"I bet he does."
"I don't share all of my sergeant's opinions." She closed the notebook. "Here's the thing, Mr.—"
"Prewitt. Lazaro Prewitt."
"Mr. Prewitt. I can't put a nine-year-old in a car with a man he met fifteen minutes ago. You understand that."
"I do."
"But I can put a nine-year-old in my car, and you can follow in yours, and you can sit with him in the family room at Arnot until somebody from DSS gets there. If that's what he wants. And if you're willing."
The words DSS dropped into the kitchen like a stone into a well, and Lazaro felt the boy beside him go rigid. He put his hand down without looking and found Emi's shoulder, the thin bones of it under the big hoodie, and rested it there. The boy did not pull away.
"I don't have a car," Lazaro said. "And my bike doesn't run. But I'll walk it. It's not far."
Officer Ostrowe looked at him a beat longer. Then she said, "Get in the front with him, then. He can sit in the back, you can sit up front with me, and nobody's going to say I put a kid in a car with a stranger, because I'll be sitting right there. It's my car. Come on."
Emi rode the whole way to the hospital in the back seat of a patrol car with his face pressed to the window and did not say one word, and Lazaro rode in front with his knee jammed against the dashboard computer, and Officer Ostrowe drove with her lights on and no siren and did not ask him anything else, and somewhere around the light at Church Street Lazaro realized his hands were shaking. Not much. Just a little. Enough that he laced the fingers together, HOLD over FAST, and held them in his lap.
He had not done that in eleven years. Not the shaking. The other thing, the thing on the bathroom floor. He had not done it since the day the State of New York had taken his paramedic certification away from him and Chemung County had put him in a cell, and he had told himself for a long time that he was never going to be allowed to do it again, and then, slowly, over a couple of years, he had understood that nobody needed to allow him. It was only that nobody would ever pay him for it, or thank him, or let him wear a uniform while he did it. That was all. The doing of it was still his.