“Reminds you you’re alive, doesn’t it?” he says gleefully.
There’s a car in the driveway—Sammie’s, the one Hoskins always called the Mitsubi-shit, and they don’t bother knocking, Hoskins kicks in the door and they rush in, guns drawn and ready to pump someone full of lead, but they’re too late, the exciting part is already over. There’s no chance for them to play hero. There’s a man on the floor, dead; Sammie, her eyes dull and her lips pale, is clutching her hand to her chest and Hoskins thinks she must be going into shock but there’s an ambulance behind them and the paramedics sweep in and take her away, and her husband too, who is weeping softly and has to be led from the house like a child.
The dead man is on his belly—ignored by the paramedics since there’s nothing they can do for him, their business is with the living—so Hoskins and Loren flip him over—it’s harder than it looks even though the guy isn’t that big—and they take a good look at his face. It’s surreal for Hoskins, to see Seever standing above this kid, looking down at the guy who tried to pick up where he left off.
“You piece of shit,” Seever says, and Hoskins’s eyes clear, and he sees it’s not Seever at all, but Loren, and the guy on the floor is the Secondhand Killer, and he’s finally dead.
It’s over.
WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW
If this were a movie, the end credits would be rolling and the lights in the theater would be coming up and you’d be trying to decide whether you should wait until the massive herd of people creeping down the stairs is gone or if you should fight your way through, because the line for the bathroom is going to be long and the drive home is bumpy and you had a big Coke during the movie—not even the large but the extra-large, the size that makes other countries laugh and point and make fat-American jokes. But you wait, despite your throbbing bladder, because sometimes there’s something cool on after the credits—like the time all those superheroes were sitting around eating lunch after they’d saved the entire planet, no one saw that coming, did they? And honestly, you want to know what happened to these people after everything was said and done, you want to know it all, so you stay, you almost piss your pants but you stay, and you are not disappointed.
*
His full name was Ethan Rhodes Hobbs, and that’s what would’ve been printed on his gravestone—if he’d been buried. Instead, he was cremated, and his mother came all the way out from Minnesota to bring the ashes home. Ethan’s mother—one Patty Hobbs, née Haven—had always thought her son would end up in a bad way, but not like this. Ethan had been in and out of trouble all through school; he’d always been violent and sullen, and there’d been that incident with the girl, and that other time with that neighborhood dog—but she’d always blamed it on his friends, said Ethan was easily influenced, that he was a normal boy trying to find his way in life. But once she was told everything he’d done after moving to Denver, Patty was forced to revise her opinion.
So Ethan’s ashes were given to his mother, and that night she’d slept in the hotel with the plain ceramic urn on the nightstand beside the bed. She thought it’d be nice to have one last night with her son, to say her final goodbye before she took him home and scattered his remains on the wind, and no one knows for sure what happened over that night, but when Patty Hobbs checked out of the hotel the next morning she stopped at the first fast-food restaurant she saw and tipped the entire contents of that urn into the trash bin sitting outside the drive-thru. She left Denver that same day, drove straight through to Minnesota with the empty urn on the seat beside her, but when she got home it was full again, maybe it was sand, maybe it was cigarette ashes, maybe it doesn’t matter.
And Ethan? Most of his ashes ended up twenty miles outside of Denver, in the Tower Landfill out in Commerce City, mixed in with the shitty diapers and empty milk cartons and mildewed newspapers and buried under layers of soil and sand and rock. But before the garbage men came, some of Ethan’s ashes were picked up by the winter wind and were sent whirling through the city, and those bits of Ethan Hobbs are there still, they’ll be dancing in the streets of Denver forever, because you can burn evil, you can cut it and crush it and think it’s gone, but you’ll never be rid of it completely, not really.