But his dreams—God, his dreams. He’s being jacked off in this one, and while this isn’t unusual—most of his dreams are about sex, have been since he was thirteen—there’s something about this that isn’t quite right. And when he looks down, he sees what the problem is right away—it’s Seever’s fist pumping up and down on his dick, and he’s got a cigarette clenched in his mouth, in the odd way Seever always smoked, biting down so hard Hoskins can see the indentations left on the filter.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Hoskins asks, but he doesn’t push Seever away. It feels too damn good for him to want it to stop, no matter who’s doing the deed.
“What’s it look like I’m doing, dumbass?” Seever growls, grinning around the cigarette. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re slow.”
“God,” Hoskins says, and he’s close, he’s so damn close, Seever has got both hands in on the action, he’s really working it now, and then suddenly he lets go, and Hoskins’s dick is standing straight up, hard as a rock, and it’s funny, the way it waves in the air, indignant.
“You’re like me,” Seever says, slapping away Hoskins’s hands when he tries to grab himself to finish the job. “Once you start, it’s so hard to stop.”
“What do you want?” Hoskins says, nearly screaming. One touch, that’s all he needs, and he’ll come, he’ll squirt like a fucking geyser. “I’m not anything like you.”
And then he wakes up.
*
The first thing he sees is Trixie walking by, out of the coffee shop and toward an old car parked off to one side. She doesn’t see him, and he’s thankful for that, because if she’d come over to the window and taken a good look at him, hollow-eyed and sick-looking, a raging boner ready to split his pants, she would’ve run away screaming. But she doesn’t see him, and she slips behind the wheel of the old car and revs the engine. It doesn’t sound like much, he bets it never gets warm enough inside and will probably give up and die at some point in the near future, but what else could she possibly afford on her salary? He wishes he could help her.
Help her? Seever’s voice speaks up, from somewhere deep in his brain. Yeah, I bet you’d like to help her. Help her bend over and stick her ass up in the air.
“Shut up, shut up!” Hoskins shouts, slamming the flat of his hand against the steering wheel, not noticing the frightened looks he gets from people walking by. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
He should go home, or back to the station, but he can’t stop thinking of Seever shoving him away, but it wasn’t Seever, he tells himself, it was Loren. Wasn’t it? It all seems so twisted up in his head now, and even his memory seems off. It was Loren dressed as Seever, and he’d been following Sammie, but that didn’t seem right because it was Seever who used to fuck Sammie, it was Seever’s voice he couldn’t get out of his brain, it was always Seever, that bastard had been riding on his back like a monkey for the last seven years, whispering dirty secrets even when Hoskins couldn’t hear him.
“I’m not a bad guy,” Hoskins says, not even aware he’s saying the words, or who he might be talking to. He’s thinking about the woman who’d killed her daughter, and how good it’d felt to hear her scream, and Joe, too, how he’d fallen silent as soon as Hoskins had hit him. It’s wrong to want to hurt people, he’s known that since preschool, but everything feels different now. Mushed around the edges. “I’ll show you. I’m not a bad guy.”
He flips on his blinker, turns out onto the street. He’s gripping the wheel, his nails are cutting into the leather. Trixie’s car is just ahead.
*
Trixie lives in the kind of apartment building that would be called a tenement in a big city, but here, in the middle of Denver, USA, with a view of the mountains and a shitty park nearby, it’s called an urban up-and-comer, like people expect it to suddenly get better any day now. It rises six stories up, and the only way into the apartments is through the long hallways that snake through the building, hallways that always smell like feet and urine and curry. He watches as Trixie gets out of her car and goes inside, and he’s right behind her, close but not too close, because if he loses sight of her in this endless maze of doors, he’ll never find her. But it’s easy, she’s on the first floor, he sees her open a door—15A—and slip in, and she doesn’t lock it, there’s no telling snick of a deadbolt being pulled. Something tells him to wait, not to burst right in, so he walks farther down the hall, his hands in his pockets, strolling, like he belongs there. He sees a few people, but no one gives him a funny look, or asks any questions—that’s one of the good things about a place like this, maybe the only good thing.
After fifteen minutes he goes back to Trixie’s door, twists the knob in his hand. It opens easily, and he goes inside. He is only in the apartment for a few minutes, and there’s mostly silence, except one scream, a woman’s scream, and then Hoskins leaves, closes the door gently behind him. There is blood on his hands—not a lot, but enough—and the blood isn’t his.