She went to the door and opened it and looked down the side of the lot through the chain-link.
The silver van was on the grass verge, forty yards down, with its driver's door hanging open. Behind it, a white Bledsoe Mill Explorer with its light bar going. And on the edge of the asphalt, sitting with his forearms on his knees and his boots in the street like a man waiting for a bus, Alton Cole, in the blue shirt he had obviously ironed himself that afternoon, with the crease down the sleeve a little crooked.
The officer was standing in the open door of the Explorer, talking into his shoulder. She could not see his face from there. She did not need to. She knew his walk. She had seen it on this same gravel in April of last year, the week after Ana Ruelas was dragged, with two detectives from the Henley County auto theft task force and a uniformed sergeant, and she had seen him stand by the service bay with his arms folded while the detectives took her computers and her binders and her printer, the old one, and she had heard him say, not to her but to the sergeant, loud enough that she would hear it, You people always know exactly what's going on in your own shop until somebody asks you.
Officer Travis Brannan. She knew his name because she had made herself learn it. She knew Ana Ruelas's name because she had sat in the back of a courtroom in the Henley County Justice Center last November at Huy's first appearance, alone, behind a row of police officers in uniform, and had seen a woman in her forties come in on a cane with a man holding her elbow, and had understood who she was before anyone said it, and had sat for the rest of the hearing with her hands so tight in her lap that she had found four little crescent marks in her palms that night.
Her phone was in her cardigan pocket. She took it out and looked at the number at the top of her call log, which was her lawyer, Mr. Fairbanks, a soft-spoken, exact man in a downtown Macon firm whom she was paying three hundred and eighty dollars an hour, and whose single most repeated instruction to her for eighteen months had been the same sentence: Any contact with the Bledsoe Mill Police Department, or any law enforcement officer, about anything, goes through me. Anything, Mrs. Phan. If an officer comes to your lot and asks you the time of day, you give him my card.
The hearing before the Board was on the twentieth. Eleven days. The Board, Mr. Fairbanks had told her, laying her file out on his desk like a hand of cards, would have in front of it the state's report, and Huy's indictment, and her own cooperation, which was considerable, and any incident reports involving her dealer number since reinstatement. Any. That was why the first permits she issued had to be absolutely clean, the buyers people she knew. That was why he had been pleased, in his restrained way, when she told him the first one would be Mr. Cole.
She could call Mr. Fairbanks now. He would answer; he always answered. He would tell her to stay inside. He would tell her that the officer would run the permit and see the issue time and the VIN match, and verify with the state's system, and release the vehicle, and that her going out there, a principal of the dealership named in the bulletin, a witness in a pending felony case in which the victim was a Bledsoe Mill officer, to argue with a Bledsoe Mill officer at the scene of a stop, was precisely, exactly, the kind of incident that would be in front of the Board on the twentieth with her name on it. He would tell her she could not help Mr. Cole by hurting her own case. He would be right.
The officer had come back to Alton Cole with a clipboard. She watched him stand over the seated man and talk. She watched Alton Cole say something, and the officer answer, and then key the microphone on his shoulder and turn his head to speak into it. Through the little window behind her, faint, came the crackle of a dispatcher's voice from the Explorer's radio, and she heard, or thought she heard, wrecker.
She thought about the bank calling her in July, twice, asking why a deposit account in her business's name was sitting on nineteen thousand five hundred dollars while her operating account had been overdrawn three times in thirty days. She had said, That is not my money, and hung up, and then sat in this office in the heat, the window unit off to save on the electric, and done the arithmetic on her house again.
She thought about Alton Cole in February, standing in the cold with his hands in his jacket pockets, answering her questions about his son's chair, how much it weighed, how tall the boy sat in it, as though nobody had ever asked him, and she thought about the thirty-one pink receipts, and 10/9 $300 LAST, which she had seen on his envelope when he set it on her desk, and about what she had said to him that first day, not knowing she was going to say it until she said it: I know what it's like to be told to come back when you have the money.
That was true, and it was not the whole of it. The whole of it was her father, in 1987, in a used Toyota Corolla with a cracked windshield, pulled over on Buford Highway in Doraville for the cracked windshield, and the officer taking the keys out of the ignition and holding them up and saying to him, slowly and loudly, as if her father were deaf or simple, Whose car? Whose car is this? and her father, who had been an engineer in Saigon and now cleaned offices at night, who owned that car outright and had the title in a plastic sleeve in the glove box because he trusted nothing that was not on paper, saying, My car. My car. Mine. And not being believed. And Thuy, thirteen, in the back seat with her little brother, saying nothing, saying nothing, saying nothing, because her father had told them both in the car before the officer reached the window, in Vietnamese, very fast, Do not say one word. Not one. She had not said one word. The officer had let them go after an hour. Her father had never spoken about it again, and he had kept that car until it rusted through, and she had never, in all the years since, been sure whether she was more ashamed of the officer or of herself.