"From the next sixty seconds," she said. "They are yours. Spend them better than the last five."
Chapter Nine
Call Your Captain
"Before you make a decision you cannot undo," Natalie said, "I suggest you use that radio."
She lifted her left hand slowly, palm open, visible, every movement announced in advance the way she would have wanted it described later, and she pointed past him toward the street, toward the cruisers sitting crooked in her driveway with their light bars still turning.
"Get on your radio and call your watch commander," she said. "Ask for Captain David Keller. Tell him you are at 4420 Oakleaf Drive. Tell him who you are talking to."
Mallory stared at her. The cuffs hung forgotten in his hand, loose as a set of keys.
"I am not calling the captain," he said, "for a routine trespasser on a Saturday morning. You must be out of your mind."
"I am not a trespasser, and I am not merely a random civilian, Officer. But you do not have to take my word for any of it. That is the beauty of the suggestion. One call. If I am lying to you, Captain Keller will tell you so, and you can arrest me with his blessing and my compliments. If I am not lying to you, that call is the only thing standing between you and the rest of your life."
"She is stalling," Mallory said to no one, to the street, to the rookie standing frozen by the patrol car. "That is all this is. She is running her mouth until we get tired."
"Or," Natalie said, "call Chief Robertson instead. I had dinner with him on Thursday. He asked about the house. I am certain he would be fascinated to hear how his patrol officers are treating the homeowners of Hawthorne Hills this morning."
The name moved through the porch like a change in pressure. Robertson was not a man Mallory had ever spoken to. Robertson was a photograph in the precinct lobby and a signature on departmental orders and a rumor of standards that arrived from a great height whenever something had already gone wrong. Nobody on a Saturday morning porch invoked the chief's dinner table. Nobody invented it either, not in that tone, not with a countdown of their own still cooling in the air.
Keller. Mallory turned the name over and found nothing in it he could use. The watch commander was a silver haired man who appeared at scenes the way weather appeared, from above, and who had a reputation for asking exactly one question first: what did you do. Officers who had worked under him for years still straightened when his Explorer pulled in. The thought of Keller being summoned to this porch, of Keller hearing this address spoken aloud, put a cold finger at the back of Mallory's neck that the woman's entire speech had not managed to place there.
Behind Mallory, down at the curb, Brian Cole had gone the color of old paper.
He had not moved in some time, but his mind had left the driveway entirely and was standing in a fluorescent roll call room two weeks earlier, at the start of a shift, with a sergeant reading down a sheet of departmental notices nobody listened to. Personnel changes. A retirement. A commendation. And then a memo about an appointment, federal, the kind of item that usually slid past the room like weather in another county.
A photograph had gone hand to hand down the row of chairs. A name had been read aloud.
The United States Attorney for the district. Newly confirmed. Sworn in a month ago.
Brian Cole had looked at the photograph for exactly as long as politeness required and handed it on, and half memorized the name the way you memorize the capital of a country you will never visit. Whitaker. Natalie Whitaker. He had never expected to need it. It had been waiting in him for two weeks like a fire alarm behind glass, and now, on this porch, with the cuffs out and the countdown spent, the glass broke all at once and the name stood up in his head next to the face of the woman in the faded hoodie, and the two of them were the same.
"Sir," Cole said.
Mallory did not turn. "Not now, Cole."
"Sir. I think we should make the call."
"I said not now."
His partner's voice had changed, though. It had a crack in it that had not been there during the countdown, and the crack did something to the porch that all of Natalie's composure had not. Mallory heard himself become, suddenly, a man whose backup was frightened. He looked at the woman again. She had not moved. She was watching him with the patience of a person who had already read the last page.