Page 20 of Forbidden Protector

The headache has been with me since I got back from the burial and I have spent seven hours giving it reasons.

Water, of which I have had none since the church.

A funeral lunch in a parish hall basement where the entire offering was ham and three kinds of pan bar, and I ate a lemon square standing up and called it a meal.

An afternoon spent on a hill in a wind that came off ten thousand feet of granite with nothing between it and the back of my neck.

All of these are true and I have been laying them down one after another the way you lay down cards you know won't take the hand.

The laptop is open on the bed with fifteen seconds of drone footage running on a loop. I have watched it enough times that I can call the turn before it happens. East to west, hold, turn, one lane over. Somebody in Salt Lake will tell me tomorrow what makes a grid like that. Tonight I just watch it come off the pattern and drop toward the camera again, and again, and again. Each time my stomach goes down with it.

I reach for the water glass and misjudge it by three inches.

Not much. The kind of thing a tired woman does at eleven at night. But my hand went where I sent it and the glass was not there, and I sit very still with my fingers closed on nothing.

The room is warm. It has been warm for a while. I noticed it around nine and put it in the same pile as the lemon square and the wind.

I look at the wall above the outlet.

The carbon monoxide detector is a beige plastic disc the size of a saucer, screwed to the wall above the outlet, standard for every motel that has been sued at least once. It is not chirping. Detectors chirp. That is the entire personality of a detector, and this one has been silent since I checked in, and I registered that as competence.

I get up and put my face close to it without touching it.

There is a green light on the front of every one of these that means the thing is awake. There is no green light. There has not been one since I checked in, and I looked straight at it twice a day for three days and saw a beige disc on a wall.

Everything in me goes cold and clean at the same time, the way it does at the top of a stairwell when the math finishes without you.

I do not think. I have trained for nine years to not think at exactly this moment. I roll off the bed onto the floor because the air is better low and it buys me four seconds, and I go on my elbows to the wall unit under the window with my head down.

The unit is running. It has been running all night. The room is seventy-eight degrees and climbing and there is no smell in here at all, and that is the part that gets me on my feet.

I kill it at the switch and then at the wall, and when the fan winds down I get low and look up behind the housing where the flue goes out through the cinderblock, and there is cloth in it. Grey, packed tight, a good four inches up. Somebody stood in this room and worked it in with his thumbs.

I do not put my hand anywhere near it.

I clip the holster on and take the laptop and the badge. I pull my coat off the back of the chair on the way past. The door opens easily now, three days of going in and out having taught it something.

I go out into the parking lot scoured down to ice and the cold takes the top layer off me before I’ve cleared the door.

It is not February cold. It is the other kind, the kind that arrives without wind and simply removes things.

My breath comes up in a column and hangs there. The inside of my nose goes tight on the first pull.

I get my arms into the coat and breathe in measured amounts, because at this temperature a deep one is its own small injury, and I stand there until the seam in my head closes.

It takes longer than I want anybody to see.

Then I go back in with my collar up over my mouth, which is worth nothing. I do it anyway. I unlatch the window and put it up as far as the frame allows.

One open door does not get air moving. I want that room empty of everything it has been holding before anybody I have to talk to walks into it.

It also means the room is gone. Below zero with the heat killed and the window up, the pipes in that wall have maybe two hours, and Ruby is going to eat that, and there is nothing I can do about it that does not involve leaving the evidence in place.

I come back out and stand at the tailgate of my rental car with my hands in my armpits.

There are gloves in my left coat pocket. There is a hat in the right one. I know both of these things the way you know a phone number you have not dialed in years, which is to say I know them and I do not go get them.

I stand out here at eight degrees below zero with bare hands and my head uncovered and some part of me that is supposed to run this body puts it off until later.