"I didn't say that."
"If I leave, there's no story."
"If you leave," Perpetua said, "there's a different story. There's the story where a man rubs out a kid's name and writes his own and the kid goes home. That story happens every day. Nobody gives a speech about it." She took off her visor and smoothed her hair back and put the visor back on. "I'm not telling you what to do. I'm telling you what it is."
The patrol car came at 8:06. It came slowly down Sumac with no lights and no siren and turned into the gravel lot and parked beside the Lexus, and for a moment nobody got out, and Ruel watched the shape of the officer inside typing something into the laptop mounted on the dash. Then the door opened.
The officer was a white man in his early forties, medium height, a little thick around the middle the way men get when they used to be athletes and now sit in cars for ten hours. He had a shaved head and a short sandy beard going gray at the chin and the kind of sunburned forearms that meant he spent his days off on a boat or a mower. His name tag said FERROL. He put his hat on, looked at the courts, looked at the four men on Court 4, looked at the old woman and the Black teenager on the bench beside Court 3, and Ruel saw his eyes do the arithmetic. It took about a second. It was not hard arithmetic.
Officer Sonny Ferrol had been a police officer in Merriam, Ohio, for nineteen years. He had grown up four miles from Wick Park, on the east side, in a house with a chain-link fence and a dog named Biscuit, and when he was a kid he had played basketball on the courts that used to be where the parking lot was now, before the city paved them over. He had been, for a while, a different kind of cop than the one who got out of the car that morning. He did not think about that much anymore. He had a daughter in college in Columbus and a son who did not speak to him and an ex-wife who did, too often, and a shoulder that hurt when it rained, and on that particular Saturday he had been on shift since eleven the night before, and he had just come from a domestic on Haddon Street where a man had thrown a microwave through a window, and he was tired in a way that was older than one night.
Cheever met him at the gate to Court 4. Ruel could not hear most of what Cheever said. He could see him gesturing: at the board, at the rec building, at the bench where Ruel was sitting. He could see Ferrol nodding. Ferrol had a notebook out but he was not writing in it.
Then Ferrol walked across Court 3 toward the bench, and Ruel stood up, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and then wondered if standing up was the wrong thing to do, and stayed standing with his hands open by his sides.
"Morning," Ferrol said.
"Good morning, officer."
"You want to tell me what's going on?"
"I reserved Court 4 at eight. I wrote my name on the board at seven. Somebody erased it and wrote theirs."