What You Don't Know by JoAnn Chaney
For Mom and Dad,
who always said I should write
THE CRAWL SPACE
HOSKINS
December 19, 2008
If this were a movie, it would start with this shot: two men climbing out of an older-model brown car, dressed in cheap suits and cheaper shoes. One of them is wearing a hat, a black panama, and it makes him look a little like a time traveler from the 1920s. But this isn’t Prohibition and this isn’t Miami; this is Denver in the year 2008, and it’s cold outside, so the man in the panama looks foolish, although you wouldn’t tell him that, not if you want to keep your asshole firmly intact, because this man might look foolish but he’s also one mean motherfucker, you can tell that if you manage to get a good look at his eyes. You might think it was a woman who gave him the hat, who teased him into wearing it, telling him he’d look so handsome in it, so debonair, but you’d be wrong. This man’s name is Ralph Loren, a name that sounds like a bad joke but isn’t, because nobody teases Detective Loren, nobody, even if they’re pretty and young with tits out to there. Loren doesn’t have a sense of humor—it’s not that he has a weird one, or a mean one; he just doesn’t have one at all. He was born missing that part of his insides, and life is a hard row to hoe without a few laughs along the way, but you don’t miss what you never had. At least that’s how the saying goes.
But it’s the second man you should watch, the one climbing out the passenger side, the tall man with the big shoulders and the beginning shadows of a beard. This man comes around the front of the car, not bothering to avoid the dirty snow piled up at the curb but plowing right through it. He’ll regret this later, when he’s back at his desk, his socks wet and cold and frozen between his toes. Paul Hoskins is that kind of man who doesn’t think too hard about what he does and regrets these decisions later. He’s always been that kind of man and he always will be, until the end of time, amen.
“We’re finally doing it, huh?” Hoskins says, looking up at the house they’ve come to visit. It’s large and brick, a house taller than it is wide, with a big bay window over the front yard. It’s traditional, not the kind of house you’d normally find in Denver, but this housing addition was built back in the ’80s, thrown up quickly for the crowds rushing in from all over—California, mostly, if you listen to the locals, all those jerks and their terrible driving skills—and it doesn’t look cheap, not like some of the other houses on the street. There are trees and shrubs planted in tasteful clusters around the property, although the foliage is faded and brown now, with nets of colored Christmas lights wound through the branches. There’s a man-made pond out back too, with a slat-wood dock and a rowboat made for two. There are fish in that pond, and frogs, but the water’s covered over with a thin sheet of ice now, and Hoskins wonders if all that has to be replaced every spring, if a delivery truck swings by with foam coolers full of wildlife. “Time to get the bad guy?”
Loren sighs, pushes back the flap of his jacket, and flips away the strap keeping the gun secured at his waist so he can get to it fast if he needs. These two are cops, detectives and partners; they’ve been together a long time and they’ll be stuck that way awhile longer, although neither one is overly fond of the other. But they’re kept together because they work well, they click, and that doesn’t happen as often as anyone would like. A good partnership is a lot like a good marriage, and as anyone can confirm, a good marriage is hard to find.
But even in the best marriage, things can go very wrong.
“It’s about damn time,” Loren says. “If I never see this dipshit again, I’ll die a happy man.”
They walk up the long driveway, which has been neatly cleared of snow by the kid next door for ten bucks, and up to the front door. It’s big and solid, oak, and the opaque sidelight is dark. It’s early, not quite seven in the morning, and everything is quiet. Inside the house looks dark, lifeless, but Hoskins catches a faint whiff of brewing coffee and his stomach growls.
“Ready?” Loren asks.
“Yeah.”
“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.