He could see nothing. The spotlight on the cruiser was aimed straight at his face, and behind it the headlights, and behind them the blue and red of the light bar going, silent, throwing color across the tan brick and the glass of the vestibule and the windows across the street, blue red blue red. A figure came out of the glare. It was a shape only, dark, wide at the shoulders. One hand at its side, near its hip. One hand holding a flashlight, the long kind, up by its ear and pointed at him.
"Drop the bag."
"Officer, this is my—"
"Drop the bag. Drop the phone. Now."
He opened his fingers. The bag hit the sidewalk with a soft, heavy slap, and the quarter rolls inside it clinked. He crouched a little, without thinking, to set the phone down instead of dropping it, because it was a phone and phones broke, and the voice came at him hard, harder than before, "Don't reach, don't reach, don't you reach for anything," and he straightened up fast with the phone still in his hand and then opened his hand and let it fall. It hit the concrete face down and the flashlight went into the ground and the world got a little darker.
"Turn around. Face the wall. Hands on the wall. Spread your feet."
He turned around. He put his hands on the brick, on either side of the open door of the night drop, which still hung down like a tongue. The brick was cold and gritty under his palms. He spread his feet. He could hear the officer behind him breathing, and the crackle of a radio, and the cruiser engine idling, and somewhere farther off, toward Broadway, another engine start up, and a vehicle pull out and accelerate away north without hurrying. He did not turn his head to look. He was afraid to turn his head.
"Anything on you I should know about? Weapons? Needles? Anything that's going to stick me?"
"No, sir. No weapon. I have a key. In the lock. It's the restaurant key."
"Don't move your hands."
He felt the man come close behind him. The officer's hand went flat between his shoulder blades and held him there, pressing him gently but completely toward the wall, and then the other hand began to move over him: down his right arm, across his back, around his waist, into his armpits, down the outside of each leg and up the inside to the groin, quick and hard and impersonal, the way Lorenz had seen men in port cities patted down at the gates. He had been patted down in a hundred ports. It had never felt like this. In port they patted you down because you were crew, not because you were you.