He walked to where Dunbar was standing and spoke to him quietly, in the manner of a man raising a concern with a colleague rather than making an accusation: this truck was legally parked, the documentation would show as much, and if Dunbar wanted to tell him what the actual charge was, Pete would feel better about the whole thing.
Dunbar's response was the response of a man who did not want to engage with the substance of the concern: he told Pete to hook it up, called it evidence, and did not elaborate.
Pete looked at Thomas then—not a long look, not a meaningful one, just the kind of glance you give a bystander when you are trying to assess the temperature of a room. And Thomas caught his eye and held it briefly.
Thomas spoke directly to Pete, not to Dunbar, because Pete was the person whose decision still mattered at this moment, and he spoke in the voice he used when he wanted a jury to understand that the facts were not complicated, and that the complication was elsewhere. He told Pete clearly and without embellishment that if those chains were attached to that vehicle, Pete Macklin would be named as a co-respondent in the federal civil lawsuit that Thomas intended to file on Monday morning; and that he strongly recommended Pete wait for a supervising officer to arrive before proceeding with anything, because what was being asked of him was not a lawful impound, and the documentation would eventually reflect that.
The word "federal" did something visible to Pete's face: a small, involuntary reorganization of his expression in the direction of a man who has just understood that the ground beneath a situation is less stable than he assumed.
Dunbar saw the hesitation and closed the distance between himself and Pete with two heavy steps. And Thomas understood from watching it that this was something Dunbar had done before: using his physical presence and the implicit threat of professional consequence to close off the space where other people's better judgment might operate. He told Pete that if Ironclad Towing wanted to remain on the precinct's vendor rotation, the truck would be hooked up now.
Pete looked at his hands. He put the toothpick back in his mouth. He pulled on his heavy leather work gloves with the resignation of a man who has weighed his immediate obligations against his abstract ones and reached a decision he was already beginning to regret, and he walked to the winch controls on the side of the flatbed.
Thomas watched the first chain come out and reach toward the front axle, felt the anger in his chest tighten another degree, and spoke to Dunbar one final time—quietly, directly, without any change in his expression:
"Look behind the driver's license. Stop this now. There is still time."
Dunbar responded by pulling his handcuffs from his belt.
He had the first one secured around Thomas's left wrist—cold, tight, the ratchet clicking three notches past comfort—when the white Explorer came around the corner.
Sergeant Raymond Okafor pulled up with the particular expression of a man who has been in this job long enough to feel the wrongness of a scene before he can articulate it: something in the geometry of the situation, the tow truck angled against a legally parked vehicle, the veteran officer with cuffs on a calm older man who showed no signs of whatever behavior warranted handcuffing, the total absence of any visible crime scene or disturbance or reason for any of this to be happening.
Okafor was 51 years old, 22 years on the force, the son of a Nigerian father and a white mother from rural Virginia—a man whose face had the particular quality of someone who had learned early to read rooms that were arranged for people who looked like one parent or the other, but rarely both; and who had built out of that education a form of perception that his colleagues sometimes described as instinct, and that was actually something more deliberate than that.
He had flagged this call himself when it came across dispatch: a priority impound request with a B&E notation and no corresponding incident report number, no victim statement, no address of an alleged crime, and had driven over. Not because protocol required him to, but because 19 years of experience with Craig Dunbar's particular approach to proactive policing had taught him that flags like that one were worth investigating in person.
He took in the scene in the time it took him to walk from the Explorer to the edge of the driveway: Pete's body language, which was the body language of a man who deeply wished he were somewhere else; Dunbar's posture, which was the posture of a man performing authority in front of an audience he was beginning to suspect was not sympathetic; and Thomas, who was standing beside the rear quarter panel of the C20 with one cuff on his left wrist and both hands visible, and an expression on his face that Okafor had seen exactly once before in his career—on the face of a former district attorney who had been accidentally arrested during a raid on the wrong address, and who had spent the following four hours being professionally, devastatingly calm about it.
His first question was not addressed to Thomas; it was addressed to Dunbar, in the tone Okafor reserved for situations where the question was also a warning:
Where was the incident report for the B&E?