Mackenzie
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.
Which is when headlights come off the county road doing something no vehicle should do on that surface.
The black F-350 comes into the lot sideways and corrects and stops dead in the middle of it, nowhere near a space. He leaves it running and shuts the door behind him.
He crosses forty feet of ice like it’s carpet.
"How long were you in there?"
"I don't know. Hours."
"Anybody else in that room?"
"No."
He goes past me without slowing and I hear him inside, one circuit, fast. Then he is back out and standing in front of me, and I have not moved because my legs have opinions about moving.
"Look at me."
"I'm fine."
"Look at me."
He does not wait for permission, which I would not have given. His hand comes up under my jaw and turns my face toward the pole light at the end of the row. His thumb is at the hinge of it, and he is close enough that the cold coming off his coat meets whatever heat I have left.
Dark eyes going over my face, and not the way he looked at me in the church. This is the way he looked at the snow with Jacob lying in it.
He reads my pupils in the bad light, one and then the other.
His other hand finds my wrist, two fingers go to the inside of it, and neither of us is breathing correctly.
Our breath goes up between us and gets tangled and hangs there and will not clear.
"Headache?"
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Since four."
His jaw does the thing I have learned to read and would rather not have learned.
"Nausea?"
"A little."
"You reach for something and miss it?"
I do not answer.
"Tatum."
"Once. A water glass."
He looks down at my hands, bare and going white at the knuckles, and then back up at my bare head.
Something in his face resolves into a number he does not like.
He lets go of me. Both hands, at once, like setting something down.
"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."
She looks at Room 6 with its dark window standing up in the frame and I watch her price it. The pipes, the drywall, and the room out of service in a month that has no other rooms to spare. Then I watch her decide not to say any of it.
"You come in the office where it's warm."
"In a minute."
She goes, at a speed her knees do not enjoy. Behind her, cruiser lights come up the road without a siren, unhurried, a man arriving to write something.