"Patrick," Harlan said again, more quietly, "hands on the wheel, both of them. Slowly."
For a long moment, nothing happened. The driver's left hand, the one that had drifted toward whatever was below the dashboard, hovered there as if weighing something. Then, very slowly, it rose. Both hands came to rest on the top of the steering wheel. The pale gray eyes did not leave Harlan's face.
"There," Harlan said. "Thank you."
The officers reached the car. Lieutenant Vance herself was the woman from the south end of the block. She came to the driver's window with her hand resting easily on the holster at her hip, and her eyes already reading the inside of the car the way a person reads a page they have read many times before. Her voice was calm and almost bored.
"Sir, I need you to turn off the engine. I need you to drop the keys onto the pavement through the window. Then I need you to open the door from the outside with your left hand, keeping your right hand on the wheel."
The driver did as he was told. The engine quieted. The keys clinked softly on the asphalt. The door opened. He was lifted out without violence, turned, and pressed gently against the side of the car while another officer cuffed his hands behind his back.
Underneath the dashboard, where his left hand had been drifting, Vance's partner found a small handgun resting in a magnetic holster bolted to the underside of the steering column. He photographed it before he touched it. Then he removed it carefully, cleared the chamber, and placed it in a plastic bag.
Harlan stepped back from the car. He felt, for the first time since he had set his coffee on the stone planter beside Isaiah, the small tremor in his right hand that had been waiting all morning for permission to arrive. He let it arrive. He set the portfolio on the sidewalk and pressed his palm briefly against his thigh until the tremor passed.
Vance walked over to him. She was a small woman with a face that had been weathered by twenty-four years of work and a pair of eyes that had been weathered by none of it. She looked at Harlan the way she looked at all civilians who had just helped her do her job, which is to say with a mixture of professional gratitude and personal exasperation.
"Mr. Whitfield."
"Lieutenant."
"That was a foolish thing to do."