP’s voice broke through the stale air of the SUV like a cold shower.
“He got a call from the cops. They used a cell, but I traced the—”
“I coulda told you that,” Luke said.
“What?”
Luke rolled up the window, put his cigarette out and shook his head.
“I’m watching three cop cars pull into the parking lot, Zoey.” He sounded like he had found EP’s math homework crumpled up in the desk.
“Shit. One sec, Calling Boss.” EP chimed off and Luke shook his head smiling.
“Now what?” Gradie asked.
“Now nothing. Boss won’t clear a shootout with the cops.” Luke shifted in his seat and got comfortable.
“Cause of the collateral,” Gradie said out loud.
“Wouldn’t do anything anyway” Luke added. “This isn’t a hit. Guy gets taken out before we can find out where he put it, we lose anyway.”
“But If they put him in jail it’ll be a million times harder to get to him, right? So wouldn’t it be better to move now?”
“Nope,” said Luke.
“Why?”
“Cause boss won’t clear an attack on the cops.” He handed Sam the lighter and she raked the end of her slim cigar with the flame.
“But if they take him in, we’ll have to hit the cops eventually anyway, right? That or give up on the job.”
“Can you stop making sense for a bit?” Luke said. “I’m trying to believe in the dream.”
“Great so now what?” said Sam. “We’ll have to go digging through his trash and all?”
“Could he have it on him?” Gradie said to the window, watching the banal storefront like it could give him a hint.
“If he was that stupid there’d be no reason to hire us in the first place,” said Luke.
“But if he knows we wouldn’t expect it—”
“We wouldn’t expect it cause it's dumb!” Sam said. “Also, the cops are probably frisking him right now, so if it is on him—”
“Zoey, you got eyes on the lot?” Luke’s tone and posture changed like a flipped switch. He snapped open the bag hanging under the glove box and pulled his Rattler out.
“Yeah, Boss has me getting the faces of the cops,” EP said, her voice a bored contrast to Luke’s energy. She hadn’t seen whatever he had. Gradie glanced out the window and saw two sedans turn off the street and pull into the lot, one through each entrance. If it hadn’t been for Luke’s reaction, he wouldn’t have thought anything about it.
“Max is gonna push—” EP continued.
“Fuck!” Luke mashed the window controls as one of the sedans revved down the center row.
“Cooper. I need you to come up front please.”
Jeff sounded like he was afraid Cooper might bite him.
“What is it?”
“I just need you to come to the front now please, ok?”
Cooper looked up from the flickering monitor and saw his future spelled out in sad wrinkles frowning at him from the doorway. They probably already had the back door covered. It was just niceties at this point.
“Why?”
“Uh, the uh, the police would like to speak to you.”
There it was. Cooper felt everything around him shift, like reality had been sliding off its foundation since he woke up and had now dropped wetly onto some new level of existence. He would have sat there forever, which in this new reality could have actually been an eternity spent sitting in that humming office, but he was disgusted by the way Jeff was looking at him, like Cooper had taken his wallet and all he could think to do was ask for it back nicely.
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“About what?”
“I don’t know, Cooper, I—, they just asked for you, I didn’t ask—” He backed up into the hall and shook his head like he was being physically pelted with accusations. It doubled Cooper's desire to punch him in the face, so he stood up and walked out the door without looking at him.
Jeff’s wrinkled face faded into the texture of everything else as Cooper walked down the hall. The walls moved past him and the store came towards him from the end of the hallway, but he felt like he was standing still, like a mouse on a wheel or an actor miming in a car while a repeating background fluttered by.
“It’s a dream.”
He tried to push out and find the edge of the dream, that border that had to be torn through to wake up, but it was all the same numbness everywhere in all directions. His feet took him down the aisle toward the front.
“It’s a nightmare.”
He saw the cement interior of a jail cell and the next decades of his life crumpled into it like an old water hose stuffed into a plastic bag. He decided or realized that he had only stolen it all because he had thought he was dreaming. Or did he just think he was dreaming now? It was impossible to tell, as if his past and present had been blended up and smeared onto the same plane, leaving room for only one dimension of feeling.
“Shit,” he breathed to himself when he got to the front. Two cops leaning near the customer service desk watched him walk up. Drew and Micah stood at their registers with their mouths open. Matt was peeking over copy and print with a big smile on his stupid flaccid face. There was one customer, some old guy getting aggravated that Drew wasn’t listening to whatever stupid shit he was saying. Cooper felt a pang of embarrassing regret that he would never again experience some delirious boomer haggling for off-brand oxfords. Outside, it was a bright day that begged for a road trip.
None of it seemed real. He looked the cops in the eye, one after the other, and knew for sure that they were demons. Phantoms that knew, like him, that it was all a dream, but were coming to arrest him anyway because, for some reason, they had to play by the rules of the fake world. He knew all this the way he knew things in dreams without learning or being told, which proved to him it was all true.
It also made him stop walking and laugh.
“Cooper Davidson?” The older cop spoke like a gym coach that Cooper faintly remembered. Cooper just stood there smiling at him. Of course he would dream of a cop arresting him with that voice.
“C’mon Cooper, don’t make a scene please, I told them you’re a good kid.”
Cooper hadn’t noticed Jeff walk up. He looked at him, standing there like a disappointed father, and realized he was made of the same grey slithering stuff as the rest of the world. His thoughts had been bouncing around in his head and he felt no hesitation about voicing them to the potbellied dream character standing next to him.
“They’re not real, man. They’re phantoms. Trying to trick me.”
Jeff’s frown deepened.
“That’s my cousin’s husband, Cooper.” He pointed to one of the demon cops and made eye contact, then kept talking to Cooper without looking at him. “Known him for years. He’s a good guy, I told him you wouldn’t cause any trouble.”
Cooper looked back at the cops. It was the eyes that ruined their disguises. Unassuming fast food and weightlifting once-in-a-while physiques, numbered buzzer haircuts, faces worked into authoritative blank expressions perfectly matched to their strip mall domains. But the eyes were from somewhere unseen. So real they seemed to float in the rolling sludge of everything else.
“If I run yall’ll catch me anyway, huh?” he asked the phantoms.
“Yeah man. All you’ll get is some extra charges,” the younger cop said.
“Run for it, Cooper!” Matt yelled from copy and print. The older cop glanced at him and his laughter died.
“All right let’s go,” Cooper said and put his hands in front of him.
The younger officer stepped up and swiftly moved Cooper's hands behind his back. He felt the cool metal on his wrists and the scraping click of the cuffs bounced off the soft dusty surfaces like a bad joke. Some words were said, or maybe he imagined them. You have the right to remain silent or something, like on tv. Hadn’t he been arrested before? The memory was hazy, blended into everything else, lost in the sound of some other part of him, screaming that the danger in their eyes was real.
The older cop nodded to Jeff and the three of them went out the door. The old man had finished at the register and had to jolt to a stop mid-stride to let them out before him. Someone said “excuse me” and Cooper wondered if it had been him.
There were two cop cars out front with lights silently taunting. The sun glared off the windshields in the lot and cars drifted by in the street beyond. Some drywall-colored sedan pulled out of one of the spots and braked suddenly as a truck came the wrong way down the lane. It all had a mechanical feel to it. Cooper felt if he reached out and touched any of the things in motion and stalled them in their cycles, the whole thing would seize up and collapse into nothing and leave him floating in a void. But he was caught in the motion of it all, connected by the metal rings on his wrists which he now pictured as toothed gears turning in time with everything else.
The younger cop held Cooper against the side of the cruiser while the older one searched him. They got his phone, cigarettes, knife, lighter, but kept searching, even lifting one foot after the other and turning out his socks. He remembered something faintly and chuckled.
“Laugh while you still can, man.” The younger cop said, and his voice was suddenly like his eyes.
They put him in the back of the car and he saw two cops who had been waiting outside stop the other two and ask them something. The two new cops glanced at him but their eyes were like everything else. He was tired of looking at it all, so he slumped onto his side in the seat. He had a few peaceful breaths staring at the matte grey panel separating him from the front seat, before something cracked outside and the stuff inside the cop’s eyes poured out into the whole world like burning thermite.