"No, sir."
He turned around. He put his hands on the warm silver roof of the van at the back corner, above the rear quarter glass with the little blue decal on it. He felt the officer's hands go down his sides, under his arms, around his waistband, down each leg to the top of each boot, the quick efficient pat that said I have done this a thousand times and I will do it a thousand more. The officer found the bank envelope in his inside jacket pocket — the one with the thirty-one dates on it, empty now, that Alton had not been able to make himself throw away — and took it out and looked at it, at the column of dates and amounts running down the front and onto the back in carpenter's pencil, at 10/9. $300. LAST. underlined, and put it back without saying anything.
"Go ahead and have a seat on the curb for me," the officer said. "Right there. Hands where I can see them."
There was no curb. There was the grass verge, and the edge of the asphalt. Alton sat on the edge of the asphalt with his good jeans on the grass and his boots in the street and his forearms on his knees, and the officer went back to the Explorer and leaned into it, and Alton could see the white glow of the computer screen on the officer's face through the windshield, and hear him on the radio, the words coming in pieces over the hum of the van's engine, which was still running because the officer had taken the fob and not turned it off, and so the van sat there with its door chime going every forty seconds, three soft tones, as if it were asking a question nobody would answer.
The sun was down behind the laundromat. The sky had gone the color of the inside of a peach. Two cars went by on Hollis Street, slowing, a woman in scrubs and then a teenage boy, their faces turned toward him, and Alton looked at the asphalt between his boots. On the other side of the chain-link fence, the lights were on in the office of Phan Mobility & Pre-Owned. He did not look there either.
He thought about Quincy at the kitchen table with the two hundred and eleven pages. Did you know there are nineteen codes for a traffic stop? He thought about the paratransit scheduler, kind, tired: It doesn't really work for shift workers. He thought, I should have checked the door in her gravel, and then thought that it would not have mattered, and knew that was true, and was surprised by how much it hurt to know it.
The officer got out of the Explorer and came back with Alton's license and a clipboard.
"All right, Mr. Cole. Here's what's going to happen. That permit comes back to that dealer number, and that dealer number's flagged, and I'm not able to verify ownership out here tonight with what you've got. So I'm going to detain the vehicle pending verification with the state. It'll be towed to the city impound on Riverside. The state opens Monday. If it all checks out, you'll get a call, you go down there with your paperwork, you pay the tow and storage, you drive it home."
"Monday," Alton said.
"Monday or Tuesday. Depends how fast the state is."
"My son starts work Monday night. That's what it's for. The van. He's in a wheelchair. He's got a job at the 911 center. Over behind the courthouse. He starts Monday at seven."