What You Don't Know(28)

“That’s what you think?”

“I think it’s interesting that you’d choose to go into law enforcement, when confrontations clearly make you anxious.”

“Can I ask you something?” he’d asked, and she’d smiled, but sourly, so he knew that she had to let him speak but she wasn’t happy about it.

“Of course.”

“Isn’t there some sex thing called the pearl necklace?” he’d asked, and she’d flushed in embarrassment, because she was wearing a blouse that had been left mostly unbuttoned and a thick rope of pearls that hung low, so your eyes were drawn down, way down into the cleft of her cleavage. Her name was Angelica Jackson, but Hoskins couldn’t stop calling her Ms. Jackson, like the old song. Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.

None of that shit made anything better for him, and he might’ve gone bananas if he hadn’t started walking when he felt himself losing it. It sounded like the most fucking stupid thing on the planet, he was like one of those old guys who show up at the mall before business hours in a sweatband and tennis shoes to cruise the perimeter, but it worked; it was the only thing that did. He couldn’t run—well, he could run, and sometimes he did run at the gym, hopped on the treadmill and cranked it until his eyeballs felt ready to burst like pimples and ooze down his face—but running only made it worse, his brain would start working overtime, like it was trying to keep up with his legs, and when his head got working like that he’d think about going out onto the street and grabbing someone, anyone, and shooting them right in the face—not between the eyes but right in the face, so there’d be nothing left and then he’d do the goddamn mashed potato in the mess it left behind. But when he walks he doesn’t have thoughts like that, everything becomes soft and distant and vague, like he’s looking at the world through gauze.

“Why are you so afraid of losing your mind?” Ms. Jackson had asked him. “What do you think will happen?”

But that wasn’t the right question, because he knew what would happen if he lost his mind, it’d already happened. He’d grabbed that daughter-killing woman, not because he’d felt some moral obligation to teach her a lesson or because the little girl’s murder bothered him in a way he hadn’t felt before. No, he’d beat the shit out of that woman because he’d wanted to; he’d wanted to hear her scream and beg for him to stop, he wanted to see her bleed. There was something pleasurable in it, feeling the soft push of her flesh under his fists and the snap of her bones; he thinks he could’ve kept doing it until she was dead, and that thought horrifies him, but there’s another part of him that smiles and rubs its hands together gleefully, and that part of him was left there by Jacky Seever, was pushed deep into his soul like a seed and left to germinate, to grow into something poisonous and deadly, a white-bellied mushroom that only grows in the dark.

*

His office phone rings when he’s pulling on his coat, and he stares at it for a long moment, because how long has it been since someone called him? Up in Homicide the phone would be ringing constantly, all day and all night, but his cases are long cold, and anyone who ever cared about them has long since stopped calling. He considers ignoring it and heading home, but then finds that he can’t. If he doesn’t answer it, he’ll spend the rest of the night wondering who it could’ve been. So he picks up.

“Hoskins?”

“Yeah?”

He doesn’t recognize the voice, not at first, takes him a moment, but only because it’s been so long since he’s heard it. Chief Jonathan Black is still technically his boss, but he doesn’t have constant contact with the man anymore, not like he used to. At first it was a relief, not having to give a daily report on his investigations and fill Black in on his progress, but then he realized that he never had to tell anyone what he was doing because no one cared. And somehow being ignored was almost as bad as having the boss man breathing down his neck.

“It’s Black.”

“Yeah, got it.”

“How’ve you been doing down there?”

Hoskins doesn’t know how to answer this. The easiest answer is that he’s fine, everything’s fucking grand, as long as the direct deposit keeps dumping into his checking account every other Friday and his health insurance is still valid and the balance in his retirement keeps ticking upward, he can’t complain. But then again, maybe he’s not fine. He’s stuck in the basement forty hours a week, in an office with no window, and no hope, flipping through murder cases that are sometimes older than he is. He’s started taking the photos out of the files and taping them to his office walls; some of them are pictures of victims before they were killed, smiling at prom or at a family barbecue, but mostly it’s the crime scene pics he puts up. Photographs of a woman on a bare mattress—the only way anyone seems to be killed on a bed, with the sheets and blankets missing—her bottom half naked, legs splayed and eyes closed; old black-and-whites of a field, overgrown with grass and weeds, with the body of a small child facedown in the packed dirt; a man lying over a sewage drain, his eyes open and glittering, seemingly alive except for the strange way the soft flesh of his neck was peeled back, the knife’s cut so deep that it’d almost separated his head from his shoulders. These photos might be a sign that he’s not okay, this macabre gallery staring down at him five days a week; maybe it’s not okay to be constantly looking in the face of death.