What You Don't Know(21)

But it was Hoskins who was put on an unpaid suspension, because he’d hit a woman. No, not just hit her—he’d punched that bitch right in the mouth and wrenched her arm up behind her back until she squealed like a pig, and she’d ended up with a cracked tooth and some bruised ribs and a bald patch where he’d snatched the hair right off her scalp. Hoskins wasn’t the type of guy to hurt a woman—he’d never done it before, and he had no plans to do it again—but he hadn’t been able to not do it, because that woman had killed her daughter; she’d starved the six-year-old and then beat her until her skull was broken open like an uncooked egg. Oh, it was bad, but it was somehow worse because that woman wasn’t a crackhead, she wasn’t a desperate hooker with a drug problem or insane—she was just mean, liked to see her kid in pain. That woman had a nice house with a minivan parked in the driveway and wore fucking cardigans, and they’d found the little girl stuffed in her own bedroom closet, knees drawn up to her forehead and her sunken eyes closed like she was sleeping, and the woman stood there and said she was depressed, that her husband had been stationed overseas by the military and she felt out of control, that she hadn’t known what she was doing, that someone should’ve checked on her, that the girl’s school should’ve noticed something was wrong, that this whole tragedy could’ve been prevented. And Hoskins had lost it, big-time, because he was tired of the excuses, he was worn out from his job, from seeing terrible things and dealing with terrible people, but it was Seever he was thinking about when he hit that woman. It’d been years since Seever, but he still dreamt about him, still caught himself reliving all the conversations they’d had, mostly one-on-one, because Seever had refused to speak with Loren after he’d punched him, wouldn’t breathe a word if Loren was anywhere around. Hoskins was the only one he’d have, and once Seever got going, once he opened his mouth and let it rip, it was almost impossible to shut him up. Seever told Hoskins almost everything he’d done, everything, and Hoskins wishes he could forget it all, wipe his memory clean, because knowing things another person is capable of, well, those things stay with you, they change you.

I liked to hear them scream, Seever had said.

He’d been a different man before Seever. A better man. But Seever had managed to rip that part of him out, with his teeth. Chewed him up and spat him out.

“Why’d you let me do it?” Hoskins asked Loren, later, after the woman had hired a lawyer because he’d used excessive force and demanded Hoskins’s head and he’d been quietly moved out of Homicide and into the basement office, where he was away from prying eyes. He was a department liability; they couldn’t fire him but they couldn’t not fire him, so this was the next best thing. “You didn’t even try to stop me.”

Loren had shrugged. Hoskins had heard that it was Loren who’d pushed for Hoskins’s transfer instead of a termination, and it’d gone through because Loren had influence, he had the higher-ups firmly by the balls, and when he wanted something he usually got it.

“Sometimes the shit gets to be too much,” Loren said, and that’s all he’d ever say about it, but Hoskins thought it was as close as Loren would ever come to telling him that he understood.





SAMMIE

Her phone rings on a Tuesday, although she misses the call, has to let it go to voicemail. Her cell is tucked into her bra, the screen pressed against the side-swell of her breast, and she feels it vibrate when the call comes through. She doesn’t get a chance to look at her phone for the next hour, because it’s not allowed when she’s on the clock, when she’s supposed to be working. Girls have been let go for less than that, and she needs this job.

This is what happens when newspapers become obsolete, when your editor says there’s an economic fluctuation and they can’t afford you anymore but you still have bills to pay—a mortgage and a car payment, groceries, you’re a grown-up, those things come along with the territory—and it doesn’t matter that you have a degree, a damn master’s degree, because you aren’t the master of anything, especially not your own fate, and you can’t find any work writing, not if you’d like to make actual money.

So you take what you can get.

It’s been almost eight months since Dan Corbin laid her off, and she was unemployed for three months, ninety days of not knowing what to do with herself except sit in front of the computer twelve hours at a time and email her résumé to a thousand places and fill out a million applications, and then she ended up here, in a shop in a big fancy mall in south Denver, not because of her education or her background but because of how she looks—at least, that’s what she thinks, because she doesn’t have any experience selling cosmetics, and none in retail. You’ll catch on quick, the manager said when she was hired. Be confident. Customers trust confidence.

It was true, she caught on, she learned, and what she didn’t know she pretended to know, and customers seemed to like her, although it would’ve been easier if she was a gay man or a foreign woman, because that seemed to be the law of beautyland: The gay men and eastern European women know all. But it was all right. It wasn’t writing, and it wasn’t exciting, and there were times she’d be applying eyeliner to a client or swatching every possible shade of red lipstick to the back of her hand if the customer would just buy something, please God anything, and she’d think: This is my life. This is all there’ll ever be, forever and ever. I’m going to get old and wrinkled and ugly, and I’ll still be showing women how to contour their cheekbones and fill in their eyebrows.