Ellery watched him through the glass. The pain in his stomach had settled into a deep ache. His temple throbbed. His hands, still pinned behind him, had gone from tingling to a swollen numbness he did not like at all.
Brandt raised the radio. "Dispatch, I have one in custody at Alder Park, Fifth and Maple. Male, adult, unidentified at this time. Detained during a vandalism investigation. He was noncompliant at the fence and resisted during escort to the vehicle. Request transport assistance is not needed. I will bring him in for booking."
The words landed one by one, each of them false in a different direction, and Ellery felt something colder than pain settle over him. Unidentified. It was a word with paperwork inside it, a word that turned a person into a problem to be processed. He had a name. He had given it repeatedly. He had identification in his pocket that Brandt could have touched with two fingers.
Through the glass he said, loudly enough that he hoped the car's own systems might hear him, "That is not true. My name is Micah Ellery. My identification is in my back pocket. It has not been checked. I did not resist at any point. I am injured. I want that noted."
Brandt did not look at him. He acknowledged dispatch, clipped the radio back, and walked around to the driver's door with the unhurried air of a man who believed the first version spoken aloud would become the version that mattered.
In the front seat he worked at his report notes while the engine idled, writing in short bursts. Ellery could guess at the sentences forming: subject refused lawful orders. Subject tensed and pulled away. Subject struck his own head while entering. Every verb shifted one inch away from the hands that had actually done the work.
"You have not asked me a single question since the cuffs went on," Ellery said to the partition. "Not my name, not my address, not whether I need medical attention. I need medical attention. My head struck your car under your hand. My stomach — you know what you did to my stomach. I am asking, on whatever record exists in this car, to be seen by a medic."
Brandt turned the radio volume up slightly. Music from a morning station filled the front of the car, cheerful and absurd. "You will be seen at booking if booking thinks you need it."
"If booking thinks," Ellery repeated. "And what will booking be told? That I resisted. That I am nobody. You are building the reason they will not believe me, before I ever reach them."
Brandt met his eyes in the mirror for the first time since the punch. "Here is what you need to understand. Out there, it was your word and my word. From here on, it is paperwork. Paperwork is what happened. You can tell your version to whoever does intake, but intake reads my report first. That is how this works. That is how it has always worked."
Ellery held the gaze in the mirror. "Then write it accurately. You still can. Write that identification was not checked. Write that I complied. Write that you struck me while I was cuffed and that my head hit the frame while your hand was on it. If paperwork is what happened, make the paperwork true."
Brandt looked away first. He put the car in gear.
The drive to the station took eleven minutes through quiet Sunday streets. Ellery counted the turns because counting gave his mind something orderly to hold. Past the library with its flag at rest. Past the bakery where a line was forming, people starting an ordinary day that had nothing to do with his. Nobody in that line knew the man in the back of the cruiser had a wife at home who believed he was looking at a broken swing and would be back for breakfast.
John Doe, Brandt would write at the station, in the space where a name belonged. Ellery understood the strategy in full now: strip the name, and the treatment could be made to sound routine. A named man had a history, a family, a position people would ask about. A nobody had only a report.
He closed his eyes against the throbbing in his temple and did the one thing Brandt could not edit out of the day. He remembered, precisely and in order, and he promised himself that if he were given any chance at all to speak into a record that could not be turned up like a radio dial, he would put his name back where Brandt had removed it, and then he would put the truth beside it, line by line.
Chapter 9: The Woman Across the Street