Chapter 14: The Pat-Down
"Turn and face the car," Officer Emily Tran said, and her voice was steadier than her eyes. "Put your hands flat on the vehicle, please."
Alicia turned and faced the Mercedes again. She placed her palms on the rear quarter panel, where the black paint was cold and slick with rain, and she spread her fingers so no one could mistake their position. The metal under her hands carried the faint vibration of the idling engine. Behind her she could hear Tran approach across the gravel, duty belt creaking, radio low.
"Feet apart," Tran said. "A little more. Thank you."
"Officer Tran," Alicia said quietly, "I am going to remain completely still. Tell me before you touch me, please, so I am not startled."
A beat of silence. "I'm going to start now," Tran said. "Back first, then sides."
The pat-down was rough in the way inexperience and fear are rough, not in the way cruelty is, though from the receiving end the difference was thinner than Alicia would have liked. Tran's hands came down hard over her shoulder blades and dragged down her back in stiff, hurried passes, pressing through the soaked fabric of her suit jacket as if the rain itself might be concealing something. She jarred Alicia forward into the panel twice. Her fingers dug along the waistband, yanked once at the line of the skirt, and moved down the outside of each leg with flat, graceless force that rocked Alicia's weight from heel to heel on the wet gravel.
"Careful," Alicia said, not in complaint but in warning, because her shoes were sliding. "The ground—"
"I've got it," Tran said quickly, and then, quieter, as though correcting herself for an audience neither of them could see, "Stand still, please."
Alicia stood still. Dignity, she had learned, was rarely a feeling; it was a discipline you performed with your body when every circumstance invited you to abandon it. So she kept her palms flat and her breathing even while a stranger's hands pressed and patted and pressed again over her ribs, her hips, the small of her back, searching for a weapon she did not own or a packet of something she had never touched in her life.
There was, of course, nothing. There was a body under a wet suit and nothing else, and at some point in the search Tran's hands began to testify to that fact before her mouth did. The passes grew slower without becoming gentle. Over the ribs a second time, the pressure changed, fingertips reading rather than grabbing, and along the waistband her thumbs hesitated where they had yanked before, as if the hands had arrived at a conclusion the rest of her had not been given permission to reach. When she checked the same places a third time, it had the unmistakable rhythm of someone confirming an absence rather than hunting a presence.
"Arms," Tran said. "Raise them out to the sides, please. Slowly."
Alicia raised her arms. Rain ran down her wrists into her sleeves. Tran ran her palms down each arm, checked the cuffs, and stepped around to face her with a reluctance she disguised as procedure. The front was done quickly, almost apologetically in its haste, knuckles and backs of hands where training demanded, over the collarbone, along the front of the jacket, and then it was over, except that Tran did not step back at once. She stood close, her light off now, the two of them lit by the cruisers, and her hand rested a moment longer than necessary at Alicia's elbow, steadying or steadied.
"Well?" Weldon called from behind them. "What've we got?"
Tran let go of her elbow. "Nothing," she said, and cleared her throat, and said it again in the voice of a report. "No weapons, no contraband. Nothing on her person, sir."
"Check again?" Weldon said. "Pockets?"
"There are no pockets in this suit, Officer," Alicia said, lowering her arms only when Tran nodded that she could. "What you see is everything I have on me. My phone, my purse, my identification are all inside the car you are about to open without my consent, as I stated for your cameras."
"She's clear," Tran said, and walked back toward the men with her wet hands open at her sides, flexing her fingers once, as people do when they want feeling to come back into them.
Blake shrugged as if the result were a coin that had landed on its edge. "Fine," he said. "She's clear. The car's the question anyway. Travis, it's your stop."
Alicia stayed by the rear panel, arms folded now against the cold rather than raised against suspicion, rain dripping from her sleeves, and watched Weldon smile for the first time since he had lit up her bumper, a man who had lost the first search of the night and was already reaching for the door handle of the second.