A few words. And the officer standing at the edge of the driveway with his chest puffed and his hand resting on his utility belt would have stumbled backward through every excuse he had ever rehearsed. He did not move toward the truck.
He had been watching men like this officer for 31 years, watching them from the bench, reading their reports, hearing their testimony, parsing the particular grammar of their justifications, and he knew with the certainty that comes from that much accumulated attention that this officer had done this before.