She was wearing her uniform. She would think about that later, many times, in many rooms. She was wearing her navy uniform trousers and her white shirt with the captain's epaulets, but over all of it she was wearing the long black uniform overcoat the airline issued for winter, buttoned to the throat against the October chill, and the stripes on the overcoat's sleeves were small and dark and did not catch the light. Her cap was on the passenger seat. Her airline ID hung on its lanyard around her neck, under the coat, where she always tucked it after leaving the secure side so that it would not swing into anything.
She had just found the starter in the narrow beam of the flashlight when a hand closed on her left arm above the elbow, hard, hard enough to pull her halfway upright and turn her around, and a man's voice said, very close to her ear, "Drop it. Drop the hammer. Whose car is this?"
There are moments in an airplane when the world narrows to a single instrument. An engine fire light. A stall warning. A voice on the radio saying a word you have only heard in the simulator. Naomi had lived through a handful of those moments in her life, and what she had learned from every one of them was that the first second belonged to the body and everything after it belonged to you. The body jumps. The heart slams. The mind, if you have trained it, steps in on the second beat and says: all right. What do we have.
What she had was a police officer. Airport police, the patch on his shoulder said, Calder Airport Police Department, and his other hand was on the grip of his holstered pistol, and his face under the brim of his cap was young and pale and set in an expression she had seen on the faces of very new lieutenants in very bad weather. He was taller than she was by half a head. His name tag said BRANDT. His fingers were digging into the muscle of her upper arm through the wool of her coat.
"I'm going to put the hammer down," she said, in the voice she used for the cabin interphone when the ride was going to get rough. "I'm putting it on the fender. Right now."
She set the hammer down on the Skylark's fender, slowly, and opened her right hand and showed it to him.
"Step back from the vehicle."
"I can't step back while you're holding my arm, Officer."
He did not let go. He moved her, one step, two, away from the open hood, and only then released her arm and put his palm flat between her shoulder blades instead. "Hands on the car. On the roof. Do it."
She put her hands on the roof of her father's car. The vinyl was cold and damp. "I'd like to tell you who I am," she said.
"You can tell me whose car this is."
"It's mine."
"Yeah? You always work on your car in the middle of the night with a hammer?"