What You Don't Know(89)
He makes sure Jimmy Galen is all loaded up before he gets in his car and drives, heading back to the station but instead ending up at the coffee shop, and he doesn’t go through but parks and watches. Trixie’s working the window, wearing a yellow polka-dot bikini, like the one from the song, and her skin is perfectly tan and smooth, even though it’s the dead of winter. He’d gone through the drive-thru the day before, on his way into work, and he saw the new bruise on Trixie’s shoulder right under the strap of her bikini, where it looked like someone had poked her, hard. Too hard.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he’d asked her then, and her face had closed up, right away, snapped shut, and he’d seen that look before from other women, women who were afraid of the men in their lives, always scared they were walking into a trap.
“Yes,” she said immediately, and Hoskins knew that if he pushed her she’d say her boyfriend was protective, but he knows that code, you aren’t a cop without seeing that shit all the time, men who think that women belong to them, like the way you can own a house, or a banana. He sits in the car and his eyes start to drift shut, he’s tired and he imagines Trixie going home to this guy, but in his head he’s the boyfriend, and he pokes her, smacks her in the face and chokes her, sticks her fingers in his mouth and bites down until those delicate bones start to break.
Where the fuck are these thoughts coming from?
He gets out of his car, paces back and forth across the parking lot a few times, and circles the Walmart, his head ducked against the wind. The walking’s not working the way it usually does; he’s still on edge, he feels like he’s chewing on glass, so he finally climbs back into his car and watches Trixie pass out coffee and make change and swipe credit cards, and he nods off, his head dropping down to his chest, and that’s not much of a surprise, because he’s exhausted, he was at the hospital all night with his father and spent the morning with Loren, he’s running on nothing but adrenaline and caffeine, and those are both in short supply.
But his dreams—God, his dreams. He’s being jacked off in this one, and while this isn’t unusual—most of his dreams are about sex, have been since he was thirteen—there’s something about this that isn’t quite right. And when he looks down, he sees what the problem is right away—it’s Seever’s fist pumping up and down on his dick, and he’s got a cigarette clenched in his mouth, in the odd way Seever always smoked, biting down so hard Hoskins can see the indentations left on the filter.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Hoskins asks, but he doesn’t push Seever away. It feels too damn good for him to want it to stop, no matter who’s doing the deed.
“What’s it look like I’m doing, dumbass?” Seever growls, grinning around the cigarette. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re slow.”
“God,” Hoskins says, and he’s close, he’s so damn close, Seever has got both hands in on the action, he’s really working it now, and then suddenly he lets go, and Hoskins’s dick is standing straight up, hard as a rock, and it’s funny, the way it waves in the air, indignant.
“You’re like me,” Seever says, slapping away Hoskins’s hands when he tries to grab himself to finish the job. “Once you start, it’s so hard to stop.”
“What do you want?” Hoskins says, nearly screaming. One touch, that’s all he needs, and he’ll come, he’ll squirt like a fucking geyser. “I’m not anything like you.”
And then he wakes up.
*
The first thing he sees is Trixie walking by, out of the coffee shop and toward an old car parked off to one side. She doesn’t see him, and he’s thankful for that, because if she’d come over to the window and taken a good look at him, hollow-eyed and sick-looking, a raging boner ready to split his pants, she would’ve run away screaming. But she doesn’t see him, and she slips behind the wheel of the old car and revs the engine. It doesn’t sound like much, he bets it never gets warm enough inside and will probably give up and die at some point in the near future, but what else could she possibly afford on her salary? He wishes he could help her.
Help her? Seever’s voice speaks up, from somewhere deep in his brain. Yeah, I bet you’d like to help her. Help her bend over and stick her ass up in the air.
“Shut up, shut up!” Hoskins shouts, slamming the flat of his hand against the steering wheel, not noticing the frightened looks he gets from people walking by. “Leave me the fuck alone.”
He should go home, or back to the station, but he can’t stop thinking of Seever shoving him away, but it wasn’t Seever, he tells himself, it was Loren. Wasn’t it? It all seems so twisted up in his head now, and even his memory seems off. It was Loren dressed as Seever, and he’d been following Sammie, but that didn’t seem right because it was Seever who used to fuck Sammie, it was Seever’s voice he couldn’t get out of his brain, it was always Seever, that bastard had been riding on his back like a monkey for the last seven years, whispering dirty secrets even when Hoskins couldn’t hear him.
“I’m not a bad guy,” Hoskins says, not even aware he’s saying the words, or who he might be talking to. He’s thinking about the woman who’d killed her daughter, and how good it’d felt to hear her scream, and Joe, too, how he’d fallen silent as soon as Hoskins had hit him. It’s wrong to want to hurt people, he’s known that since preschool, but everything feels different now. Mushed around the edges. “I’ll show you. I’m not a bad guy.”