"Henley, four-twelve," he said into his shoulder. "Can you have a supervisor respond to my location."
"Four-twelve, copy, supervisor to Hollis at Tanyard. Sergeant Benitez, can you respond?"
The answer came back almost before the dispatcher finished. "Two-oh-one, I'm on Tanyard by the high school, two minutes."
Travis took his hand off his holster.
"Ms. Phan," he said, "stay right where you are, please. Don't come any closer to the vehicle. The sergeant's on the way."
"Thank you," she said. Her voice shook on it. She had one shoe off. He noticed that and did not want to have noticed it.
Sergeant Ramona Benitez pulled up in a marked Tahoe a minute and fifty seconds later and parked it on the far side of the van with its lights off. She was fifty-one, short and heavyset, gray at the temples, eleven years a road sergeant, and she got out of a vehicle like someone who had been in a great many bad situations and had stopped hurrying toward them. She looked at the van with its door open and its engine running. She looked at the man on the edge of the asphalt and at the woman with one shoe standing in the grass holding a green certificate. Then she looked at Travis.
"Talk to me," she said.
He told her. He told it the way he would have written it: the permit, the flag, the dealer's history, the driver's statement, the paperwork in the folder. He told her he had detained the vehicle pending verification with the state and requested a rotation wrecker. Every piece of it was procedure, and underneath it he could hear something he could not get his hands around, like a faucet dripping in another room.
Benitez listened without interrupting. When he finished, she said, "What's the date on the bulletin?"
He did not answer right away.