Donnelly gave a short laugh that was not amusement. "A general. Of course."
Moreno ignored him. "You know the number?"
"Yes, ma'am."
She nodded to Vance, who stepped forward with his own phone after a glance at her, because Derek's phone was still inside the house on the charger where he had left it that morning, next to the deed he could not reach. Vance held the device out and Derek, with his hands cuffed, could not take it. Moreno saw the problem before he had to name it. She instructed Vance to dial as Derek recited, digit by digit, steady and unhurried, and to hold the phone to Derek's ear. The small indignity of it settled over the driveway. No one on the sidewalk said anything. Even Barbara Nielsen, across the street at 415 Willow Creek Lane, had gone quiet behind her phone.
The line rang twice. A woman's voice answered on the third ring, crisp and unhurried, with the practiced neutrality of someone who screened calls for a four-star general and had heard every kind of urgency there was.
"Office of General Hart. This is Major Kline. How may I help you?"
"Major, this is Derek Malone," he said. "Staff Sergeant Malone, formerly. I served under the general in the regiment. Ma'am, I am sorry to use this number for a personal matter, but I am standing in my own driveway in handcuffs, and I need someone to tell these officers who I am."
There was a pause, not of confusion, Derek thought, but of a mind rearranging priorities. He heard a keyboard, a muted question to someone else in a room far from Cedar Bluff. He gave her the address when she asked, the subdivision, the cross street, the name of the sergeant standing in front of him. He spelled Malone once. He did not raise his voice. He did not plead. He described the situation in the plain sequence it had happened, the repair, the call Barbara had made, the deed in the drawer, the keys in the truck, because facts laid out in order had a weight that anger never did.
"Stay on the line, Mr. Malone," Major Kline said at last, and her tone had changed in a way Derek recognized, the way a headquarters changed when a routine afternoon stopped being routine. "Do not hang up. The general has been informed. He is asking for the address again to confirm."
Behind him, Donnelly shifted his boots on the concrete. "This is a stall," he said to Moreno, but quieter now.
"It is his one call," Moreno said. "Let it finish."
Derek stood with a younger officer's phone held to his ear, in the yard of a house he had bought with money he had saved across twelve years of service and five years of contracting work that had taken him farther from home than the Army ever had, and he listened to a distant office come awake on his behalf. On the other end of the line he heard a door, a low voice he knew instantly even after years, asking a single question he could not quite make out. Major Kline answered it. Then she came back to him, clear as a bell.
"Mr. Malone," she said, "General Hart says to tell the officers to keep you safe and unharmed, and that he is on his way. He says twenty minutes. He says you are to tell Sergeant Moreno exactly that, word for word."
Derek repeated it, word for word, looking at Moreno as he did. He watched the information move across her face. She took the phone from Vance then, and spoke to the aide herself, short confirming sentences, her badge number given without being asked. When she ended the call she handed the phone back and stood for a moment with her hand resting lightly on her belt, deciding what kind of afternoon this had become.
"All right," she said to her officers. "Nobody moves him. Nobody takes him anywhere. We wait."
Chapter 12: The Black SUV
Twenty minutes is a short time in a kitchen and a long time in handcuffs. Derek counted it the way he had counted other waits, not by the clock on Vance's phone, which the younger officer checked and then stopped checking out of something that might have been embarrassment, but by the small changes in the street. The heat eased a fraction as a thin bank of cloud moved in from the west, the kind that promised rain by evening and made his knee throb in agreement. A delivery van slowed at the corner, took in the cruisers and the gathered neighbors, and reversed carefully back the way it had come. Someone's sprinkler came on two houses down and ticked steadily against the quiet, indifferent to all of it.
The crowd did not disperse. It organized itself, as crowds in neighborhoods do, into small knots of people who had known each other for years and were now learning something new about one another in real time. George Park had been joined by his wife, who held his arm and spoke low and urgently, as if volume were the thing that had gone wrong. Across the street, Barbara Nielsen stood in the shade of her own porch with her phone in both hands. She had lived behind that porch for twenty-one years. She knew every car on Willow Creek Lane by sound. What she had done that afternoon she had done, Derek understood, out of a certainty that had not required evidence beyond the sight of him, and certainty like that does not dissolve because a sergeant asks everyone to wait. She refreshed something on her screen. She typed. She watched him over the top of the phone as if he were still, somehow, the threat she had reported, a dangerous man with a weapon, though the pry bar lay on his porch in plain sight and his hands were bound behind him.
Howard Fitch arrived on foot, because the HOA president of Cedar Bluff believed that arriving on foot showed he belonged to the street rather than merely managed it. He wore pressed khakis and a polo shirt with the subdivision's name stitched small over the chest, and he carried a folder he did not need. He spoke first to Moreno, then, when she gave him little, to the neighbors, in the smoothing tone of a man who had chaired meetings about fence heights and mailbox paint and believed every problem could be lowered, like a voice, by procedure. "Let's all stay calm," he said, to no one in particular and to Barbara most of all. "I'm sure this will be sorted out. We don't know all the facts yet." He glanced at Derek when he said it, and Derek marked the glance for what it was: the facts, in Howard Fitch's accounting, did not start with the man who lived in the house.