It came out of her much louder than she meant it to. It came out of her the way a hand comes up to block a blow, without asking permission. He stopped, his thumb still on the mic, and looked at her.
"Please," she said, quieter. "Please don't run the other one."
"Hold on, Fourteen," he said into the mic, and let go of it, and looked at her for a long time. "Why not?"
"Because somebody watches for it."
"Who?"
She did not answer. She could feel the blood in her face. She could feel the Tahoe woman's phone on her like a sunlamp.
"Ma'am. Who watches for it?"
She took a breath. She had rehearsed this too, in the apartment on Mulberry Street, with the radiator ticking, and in every rehearsal she had said it better than she said it now. "My ex-husband," she said, "is in law enforcement. Up north. I'm not going to tell you where. He has friends. He has friends who have friends. Every time somebody puts that name into a system, somewhere, it leaves a mark, and I don't know who can see the marks, and I don't know who he's asked to look. I'm asking you, please, run Brooke Garvey all you want. Run her twice. But please don't type the other name into anything. Please."
She heard how it sounded. She heard it exactly the way he must be hearing it. My ex is a cop and he's after me: it was the kind of thing a woman said in a parking lot to get out of a ticket; it was the kind of thing a woman said on a daytime talk show; it was, she knew, the kind of thing that the people who ran this world had decided, a long time ago, to hear with one eyebrow up. She had seen that eyebrow go up in the face of a desk sergeant in a town three hours north, the night she had finally called, the night the two deputies came out to the cul-de-sac and stood in the driveway with Colt joking about the Browns while she stood in the doorway in her bathrobe holding a bag of frozen peas to her jaw. One of the deputies had said to her, gently, kindly, almost fatherly, You sure you want to do this to his career, Ashleigh? And then they had left, and she had gone back inside, and the house had been very quiet for a long time, and that was the night she had started planning.
The officer was watching her face. She did not know what he saw there. Whatever it was, it made him take his thumb off the mic for a second, and then put it back.