What You Don't Know(46)
He rams into Ted, knocking him off the side of a car and onto the ground, and then he’s on top of the kid, sitting on his skinny chest with his knees pinning his shoulders, he’s got his hands around Ted’s throat, and Ted is screaming, trying to scream, but Hoskins doesn’t hear any of it, all he can hear is Seever—they thought I was going to let them go, they thought I was done, they were wrong—and then there are hands on his shoulders, pulling him away, and something slammed across the back of his skull, hard and metallic, and it makes a hollow echo in his head that he hears before he actually feels, and the pain makes him let go of Ted’s throat and he stands up, takes a few stumbling steps away on the sidewalk. And then there’s Loren, shouting something he can’t understand, it’s all gibberish, nonsense, and then Loren pushes those glasses up his face—those goddamn glasses and that hair, and Hoskins thinks that it is Seever here, and not Loren, maybe it’s always been Seever—and hits Hoskins across the face with the flat of his hand, knocks him out cold.
SAMMIE
Sammie barely makes it to the bathroom in time. She shoves back the metal door of the stall, hard enough that it bounces back and hits her shoulder, nearly knocking her over. The food that dredges up from her stomach and out of her mouth is thick, ropy. Some of it looks the same as it did when she ate it—strands of lettuce, hunks of salami, thick pieces of tomato.
She flushes, washes her hands, and rinses her mouth, swishing to get all the sour taste out, even the stuff caught in the far back corners, the leftovers tucked between the fat of her cheek and her gums. She’s sweating, hot beads clinging to her upper lip and scattered across her forehead, and clawing through her purse, looking for gum or a mint, because she doesn’t want Hoskins to smell the vomit on her breath. If she ever gets to talk to Hoskins. There’s a stick of gum at the bottom of her bag, still mostly wrapped. It’ll have to do. If the bathroom were stocked with paper towels she’d press a wet one against the back of her neck to help with her nausea, but there are only the dryers that blow hot air. Global-fucking-warming, she thinks. Can’t even get a paper towel anymore.
She’d still been waiting for Hoskins when he’d walked out of the house, she wasn’t going to let him get away without trying one more time, and she’d seen him shove through the people, there were so damn many, but she didn’t see what happened, only heard the screams and felt the push of the crowd. He attacked a young man, she heard someone say. For no reason at all. Grabbed him and threw him against a car. Tried to strangle him.
Then an ambulance had shown up and scooped Hoskins up, and she’d followed it all the way to the hospital, and she’s been sitting around ever since, waiting for some word on Hoskins. She’d let the bored employee at the front desk know she was waiting for him, but the woman had seemed supremely uninterested and waved her off. So Sammie had sat in the hospital waiting room, watching Divorce Court quietly act out its drama on the old TV hanging in the corner and outlining an article on the backside of a receipt she’d dug out of the trash. She doesn’t have anything to write about, nothing that Corbin would actually run, except this, if only she can find out what happened behind that line of police tape. It has something to do with Seever, she knows it—why else would Loren be dressed up like that, why else would he bother visiting him in prison? She has to find out what it is before Chris Weber does, because he surely knows about her talk with Corbin by now, he must know he’s got some competition. Corbin probably called Weber as soon as she hung up, just to rub it in his face. But Corbin’s that type—he’ll do anything to flay a good story out of his writers.
Of course, she thinks, it doesn’t much matter if she gets anything out of Hoskins. She has the story of the year, of the decade, if only she’d write it: I slept with a serial killer.
If she gets that desperate, she’ll do it. She’d put all her dirty laundry out to dry, write a big story about working in one of Seever’s restaurants, of the flirting that went on, the charged comments, until there was finally a night when they ended up alone in the restaurant, and they’d had sex on the stainless-steel counter in the kitchen. She was only nineteen when it happened, and Seever was older, much older, and she’d always been attracted to that, age and power and money, and she’d let it go on for months before she was offered a job at the university library that she couldn’t turn down, and she’d quit the restaurant and just like that, it was over. She didn’t see Seever in person again until his trial, and she’d always sit in the back of the courtroom, where there were plenty of people separating them and he wouldn’t be able to spot her.
Oh, she could write about Seever, and she’d have a captive audience; people would be eating right out of her hands. She could write about the way he’d held her naked hips, the rough feel of his hands grabbing them so he could nudge in a little deeper. Or she could write about the way he’d liked to tie her up, or when he’d asked her to fix the sleeve of his shirt around his neck and choke him while he masturbated, but she can’t. She wants to write again, but her pride keeps her from going that far, because people would look at her and they’d know, and Dean would too, and she doesn’t want to see the revulsion in his eyes. It makes her cringe, the idea that one day everyone could know these things about her, and how would she defend herself? By saying that she was so young, that she’d wanted a good time, that she hadn’t known he was a killer? And all those things are true, but no one will care, because all that matters is the juicy story.