High Country- Pigeon 12 by Nevada Barr

a smile that would reassure children and make nuns go weak at the knees.
     
    Encouraged, Anna tried to recapture that middle-aged-waitress invisibility she had so lately belied, and slunk through the counters and pots toward the warming ovens beside the oversized gas range. She was opening the oven door when Wither shouted.
     
    "Out!"
     
    The violent bark of sound startled her and she banged her elbow on a countertop, momentarily disorienting herself with the explosion of pain from the misnamed funny bone.
     
    "Out!" was shouted again and: "Look out."
     
    "Christ!"
     
    Then she was in the air, her toes slapping cabinet doors as she whirled past.
     
    A crash.
     
    A scream.
     
    She was on the ground again a couple of yards from the ovens. Scott stood between her and the gas range. Water steamed and streamed over the floor. Underchefs cowered on the far side of the kitchen's central island. Dark eyes, sunken and burning like hot coals in his pale, fleshless face, Jim Wither stood to Scott's other side. The cadaverous chef was trembling as if an emotion too great for his being raged through his wasted frame.
     
    The abruptly fragmented world coalesced.
     
    Wither had knocked over-or thrown-a pot of boiling water that landed where Anna had been standing. Had Scott Wooldrich not snatched her up and moved her, she would have been scalded from waist to ankle. Scott's apron and trousers were wet. Anna hoped they'd saved him from being burned. The back of his right arm was an angry red where the boiling water had splashed him when he'd stepped in to save her skin.
     
    The sight of burns on him made her angrier than if they had been on her own body. Grateful as she was for the rescue, she now owed Scott, if not a pound of flesh, then at least an ounce or two.
     
    The slow boil that had simmered on her mental back burner since Jim Wither had begun his vendetta went over the top.
     
    Stepping around Scott, she faced the chef. "What in God's name is your problem? Did I run over your dog? Make a pass at your wife? Tell me for Chrissake. I'll apologize-hell, I'll grovel. What is it?"
     
    The quiet after this brief interrogative tirade was absolute. No choppers chopped. No pans clanked. The spilled pot's fellow ceased to boil.
     
    Tiny's sharp voice cut through the palpable silence. "What is going on here?" she demanded.
     
    "That's what I'm trying to find out," Anna said. She did not look away from Wither. There was something wrong with the man and she wasn't sure if it was overblown prima-donna or homicidal tendencies. Another three gallons of scalding water stood at his elbow. If he so much as looked in that direction, Anna would take him down. Better an undignified brawl on a wet floor than getting burned.
     
    "What are you doing in the kitchen?"
     
    Tiny's voice cut at the back of Anna's neck. She ignored it.
     
    Unblinking, Wither held her gaze. Tremors she'd noticed before traveled up from his hands till his head shook on his neck in a palsy. The flush of anger drained from his face leaving it paler than usual and covered in a sickly sheen of sweat. He broke eye contact and looked past Anna to Scott or Tiny or one of the underchefs. What, if anything, was communicated, Anna couldn't say. She'd not yet reached the place where it was safe to divide her attention.
     
    Wither came back to life in the sense that the peculiar mix of rigidity and trembling broke into a more ambulatory pattern.
     
    "Get back to work," he snapped. "Clean this water up. Now. Now. Now!"
     
    The kitchen muttered and hummed. Wither shot Anna one more hard look. This time it seemed more searching than menacing. "Rolls'll be hot," he said and turned his back on her.
     
    Suffering a touch of palsy herself, Anna returned to her task at the oven. Scott was still near-pleasantly so-a shield for her back, a screen for her momentary weakness.
     
    "Are you all right?" he whispered. His mouth close to her ear, she could smell mint on his breath, or