He watched my face crumple, like he’d been waiting to see how long it took, then glanced away, letting a coughing fit seize him. Maybe real, maybe a distraction, maybe both. He caught every bug, new and old. Compromised immune system, he said. Too many antibiotics as a boy, and now the very thing he needed, no longer in reliable supply. So, he was feeling like shit and I was the first target to come along.

“You wouldn’t have to be out here hating it so much if you’d make more of an effort in the den. You know, play politics a little?” I got this advice often enough myself. “Earn a post inside with the clerks or tellers. It’s bad for you, out here in the damp. And you got more brain than all of ’em combined. You’re wasted out on the streets.”

The coughing passed. Rube drew in a rough breath, reaching for a laugh. “Oh, I’m wasted all right.” But since his health was the only dark subject he refused to dwell on, bringing it up finally got him off his rant. “So, you showed up all grins and giggles. Had a good night?”

My turn to shrug and avoid. “Moderate.”

I didn’t have a lot of secrets, least not that I could remember, and Rube knew most of them. But tonight’s encounter I wouldn’t, couldn’t share with him. Maybe once I had a better handle on it myself. My fingers had strayed to my gut wallet, where the waterproof corners of the plastic folder and the blister packs poked into my skin, pre-punishment for the crime I was contemplating. Did guilt show on my face, in my eyes?

I swung my heavy grab bag up onto the rail. “Need a lift?”

He reached for his own empty bag and shook it dismally.

Going home light was never good, and Rube did it more often than most. Said he didn’t have the picking ‘knack,’ but I thought it was more his distraction. Gaunt as he was, he shouldn’t be missing meals for not earning his chits. Worse, the medics might decide there were better uses for the malaria pills the den scrounged for him. Every dry, unlooted apartment broken into, the medicine cabinet was the first point of search. I could give him the blister packs, but who knew what was in them? Instead, I fished around in my bag and hauled out the two shrink-wrapped blocks. The labels were unreadable in the faint dawn light: Chinese or something. “Here. Turn these in. I got enough to keep the tellers happy.”

His mouth tightened, but he weighed them on his palm. “Protein?”

“Maybe.”

“My birthday’s next week. Twenty-seven and counting.”

“Lucky you.” He knew the date and everything. Made me jealous.

He shoved the bricks in his bag. He’d thank me later, when he was feeling better.