Thuy Phan laid the receipt book and the bank statement carefully on the hood of the Tahoe and took a business card out of the back of the receipt book and gave it to the sergeant. Benitez looked at it and took her phone out of her breast pocket and dialed and turned away a few steps with the phone to her ear.
While she was on the phone, nobody said anything. The van's chime went off again. Down Hollis Street, the woman in scrubs had pulled over at the curb with her window down, and the boy on the bicycle had come back and was watching from in front of the laundromat. Thuy Phan stood by the Tahoe with her arms crossed tightly over the front of her cardigan, and Travis saw that she was shaking, a fine, continuous tremor, and that she was looking at nothing, at the dark gap in the fence she had run through.
Alton Cole sat on the edge of the asphalt with his forearms on his knees and did not move at all.
Travis looked at him then, really, for what he understood was the first time. He saw a heavy-shouldered Black man near sixty with gray in his short hair and a crooked crease down the sleeve of a blue shirt that he had ironed himself, badly, and a cut on the back of one knuckle, fresh, where the edge of a key fob had been pried across it. He thought about the envelope he had taken out of the man's jacket and put back. He had told himself it meant nothing, that anybody could write anything on an envelope, and that was true, and it was also true that no one had ever, in two hundred and sixty-one stops, shown him an envelope like that, with thirty-one Fridays on it in carpenter's pencil, wearing through the paper.
Sure you bought it. He heard himself. He had heard himself at the time, too, and had not stopped.
Benitez came back and put her phone in her pocket.
"That was Investigator Sistrunk at the Department of Revenue," she said, to all of them at once. "He was at his son's football game. He's not happy we called him. He says Ms. Phan's permit access was restored on September twenty-fifth after the state completed its review, and that the April bulletin was supposed to be rescinded by the auto theft task force at that time, and he's going to make some calls Monday about why it wasn't." She turned to Travis. "Cancel the wrecker."
He keyed his shoulder. "Henley, four-twelve, cancel that rotation wrecker."
"Copy, four-twelve, wrecker canceled."
"Give him his keys."