He lays his palm flat against the glass and is surprised for some reason that it sticks there – he thinks of tongues velcroed to icy lamp-posts, and freezerburn. He has been living in a warm climate until recently so he is having to rekindle the sense memory that is, to put it frankly, a little rusty.
The house is like a freezer. When a house can get this cold, why wouldn’t you have a HVAC man put something in that wasn’t sluggish in the mornings? He brings to mind that awful little petrol car he had during Ohio winters for the three years he was stationed there, and how it would cough and splutter, and he still refused to switch to the diesel everyone kept recommending.
Why had they sent him out here? Funny – chilling out was the way they had put it. A man with anger issues on the force was a problem. It some days made perfect sense to him, when he considered that the words Police Force, meant that they were an organisation to Police force, as in control force. He had problems when he started to think of them as an organisation using force to police others.
A fist against the nose of a perp, got your blood pumping, it heats you up. Rage can go to that place where cold logic comes in, and you start to calculate, and the violence becomes impersonal. When someone finds out that you overstepped the line, coolness, and then the heat of shame.
He understands the man that steps through the door – the steam is coming off him. He is packing heat. He tries to cool him down and find out what his beef is. Finding out the why of his being here fires him up again though. It is strange being shot. he has been shot at, but he has never taken a bullet. For some reason he never assumed that he would be killed by a shooter; he was an oddity in his profession, that he thought he was going to die of old age.
His killer, having done his job, leaves, and that heat leaves with him. Laying there, blood pumping, he feels warm, and strangely thinks about wetting the bed – how it would feel warm at first, and then it would cool, and become comfortable. He did not think death would feel like that. But that is exactly it.