Chapter 7: License and Registration
"License, registration, and insurance," the officer said, as if the words were a door he intended to slam. He stood close enough that rain dripped from his cap brim through the crack of the window onto the door. "Hand them over. Let's go."
Alicia Ford did not reach for anything. That was the first rule she had taught herself years before she ever taught it to a client: narrate before you move, and move only after you have narrated. Surprises helped no one on a roadside at night, least of all the person seated inside the car with a stranger's hand resting near a weapon.
"Officer, my license is in my wallet," she said. "My wallet is in my handbag on the rear seat. My registration and insurance card are in the glove compartment. I will get them one at a time, in the order you prefer, and I will tell you before each movement. Which would you like first?"
"I just told you what I want," he snapped. "All of it. Don't make this complicated."
"It is not complicated, sir. It is careful." She kept her tone level, almost gentle, refusing the invitation in his voice to become the problem he seemed to expect. "My right hand is leaving the steering wheel now. I am opening the glove compartment. Inside there is a black folder. I am taking only that folder."
The compartment clicked and sighed open. Paper edges, a folded map she kept out of stubbornness, the folder where she said it would be. She lifted it with thumb and forefinger, slowly, and set it on her lap where the interior light fell on it plainly. From it she drew the registration first, then the insurance card, sliding each through the narrow window opening one at a time so he had to take them one at a time, so there was a rhythm and a record to the exchange.
"Registration," she said. "Insurance. Both current. The car is mine."
He studied them under his flashlight longer than reading required, turning them slightly, as if hoping the paper would confess something if he stared hard enough. Rain beaded on the documents before he tucked them against his palm instead of handing them back. Alicia noted that too. Documents retained felt different from documents checked. One was procedure. The other was leverage.
"Now the license," he said.
"My left hand stays on the wheel. I am turning half an inch toward the rear seat. My handbag is directly behind my seat, on the leather. I am bringing it forward onto my lap. I will open the clasp where you can see it."
She did exactly that, no faster than she had described, her movements almost ceremonial in their slowness. Wallet out. License drawn from its clear sleeve. She held it up inside the car first, angled to the light, so he could see her photograph, her name, her address ten minutes from this ditch, before she passed it through the crack.
He read her name aloud with a flat, testing emphasis, as if it were a claim he intended to dispute. "Alicia Ford."
"Yes. That is my license, and that is my name. My home address is the address printed there."
"You live up near the ridge road?"
"I live at the address on the license, sir."
It was a lawyer's answer and she knew it, precise to the point of provocation for a man who wanted either deference or disorder and was receiving neither. She could not help that. Precision was how she thought. For twenty years she had built arguments out of exact words, and she was not going to abandon the discipline on a wet shoulder because a stranger preferred her frightened or sloppy. Frightened and sloppy got misquoted. Precision left a record, even when the only recording device was memory.
He held all three documents now, fanned in one hand like cards he did not intend to return soon. His other hand had drifted, again, to rest near his belt. "Stay in the vehicle," he said, though she had given no sign of doing anything else. "Do not reach for anything else. Do not touch your phone. You understand me?"
"I understand you," Alicia said. "I am remaining in the vehicle. My hands are returning to the steering wheel. I would like my documents back when you have finished with them, please."
He gave a short laugh at the please, as if courtesy were a dialect he found amusing in her mouth, and stepped back toward his cruiser without answering, taking her name, her address, and her proof of ownership with him into the rain. She watched him go in the mirror, unhurried despite the weather, a man entirely comfortable making a stranger wait in the cold while he decided what happened next.
Chapter 8: How Do You Afford This Car?