“We’re finally doing it, huh?” Hoskins says, looking up at the house they’ve come to visit. He’s always been that kind of man and he always will be, until the end of time, amen. Paul Hoskins is that kind of man who doesn’t think too hard about what he does and regrets these decisions later. He’ll regret this later, when he’s back at his desk, his socks wet and cold and frozen between his toes. This man comes around the front of the car, not bothering to avoid the dirty snow piled up at the curb but plowing right through it. At least that’s how the saying goes.īut it’s the second man you should watch, the one climbing out the passenger side, the tall man with the big shoulders and the beginning shadows of a beard. He was born missing that part of his insides, and life is a hard row to hoe without a few laughs along the way, but you don’t miss what you never had.

Loren doesn’t have a sense of humor-it’s not that he has a weird one, or a mean one he just doesn’t have one at all. This man’s name is Ralph Loren, a name that sounds like a bad joke but isn’t, because nobody teases Detective Loren, nobody, even if they’re pretty and young with tits out to there. You might think it was a woman who gave him the hat, who teased him into wearing it, telling him he’d look so handsome in it, so debonair, but you’d be wrong. But this isn’t Prohibition and this isn’t Miami this is Denver in the year 2008, and it’s cold outside, so the man in the panama looks foolish, although you wouldn’t tell him that, not if you want to keep your asshole firmly intact, because this man might look foolish but he’s also one mean motherfucker, you can tell that if you manage to get a good look at his eyes. One of them is wearing a hat, a black panama, and it makes him look a little like a time traveler from the 1920s. If this were a movie, it would start with this shot: two men climbing out of an older-model brown car, dressed in cheap suits and cheaper shoes.

What You Don't Know by JoAnn Chaney