“Those gals used to hang out around Seever’s place before we arrested him,” Loren had said. “You remember those two? Said he’d hired them to weed the garden, to sweep his driveway?”
“No.” But of course Hoskins does, they’d interviewed those girls after Seever’s arrest, along with anyone else who’d been associated with Jacky Seever, and those two, barely out of high school, were walking dynamite. After the interview was over, when Hoskins stood to show them out, the two of them had come right up to him, one on each side, making a Paul Hoskins sandwich, and offered to meet him after work, to let him have them both in bed at the same time. Either one of them—or both—could’ve ended up buried in Seever’s crawl space, but neither seemed overly concerned about it, and he’d thanked them for coming in and showed them out, but he’d been sweating as he did it, trying not to look at their ripe bodies and their puckered mouths. Did he remember them? God.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. These two were snatched off the street, they were kept alive for three days before they were dumped, Paulie. Tortured and raped. The bastard cut off their fingers, just like Seever used to do.”
“Coincidence,” Hoskins said. But he was sweating, shaking a little. That’s how news about Seever made him feel—like a nervous kid. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens.”
“That suggestion makes you an asshole.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to hear about Seever, or any of this.”
“You miss it. I know you do.”
“No, I don’t,” he’d said, but was that true? Yes. Sometimes. “Leave me the hell alone.”
It takes ten minutes for him to get to work, to the same building he’s been working in for the last twenty-two years. After Seever’s arrest, he got his own private office that looked out over downtown, one with big windows and a door with a lock. He was in that office for almost five years before he was told to pack it up and pound sand; he was punted off the eighth floor and down to the basement, to an office that’s dry and clean and decent, he’s lucky to still have a job, to still have a paycheck coming in, but it’s still the basement, down where you hide the things you no longer want to see but still want to keep around.
*
Everyone thought it would be Ralph Loren who eventually lost his shit, who’d end up being kicked out of the department for doing something stupid, because that was Loren’s jam, that was always what he did. There were rumors that before Loren had joined the Denver PD, when he’d been working undercover out in Miami—or was it Atlanta?—that some big-time drug dealer had pissed him off and Loren had shoved a bong so far up the guy’s ass that it’d ruptured something inside, and that’s how he’d ended up in Colorado, transferred halfway across the country for his own safety.
But it was Hoskins who was put on an unpaid suspension, because he’d hit a woman. No, not just hit her—he’d punched that bitch right in the mouth and wrenched her arm up behind her back until she squealed like a pig, and she’d ended up with a cracked tooth and some bruised ribs and a bald patch where he’d snatched the hair right off her scalp. Hoskins wasn’t the type of guy to hurt a woman—he’d never done it before, and he had no plans to do it again—but he hadn’t been able to not do it, because that woman had killed her daughter; she’d starved the six-year-old and then beat her until her skull was broken open like an uncooked egg. Oh, it was bad, but it was somehow worse because that woman wasn’t a crackhead, she wasn’t a desperate hooker with a drug problem or insane—she was just mean, liked to see her kid in pain. That woman had a nice house with a minivan parked in the driveway and wore fucking cardigans, and they’d found the little girl stuffed in her own bedroom closet, knees drawn up to her forehead and her sunken eyes closed like she was sleeping, and the woman stood there and said she was depressed, that her husband had been stationed overseas by the military and she felt out of control, that she hadn’t known what she was doing, that someone should’ve checked on her, that the girl’s school should’ve noticed something was wrong, that this whole tragedy could’ve been prevented. And Hoskins had lost it, big-time, because he was tired of the excuses, he was worn out from his job, from seeing terrible things and dealing with terrible people, but it was Seever he was thinking about when he hit that woman. It’d been years since Seever, but he still dreamt about him, still caught himself reliving all the conversations they’d had, mostly one-on-one, because Seever had refused to speak with Loren after he’d punched him, wouldn’t breathe a word if Loren was anywhere around. Hoskins was the only one he’d have, and once Seever got going, once he opened his mouth and let it rip, it was almost impossible to shut him up. Seever told Hoskins almost everything he’d done, everything, and Hoskins wishes he could forget it all, wipe his memory clean, because knowing things another person is capable of, well, those things stay with you, they change you.