Travis unbuttoned the flap of his breast pocket and took out the key fob. He walked over to where Alton Cole was sitting. The man got up, slowly, using one hand on his knee, the way men with roofer's knees get up, and stood, and he was taller than Travis had thought, and he held out his hand, palm up, and Travis put the fob in it. Then he handed him the folder, and his license.
"Sir," Travis said. "You're free to go."
The man looked at him. He did not say anything.
Benitez was watching. Travis felt her watching. He knew there was more to say, and he knew roughly what it was, and he also knew the body camera on his chest was recording, and that every word he said now would be in the footage that Benitez would have to review for the use-of-force-and-detention report she was going to make him write before he went home tonight, and that his lieutenant would read, and that if this man made a complaint, a captain would read, and a lawyer. He thought about Ana with her cane. He thought, I was not wrong to check. He thought, I was not wrong to check, and he could feel that this was true and also that it was not the thing, that the thing was somewhere else, in the four words he had said and the way he had said them.
"I was wrong about the vehicle," he said.
The man held his eyes for a long moment, and Travis understood, as clearly as if it had been said out loud, that Alton Cole had heard exactly what he had said and exactly what he had not.
"Yes, sir," Alton Cole said. "You were."
Then he turned and walked to the van and shut the driver's door, and went around to the passenger side, and bent and looked at the latch on the sliding door in the light from the Tahoe's headlights, and pressed the door hard with the flat of his hand until it clicked, a solid, final, mechanical sound, and the chime stopped.
Benitez took a card out of her pocket and wrote on the back of it and went to him there by the sliding door. Travis heard her say, quietly, "Mr. Cole. That's the incident number. If you want to make a complaint, that number gets you the footage from both our cameras and this officer's report, and it goes to Internal Affairs, not to me. You can do that online or in person at the station. You have a right to do it. Nobody's going to hold it against you."
"Thank you, Sergeant."