Page 22 of Forbidden Protector

"Where are your gloves?"

"My pocket."

"Which one?"

"Left."

He does not go into my pocket. He waits, and I understand that he is making me do it, and I understand about a second later why.

I get the gloves out. It takes me two tries to find the opening of the left one, and by the second try I am furious, and the fury is the first thing that has felt like me since I came out that door. Then the hat, jammed down over my ears. Then a scarf from the inside pocket of my coat, which I wrap twice around my neck.

Somewhere in the middle of it my head comes back on. Not all the way, but enough that I can feel the shape of how far gone I was, standing in a lot at eight below with a coat on and nothing else, running an investigation.

"There we go," he says, to nobody.

Then he takes my face again.

That is the one that gets me.

The first time was triage and we both had somewhere to put it. This time I am upright, gloved and hatted, and my pupils have already told him whatever they were going to tell him.

He puts his hand under my jaw anyway, turns it toward the light, and looks at me for four seconds that have no clinical purpose whatsoever.

I am standing in a frozen parking lot with a man I put on a suspect list on Tuesday, and I do not step back.

He knows. He has his hand on the one place where a person cannot lie about her own pulse and he is not going to say a single word about what it is doing.

I knock his hand away.

One beat too late. One entire beat, and I feel the size of it as it passes.

I watch him take it, put it somewhere, and close the drawer.

"Don't," I say.

"You were going to fall down."

"I was standing."

"You were doing both."

"There's cloth in the flue." I say it to have something in my mouth that is not the other thing. "Four inches up, behind the housing. And there's no light on the detector."

"I saw both."

"I didn't touch either one."

He looks at me then, one flat second. Whatever goes across his face is not admiration and is adjacent to it.

"I believe you," he says. "Nothing in there looked handled."

One circuit of that room and he had all of it. He walked into that air knowing what was in it, and neither of us is going to say a word about that.

Down at the office end of the lot, a door opens and Ruby, who runs the Riverview and has the wattage of a woman woken at eleven, comes out in a parka thrown over a nightgown with bare ankles above a pair of unlaced boots. She makes it nine steps before the cold finds what she is not wearing and she stops and pulls the parka closed with both fists at her throat.

"That thing's brand new," she says, to nobody. "That heater's from October."

"The unit's off. Nobody's hurt." She is sixty and standing on ice in a nightgown and none of this is hers. "Ruby, the window in 6 is open and it has to stay open. I'm sorry. Shut the water off to that wall in the next hour or you're going to lose the pipes."