"Well?" Holt said. "Homeowner or help. It is a simple question, for a simple morning."
"Yes," Naomi said, at last, pleasantly. "It is." And then she asked him, in the same even tone she might have used to ask a clerk to read back a stipulation, the question she had been asking men in uniforms and out of them since she was a girl tall enough to see over a counter.
"Officer, may I have your badge number, please?"
Chapter Five
Forty Five Seconds the Street Will Never Forget
He laughed at her fully and delightedly, as if she had told the best joke in Laurelhurst.
"Four eight two seven," he said. "Write it down, grandma. Frame it. Put it over the mantel."
"Thank you," Naomi said. "I will remember it."
Something about the way she said it, level, unhurried, a woman accepting a document across a counter, went through him wrong. His laugh thinned. The street was watching now, and he could feel it watching, and a thing Ryan Holt had never tolerated was an audience that was not on his side.
"You think this is a game," he said. "You think a question makes you somebody." He came through the gate.
She did not step back. The gate clicked shut behind him with a domestic sound, and he crossed her yard in four strides and closed his hand around the hose, above hers, and took it the way a man takes a toy from a child. It did not occur to him that the small red light on his chest, the body camera bolted to his uniform that he had learned to forget, had woken with his movement and was watching everything he did with its patient, unblinking eye.
"Nozzle is live," he said to no one, almost conversational. "You like watering things so much. Let us see how you like it."
The first blast hit her square in the chest.
Cold. The morning was early and the water came out of the ground cold, and it struck her with a force that surprised her even as she refused to be surprised by it, a fist made of weather. It flattened her cardigan to her. It climbed her neck in a sheet and found her face, and her hair came down in wet ropes, and the roses behind her shook and threw off petals like small change.
She did not scream. Witnesses would say that later, every one of them, in the same wondering tone, as if it were the part they could not file away. She did not scream, and she did not run, and she did not raise her hands to beg. She stood in her own front yard at 422 Ashbury Lane with her chin up and water running off her in rivers, and she let the man do it, because some deep and furious arithmetic in her had already concluded that the worst thing she could do to Ryan Holt was allow him to finish.
"That is enough," somebody said from a porch. "Officer, that is enough now."
He did not hear, or hearing, he chose the water. He swept the stream across her shoulders, down, up again, a man washing a car, a man rinsing a step, methodical with it, and the sound was every sprinkler on the street turned savage at once.
At the cruiser, Daniel Price stood with the passenger door open and one hand on its frame, and he did not move.
He would remember the not moving longer than he would remember anything else about the day. He heard his own voice say "Sir" once, small, swallowed whole by the hissing of the hose, and then he watched his training pick itself up and leave the street without him. Six months of academy lectures and scenarios. All of it stood on the lawn across from him in the person of an old woman getting wet, and none of it crossed the six feet of pavement to her. He did the math of his career over the sound of the water, and the math won, and he hated it even while it was winning.
Across the street, Evelyn Porter had her phone up in both hands, held steady as a level, the way her grandson had taught her, elbows tucked, and she did not call out again. She filmed. Porches had filled the length of the block, doors standing open, a man in a bathrobe with a coffee forgotten in his hand, a woman at the blue house with her hand over her mouth.
And they counted. Nobody decided to. It rose out of the porches the way counting rises out of a crowd watching a rocket climb, ragged at first, then together. Twenty. Twenty five. Holt's arm did not tire. Naomi Greer's chin did not drop. Thirty. Thirty five. The rose bed behind her had become a beaten, shining ruin, petals and mud, and her dress hung off her like a flag after rain, and still she stood, eyes open, looking at him over the water, memorizing him.