Two cruisers came in hard and stopped at angles that blocked his driveway completely. The first nosed in from the left, the second from the right, their front bumpers turned toward each other like a gate being shut. Dust lifted off the shoulder of the road. A third sound, farther off, faded somewhere behind them, but these two were enough. Their light bars were still turning, throwing red and blue across the lawns, across the white siding of his house, across the faces of the porches opposite. In the sudden quiet after the engines, he could hear a dog barking two houses down and the tick of a cooling motor.
Derek did not move toward them. Training had put a kind of order in him that stayed even when he resented it. He set his feet where they were, in the grass just below the porch steps, and he kept his hands where they could be seen, loose at his sides. His knee ached from crouching at the threshold. He had been favoring it without noticing until he stood still. Rain was coming sometime tonight, whether the sky admitted it yet or not. He could feel the familiar stiffness settling in, and he shifted his weight a fraction and then stopped himself, because any movement now would be watched and measured.
Doors opened on both cruisers at almost the same time. The officer from the first car came out fast and stayed behind the shelter of his door for a moment, one hand up near his shoulder radio. He was broad through the chest, with a short haircut and a face already flushed from the heat inside the car. The second officer was younger and thinner, and he came around the back of his cruiser more slowly, looking from Derek to the house and back again as if he were trying to match what he saw to what he had been told on the way in. Neither of them looked at the tools first. They looked at Derek.
That told him what the call had been. He had not heard Barbara Nielsen make it, though her house sat directly across at 415 Willow Creek Lane, close enough that he could see the edge of a curtain settle back into place in her front window. He did not look at that window for long. Looking across the street felt like a mistake. Looking anywhere felt like a mistake, and yet standing with his eyes fixed forward felt like one too. He chose the middle distance, the space between the cruisers, and kept breathing in the slow count he had learned years ago and never entirely put down.
The older officer spoke into his radio in short, clipped phrases. Derek could not make out every word, but he caught an address repeated, his own address, spoken as if it belonged to someone else. He caught a phrase about a possible forced entry in progress. He caught another about a tool described as a weapon. At that his eyes went, against his will, to the pry bar leaning by the door. It was an ordinary thing, flat steel with a worn blue handle, bought at a hardware store the week he moved in. In the flashing light it caught a red edge and looked harder than it was.
The younger officer moved a step closer to his cruiser's hood and set a hand on it, not quite steady. The older one had come out from behind his door now and stood with his boots in the street, squared up in a way Derek recognized. It was a posture meant to take up room and end argument before it began. Derek had seen men use it in other places, under other flags of authority, and he had never liked it better for knowing how it worked. He could also see, past the cruisers, the first signs of the street waking up to the spectacle. A front door cracked open down the block. Someone on a porch lifted a phone. No one came into the road.
He lifted his chin a little, not in defiance, only to hear better. His mouth was dry from the afternoon and from sawdust. There was a bottle of water on the porch step behind him, sweating in the heat, but it might as well have been a mile away. He did not turn for it. He stayed where he was, in the grass he had mowed two days earlier, in front of the house with his name on the paperwork inside, and waited for them to tell him what they had already decided he was.
Chapter 7: Hands Where I Can See Them
Officer Chris Donnelly did not introduce himself. He planted himself at the edge of the driveway where the concrete met the street, filled his chest, and shouted as if Derek were fifty yards away instead of fifteen. His voice carried past the house and bounced off the garages across the street, and in its wake the whole block seemed to hold still to listen. He ordered Derek to put down anything in his hands and to keep his arms raised where they could be seen at all times. The words came one on top of another, fast and loud, as though volume itself were a kind of control.
Derek looked down at his own hands. They were empty. He had set the plane aside before the cruisers arrived and the pry bar was still leaning against the doorframe where he had left it, a full pace behind him and to the right. But an empty hand could be argued with, and he was not going to argue over a fact the officers would have to settle for themselves. Slowly, in a way he hoped read as deliberate rather than reluctant, he opened his fingers wide and raised both arms to shoulder height, then a little higher. The movement pulled at a tired muscle in his back. Sawdust fell in a faint line from the hem of his olive T-shirt.
Donnelly told him to step away from the house. Derek did not move at once, not from refusal, but because the order as given would take him closer to the pry bar if he stepped straight back and closer to the cruisers if he stepped forward, and neither direction matched the picture he was trying to give them. He spoke for the first time, and he kept his voice lower than theirs on purpose, because a low voice carried the words and left the challenge out of them. He said he wanted to comply and asked which way the officer wanted him to move. The question seemed to annoy Donnelly more than silence had. He repeated the order louder, with a gesture that cut sideways toward the lawn, and Derek moved that way, three slow steps across his own grass, his hands up the whole time.