What You Don't Know(19)
“Don’t worry, I’ll make this last,” a voice says, stubble brushing against her earlobe, his cologne so strong that she’s practically choking on it. It’s Seever, she thinks, and she tries to fight him but he’s got the upper hand; she was surprised and not ready, but really, hasn’t she been expecting this all along? Seever’s not in prison at all, he’s here with her, in her bed, he’s going to finish what he started, and this is not a dream.
MOVE ON
December 1, 2015
If this were a movie, you’d know time has passed because the words would be printed right there on the bottom of the screen for you to read: ix years later. And this scene would open up over the city of Denver—the camera would sweep over downtown, taking in the strangely curved glass walls of the Wells Fargo building and the golden dome of the Capitol, and the snakelike curve of I-25 as it unfolds north and south. And the mountains, always the mountains, huge hills of purple and blue on the western horizon, their caps dusted with snow. We would see all this and dive down with dizzying speed, toward Colfax Avenue, where most of the city’s porno shops and the massage parlors are located, where there’s always graffiti and loud music, and if you know enough, if you’re desperate enough, you may know where to park your car and honk so the hookers’ll come out and show their faces, among other things. On Colfax, not far from the rush of the interstate, is a coffee shop, plunked right down in the corner of a Walmart parking lot like an accident, way out where the donation bins and the RVs sit, where the piles of papers are stacked for recycling, and on windy days it’s a hot-ass mess, a hurricane of smeary newsprint and words. The coffee shop looks like a refrigerator box thrown on its side, like a playhouse for a kid, but it’s a real, legitimate business where a customer can pull their car right up along the side and watch through a window as their coffee is being made. The coffee is overpriced and tastes like shit, and there aren’t many choices. No pastries or granola or protein packs. Nothing like that. Just coffee.
But what the place lacks in options, it makes up for in other ways. The employees, mainly. They’re all women—girls, really—and they work their shifts in bikinis. Sometimes lingerie. It’s part of the concept, to satisfy the customer. Get some coffee, get an eyeful. Like a Happy Meal for adult men.
Det. Paul Hoskins is a regular customer.
“Same as usual, honey?” Trixie says, leaning out the window. She speaks with a Southern accent, but Hoskins knows it’s a put-on, nonsense she’s picked up from TV, because she occasionally slips right back into the flat, toneless drawl most people seem to have these days. She’s wearing a hot-pink bra and a black thong. Her tits look ready to tumble right out into the open, and he can see the beginning of a pimple in her cleavage, red and irritated.
“Yeah.” The girls all know he’s a cop; they say it makes them feel safe to have him come through every morning. His coffee is always on the house.
Trixie hands Hoskins a steaming foam cup—she must’ve seen him coming, got his drink ready. Large coffee, straight black. Loren always used to give him shit for drinking it like that, called him a real man and asked him how much hair he had on his chest and then dumped three packets of sugar and a dollop of cream into his.
“Thanks,” he says. “Slow morning?”
“It’ll pick up,” Trixie says.
“You got any big plans for the weekend?”
“Not really.” There’s a sketch on the side of the foam cup, a cartoon mug with long, sexy legs sprouting from the bottom and big, juicy lips around the midsection. That’s their logo—a cup of coffee that looks ready and more than willing to give a blowjob. Hoskins sometimes wondered if any horny teenage boys jacked off to that logo. “Hey, I brought in some doughnuts this morning. You want one?”
He doesn’t think Trixie’s her real name—what kind of parent would do that to their kid?—but he’s never asked. It gives the girls a sense of security to give out a fake name, although it’s a false sense, especially in this day and age, when anyone can find out anything. But he understands. Telling a little lie to make life easier.
“What do you got?”
“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.