Alton straightened up slowly from the door. He stepped back onto the grass. He kept his hands where they were, out from his sides a little, the right one closed around the key fob.
"Yes, sir."
"What're we doing here?"
"Door alarm came on. I was checking the door."
"Uh-huh." The officer came forward two quick steps, and before Alton understood what he was doing, he had reached out and taken the key fob out of Alton's closed hand, not gently, prying it free with his fingers so that the edge of the plastic scraped across Alton's knuckles. He stepped back again and dropped the fob into the breast pocket of his uniform shirt and buttoned the flap over it. "I'm going to hold onto these. Officer safety. Whose vehicle is this?"
Alton looked at the pocket. He had held that fob for perhaps four minutes.
"It's mine."
"It's yours."
"Yes, sir. I just bought it. Right there." He moved his head, only his head, toward the chain-link fence and the gravel lot beyond it and the green cinder-block office with the lights on inside. "Fifteen minutes ago."
The officer did not look where he was pointing. He looked at Alton, at his pressed blue shirt and his clean jeans and his good boots and his hands, which were a roofer's hands, cracked across the knuckles and dark in the creases with tar that no soap had gotten out in thirty years, and then at the van, and then back at Alton, and something moved at the corner of his mouth.
"Sure you bought it," he said.