She looked away from him at the store. A young woman in the red QuikTrip shirt had come out the side door with a vape and stood under the overhang with one arm folded across her stomach, scrolling her phone with her thumb. At the pump across the island from Selma a young man was filling a battered white pickup with a trailer full of lawn equipment hitched to the back, mowers and blowers strapped down under a cargo net, the bed full of empty paper leaf bags. He had a sweatshirt on with the hood down and grass on his boots. He had noticed the police car too, she could see, and he had noticed her noticing it; he looked at her once across the island and then made himself look at his pump.
She thought about Kenan on the bench at Carondelet Park with the late kids. Five-oh-eight by the clock on the pump.
She thought about calling Tarik and did not. Tarik was at the pharmacy until nine on Fridays, and he would hear it in her voice, and then he would be worried for four hours with a line of people waiting for prescriptions, and it would be for nothing, probably. Probably the officer was running every plate in the lot. Probably in a minute he would find that Selma Hodžić had neither, and that the 1984 Mercedes-Benz 300D with Missouri plates was registered to a business at an address on Morgan Ford Road, and he would put the car in reverse and go look for somebody else.
She had a list in her head, and she went through it now, standing at the pump, the way she went through the list in her head before she put a car up on the lift. Her father had made her learn the list. He had made her learn it in 2003, after the summer when the shop got stopped, which was what the family called it, the summer when for three months there was a patrol car parked across Morgan Ford from the shop most afternoons, and officers came in twice to ask her father for his business license and once to ask about a car that had been reported stolen in Affton, which was not in the shop and had never been, and once, in August, an officer had pulled her father over a block from home for a broken taillight that was not broken and made him stand with his hands on the hood of his own car on a ninety-five-degree afternoon while the officer looked through the trunk. Her father had come home and not said anything about it for two days, and then on the third day he had sat her down at the kitchen table, eighteen years old and about to start her first semester at Meramec, and he had made her write it down. What you say. What you don't say. Stay calm. Keep your hands where they can see them. Do not reach for anything without saying first what you are reaching for. Ask if you are being detained. Ask if you are free to go. Do not consent to a search. Do not argue on the street; the street is not the place to win. Get names. Get numbers. Ask for a supervisor. And then, in her father's handwriting at the bottom, because he had taken the pen from her: Be polite. Be more polite than him. Polite is armor.
She still had the paper. It was in the glovebox of this car, in a plastic sleeve, under the registration and the inspection certificate and the title, which she also kept in the glovebox, though everybody told her not to, because her father had always kept the title in the glovebox, and it was his car.
The pump clicked off. She topped it to the next dime, the way her father always had, and hung the nozzle back on the pump and screwed the fuel cap on and closed the little door. She pulled the receipt. She folded it and put it in the pocket of her coat. She took the car key out of the same pocket, because she had locked the car when she got out, out of the same habit that made her lock the shop door when she went to the bathroom. She walked to the driver's door.
Behind her, the police car's door opened and shut.
She turned around. She did it slowly, with the key in her right hand where he could see it, and her left hand open at her side.
He was coming across the lot toward her. He was bigger out of the car than in it, not tall so much as wide, a man in his fifties with a heavy neck and a gray brush mustache and a gut that pushed the front of his duty vest out over his belt. His hair was cut very short and had gone almost entirely white. Three stripes on each sleeve. The name tag over his pocket said KOPECKY. He walked like his knees hurt him. He did not walk toward her. That was the first strange thing. He walked toward the car, and when he got to it he did not come around to her side but stopped at the rear bumper, on the passenger side, and stood there looking at it, at the trunk lid and the taillights and the chrome of the bumper, the way the old men at gas stations looked at it. Then he walked slowly up the passenger side, trailing his eyes along the body, and when he got to the rear passenger door he stopped again.
He looked at the dent.
He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that the young man at the pickup truck across the island had stopped pretending to look at his own pump and was openly watching. Then the sergeant bent, with a little grunt, one hand on his knee, and put two fingers of his other hand into the dent, the way you would put your fingers into a footprint in wet cement to see how deep it went.