The Cheater

Crime Fiction by Michael Downing

Night is the hardest part.

The stretch that burns you out inside, drawing out the minutes until they snap like a whip against your skin. Cooper sucks on his Marlboro, feeling the burn, squinting his eyes shut, letting the smoke roll around his head until it stings. The darkness never lets up. It’s a cage, the kind without bars but the kind that still keeps you locked tight, pressing against you. It isn’t just the silence – it’s everything coming back at you. All your shit, piling up like a mountain, impossible to get through.

Night does that to you.

It twists your thoughts. Makes you bend so hard you swear you’ll break. Like a slow bleed. Every second pulling at you until all you want is to stop breathing, stop existing before it hurts any more. No more minutes. No more time.

Time is the enemy on Death Row. Not the guards. Not the other cons. Doesn’t matter how tough you are, what you did, or how you feel about it. Time doesn’t give a damn. It works against you no matter what you do. Fills too many hours with thoughts that never leave. The way your head just refuses to let go of those things. No distractions. Nothing to fill the void. Just a long stretch of hours pushing you towards madness. Minute by minute. Night after night.

Cooper crushes the cigarette, feeling the weight of the silence pressing on his chest. It is quiet. The emptiness is suffocating.

“The worst place to be, is somewhere with nothing to do,” Cooper says. “Makes it worse, you know?”

Mackey shrugs like always. He runs an ebony hand across the grimy blue uniform the guards wear, watching from the other side of the bars. Expressionless.

“Maybe that’s part of the punishment. Supposed to reflect on what you done wrong,” he says. Pauses, then, “Think you’d be used to it by now. It’s been three years.”

Cooper spits, watching the glob of phlegm slide down the wall. Silent, like it’s that simple.

“A man in your situation might as well enjoy the time you got left. Hang on to it before it’s gone,” Mackey adds.

“Hard enjoying anything when there’s too much of it.”

Mackey doesn’t answer. The conversations with Cooper are always the same.  Stays in that same place, knowing when to talk, knowing when to leave it alone.

The first time Cooper got sent up, he learned how to handle the time. You didn’t survive inside without hardening up, bending yourself into something that didn’t feel the weight of it. But this is different. This isn’t Rahway State. He’s not that kid anymore, the one just barely out of his teens. The world was still out there back then, but that’s gone now. It’s 1955. That five year stretch in Rahway is a blur – gone in a heartbeat. It doesn’t count for anything here. Not when you’re watching your life winding down like a clock ticking off minutes with nothing but walls and silence surrounding you. Nothing but waiting.

Wasn’t it his mother who said he could get used to anything? Telling him, “Just let go of the bad thoughts. “

Probably. If what she said still matters.

Cooper doesn’t let thoughts chew him up inside. Doesn’t feel regret, just the burn of everything he’s done. There isn’t much anyone can say about it now. He isn’t crazy. Isn’t some monster, like the prosecutor said or how the system treats him.

He stares at the wall, feeling the weight of all of it pressing down on him again.

Cooper’s a stone-cold killer like everyone on Death Row. But that’s all he’s got in common with them. Tall, lanky, quiet—just a pair of frigid blue eyes and a face carved out of years of hard living. Like a machine, all sharp angles and stillness. The kind of machine you can talk to for hours, trying to dissect, but never really understand. After three years Mackey still hasn’t figured him out. Never really knows what’s ticking behind those eyes.

“One day you’ll wish your seconds felt like hours,” Mackey says.

Cooper just looks at him. Time doesn’t pass like that, not for him.  The hours break off in jagged, unbearable chunks—seconds stretching too long, pieces too small, never enough to fill the empty spaces.

This is it. His life now, with no end in sight. Just waiting. Watching time crawl past, knowing he’ll never see the end of the decade or live to be an old man. The world outside has already left him behind.

His world now is a ten-by-ten cell. One he knows like the back of his hand, probably better than he knows anything. The chipped paint on the walls, the rusted pipes jutting out from the concrete like twisted veins. The seatless toilet, the tiny metal-framed bed that squeaks with every move, the table tilting at a weird angle no matter how many matchbooks he shoves under the legs. That light hanging over his bed like a sword just waiting to drop. The floor cracked and cold beneath him. All of it burned into his mind, more familiar than the memories of the outside world.

Sometimes Cooper stares at the cracked concrete beneath him, feeling just like that floor. Cold. Cracked. Lifeless.

Prison is a cold, empty place that will tear out your heart.  Leave you with just the memories of what people said about you.

“Elias Cooper is a monster,” the prosecutor kept repeating at his trial, shaking his head, unable to look at him. “A man who’s hurt everyone he’s ever touched in his thirty-three years. A brutal killer.”

Cooper smiles, that same smile from the trial. The one that never quite reaches his eyes. The words are always the same. They couldn’t come up with anything else. Brutal was their go-to, always thrown at him like a dirty rag. Every witness had a story about his brutality, like it was the thing that mattered most. Maybe they were right. Maybe the shit he did was brutal. But brutality doesn’t mean a thing to him. A crime is a crime. Once you cross that line, it doesn’t matter by how much.

Cooper knows what he did. Hell, he’d practically confessed when they slapped the cuffs on him. No need for the guns or sirens, the Atlantic City cops dragging him out of the Apollo Theater matinee while the twenty-dollar whore he’d picked up on Pacific Avenue screamed about not getting paid. He would’ve gone without a fight. If his lawyer hadn’t been so goddamn stubborn, he wouldn’t even have gone through the whole trial. The lawyer thought Cooper might get a break if he claimed innocence and took the stand in his own defense. Wrong again.

All he wanted was a couple of dollars.  Thirty, maybe forty dollars.  He only planned to be in the house a few minutes.  Just until he found the cash, but then she woke up.  Even then he would have gone without a fuss if he’d gotten the money but that bitch started yelling.  If she would have shut up and listened, nothing would have happened, but it didn’t work out that way.  All Cooper heard was that goddamned voice cutting through him like a knife.  Over and over it echoed in his head.  So he hit her. 

“You struck a sixty-two year old woman?” he was asked on the stand. 

Cooper nodded. Couldn’t deny what had happened.

“And then you hit her again and again?  Ten, maybe fifteen times?  First with your fists, then with a metal pipe? Kept hitting her until she was unrecognizable.”

The metal pipe was there.  It felt comfortable in his hand when he swung it, and once Cooper hit her, she stopped yelling. Stopped putting up a fight. He liked how that felt. 

“And you kept hitting her?  Over and over again?” 

Cooper could’ve lied, but instead he nodded, saying, “I wasn’t trying to kill her.” 

“But she died.  You beat her to death.  You killed her.” 

“That shouldn’t matter.  It wasn’t my intent.” 

“Don’t think the rest of the world sees things the same way you do,” Mackey tells him. 

Cooper figures that goes without saying. 

***

Night comes too soon.  It is always abrupt and sudden, never enough time to prepare for it. Too much time to fill. 

Sometimes his hands shake and twitch when he thinks about what’s ahead when they come to take him to the chair. What it’ll feel like to be strapped into Old Smokey, saltwater poured on his head, hood pulled over his face. The first jolt that shocks him into unconsciousness, followed by a second that kills him. The smell of skin and burning organs filling the air. If he had to picture his own death, it wouldn’t be like that. How was it, that his mother used to help him through those long, lonely nights as a child, when he was scared and afraid? Wasn’t there a song she’d sing to him?  The melody comes and goes but Cooper can’t put the words together. 

He stares hard at the flickering cigarette ash, wondering why his thoughts always jump back to her. 

Some things are better left in the past; hard enough dealing with the present. 

 “Most of the others make it through the night with no problems,” Mackey once told him. “You been here long enough. Should’ve figured it out by now.” 

But Cooper just shook his head slowly from side to side.  Sleep’s not the same for him; not like it is for the others.  Not with the nightmares that haunt him, even when he’s awake. Every night Cooper stares through the darkness at the ceiling, listening to the noises that echo in his ears. Feeling the fear that never leaves. They come for you at night. It cuts into your thoughts. The waiting, wondering when they’re coming for you.

Sooner or later the appeals run out. 

Sooner or later they come for you because they never forget you are there. The State of New Jersey has already electrocuted eight men this year. There’s still plenty of time to make him number nine.

The first thing you hear is corridor gates sliding open an hour before midnight.  No last meals. No last requests. No pardons from the governor. It doesn’t work like that in New Jersey. Hearts skip a beat and mouths go dry, whether it’s your time or not.  You hear that soft shuffle of the priest and the trio of guards padding towards the cell and it gets you. Everybody acts tough, talking shit until that moment stares you in the face.  Then it changes.  Cooper heard it seize the strongest by the throat, leveling them, begging God for mercy and salvation.  Cooper listened, sometimes so intently that in the silence he could hear his own breathing, quick and hoarse like a dog panting. 

He doesn’t know when his time is coming, but he knows it will be on him soon enough. Knows it deep down inside like the weight of the world on his chest.

Nothing will stop them from taking him.   

Nothing will cheat them. Not when it’s his time to go. 

He never bothered appealing his conviction. Fired his public defender, done with the whole circus. One night—probably soon, maybe tonight—those footsteps will return, this time for him. He’s imagined it a thousand times. Filled his nights with it. He’ll hear the doors open, the boots pounding down the hallway. The guards and the priest, walking together, footsteps echoing. Cooper will stay on his bed, counting the beats, waiting for them to pass. But this time they won’t. The footsteps will stop, just outside his cell. And the priest will step into the dark, starting his sermon. Right, wrong, forgiveness. Prayers. The same tired song. Cooper’s mother used to sing it, too, back when she still cared. Always telling him what to do, whether he wanted to hear it or not. Right, wrong, and don’t forget to pray.

But Cooper won’t play that game. He knows better than to sit and wallow in guilt. There is no room for tears in here. Apologies won’t change a thing, and he isn’t offering any. Ever. The past is the past. What’s done is done.

“Why explain why I did it?” he once said when Mackey pressed him.  “It just happened.” 

“Just happened?” 

Cooper nodded. Same thing he said at his trial.

“Nothing just happens,” the Prosecutor said.  He stared at Cooper with a mocking, open mouthed stare.  “There’s got to be more to it than that.” 

Cooper shrugged emotionlessly.  “I told her to shut up.  But she kept going on.  Kept talking. Then she started yelling-“ 

“And what happened?” 

“I couldn’t stand it.  People talked to me like that all my life.  Like I was shit. Like what I wanted wasn’t important. Like I didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to take it no more.” 

“Not this time.  Not from her!” he added.

Cooper remembers shifting uncomfortably on the witness stand, looking down.  He didn’t think they’d understand but he kept going.  Hoping they’d see what he saw, putting themselves in his shoes. He sat in the cushion-less wooden chair, back digging into the splinters just hard enough to feel uncomfortable. “I hit her to shut her up.  But she kept going, so I hit her again. And then again.”

All eyes in the court were locked on him.  It made him nervous.  Edgy. 

“I just wanted to make her stop.” 

That’s when it hit him—the edge he’d been pushing away, the pounding in his head that he couldn’t ignore anymore. He tried explaining, tried saying why he couldn’t take another second of it. But the words came out wrong, tangled up like a strands of barbed wire. He could feel the stares, the cold looks cutting through him. None of them really got it.

What did it matter if they did?

“Are you sorry?” he was asked. Over and over, like it was a chant.

Sorry? What did sorry even mean anymore?

Sorry wasn’t going to fix anything. What was an apology worth to people who wouldn’t ever understand? And even if they did, if they got it—what difference did it make? What did it matter if someone died, or if a mother’s love, or the love of some God, could even make a dent in the mess of it all? Cooper knew better than that. Some things in life don’t get fixed. Sorrow was just a crutch, something weak people leaned on when they couldn’t stand up straight.

He decided a long time ago there was nothing to apologize for. Lived his whole life that way and wasn’t going to change.

Wasn’t it his mother who spent her whole life saying sorry? Sorry for things that weren’t even her fault? From when he was a kid all the way up until the day he wound up in Rahway for killing that loudmouth at the bar? The one who got in his face and wouldn’t back down, even when Cooper pulled the knife. She was always spreading her sorrieslike candy, smoothing over his mistakes like they weren’t his to own. He couldn’t breathe without her there, whispering apologies into every corner of his life. It was her fault. All of it. If they wanted an apology, they could’ve asked her to say it. She was the one who could carry that weight, not him. Let her take the blame for everything.

But that isn’t gonna happen.

Cooper reaches for another Marlboro, the smoke filling his lungs like a moment of quiet rebellion.

***

He sits motionlessly on the bed; his back against the cold stone wall as smoke rings float across the shaft of moonlight cutting through the cell.  It’s quiet and black in his corner, and for once the sounds of the night don’t matter.  There’s an eerie feeling in his stomach and a strange tingling in his hands, like the night they arrested him at the Apollo — pumped up, adrenalin racing, his head pounding.  Something is going to happen.  He knows that much. 

Cooper pulls the short steel shank from beneath his mattress.  Three hard inches of sharp steel, with a fistful of black tape wrapped around the handle, giving it a better grip.  It fits his hand perfectly.  It cost him plenty; thirty packs of Marlboros and four months to get one of the orderlies to smuggle it to him, stuck inside a hollowed out library book.  Hard to keep it hidden every time they tossed his cell, but worth the price and trouble.   

It’s not pretty, but it’ll do what he needs it to do.

A weird little smile curls his mouth.  For the first time on the Row, he’s calling the shots. He’s in control. Him — nobody else this time.

It feels good. Satisfying. 

He takes one last drag on his Marlboro, holding the smoke in his lungs.  Hears footsteps but this time he’s not listening to find out if it’s one or two or three people coming, or trying to figure out where they are going.  It doesn’t matter.  He lets out that deep breath and rips the shank across his wrist.  Once.  Twice, Then a third time.  The blade cutting through skin, muscles, and veins, leaving long jagged lines.  He ignores the pain, watching the dark blood stream from his arm.  Tries cutting the other wrist but his arm is useless. Can’t grip the shank. He watches his life pour from his body, spilling across the floor, covering the cracks.  It falls like rain, splattering everything in its path.  Cooper lifts his arm, letting the blood run in streams, pouring over his face, flowing across the smile he wears. 

No more nights. No more nothing. Then he slowly closes his eyes before it all goes black. 

***

The priest crosses himself, low and quick, like he wants to sneak it past the dead air of the cell. His hands shake, not from fear, but from whatever is left in him after years of holding on to a faith that doesn’t stick anymore. They wheel out Cooper’s body, wrapped in a white sheet, soaked red with blood, still wet and heavy. One of the guards, his voice thin with irritation, bitches about the blood that splattered on his pants. Like death is just an inconvenience to be washed away.

Mackey leans against the wall outside the cell, taking one last drag of his cigarette. He watches the priest, wondering if heaven or hell are real, or if anyone even cares.

It’s late, but the Row is awake. Faces pressed to the bars, some quiet, some talking softly, staring at the light spilling out of Cooper’s cell like it’s supposed to show them something. Waiting for some kind of meaning to spill out with the body.

“A shame,” the priest mutters, his voice dry and tired. Maybe regret or frustration that he couldn’t save this one.

The guard nods but the look on his face is fake—flat, like someone who’s been doing this too long and can’t remember the last time he cared about anything. He turns to Mackey, looking him over, sizing up the story. “So, this is that tough guy, huh? Big, hard-ass son of a bitch? The one they all talk about?”

Mackey doesn’t answer. Just crushes his cigarette under his heel. The sound of it burning out is the only response.

“The fucking scumbag who killed his own mother?” the guard asks, looking to Mackey.  “Heard about him. Beat the hell out of her, whacked her with a pipe to make sure she was dead, then took in some movie with a five and dime hooker?” 

Mackey nods.

The guard smirks.  “Can’t figure that out.” 

“Not much left to figure out.” 

“Yea, but his own mother?  How could a guy kill his own mother? Why’d he do it?”

Mackey doesn’t flinch. Just shakes his head slowly. “I don’t got that answer. Some guys are just built that way.”

“Feels like we got robbed. Should’ve been the ones to strap him in the chair and make it right. Fix it,” the guard says.

Mackey shrugs. The thing with fixing stuff like this? It doesn’t get fixed. Not by any of them. He knows that. They all know that.

Some things are too evil to fix.

He watches Copper’s body getting wheeled down the hall, but doesn’t watch for long. Takes the pack of Marlboros from Cooper’s bed, shoving them in his pocket, then turns out the light. He turns, headed back down the hall, the last few hours of his shift waiting like a sentence.

---

Bio: Michael Downing is a writer originally from New Jersey, now living in a small college town in Georgia. Over the past fifteen years he has written some plays, published a few books, and his short stories have been featured in various publications and anthologies (some that have even been nominated for Pushcart Prizes). He is still everything New Jersey: attitude, edginess, and Bruce Springsteen….but not Bon Jovi.

Michael has also been published on The Yard before.

Cover photo by pexels/Mark Stebnicki

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