"Convenient story. Turn around."
The sedan's roof was warm against Marcus's forearm. He could see his own reflection in the rear window, warped, a pale-blue shape with a stranger's hand on it. Beyond the reflection, through the glass of the car, through the glass of the store, someone was standing just inside the door.
*
Leila Haddad had been wiping down the inside of that door with blue spray and a paper towel when she heard it. The door had been propped on its closer an inch from shut, and the voice came through the gap the way cold comes through a window—Step away from that car—and she looked up and saw the officer she knew as Dale crossing the lot faster than she had ever seen him move.
Large coffee, two creamers, a pack of the peppermint gum by the register. He had never once paid. Her uncle Samir had made that rule the week the store opened under his name, three years ago: "The police, they don't pay. We want them here. We want them to like it here." Dale called her kiddo. He had asked her once whether she was from here, and when she said Springfield, he'd laughed like she had told a good joke and said, "No, I mean from from," and she had rung up the next customer instead of answering.
The red sign her uncle had taped to the door at eye level read, from the outside, NO ENTRY WITH FACE COVERED — PLEASE REMOVE HOOD & MASK. From the inside it read backward, and she had looked at it backward so many evenings that the last letters, the K and the S where her paper towel had stopped, felt like part of the door.
The man by pump four had his hands up. He wore glasses and a blue shirt, and he looked like her chemistry instructor at the community college, or like somebody's dad picking up somebody's prescription—like a man who had never in his life made anyone wait for him.
Her phone was in the pocket of her apron. Leila was twenty-two, and she had seen on that phone a great many recordings of moments like this one, and every time she had wondered about the person holding the camera: whether their hands had shaken, whether they had been afraid, whether they had thought about it at all or whether it was a reflex now, like putting a hand out to catch something falling. She found out. Her hands shook. She was afraid. She thought about her uncle, who would be back from the bank deposit in twenty minutes, and about Dale's coffee and Dale's gum and how quickly the police came to the Sunrise when someone was shouting in the lot. She thought about all of it for perhaps a second and a half. Then she pressed the red circle and held the phone flat against the glass, just below the sign, as the man said, "It's my car."
*
"Run the plate before you put cuffs on me," Marcus said over his shoulder.
He said it the way he would say it to a new technician about to hand a bottle across the counter without scanning it. Not loud. Not pleading. Here is the step. Do the step.
The officer's other hand was already at his belt. "I decide what gets checked."
The first cuff closed around Marcus's right wrist with a sound he would hear for months afterward at odd moments—in the ratchet of a seat belt, in a stapler, in the click of the childproof caps he pressed and turned forty times a shift. It was not a loud sound. It was a small, decided sound. The second cuff took his left wrist, and the officer squeezed both until the steel sat against the bone.
Marcus breathed. He counted. One, two, three, four, five. He had counted pills for twenty-one years. He could count anything.
Behind him a second cruiser swung off the road and into the lot, its light bar going—red, blue, red, blue—and the colors washed across the white concrete and the sedan's silver roof and the glass of the store, so that for a moment the young woman behind the door was lit red, then blue, then red again.
The officer still had a hand on Marcus's shoulder. Marcus turned his head as far as it would go.