"Uh huh." He folded the envelope and put it in his own breast pocket, above the body camera, and buttoned the flap over it.
That was the moment Lorenz felt the fear arrive. Not when the light hit him. Not when the cuffs went on. It came when he watched the envelope disappear into the cop's pocket and the button close over it, because he understood then that he could not prove anything, not one thing, that every true sentence he spoke would be heard as the thing a liar would say. He was a man in a back seat with his hands behind him, and the words in his mouth had stopped being worth anything at all.
"I want you to listen to me," he said. His voice came out thin. He made it steadier. "I am not a thief. I put the bag in. I closed the door. I always hear it fall, every night, it falls down a long way, you hear it land. Tonight it didn't fall. It made a little sound right away, like metal. So I opened it to look. Something is in there. A shelf. Something shiny across the chute. I saw it with my light. I was taking my bag back out because if I left it there anybody with a key could take it. That's all. That's all I was doing."
"A shelf."
"Yes."
"In the chute."
"Yes. Please. Just look."
Brodersen looked at him with those light, steady eyes. Then he stepped back from the door and bent and picked the deposit bag up off the sidewalk where Lorenz had dropped it, and held it up under the floodlight, and turned it over in his hands.
"What's in it?"
"Two thousand nine hundred fourteen dollars and thirty-seven cents. Cash and coin, two checks. One check from Mr. and Mrs. Hutsell, sixty-two dollars and forty cents. One from a man named Pfeiffer, thirty-eight dollars. The slip. The Z report and the batch report. Bag number 4471-0938. It's in the log at the restaurant. Two signatures. Mine and the bartender."
He said it all in one breath, the way he would have called back a ticket. The cop's eyebrows went up very slightly.