Chapter 13: The Taillight
The shift ended at nine and the parking lot was already glazed with cold. Route 87 runs dark and straight past Coldwater Creek, and I drove it the way I always drove it: both hands where they belonged, speedometer needle sitting on the limit like it was paid to be there. I was thinking about soup. I was thinking about the calendar with the red date on it. I was not thinking about my taillight, because my taillight worked. I had replaced the bulb myself in March, in Esther's driveway, with a two-pack from the parts store, and I had the receipt in the glove box to prove it.
My father taught me how to be stopped by police the way other fathers teach fishing: early, and more than once. Hands where they can be seen. Voice like a table, flat and steady. Answer the question that was asked and not the one underneath it. He'd been a witness in rooms where men with badges decided what the record would say, and he knew the record starts at the roadside. I thought of him the whole time the lights were growing in my mirror — which is to say I thought of him the way I always did on that road: as the reason I knew how much the next ten minutes could weigh. I slowed down carefully, before he ever raised his hand.
The lights came up behind me fast, red and blue, no siren. The unit was unmarked, and when the door opened, the man who unfolded himself from it was not a trooper and not a deputy. It was Chief Dale Dillard, in person, doing roadside work that men with his office and his years do not ordinarily do.
"Evening, Wren." He knew my name the way you know a name you've written on paperwork. "Your taillight's out."
"It isn't," I said. "I replaced it in March. There's a receipt in the glove box, if you want to write it down."
He looked at the rear of my car a long moment, like a man reading a page he intended to disagree with. "Step out of the vehicle for me."
I stepped out. The cold came through my shoes like water. He asked whether I was carrying anything he should know about, and then he asked to search the car, and I said the words I had rehearsed in a lawyer's office, in the exact order Kate Brennan had taught me to say them, loudly enough for the little red eye of his dash camera to drink them in: "I do not consent to a search of my vehicle, Chief. I want that on the record."
"You can want it on any record you like," he said, and something in his voice had finished being official.
He walked the car twice, slow, with his flashlight. Once — I will remember this the way you remember the sound a roof makes before it goes — the rear door on the driver's side opened, and closed, and he stood there a moment with his hand on the roof, looking not at the car but down the empty road, as if he were waiting to see whether God or anybody was watching. Then he called for the tow, and he told me the car was being impounded pending a full inventory, and that I would be coming with him to the station to sort out the paperwork.
They put me in the back of a deputy's unit for the ride in, because the chief's unmarked car had no cage and, I suppose, no witnesses it could keep. At the station they walked me past the dispatch desk, where Marla — who has known me since I was nine and selling raffle tickets for the volunteer fire department — looked at me, looked at the chief, and then looked at her keyboard with an intensity that told me she'd be remembering all of it, in order, for whoever asked her later. Small towns run on two records: the official one, and Marla's. I took what comfort I could from knowing the second one was being kept by a careful woman. Then they sat me in the little interview room to wait while the tow took my car apart on paper.
At the station, in a room that smelled of bleach and old coffee, a deputy read the inventory list aloud the way you read a weather report for somebody else's town. Spare tire. Jack. One paperback. Registration. And then he said, "One sealed packet, recovered from beneath the driver's seat," in the same flat voice, and held it up in a gloved hand for the camera in the corner.
I had never seen it in my life. I said so. I said so several times, in several registers, and the deputy wrote down my name and the time, and not one word of what I said.