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different these days. He’s lost weight. He’s bald now, and there’s a big scar on the side of his head, and she couldn’t get there, couldn’t put a name to the face. “You’re a cop,” she said.
    “No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
    “He was supposed to be in jail,” she said, then she started to slowly shake her head. He knew what she was doing. She was doing the addition. She was trying to figure out how many years had gone by and the math was all out of whack. Then she started to look angry. Her face tightened and she clenched her jaw. The arithmetic and shock were giving way to the reality of what almost just happened.
    “I’m going to call the police,” he told her, and he meant it. He had wanted to kill Dwight Smith, but this would have to do. He couldn’t kill this man in front of this woman. Smith would go to jail. In a few years he would be somebody else’s problem. The engine was still running, but it had slowed down. Calling the police was the next move.
    “Just who are you?” she asked again. “And why are you here?”
    “I was following him.”
    “Why?” she asked.
    “Why was anything,” he said.
    She didn’t understand his answer. “You followed him here.”
    “Yes.”
    “You saved my life,” she told him. “He was five seconds away from raping me.”
    He said nothing.
    “None of it makes sense,” she said. “I don’t understand, I mean, he’s supposed to be in jail, I’m sure of it, and why were you following him? How did you know he was going to come after me?”
    “I didn’t know.”
    “Then why were you following him?”
    “Why was anything,” he said again.
    “I don’t know what you mean by that.”
    “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.”
    She thanked him over and over as she sat in the corner of the bathroom. What had happened was sinking in. Then it came to her—who he was. It didn’t make sense to her. Of course it didn’t. Then she asked, “How long will he get in jail this time?”
    He shrugged. Dwight Smith had broken into her house, he had assaulted her, but he hadn’t raped her. The justice system was like a lottery sometimes. “I don’t know. Two years. Five years. Ten. I don’t know.”
    “Can I get cleaned up first? I don’t . . . don’t want to be naked when the police arrive.”
    “Of course,” he said.
    She would look at him and she would look at Smith, but mostly she would just look at the spot on the floor where, if things hadn’t changed, she would now be pinned beneath a man and his knife. She didn’t look like she was about to get up any time soon. She was nodding. She wasn’t saying anything and she still kept looking at the floor, but she was nodding.
    Then it came. A different question. Not too dissimilar to Why should, close enough, almost, to be related. She asked What if.
    “What if we didn’t call them right away?” Silence followed the question, and he let it hang there, allowing her to get her thoughts together. “What if . . . I mean, I mean, what if you gave me five minutes alone with him?” She looked up at him, and there were no more tears, all her tears had dried up and so had the snot, but her cheeks were still flushed. She looked angry. Only there was something else too. Something in her eyes. She was looking intothe future. She was looking five minutes into the future and she was seeing what one human being was capable of doing to another, and she was liking it. And what did the New Him see? The New Him saw him evolving into a New New Him. The engine was red-lining.
    “Would you do that?” she asked.
    It was a good question. An excellent question. It got him thinking. It got him thinking that in his twenty years as a cop he’d put away a lot of bad people, and in that time he’d had a lot of good people ask him that exact question. It was always five minutes. They wanted five minutes alone with the man that had hurt them or their family. It was never ten minutes.