The line moved the way Kessler liked it to move, which was steadily, without discussion. He stood at the narrow place with his hand loose at his side, and the morning's traffic presented itself to him car by car, each driver already slowed, already reaching for the window switch, already composing the small apologetic performance that drivers reserve for men in uniform. Most of them would not need it. The sergeant's method, if method was the word, depended on the mood of the moment and the look of the vehicle, and the look of the driver, and on judgments he would have been hard pressed to write down afterward in any order that sounded like a reason.
The pickup came first in this stretch of the queue, an old Ford with ladders racked above the bed and a toolbox riding behind the cab. The driver was a man in his fifties with sun in the lines of his face and both hands placed high on the wheel where they could be seen. Kessler looked at the truck, looked at the man, and felt the small click of recognition that passed, on his roadside, for a background check. Working vehicle. Working man. The sergeant lifted two fingers from his hip and rolled them forward, and the pickup eased through the gap in the cones and gathered speed, gone inside half a minute, unrecorded in any log except the driver's own relief.
The white sedan came next, a mother at the wheel and a small child waving from a car seat in the back, the whole arrangement so legible that Kessler smiled before he decided to. He gave the sedan his friendly wave, the open palm one he saved for the vehicles that flattered the checkpoint by passing through it, and the woman smiled back with the gratitude of a person released from an examination she had not studied for. Ward, down the line, watched the wave and made the observation he had been making all morning, that the sergeant had two weathers and the drivers could not forecast either of them.
Then the delivery van, big and boxy and impossible to search in any reasonable span of time, came lumbering down the single lane with its schedule written all over its driver's face. Kessler did not even let it slow. He stepped aside and swept an arm toward the gap and around the inspection shoulder, routing the van past the whole apparatus, and the driver nodded once, professionally, the nod of one schedule respecting another. Ward wrote nothing in his notebook. There was nothing to write. Three vehicles, three judgments, and the record of the checkpoint for those minutes existed nowhere on paper at all.
The sound reached them before the machine did, a deep uneven note that did not belong to any car in the queue. Ward felt it first in his ribs. Then the motorcycle came over the rise and into the narrowing lane, bright red, low and deliberate, a Ducati Panigale V4 moving at the reduced speed the cones demanded, its rider upright in black leathers with a full face helmet catching the sun. Even slowed, even hemmed in, the machine announced money the way a trumpet announces a parade, and every head on the roadside turned toward it with the ancient attention people pay to red things moving fast.
Kessler stepped out into the lane.
He did not raise the two fingers. He did not produce the friendly open palm. He planted himself in the narrowing road with his boots apart and pointed at the rider, one arm extended, finger level and certain, the gesture traffic cops make in films and sergeants make when they have already decided. The Ducati rolled to a stop exactly where he pointed, the engine ticking down, the rider's boot finding the asphalt with the unhurried balance of long practice.
It took seconds. That was the remarkable part, the part Ward would remember when he was asked about it later under fluorescent light in a room with a recorder: the whole selection took seconds, and nobody on the roadside, not the drivers still waiting in the lane behind her, not Ward, not even Kessler himself, could have said what fact it rested on. The pickup had rolled through. The sedan had been waved on with a smile. The van had been routed around like honored freight. The red motorcycle was stopped, alone in the inspection lane, its rider sitting motionless with both hands visible on the grips, and the roadside settled into the held breath that follows a choice everyone has witnessed and no one will describe.
Chapter Four
Kill the Engine
"Kill the engine."
Those were the first words Sergeant Kessler spoke to her, and he spoke them the way he spoke to all of them, as a condition rather than a greeting. The Ducati's engine died. The sudden quiet sat down on the roadside like a fifth person, and in it you could hear the tick of cooling metal and the far wash of traffic passing on the lanes beyond the cones. The rider stayed astride the machine, hands on the grips, visor up now so that her eyes showed, dark and steady above the black of the leathers.