"Yes, ma'am."
Then she turned to Kurt, and he braced himself, and she did not say anything to him at all. She looked at him for a long time, long enough that he understood the silence as a decision, and then she turned her back on him and waited for the girl to finish packing.
Kurt picked the can of Campbell's soup up off the table and held it out. The girl looked at it. She did not take it from him. After a moment, her father reached past her and took it out of his hand and put it in the tote on top of the bread, where it would look the same as it always did when the bag was opened.
Isaac Lowry straightened up with the tote in one hand and the chicken under his arm. At the door he stopped and turned around.
"I'm going to need your badge number," he said.
Kurt told him. Isaac did not write it down. He repeated it once, out loud, the five digits, and nodded, and went out after his daughter and Mrs. Dunning, and the steel door swung shut behind them on its pneumatic arm and stopped, as it always did, an inch short of the frame.
Kurt stood in the package room under the buzzing light. On the floor under the bottom shelf, where it had rolled during the struggle, was a single clementine. He bent down and picked it up and stood holding it, cold and dimpled in his palm. Caught on it was a torn scrap of the orange mesh bag it had come in, and on the scrap, slightly crooked, a small round sticker printed with a wave and a sun.
He called his sergeant from his kitchen at a quarter to five, still in his jacket, standing at the counter where he had eaten his sandwich that noon. He had not turned on the lights. The rain had picked up and was running in sheets down the window over the sink, and the parking lot beyond it, and his own patrol car parked nose-in by the dumpsters, had gone soft and gray and shapeless behind the water.
Sergeant Vida Kalani picked up on the fourth ring. She was a broad, unhurried woman of fifty with a voice that never rose, and she had been his sergeant on swing for six years. He heard a game show in the background, and then he heard her turn it down.
"You're off today," she said.