What You Don't Know(2)

Loren rings the doorbell, pressing his thumb down on the glowing button so hard his finger goes white above the first knuckle, and then immediately starts knocking. Loren is not a patient man. He’s a pot of water ready to boil over on the stovetop, a balloon pumped too full of air. His fists make a heavy, dull sound on the door that makes Hoskins’s head hurt, but he doesn’t say anything.

It takes a bit—thirty seconds, maybe a few minutes, Hoskins doesn’t know—before the door is pulled open. Hoskins had thought Jacky Seever might be in a bathrobe at this time of day, or a pair of tighty-whities, stained yellow at the crotch, but instead he’s in a suit, same as always. Seever’s the kind of guy who’d mow his lawn in a suit; he probably sleeps in the damn things. Three-piece suits, all the same unvarying shades of slate gray or dark blue, slacks and a coat, a vest with a silver watch peeking from a pocket. The suits are all well tailored and pricey; they make Seever look like a man-about-town, and those suits may be the reason why Hoskins hates Seever so much, because he’d never be able to afford anything like that, not on a cop’s salary, but it’s not the only reason. It’s Seever’s suits, and it’s his fingernails, which he keeps neatly trimmed and buffed, and it’s his hair, parted on the right and sprayed until it’s as hard as concrete. And the glasses—Jesus Christ, it’s those glasses, wire-rimmed transition lenses that get darker in brighter light, that’s what Hoskins first hated about Seever—those fucking glasses. Anyone who wore those glasses of their own free will was an asshole. Hoskins grew up poor; he’s got a natural distaste for guys who strut around, flashing their bankrolls and Seever’s one of those guys, but he’s also worse, because he’s got money, but he’s also a snake in the grass. A phony-baloney, like his old man always says. Or in Latin, phonus-balonus.

“Officers?” Seever says. He asks everyone to call him Jacky, but Hoskins has never been able to do it. For him, this lousy fuck will never be anything other than Seever. “Early, isn’t it? Is there something I can do for you?”

“Oh, you fat bastard,” Loren says mildly, taking a step forward so Seever is forced back, has to make room to let them in. Seever’s a small man; he wouldn’t be able to keep them out if he tried. So he doesn’t. “You know why we’re here.”

There’s powdered sugar dusted across the front of Seever’s vest, strawberry jelly smeared between his knuckles. Sloppy. He’s been eating more these days, and with greater frequency. They’ve watched Seever duck into restaurants and gas stations, come out with plastic carry-outs of steaming food, cases of Diet Coke. Seever eats when he’s under stress, and when he realized the police were constantly watching him, trying to nail his ass to the wall, he amped it up. Even in the last week he’s gained. His belly is softly ballooning over the waistband of his slacks, straining the buttons on his tweed vest. The whole getup would fit someone in better shape, it might’ve fit him before but it doesn’t now, and now the shirt doesn’t quite conceal the underside of his gut, which is covered in wiry black hair and purple stretch marks. Reverse cleavage.

Hoskins follows his partner into the house, pausing long enough to shove a slip of paper into Seever’s hands. A search warrant. It says they’re looking for marijuana, but they don’t give a shit about drugs. It wouldn’t matter to them if the kitchen wall were built with bricks of Mary Jane. But they needed a way to get into Seever’s house, they’d been spinning their wheels for weeks, trying to catch Seever at more than cramming food in his face and scratching his ass, and it’s the best Judge Vasquez could give them. The best any judge would give them, because none of them liked Loren, not that Loren gave a flying fuck, but it sometimes made things difficult, so it was Hoskins who’d petitioned for the warrant, who’d had to put on his smiley face and explain the situation, Hoskins who’d had to beg for help. But that’s how it was with Loren, how it’d always been. Loren wanted what he wanted, and someone else had to get it for him.

“Weed?” Seever says, the warrant pinched between his pointer finger and thumb. By the looks of it, he might’ve been holding a square of used toilet paper. He reads it, laughing, a sound that’s like glass breaking. “You’re not going to find any of that here.”

“That’s all right,” Loren says. He’s smiling, or at least pulling his lips back from his teeth, although it makes him look more like a rabid dog than a man. “I have a feeling we’ll find what we’re looking for.”

Seever closes the front door, shutting out the cold morning light, and Hoskins is blind for a moment. This isn’t good. The blinds are all drawn, the interior of the house is dark. His eyes haven’t had time to adjust. He wonders if Seever knows this, if he’ll take this particular moment to lose his shit, to try to kill the two cops who’ve come to put him away for the rest of his life. But Seever doesn’t move, only stands inside the door, his hands hanging down at his sides, because really, no matter how he acts or what he says, Seever is a coward.

“Where do you want to start?” Seever asks. He’s pleasant, unconcerned. “Upstairs? Gloria’s at her mother’s place for the weekend, so you can—”

“The crawl space,” Loren says. “I want to see that.”

*

But the crawl space is flooded, filled with rank water and unidentifiable bits, floating clouds of grease. Standing over the cutout in the laundry-room floor, Hoskins watches their three reflections in the black water, waves his hand so his twin down below does the same.