"No."
"It's the state system. The database. Plates, licenses, warrants, everything. You type in a plate and it tells you whose car. And every time you run something it logs it. Your badge number, the time, what you ran. You're supposed to have a reason. A call, a stop, an investigation. It's a crime to run somebody for personal reasons. They fire guys for it. There was a guy in my district, they fired him two years ago for running his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend." He swallowed. "Sixteen years. I don't even know how many. Fifty. A hundred. Old Mercedes all over south city, old men driving to church, a kid in Tower Grove with one he bought for his girlfriend. And I'd run it, and it'd come back to somebody, and I'd see it wasn't— and I'd drive on. Nobody ever pulled my history. Nobody ever had a reason to."
"Until today," Selma said.
He nodded at his hands. "I saw you on Gravois. By the windmill. I saw the color and I saw the shape and I thought, okay, another one. And I got behind you and I saw the dent."
"The dent," she said.
"I put that dent there."
She looked at him.
"I was seventeen. Summer of eighty-nine. He'd had it two months. He didn't let anybody drive it, not even my mother, but he went to a retirement party for a guy at the post office and got a ride home, and he left the keys on the hook, and I took it. I took it to go see a girl in Affton. And I came back at two in the morning with the lights off so he wouldn't hear, and I backed it into our driveway, and I backed it right into the mailbox post." He shook his head slowly. "Into the mailbox. A letter carrier's mailbox. A big iron post he'd sunk in concrete himself. He came out in his undershirt and stood in the driveway and looked at it. Didn't yell. I wanted him to yell. He just looked at it a long time and said, well, Gene, now it's got a story. And he never fixed it. My mother wanted him to fix it and he never would. He said a car ought to be allowed to keep one scar."
The sound Selma made then was not quite a laugh. She put her hand flat on the roof of the car to steady herself.
"What," he said.
"My father," she said. "He said the same thing. Almost the same words. He fixed everything. Every panel. He spent eleven months finding the right seats. And he left the dent. I asked him why, and he said, because it is the car's first life. A car should be allowed to keep one scar to remember."