At six-twenty on Monday evening he drove Quincy to the dispatch center behind the courthouse annex. Quincy wore the navy county polo shirt and the lanyard and his good chair. In the lot, Alton parked in a space with eight feet beside it and opened the door and the van knelt, and Quincy worked the switch himself, and rolled down onto the asphalt, and turned the chair to face his father through the open door.
"Seven a.m.," Quincy said.
"I'll be here at quarter till."
"Don't be early. It's embarrassing."
"I'll be here at quarter till."
Quincy rolled up the walk to the steel door with the keypad, and a woman inside buzzed him in, and the door shut behind him.
Alton sat in the van in the lot. On the dash, under the rearview mirror, was a white card with an incident number on the back of it in Sergeant Benitez's handwriting, and beside it the department's citizen complaint form, which he had printed on Quincy's printer on Saturday and filled out on Sunday night at the kitchen table, every line of it, in his square careful capitals, everything but the signature at the bottom. A pen lay across it. The sun was going down behind the courthouse, and the light in the lot was going long and orange, the way it had on Friday in the gravel of Phan Mobility & Pre-Owned, laying the shadows of the light poles across the asphalt in stripes.
Inside that building, behind that steel door, his son was sitting down for the first time at a console with a headset on, and in a few minutes a phone would ring, and Quincy would say the words he had practiced at the kitchen table all weekend in his flat, precise voice: Henley County 911, what is the address of your emergency? And somewhere out in the county a car with a light bar would answer him.
Alton picked up the pen. He held it a while, turning it in his cracked fingers, looking at the line at the bottom of the page. A patrol car came into the lot behind him and parked by the steel door, and an officer got out, a young woman, and went inside without looking at the van. The light got longer.
He clicked the pen. He was not in a hurry. He had learned that on Friday, sitting on the edge of the asphalt: that the time to decide was not when it was happening, but after, when you were home, or as close to home as you could get. He sat in the van his Fridays had bought, with the engine off and the windows down and the evening coming on, and he put the point of the pen to the paper, and he thought about it.