She put the phone back in her pocket without calling anyone.
She went to the safe, which was standing open, and took out of the deal jacket not the copy of the title but the original, the mint-green Georgia certificate with the guilloche border and the dealer reassignment on the back with her signature and Alton Cole's in blue ink, still not quite a half-hour old. She took the tablet off the desk, still logged into the state's permit system, and the carbon book of deposit receipts, the yellow copies, the ones she kept, and the bank statement for the deposit account that showed every one of his Fridays as a line, and she held all of it against her chest in both arms, the tablet on the bottom, and she went out the door so fast it banged against the cinder-block wall and bounced back and hit her shoulder, and she ran.
She had not run in years. She was fifty-two and wearing flats with no backs, and the gravel slid under them, and one of them came off halfway down the lot and she left it. She ran down the inside of the chain-link fence, past a Nissan Altima with $6,995 soaped on the windshield, toward the place at the end where the fence had a gap for the side driveway onto Hollis Street, and as she ran she heard her own voice come out of her, too high, cracking on the vowels like a girl's, and did not know until she heard it that she was going to shout:
"That vehicle belongs to Mr. Cole! Officer! That vehicle belongs to Mr. Cole!"
She came through the gap in the fence onto the grass, holding the papers against her chest with both arms, and the officer had turned toward her with his hand on his holster and his other hand up, flat, palm out, and his voice was very loud.
"Ma'am! Stop right there! Stop!"
She stopped. She was perhaps fifteen feet from him. She was breathing like a bellows. One foot was in a flat and the other in a stocking on the grass, and she could feel a piece of gravel under her heel.
"Don't come any closer. What's in your hands?"
"Paper," she said. "Only paper. The title. My tablet. The receipts."
"Put it on the ground."
"I'm not putting the title on the ground."