“Couple powdered sugar. One—oh, two glazed. Something with filling. Looks like raspberry.”
He’d found out about this place from a woman he’d dated, Vicki, or something like that, he can’t even remember her name, who’d read about it online and then went into one of her rants—she said that’s what the world was coming to, people would get their rocks off anyplace they could, even if it was their morning coffee. But Vicki was also the kind of woman who wished she could live back in the 1950s and wear an apron, and thought most men were perverts, any woman with a good body and a low-cut shirt was a whore. She had opinions, she had a big mouth, but she was mostly insecure. Insecure and needy, and he’d put up with it, not for any good reason but mostly because she kept coming back. He couldn’t even remember how they’d started dating, or where he’d first met her. She’d finally broken up with him, went through his bathroom cabinets and dresser drawers and packed up everything she’d left behind over the six months of their relationship, shouting that she was through with his shit, that he was a bastard who’d never be able to hang on to a woman, that he’d never find anyone better than her. He’d heard it all before. She dumped him because he was damaged, because being with him was like dating a robot, but he figured it was really because of the coffee cup he’d forgotten to throw away, Vicki had seen it and known he’d been going to that place, and if there was one thing she wouldn’t put up with, it was a boyfriend who liked to stare at half-naked women while they poured his coffee. So Vicki had left, but she still sometimes texted him, wanting to check in, she’d say, and he knew he could get her back, if he wanted.
He didn’t.
“Are you offering me a doughnut because I’m a cop?” he asks.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Trixie says, the smile dropping right off her face. There’re two scratches on her shoulder, deep ones. Could be from a cat, although they don’t look it. “I thought you might like one.”
He reaches through the window and touches her arm. It’s cold outside, and Trixie’s arms are studded with goose bumps. She looks unsure for a moment, and right below the uncertainty hovers another emotion: fear. He’s seen it plenty of times over the years, usually on women who get treated like punching bags by the men in their lives.
“I was kidding,” he says. “Sorry, bad joke. I’ll take the raspberry one, if you don’t mind.”
She smiles again, but it’s weak. He’d like to ask her out, to take her to dinner and maybe go to bed with her, to trace a finger down the length of her naked spine. But it’s not a good time to ask, it seems like it’s never the right time, but especially not when she looks like this, like he punched her in the belly, quickly, the ol’ one-two, knocked all the air from her lungs and left her green.
“Have a good day,” she says, handing him the doughnut wrapped in a napkin. When she leans over, he sees the tattoo on her hip, above the lacy waistband of her panties. Five-by-five, he thinks it says, that old way of saying that everything was all good, but he’s not positive, it’s blurred and sloppy, the ink gone purplish and soft.
“Thanks. See you in the morning?”
“Nah, I’ve got the day off.”
“Okay.”
He pulls into traffic, turns right, toward downtown. It’s still early, the sun’s barely out, but his cell phone is already ringing. He grabs it out of the cup holder where he leaves it, glances at the screen. It’s Loren. He doesn’t answer. They’re not partners anymore, it’s been nearly two years since their split, but Loren still calls him plenty. To shoot the shit, Loren says, but that’s a joke, because when did Loren ever just want to chat? Never, that’s the answer. No, Loren calls because he likes to remind Hoskins of what he used to have, what is now out of his reach. Or maybe he phones because he doesn’t have a partner anymore, there’s no one he can talk to these days. Loren’s been burning through partners left and right since Hoskins left, no one has ever been able to stand working with Loren and that hasn’t changed, something that Hoskins finds strangely comforting.
So Loren rings every few days to tell Hoskins about his caseload, what’s going on. Most recently, his calls have been about the two women who were pulled out of the reservoir two weeks before. Neither of them had been weighed down, the killer either hadn’t thought of it or hadn’t cared, but they’d been tied together with twine, looped around each of their necks, keeping them tethered, so they’d be found at the same time.