"You get to play?"
"Some."
"Then go play some more. I've got towels in the car getting mildew." She looked at Perpetua. "Thank you."
"I didn't do anything," Perpetua said. "I just read the board."
"Mm-hm," said Benedetta Abara, who had raised a son and a grandson and had worked twenty-six years in a hospital basement, and who knew exactly how much it took to just read something out loud in front of a man with a badge. She put her hand on Perpetua's arm for a second. Then she walked back to the Corolla and got in and drove away, more slowly than she had come.
Ferrol let out a breath.
"That's a woman," he said, "who would've made a good sergeant."
"She'd have hated it," Ruel said.
"Yeah. The good ones do." He looked at the board again. Then at Ruel. Then at the racket in Ruel's hand, the old Wilson with the fat handle. "How's your backhand?"
"Bad."
"Tito's was bad too." Ferrol rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm off in ten minutes. I'm not going to play tennis in a uniform. That'd look worse than the rest of this whole morning put together." He hesitated, and for the first time Ruel saw something in him that looked like shyness, an odd thing on a big tired man with a gun on his hip. "But I've got a box. In my garage. Rackets. When they closed the building, somebody was going to throw them in a dumpster, and I took them home. There's maybe thirty. Most of the strings are shot. I never did anything with them. I just. Kept them."