“Yeah?” Loren says, mocking. “When’s your ball sac gonna drop? That high-pitched voice you got makes me want to punch you in the face.”
Hoskins doesn’t respond to this. He’s been taking this kind of shit from Loren for the last ten years, and he’s learned that it’s best not to respond. Safer. Loren can shovel it out to anyone who’ll listen, but he certainly can’t take it. The last time they had it out was three years before, when Hoskins made a smartass remark about Loren’s mother—that’s what you do, if you want to piss a guy off, you go right for his mom, even if you don’t know her, even if she’s dead—and Loren broke his nose. There’d been an investigation, and a reprimand. A few visits to the department psychologist. But they’d still been forced to work together. If Hoskins had learned one thing about his partner, it was this: Keeping quiet is better. It wasn’t that he was afraid of Loren, and he’d be able to hold his own in a fight, but if it came down to it, if you really got down to the brass knuckles (which is how Hoskins had thought the saying went since he was nine years old), he thought it was better not to speak if there wasn’t anything to say. His father used to tell him to keep his pie hole shut more often, and the old man was right: Silence often made things easier, kept it simple.
Loren rings the doorbell, pressing his thumb down on the glowing button so hard his finger goes white above the first knuckle, and then immediately starts knocking. Loren is not a patient man. He’s a pot of water ready to boil over on the stovetop, a balloon pumped too full of air. His fists make a heavy, dull sound on the door that makes Hoskins’s head hurt, but he doesn’t say anything.
It takes a bit—thirty seconds, maybe a few minutes, Hoskins doesn’t know—before the door is pulled open. Hoskins had thought Jacky Seever might be in a bathrobe at this time of day, or a pair of tighty-whities, stained yellow at the crotch, but instead he’s in a suit, same as always. Seever’s the kind of guy who’d mow his lawn in a suit; he probably sleeps in the damn things. Three-piece suits, all the same unvarying shades of slate gray or dark blue, slacks and a coat, a vest with a silver watch peeking from a pocket. The suits are all well tailored and pricey; they make Seever look like a man-about-town, and those suits may be the reason why Hoskins hates Seever so much, because he’d never be able to afford anything like that, not on a cop’s salary, but it’s not the only reason. It’s Seever’s suits, and it’s his fingernails, which he keeps neatly trimmed and buffed, and it’s his hair, parted on the right and sprayed until it’s as hard as concrete. And the glasses—Jesus Christ, it’s those glasses, wire-rimmed transition lenses that get darker in brighter light, that’s what Hoskins first hated about Seever—those fucking glasses. Anyone who wore those glasses of their own free will was an asshole. Hoskins grew up poor; he’s got a natural distaste for guys who strut around, flashing their bankrolls and Seever’s one of those guys, but he’s also worse, because he’s got money, but he’s also a snake in the grass. A phony-baloney, like his old man always says. Or in Latin, phonus-balonus.
“Officers?” Seever says. He asks everyone to call him Jacky, but Hoskins has never been able to do it. For him, this lousy fuck will never be anything other than Seever. “Early, isn’t it? Is there something I can do for you?”
“Oh, you fat bastard,” Loren says mildly, taking a step forward so Seever is forced back, has to make room to let them in. Seever’s a small man; he wouldn’t be able to keep them out if he tried. So he doesn’t. “You know why we’re here.”