The cruiser stopped. It stopped right at the corner by the big maple, forty steps from her, and the engine kept running, and the driver's door opened.
She did not run. She had thought about it, in the abstract, many times, lying awake in the apartment on Mulberry Street with the radiator ticking: what she would do, if. Every version of the plan had begun with do not run. Running was what guilty people did. Running was what got you put on the ground. She took her hands out of her hoodie pocket, slowly, so that they could be seen, and let them hang at her sides, and turned her face back to the building, to the third window from the left, because it was 2:53 and she had seven minutes, and she was not going to spend them looking at a police car if she could possibly help it.
She heard his boots on the sidewalk. Heavy, unhurried. She heard the leather of his belt creak and the little electronic chirp of a radio being turned down.
"Afternoon, ma'am," he said.
Officer Rodney Prentice had been a police officer in Ludlow Run for twenty-three years, and in that time he had developed a theory about Fridays, which was that nothing good had ever been reported to the dispatch center on a Friday after two o'clock in the afternoon. People held their bad news all week, he believed, the way they held their breath going under a bridge, and then on Friday afternoon they let it go all at once. The domestic that had been simmering since Monday boiled over. The kid who had been skipping school all week got caught shoplifting at the Dollar General, the one on the north side of 33, never the south. The man whose neighbor's dog had been barking for four days finally walked over with a baseball bat. Friday afternoons, Rodney liked to say, were when the week came due.
This particular Friday, the ninth of October, he had worked since six in the morning and had so far handled a fender-bender in the Kroger lot, a lost wallet that turned up in the reporting party's own glove box while Rodney stood there, and a false burglar alarm at the vape shop. He had drunk four cups of coffee. His lower back, bad since a foot pursuit in 2011 that had ended with him on the hood of a Buick and the suspect still running, was talking to him in the low, steady voice it used in the afternoons.
He was rolling west on Seventh at 2:49 when dispatch came over the radio.
"Unit 14."
He picked up the handset. "Fourteen."
"Fourteen, respond to Cordell Street Elementary, Cordell Street side, east fence. RP is a parent in the pickup line, reports a white female, thirties, dark hair, gray hooded sweatshirt, standing at the fence watching the playground for the last several minutes. RP advises the female is not in the walker area. RP states the female matches the description from the district notice regarding the incident at Winfield Elementary."