Page 19 of Forbidden Protector

Motel room. Cheap door, cheaper lock, and me putting it shut behind us with the flat of my hand while she backs up talking, because she'd talk. She'd have three more questions loaded and she'd fire every one of them at me while I walk her into that wall.

That coat cut for a city on the floor. That white shirt she wears buttoned to the collarbone like a dare, and my hands in it, and buttons going somewhere. Her bra plain, functional, and federal. I'd get my mouth on her through it first, just to hear what she does about it. She has a mouth on her and I want to know what shape it makes when she stops being able to run the interview.

Her hands in my hair. Both of them. Pulling, hard, because she's had them in fists in her lap since Tuesday and I have watched her tell them no, and the second she stops telling them no she is not going to be careful with me. And I don't want her to be.

I have my forehead against the tile, my hand moving, the water going over me, and I give up on quiet.

The pins. I'd take the pins out. All of it down, the whole heavy weight of it in my fist, her head back and her throat out and my mouth on it. I would take my time about that one thing and be exactly as patient as she has been unbearable.

Then off the floor. Her legs around me and her back on that wall and the sound she'd make when she finally understood the size of the mistake. I would say every filthy thing I have not said out loud to another human being in ten years, low, at her ear, all of it, while she comes apart on me and has to hear herself do it.

And her looking down at me. That's the one. That's the picture that finishes it. Five foot ten of federal agent up off the ground with her hands full of my hair, looking down at me for once in her life, and neither one of us able to do a single thing about who I am.

I come hard enough that my knees go, and I stay like that, both palms on the tile, breathing like a man who has run something, while the water beats on the back of my neck and takes it all down the drain.

The house is very quiet.

I stand in it.

She has my name in her notebook in her own handwriting under a question about a dog.

Somewhere north of me a man in soft-soled boots walked my fence in daylight and tied a flag on it so I'd know he'd been there.

And I have just spent the last seconds of a funeral day with my hand on myself thinking about the federal agent trying to take my family apart.

It has already happened four times this week.

The water runs cold and I shut it off.

I come out with a towel and my hair wet down my back. I get a shirt out of the drawer, and I turn the scanner on the way I turn it on every night.

It's already talking.

"...Riverview, east side, Room 6. Reporting party won't identify. Requesting welfare check."

I have my hand on the truck keys before dispatch finishes the address.

"Copy. Unit's ten minutes out."

Ten minutes.

Nobody in Rimrock calls in a welfare check on a stranger. Nobody in Rimrock knows her room number.

The clerk knows her room number, and the family that put me on that curb at Great Falls knows her room number.

The man who tied orange tape at eye height on my fence knows how to find out anything he wants to know.

Somebody wants a uniform at that door tonight.

Or somebody wants ten clear minutes before one gets there.

I go out through the mudroom pulling my coat on over a wet shirt.

I put my foot down and take it to ninety-five on frozen asphalt, and I am eight minutes out.

SEVEN

MACKENZIE