Chapter 12: Backup
The backup arrived the way Weldon had asked for it, fast and loud. Headlights swung around the bend behind them, two sets, and the wet pavement threw the light back in long smears. A cruiser pulled in hard ahead of the Mercedes and angled across the shoulder, boxing the black car in at the front, and a second cruiser slid in behind Weldon's unit at the rear. Doors opened. Radios chattered. In under a minute Alicia Ford went from a woman standing alone in the rain to a woman surrounded.
"Sergeant," Weldon called out, already walking toward the front cruiser. "Appreciate the response."
Sergeant Howard Blake got out slowly, a big man settling his belt as he came, twenty years in uniform written into his unhurried way of moving. He took in the Mercedes, the woman facing it with her hands raised, and Weldon, in that order, and his expression did not change at any of them.
"What've we got, Travis?" he asked.
"Everything," Weldon said. "Erratic driving, weaving lane to lane, I paced her all over the place. Got up to the window and got nothing but attitude. Strong odor of marijuana coming right out of the car, plain as day. She refused to get out for a solid minute, started arguing law at me, combative the whole time. That's why I called it in code three. Didn't know what else she had in there."
None of it was true. She wanted to turn around. She kept facing the car.
"Ma'am," Blake said, not unkindly and not kindly either, "you causing problems out here tonight?"
"No, Sergeant," she said to the wet roof of her car. "I was driving the speed limit. There is no marijuana. I have never used it and neither has anyone in that car. I got out when he finally stepped back enough for the door to open."
"She's been narrating like that the whole stop," Weldon said. "Like she's performing. You tell me that's normal."
From the rear cruiser, the third officer approached more slowly. Officer Emily Tran was young enough that the rain gear still looked new on her, and she carried her flashlight in both hands for a moment before remembering to settle into one. She stopped a few paces farther back than the men, and Alicia, turning her eyes without turning her head, could see the rookie taking in the scene in pieces: the boxed-in luxury car, the woman in a soaked business suit with her palms open, the senior officer with his hand drifting again and again toward his weapon, the sergeant nodding along before he had asked a single question of his own.
"Tran," Blake said, "cover the vehicle. Eyes on the interior. We don't know who else might be in there."
"Yes, sir." Tran moved along the driver's side, careful on the gravel, and shone her light briefly at the rear window, then the front. The tint gave her back only her own reflection and the rain.
"Any weapons in the vehicle, ma'am? Anything illegal at all?" Blake asked.
"No weapons. Nothing illegal. Registration and insurance are in the glove compartment, where I told Officer Weldon they were before he ordered me out."
"And yet we still smell what we smell," Weldon said. "Funny how that works. Sergeant, I'm telling you, it hit me the second the window came down. She's going to lawyer her way around a search if we let her talk long enough."
Blake studied Alicia the way a man studies weather he has already decided about. "Here's how it goes," he said. "My officer made observations. Observations give us reason to look closer. You standing out here arguing doesn't change that, and it doesn't look good for you."
"I am not arguing," Alicia said. "I am answering your questions while standing in the rain with my hands up, which I have not lowered."
"She also hasn't shut up since I stopped her," Weldon added.
Tran shifted her weight. "Sir," she said, very quietly, to no one in particular and to Blake in fact, "do we have the stop on—" She stopped herself when Blake glanced at her, and finished differently. "Should I run the plate, sir?"
"Run it," Blake said, waving her off. "Then get back here. We're going to need you for a pat-down if this goes where I think it's going."
Tran walked to her cruiser, shoulders tight. Alicia's arms had begun to ache, but she kept them raised; lowering them uninvited would become another plank in Weldon's story, and she refused to hand him lumber.
"Sergeant," she said, "I would like to lower my hands to my sides. They will stay visible. I am not a threat to anyone here."
Blake looked at Weldon rather than at her. Weldon gave a small shake of his head, almost amused.
"Keep them up a little longer, ma'am," Blake said. "Until we sort this out."