"For ten years," Perpetua said.
"For ten years."
"That's a long time to keep rackets you're not using."
"It is." He looked at the boarded-up building. "I used to drive past here. On patrol. I'd see the paint on the board from Sumac, and I'd look the other way. I'd tell myself the program was over, that's how it goes, budgets, the city, nobody wanted it. I told myself I was the only one who remembered. I guess it was easier if I was the only one."
"You weren't," Perpetua said.
"No. I see that now."
He did not promise anything. Ruel noticed that. Later, he would think it was the thing that made him believe the rest. Ferrol did not say I'll bring the rackets next Saturday, or I'll talk to the city, or I'll fix it. He just told them about the box, the way you tell a doctor about a symptom, and then he said, "I've got to sign out," and walked back to his car and drove away down Sumac, slowly, with no lights.
For a week, nothing happened, which Ruel had expected, because in his experience that was what usually happened after something happened.
He went to school. He bagged groceries on Thursday night. He did not tell anybody at Merriam East about the courts, except his friend Kwesi Amankwah, who sat next to him in chemistry and who listened to the whole thing with his mouth slightly open and then said, "So the cop's the sign guy," and Ruel said, "The cop's the sign guy," and Kwesi said, "That's crazy," and then, after a minute, "Is he going to do anything?" and Ruel said he didn't know.
On Wednesday his grandmother came home from work and put a printout on the kitchen table. It was Ferrol's incident report. She had gone to the police department on her lunch break and filled out a public records request, and a clerk had printed it for her for forty cents. It was two pages. It said, in the language police reports are written in, that the reporting party had described a juvenile male as aggressive and loitering, and that upon arrival the reporting officer had observed no aggressive behavior and no loitering, and that the juvenile male had a valid reservation per the posted court system, as confirmed by the board steward, a witness from the reporting party's group, and the reporting officer's own inspection of the board. In a box marked Narrative, near the bottom, there was one sentence that did not sound like a police report at all. It said: R/O initially treated the juvenile as the subject of the complaint before verifying the facts, which was an error on the part of R/O.
Ruel read it three times.