"Then cancel it."
"That's not how this works."
"Then call your sergeant," Thuy Phan said. "Please. I am asking you to call your supervisor out here. I'm allowed to ask that. I'm asking."
The officer looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Alton Cole, sitting on the edge of the road. Then at the van, with its driver's door open and its engine running and its chime still going, every forty seconds, three soft tones.
He keyed the microphone on his shoulder.
Travis Brannan had been a police officer for nine years, and for the last seventeen months of them, since the Tuesday in April of last year when Ana Ruelas was dragged forty-one yards down the shoulder of Highway 19 by a black Dodge Charger with a paper tag in its rear window, he had been on what the department called the Tag Enforcement Detail and what everyone else in the building called Brannan's thing.
He had been Ana's trainee once, his first year. She had taught him to stop at an angle, to keep his voice level and his feet moving, to say Evening, sir and mean it. On that Tuesday in April she had made a stop on a Charger with a temporary operating permit that came back valid, issued by a dealer called Phan Mobility & Pre-Owned in Bledsoe Mill to a buyer in Clayton County, and she had walked up to the driver's window, and the man in the driver's seat, who had two warrants and a pistol under the seat and had never bought a car from anybody in his life, had put the Charger in drive while her forearm was still inside the window. Travis had been the second unit on scene. He had held her leg together with his hands on the shoulder of Highway 19 while the ambulance came, and her blood had been warm and then it had been cold, and she had kept saying, very calmly, It was valid, Trav, it came back valid, it came back valid.
She had a titanium rod in her femur now and walked with a cane and worked a desk in records. She was forty-four. She had been going to make lieutenant.
The man who sold that permit had sold almost two thousand of them, and Travis had read every page of the task force report that he was allowed to read, and he had learned the shape of the thing. Paper tags that came back valid because they were valid, technically, issued on the state's own system by a licensed dealer under a real dealer number to names that might or might not be real, for cars that dealer had never seen. Paper that was not a lie on its face. Paper that was a lie all the way down. He had pulled two hundred and sixty-one fraudulent temporary permits off cars in Henley County since that April, and of the drivers of those two hundred and sixty-one cars he would estimate that two hundred and fifty of them had looked him in the face and said the same four words. I just bought it.
He had stopped hearing the words. He knew that. In some part of himself that he did not visit often, he knew it, the way you know about a tooth that is starting to go.
He had been sitting in the lot of the laundromat on Hollis Street that evening because a lieutenant in the auto theft task force had mentioned at a meeting the week before, in passing, that the state had turned Phan's permit access back on, and something in Travis had gone tight at that, and so on Friday, at the end of his shift, he had pulled into the laundromat lot with a view of the side of her gravel and run plates on his laptop and waited, not for anything in particular. He had watched a silver minivan pull out of her lot onto Hollis Street with a permit in the rear bracket that he could see from forty yards was brand new, the plastic sleeve still shining, and he had watched it go forty yards and pull onto the grass, and a man get out and go around to the passenger side and bend down to the sliding door as if he were checking for something there, and he had run the permit, and it had come back valid, issued that day, to the dealer number with the flag on it. And he had thought, Here we go. He had thought it before he got out of the car. He knew that, too, standing in the grass now with the dealer fifteen feet away holding a green piece of paper up in the dusk and the man still sitting on the edge of the asphalt. He had thought it before he saw the man's face.