"Mr. Cole," she said. "It's yours."
He took it. It was warm from her pocket. He closed his hand around it.
"Thank you," he said. "For holding it. In July. For keeping it separate. I know you didn't have to."
She looked off toward the street, and something went across her face and was gone.
"In July," she said, "I could not make payroll for my one mechanic. I paid him out of my own house money for six weeks. Your account had nineteen thousand dollars in it and the bank called me twice to ask why I didn't move it into my operating account." She shrugged, small. "It wasn't my money. Go home. Show your son."
He got in. He adjusted the seat, which had been set for someone shorter, and the mirrors, and he put the folder on the passenger seat, which was still in, because Quincy was not in the van yet and he had not yet taken the seat out, though she had shown him how. He put his foot on the brake and pushed the button, and the engine came on with almost no sound, a hum you felt more than heard, and the dash lit up blue and white. He sat there a moment with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way he had been taught in 1983 in a Plymouth Reliant.
Then he put it in drive, lifted his hand to Thuy Phan through the window, and pulled out of the gravel onto Hollis Street, heading for the back way home.
He had gone not quite to the end of her side fence, maybe forty yards, when a chime sounded three times on the dash and a red icon lit, a little drawing of a minivan with its side door hanging open, and a voice in him that was mostly his father's said, Don't you drive one foot with a door you don't trust. He looked in the mirror. The sliding door on the passenger side looked closed. The chime came again. He put on his signal, though there was no one behind him on the narrow street, and pulled over onto the grass verge in front of the chain-link fence that ran along the side of the lot, where the gravel ended and the road began to run between the Phan lot and the back of a laundromat, and put it in park and got out with the key fob in his hand to look.
He was bending to look at the latch on the sliding door, at the little steel striker where the door met the frame, when he heard a car door shut behind him, and turned, and saw the light bar going blue and red on the roof of a Ford Explorer that had pulled onto the grass ten feet behind the van, and a police officer walking toward him with one hand resting on the holster at his hip.
He was a white man, early thirties, tall, with a high-and-tight haircut gone a little long at the top, in the dark blue uniform of the Bledsoe Mill Police Department with a body camera clipped to the center of his chest and a radio microphone on his left shoulder. His name tag said BRANNAN. He had the walk that Alton had seen on young officers his whole life, a walk that had been taught to them, weight forward, eyes moving, and he stopped about eight feet away, at an angle, so that the back corner of the van was between them.
"Evening," the officer said. "Go ahead and step away from the vehicle for me."