HOSKINS
The idiots he had following Loren have already lost track of him. He’s not sure how it happened—maybe it’s because Loren’s squirrelly and Denver’s a big city with plenty of places to hide, or because they’re not putting all that much effort into it, because Hoskins isn’t anyone important these days; he’s been down in the basement long enough that the other detectives don’t want to follow his command anymore, he can see it on their faces, tell by how they react to his orders. He’s a joke these days, and not even a funny one.
“He drives fast,” one of the detectives tells Hoskins in a slow, drawling voice. An I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-this voice. “It looked like he was heading toward the station, but he’s not there now.”
“Check his house,” Hoskins says. “There’s a bar down on Wynkoop where he likes to go. Why do I have to tell you how to do your fucking job?”
He hangs up without waiting for a response, because if he has to spend one more minute listening to the useless prattling of these morons he’s going to lose his shit. It’s all running away from him, being lost in chaos, and he didn’t want to work this case to begin with, he was ordered to do it. He’s called Ted, had the kid confirm Loren’s whereabouts when each of the victims went missing, and Loren’s clear. He’s not the Secondhand Killer but he’s definitely not right in the head. He’s called Chief Black, told him his concerns about Loren, how he’s dressing up like Seever and following Sammie and now vanishing, but the boss man isn’t concerned, says that’s how Loren is, it’s to be expected, that the Secondhand Killer is still out there, so shouldn’t Hoskins be focusing on that instead of babysitting his partner? And that shit makes Hoskins so mad he’s ready to tell Black to go fuck himself, to turn over his badge and his gun and call it done, he hasn’t been this mad in a long time. This was never supposed to be his problem, yet here he is, Loren’s gone and there’s a dead kid being zipped up in a bag and Sammie is upset because there’s another reporter here and Hoskins wants to go home, to catch up on the sleep he missed when he took Joe to the hospital. It’s been a long day, long enough that when he thinks back to that morning, to Joe screaming, terrified and sobbing, it feels like it happened weeks ago, not in the last twelve hours.
He makes sure Jimmy Galen is all loaded up before he gets in his car and drives, heading back to the station but instead ending up at the coffee shop, and he doesn’t go through but parks and watches. Trixie’s working the window, wearing a yellow polka-dot bikini, like the one from the song, and her skin is perfectly tan and smooth, even though it’s the dead of winter. He’d gone through the drive-thru the day before, on his way into work, and he saw the new bruise on Trixie’s shoulder right under the strap of her bikini, where it looked like someone had poked her, hard. Too hard.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he’d asked her then, and her face had closed up, right away, snapped shut, and he’d seen that look before from other women, women who were afraid of the men in their lives, always scared they were walking into a trap.
“Yes,” she said immediately, and Hoskins knew that if he pushed her she’d say her boyfriend was protective, but he knows that code, you aren’t a cop without seeing that shit all the time, men who think that women belong to them, like the way you can own a house, or a banana. He sits in the car and his eyes start to drift shut, he’s tired and he imagines Trixie going home to this guy, but in his head he’s the boyfriend, and he pokes her, smacks her in the face and chokes her, sticks her fingers in his mouth and bites down until those delicate bones start to break.
Where the fuck are these thoughts coming from?
He gets out of his car, paces back and forth across the parking lot a few times, and circles the Walmart, his head ducked against the wind. The walking’s not working the way it usually does; he’s still on edge, he feels like he’s chewing on glass, so he finally climbs back into his car and watches Trixie pass out coffee and make change and swipe credit cards, and he nods off, his head dropping down to his chest, and that’s not much of a surprise, because he’s exhausted, he was at the hospital all night with his father and spent the morning with Loren, he’s running on nothing but adrenaline and caffeine, and those are both in short supply.