“You’ve been quiet, that’s all.” Ted takes a step into the office, and stops. He’s holding his wallet in his hands like it’s a purse, and Hoskins knows exactly what sorts of comments Loren would’ve made about that. Hoskins guesses Ted’s in his early twenties, sports those tight jeans and the low-top sneakers all the kids seem to wear these days, and not even ironically. If the kid lived in San Francisco or Seattle, he’d be working at some tech company, changing the face of the Internet. But in Denver, Colorado, Ted’s another unseen cog in the wheel of the police force, hidden away underground. “You want to talk?”
Hoskins is stunned for a moment, and then laughs, actually guffaws, because when was the last time he had anyone besides the department psychologist ask if he wants to talk? He was partners with Loren for almost fourteen years, and he was never the kind of guy to talk; if you started sharing with Ralph Loren, he would’ve told you to stick your feelings right up your poop-chute.
“What’s so funny?” Ted asks, frowning, and it makes Hoskins think of when he’d first been moved down to the basement and Ted had introduced himself. He’d asked Hoskins to call him Dinky, because that’s what his big brothers had always called him, and all his friends, and that had made Hoskins laugh, hard.
“Why Dinky?” Hoskins had asked. “Out of every nickname in the damn world, why that one?”
“You ever seen those vacation movies? You remember the dog that got tied to the bumper and dragged?”
“Yeah.”
“One time this kid hog-tied me to his bike,” Ted had said. “He dragged me down the street, and I lost most of the skin on my arms, had gravel ground into my face. The doctors had to pick it out with tweezers.”
“Nothing’s funny,” Hoskins says now, wiping at his eyes. “You surprised me. Same shit, different day. You know.”
Ted nods, still frowning, but Hoskins knows that Ted doesn’t know, because he’s a kid; he’s still wet behind the ears and he doesn’t know shit about much of anything. Ted still lives at home with his parents, still drives the car they bought him for his sixteenth birthday, spends most of his free time with his eyes glued to the screen of his cell phone. He’s a nice enough kid, smart and hardworking and eager to please, but he’s also na?ve. Probably still a virgin.
“Hey, I guess I do need one thing,” Hoskins says. “Do you have access to old autopsy reports? I need stuff for the Grimly case, back in ’92, and I can’t figure out this damn computer.”
“I can get into anything in our database,” Ted says. He’s excited, now they’re on familiar ground. “You need some hard copies of it, or would an email be okay?”
“If you’ll get it to me on a floppy disk, that’d be great.”
Ted frowns.
“I’m pretty sure your computer doesn’t even have a port for a floppy—”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh.”
“An email would work,” Hoskins says. “I can print it out myself if I need it. And it’s not any hurry. Take your time.”
“Okay. Oh, hey, I just remembered—I was looking through the files on Seever, and he did some messed-up stuff,” Ted says, casually, although by his tone, it sounds like he’s been waiting to bring this up. That’s how people are, once they realize that Hoskins was one of the cops who arrested Seever, they think he’d like nothing better than to tell them all about it. If given half the chance, people would squeeze him for every bloody detail. “It’s really interesting, that he—”
“Who gave you permission to read through those?” he says angrily. “Those are classified files.”
I don’t think about Seever anymore, he’d told the department’s headshrinker a few weeks before. Not unless someone brings him up. But everyone always wants to talk about him. Like nothing else has happened in the world in the last seven fucking years.
A lot of detectives find themselves affected by a particular case, she’d said, toying with the bracelets on her wrists. They made a metallic chiming sound that put his teeth on edge. Especially with a larger-than-life figure like Jacky Seever, it’s normal to—
Didn’t you hear me? I don’t want to talk about him.
“Nobody gave me permission. But I know you worked that case, and—”
“Keep your fucking nose out of those files,” Hoskins says. “And just because I was on that case, doesn’t mean I want to rehash it with your ass.”
Ted blinks, and for a moment Hoskins is sure he’s going to cry, he’s still young enough for tears. He considers apologizing for a moment, then doesn’t. Better to let the kid figure out things on his own.
“All right,” Ted says. “Well, I’ll be back.”
“Okay.”
Ted looks at him one more time, sullenly, and disappears. A minute later, Hoskins hears the elevator doors slide open and closed, and then he’s alone.
*
“How’s he doing?” Hoskins asks. “Is he having a good day?”
He’s on the phone, calling home to check on his father. Good ol’ Joe Hoskins, who’d spent forty years as a floor supervisor down at the Brewery in Golden, who used to play poker every Tuesday with his work buddies and knew how to blow rings with his cigarette smoke, moved in with his only son in the early spring, when they decided he was no longer fit to live alone.