“What?” Sammie asks. “Did you have to steal? Or cheat? Suck a dick?”
“No,” Weber takes a step back, taken aback at her sudden vitriol. Surely he’s heard about her, the rumors, and he knows what she’s had to do, he’s heard what she’s capable of, but he still seems surprised. “Nothing like that.”
“Or maybe you’re the killer,” she whispers to him, coming closer. She’s just screwing with him now, trying to get him riled up, but an emotion still flickers across his face—shock, or guilt? It’s gone before she can tell. “That’d be the perfect way to get your career going, wouldn’t it? Murder a few people, make it look like Seever’s work. And then you’re in, right?”
“That sounds like something you’d pull, not me,” Weber says. “The last year has been lonely, hasn’t it? All you’ve got now is a pathetic retail job to hang on to.”
“Oh, spare me,” she says, spitting out the words. She can feel the corners of her mouth twisting down, the crease between her eyebrows deepening. She is angry, and anger is ugly. “You thought this was going to be easy, didn’t you? That Corbin would hand these assignments right over, free and clear, that I’d be begging to help you? That’s not how any of this works.”
Hoskins steps into the waiting room. He pauses, listening to the woman at the front desk, and then he looks at Sammie. There’s a bandage across the bridge of his nose, he’s holding an ice pack to the back of his head.
“Now, if you’ll get the fuck out of my way, I have an article to write,” she says, flipping her hair over her shoulder and walking away.
“What’re you doing here?” Hoskins asks. He doesn’t look pleased to see her, but he’s not exactly angry either, and she takes that as a good sign. He doesn’t seem to notice Weber at all. “Are you still following me?”
“You look like shit.”
“That’s what I need right now. Someone pointing out how I look after I get my face broken into pieces.”
“I heard you had it coming,” she says, and he stares at her, blinks. There’s dried blood crusted around the inside of his left nostril. “I understand you’re beating up kids now?”
Hoskins snorts, then grabs at his head and groans.
“Jesus, it hurts.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” she says, putting her hand on his arm and guiding him farther down the hall, away from Weber, who looks like he’s been kicked in the balls so hard they’ve popped up in his throat. But he’ll recover quickly, and she wants to be gone by then, to have Hoskins alone. “Maybe some dinner.”
“And what do you get out of it?” Hoskins asks, but she can tell by the way he’s looking at her that he already knows what she wants—his words. Just like old times.
“I get the pleasure of helping a good friend.”
HOSKINS
They go to McDonald’s, because that’s what she wants, and she’s driving, so he can’t put up much of an argument. She doesn’t want to go through the drive-thru and eat in the car, so they go inside and sit in one of the hard plastic booths. She orders four double cheeseburgers and a large fry. A gigantic cup that must hold a gallon of Coke. Hoskins only has coffee, and watches, bemused, as she spreads a napkin onto her lap and starts shoveling food into her mouth.
“You’re going to eat all that?” he asks.
“Watch me.”
So he does, sits back and looks at her. There are smears of makeup under her eyes, her lipstick is bleeding at the corners of her mouth. Sammie looks older in the cheap fluorescent lighting, drawn. Some women gain weight as they age, put on a few extra pounds around their middle, but he thinks Sammie has actually lost weight the last seven years. He can see every vein crisscrossing the tops of her hands, every tendon. They’re ugly hands. Witch hands. She smells like oranges. Men love the smell of fruit on a woman, she used to say, but he’d always thought that she was talking about him, not other men. She used to spray her perfume behind her ears, on her wrists, the soft spot where her thighs came together.
Did Seever like it when she smelled like fruit?
He doesn’t ask.
“So who was killed in that house?” she asks, her mouth so full of food he can barely understand the words. “Is it connected to the other two women? Brody and Abeyta? Is it a copycat killer?”
He picks up his plastic spoon, puts it down again.
“I know why you attacked that kid, but it’s not him, Paulie.” That’s what Loren had said over the phone; he’d called when the doctor was looking him over and Hoskins had answered, even though they hadn’t wanted him to. There was a sign in the room—No Cell Phones—but that’s one of the perks of being a cop. You could ignore rules like that. “That kid—what’s his name? Ted? I checked. He was in Miami the weekend Brody and Abeyta went missing, his mom says he’s been home every night for the past week.”